I looked at the study and it’s not about Belgian hospitals, so it doesn’t really apply to me.
Even if there is no direct nearterm financial cost, you could plausibly use the time saved by not donating a kidney to generate at least 1 $? For example, I guess the cost to your parents would be higher than this, so they might be happy to donate a few dollars to THL for you not to donate a kidney. Even if not now, the time you save may also increase your income by more than 1 $ in the next few years. For an hourly rate of 20 $/h, it would only need to increase your wages expressed as working time by 3 min (= 1/20*60).
In Belgium you can leave a message to the person you’re donating to, so I had planned to leave a message about veganism and effective altruism. I think this will be a very powerful reason to change behavior, seeing as it comes from their altruistic donor.
This sounds inspiring. At the same time, would you feel comfortable donating a kidney if it being good depended on the beneficiary having a sufficiently high chance of becoming vegan or effective altruist? Note the beneficiary would probably rather read a message which does not convey that you are expecting something in return...
If you chose to make a (possibly indirect) request in your message, you may want to consider asking for a donation instead of raising veganism:
If you trust my numbers on the scale of the suffering of farmed animals, the annual suffering caused by a random human to farmed animals is equivalent to 4.04 DALY (= 4.64*0.870).
So, for a life expectancy of the kidney recipient of 30 years, the potential gain due to becoming vegan would be 121 DALY (= 30*4.04).
The above could be averted donating 8.07 $ (= 121⁄15.0) to THL.
The kidney recipient would probably prefer to donate a few dozens of dollars to THL over becoming vegan.
As for raising effective altruism in your message:
I guess the kidney recipient would tend to have an older age than that at which people usually become engaged with effective altruism, so there would be less room to change to a more impactful career, and I assume most of the benefit would come from additional effective donations.
Giving What We Can estimated each GWWC Pledge leads to 22 k$ of effective donations. If I recall correctly, these effective donations are expressed in terms of ones to GiveWell’s top charities, which would mean each GWWC Pledge averts 220 DALY (= 22*10^3*0.01).
Only around 1 in 1 million people are quite engaged with effective altruism (8 k in 8 billion), and maybe 1 % of the global population knows about it, so only 1 in 10 k (= 10^-6/0.01) people who know about it become quite engaged.
If the kidney recipient is 100 times as likely to sign the GWWC Pledge as the above, they would have a 1 % (= 100*10^-4) chance of signing it.
As a result, the expected benefit of your message would be 2.20 DALY (= 220*0.01), which corresponds to 14.7 % (= 2.20/15) of the benefits to the recipient I mentioned in the previous comment.
So it appears that raising effective altruism in your message does not significantly increase the overall benefits.
My best guess is that I had better not donate a kidney. However, I should note the calculations in this and my past comments involve a great deal of uncertainty. Yet, in my view, the uncertainty also illustrates it is unclear whether donating a kidney is good/bad if one’s marginal earnings/savings are going towards the best interventions to help animals.
I don’t think we can just equate 15 QALY’s to 15 DALY’s, these are different metrics. I tried to find a converter online but it looks like there is no consensus on how to do that.
Additional benefits of making someone an EA include: doing part-time/volunteer work (e.g. currently everyone at effectief geven is a volunteer), and them making other people EAs (spreading the generated expected QALY’s further).
Same things could be said for veganism, which is less likely with a one time donation since people don’t make that part of their identity. But the cost-effectiveness is a good point. Maybe many small donations over time could achieve those same things while being more cost-effective? But then again the funding landscape might change. I’ll think a bit more about this.
I think the recipient is much more likely than that to sign the pledge, since the average person who has heard of EA associates it with SBF-types while this person is a direct life-changing beneficiary.
I also noticed you didn’t add the ‘costly signal factor’ to your analysis. I think we EAs tend to fall for the McNamara trap of basing our decisions only on quantitative observations and ignoring the rest. A lot of the factors I’m pointing at, spreading the idea of EA, making it easier to win people over, making people change their identity/attitudes, don’t have numbers attached to them but are nonetheless very impactful.
