I’m surprised by your last point, since the article says:
Although it seems unlikely x-risk reduction is the best buy from the lights of the total view (we should be suspicious if it were), given $13000 per life year compares unfavourably to best global health interventions, it is still a good buy: it compares favourably to marginal cost effectiveness for rich country healthcare spending, for example.
This seems a far cry from the impression you seem to have gotten from the article. In fact your quote of “highly effective” is only used once, in the introduction, as a hypothetical motivation for crunching the numbers. (Since, a-priori, it could have turned out the cost effectiveness was 100 times higher, which would have been very cost effective).
On your first two points, my (admittedly not very justified) impression is the ‘default’ opinons people typically have is that almost all human lives are positive, and that animal lives are extremely unimportant compared to humans. Whilst one can question the truth of these claims, writing an article aimed at the majority seems reasonable.
It might be that actually within EA the average opinion is closer to yours, and in any case I agree the assumptions should have been clearly stated somewhere, along with the fact he is taking the symmetric as opposed to asymmetric view etc.
I’m surprised by your last point, since the article says:
This seems a far cry from the impression you seem to have gotten from the article. In fact your quote of “highly effective” is only used once, in the introduction, as a hypothetical motivation for crunching the numbers. (Since, a-priori, it could have turned out the cost effectiveness was 100 times higher, which would have been very cost effective).
On your first two points, my (admittedly not very justified) impression is the ‘default’ opinons people typically have is that almost all human lives are positive, and that animal lives are extremely unimportant compared to humans. Whilst one can question the truth of these claims, writing an article aimed at the majority seems reasonable.
It might be that actually within EA the average opinion is closer to yours, and in any case I agree the assumptions should have been clearly stated somewhere, along with the fact he is taking the symmetric as opposed to asymmetric view etc.