FWIW I donât think GiveDirectly should be âthe barâ for being considered one of the most effective organizations in the global health and development space.
I think both 5x and 10x differences are big and meaningful in this domain, and I think there are likely billions of dollars in funding gaps between GiveWellâs bar (~10x) and GiveDirectly. I think donors motivated by EA principles would be making a mistake, and leaving a lot of value on the table by donating to GiveDirectly or StrongMinds over GiveWellâs recommendations (I say this as someone whoâs donated to both StrongMinds and GiveDirectly in the past, and hugely respects the work they both do).
Recognize this might be a difference in what we mean by âone ofâ the most effective, but wanted to comment because this sentiment feeds into a general worry I have that a desire for pluralism and positivity within GH&D (both good and important things!) is eroding intensity about prioritization (more important IMO).
Fair points. Iâm not planning to move my giving to GiveWell All Grants to either SM or GD, and donât mean to suggest anyone else does so either. Nor do I want to suggest we should promote all organizations over an arbitrary bar without giving potential donors any idea about how we would rank within the class of organizations that clear that bar despite meaningful differences.
I mainly wrote the comment because I think the temperature in other threads about SM has occasionally gotten a few degrees warmer than I think optimally conducive to what weâre trying to do here. So it was an attempt at a small preventive ice cube.
I think youâre right that we probably mean different things by âone of.â 5-10X differences are big and meaningful, but I donât think that insight is inconsistent with the idea that a point estimate something around âabove GiveDirectlyâ is around the point at which an organization should be on our radar as potentially worth recommending given the right circumstances.
One potential definition for the top class would be whether a person could reasonably conclude on the evidence that it was the most effective based on moral weights or assumptions that seem plausible. Here, itâs totally plausible to me that a donorâs own moral weights might value reducing suffering from depression relatively more than GiveWellâs analysis implies, and saving lives relatively less. GiveWellâs model here makes some untestable philosophical assumptions that seem relatively favorable to AMF: âdeprivationist framework and assuming a âneutral pointâ of 0.5 life satisfaction points.â As HLIâs analysis suggests at Section 3.4 of this study, the effectiveness of AMF under a WELLBY/âsubjective well-being model is significantly dependent on these assumptions.
For a donor with significantly different assumptions and/âor moral weights, adjusting for those could put SM over AMF even accepting the rest of GiveWellâs analysis. More moderate philosophical differences could put one in a place where more optimistic empirical assumptions + a expectation that SM will continue reducing cost-per-participant and/âor effectively refine its approach as it scales up could lead to the same conclusion.
Another potential definition for the top class would be whether one would feel more-than-comfortable recommending it to a potential donor for whom there are specific reasons to choose an approach similar to the organizationâs. I think GiveWellâs analysis suggests the answer is yes for reasons similar to the above. If youâve got a potential donor who just isnât that enthuiastic about saving lives (perhaps due to emphasizing a more epicurean moral weighting) but is motivated to give to reducing human suffering, SM is a valuable organization to have in oneâs talking points (and may well be a better pitch than any of the GiveWell top charities under those circumstances).
I think Iâm more skeptical than you that reasonable alternative assumptions make StrongMinds look more cost effective than AMF. But I agree that StrongMinds seems like it could be a good fit for some donors.
I think Iâm more skeptical than you that reasonable alternative assumptions make StrongMinds look more cost effective than AMF. But I agree that StrongMinds seems like it could be a good fit for some donors.
Interested if you could elaborate here. Iâm not sure which intuitions you consider âreasonableâ and why. As Joelâs figure 4 above indicates, for either HLIâs or GiveWellâs estimates of StrongMinds, talk therapy can be more cost-effective than bednets, and vice versa, but which is more effective depends on the philosophical assumptionsâso that ought to be the debate weâre having, but arenât. Perhaps we have a much more capacious concept of which assumptions are reasonable and youâd want to rule some of those out? If so, which ones?