Thanks for following up!
Cool!
Even if there is no direct nearterm financial cost, you could plausibly use the time saved by not donating a kidney to generate at least 1 $? For example, I guess the cost to your parents would be higher than this, so they might be happy to donate a few dollars to THL for you not to donate a kidney. Even if not now, the time you save may also increase your income by more than 1 $ in the next few years. For an hourly rate of 20 $/h, it would only need to increase your wages expressed as working time by 3 min (= 1/20*60).
This sounds inspiring. At the same time, would you feel comfortable donating a kidney if it being good depended on the beneficiary having a sufficiently high chance of becoming vegan or effective altruist? Note the beneficiary would probably rather read a message which does not convey that you are expecting something in return...
If you chose to make a (possibly indirect) request in your message, you may want to consider asking for a donation instead of raising veganism:
If you trust my numbers on the scale of the suffering of farmed animals, the annual suffering caused by a random human to farmed animals is equivalent to 4.04 DALY (= 4.64*0.870).
So, for a life expectancy of the kidney recipient of 30 years, the potential gain due to becoming vegan would be 121 DALY (= 30*4.04).
The above could be averted donating 8.07 $ (= 121⁄15.0) to THL.
The kidney recipient would probably prefer to donate a few dozens of dollars to THL over becoming vegan.
As for raising effective altruism in your message:
I guess the kidney recipient would tend to have an older age than that at which people usually become engaged with effective altruism, so there would be less room to change to a more impactful career, and I assume most of the benefit would come from additional effective donations.
Giving What We Can estimated each GWWC Pledge leads to 22 k$ of effective donations. If I recall correctly, these effective donations are expressed in terms of ones to GiveWell’s top charities, which would mean each GWWC Pledge averts 220 DALY (= 22*10^3*0.01).
Only around 1 in 1 million people are quite engaged with effective altruism (8 k in 8 billion), and maybe 1 % of the global population knows about it, so only 1 in 10 k (= 10^-6/0.01) people who know about it become quite engaged.
If the kidney recipient is 100 times as likely to sign the GWWC Pledge as the above, they would have a 1 % (= 100*10^-4) chance of signing it.
As a result, the expected benefit of your message would be 2.20 DALY (= 220*0.01), which corresponds to 14.7 % (= 2.20/15) of the benefits to the recipient I mentioned in the previous comment.
So it appears that raising effective altruism in your message does not significantly increase the overall benefits.
My best guess is that I had better not donate a kidney. However, I should note the calculations in this and my past comments involve a great deal of uncertainty. Yet, in my view, the uncertainty also illustrates it is unclear whether donating a kidney is good/bad if one’s marginal earnings/savings are going towards the best interventions to help animals.
I don’t think we can just equate 15 QALY’s to 15 DALY’s, these are different metrics. I tried to find a converter online but it looks like there is no consensus on how to do that.
Additional benefits of making someone an EA include: doing part-time/volunteer work (e.g. currently everyone at effectief geven is a volunteer), and them making other people EAs (spreading the generated expected QALY’s further).
Same things could be said for veganism, which is less likely with a one time donation since people don’t make that part of their identity. But the cost-effectiveness is a good point. Maybe many small donations over time could achieve those same things while being more cost-effective? But then again the funding landscape might change. I’ll think a bit more about this.
I think the recipient is much more likely than that to sign the pledge, since the average person who has heard of EA associates it with SBF-types while this person is a direct life-changing beneficiary.
I also noticed you didn’t add the ‘costly signal factor’ to your analysis. I think we EAs tend to fall for the McNamara trap of basing our decisions only on quantitative observations and ignoring the rest. A lot of the factors I’m pointing at, spreading the idea of EA, making it easier to win people over, making people change their identity/attitudes, don’t have numbers attached to them but are nonetheless very impactful.