Iâm not sure if this is what you meant, but if weâre talking about a raw difference in philosophical/âethical intuitions, I am very reluctant to say that some of those are unreasonableâin case any reader isnât aware of this, philosophy seminars often end up with the discussants realising they just have different intuitions. To say, at this point, your intuitions are reasonable and the other personâs are unreasonable is the rhetorical equivalent of banging your fist on the tableâyouâre not making a new argument, youâre just hoping the other person will agree with you anyway!
I think each part of this chart has some assumptions I donât think are defensible.
1. I donât think a neutral point higher than 2 is defensible.
You cite three studies in this report.[1] My read on what to conclude about the neutral point from those is:
i) IDinsight 2019 (n=70; representative of GW recipients): you highlight the average answer of 0.56, but this is excluding the 1â3 of people who say itâs not possible to have a life worse than death.[2] I think including those as 0 more accurately reflects their preferences, so 2/â3*0.56=0.37/â10
ii) Peasgood et al, unpublished (n=75; UK): you say 2â10 and I canât find the study so Iâm taking that at face value.
iii) Jamison and Shukla, unpublished (n=600, US, Brazil, China): you highlight the average answer of 25â100. In private communication with the author, I got the impression that 1.8/â10 was probably more appropriate because the scale used in this study isnât comparable to typical life satisfaction scales.[3]
So what to make of this? I think you could reasonably put weight in the largest study (1.8/â10). Or you could put weight on the most representative study (0.37). I lean towards the latter, because I intuitively find it quite likely that less well off people will report lower neutral points (I donât feel certain about this, and hoping Jamison & Shukla will have enough sample to test it). But either way, I donât see any way of combining these studies to get an answer higher than 2.
In addition, a neutral point of 5 implies the average person in over 40 countries would be better off dead. A neutral point of 2.5 implies the average person in Afghanistan would be better off dead. I find these both jarring implications.
HLIâs belief that a neutral point of 5 is within a reasonable range seems to come from Diener et al. 2018.[4] But that articleâs not explicit about what it means by âneutral pointâ. As far as I can tell from a quick skim, it seems to be defining âneutralâ as halfway between 0 and 10.
2. I donât think 38% is a defensible estimate for spillovers, which puts me closer to GiveWellâs estimate of StrongMinds than HLIâs estimate of StrongMinds.
I wrote this critique of your estimate that household spillovers was 52%. That critique had three parts. The third part was an error, which you corrected and brought the answer down to 38%. But I think the first two are actually more important: youâre deriving a general household spillover effect from studies specifically designed to help household members, which would lead to an overestimate.
I thought you agreed with that from your response here, so Iâm confused as to why youâre still defending 38%. Flagging that Iâm not saying the studies themselves are weak (though itâs true that theyâre not very highly powered). Iâm saying theyâre estimating a different thing from what youâre trying to estimate, and there are good reasons to think the thing theyâre trying to estimate is higher. So I think your estimate should be lower.
3. I donât think strong epicureanism is a defensible position
Strong epicureanism (the red line) is the view that death isnât bad for the person who dies. I think itâs logically possible to hold this position as a thought experiment in a philosophy seminar, but Iâve never met anyone who actually believes it and Iâd be deeply troubled if decisionmakers took action on the basis of it. You seem to agree to some extent,[5] but by elevating it to this chart, and putting it alongside the claim that âAgainst Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptionsâ I think youâre implying this is a reasonable position to take action on, and I donât think it is.
So I think my version of this chart looks quite different: the x-axis is between 0.4 and 2, the StrongMinds estimateâs quite a bit closer to GiveWell than HLI, and thereâs no âepicureanismâ line.
What does HLI actually believe?
More broadly, Iâm quite confused about how strongly HLI is recommending StrongMinds. In this post, you say (emphasis mine)
We conclude that the Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions. We expect this conclusion will similarly apply to the other life-extending charities recommended by GiveWell.
And
Weâre now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money.
But youâve said elsewhere:
HLI does not (yet) take a stance on these different philosophical views.
That strikes me as inconsistent. Youâve defined a range of assumptions you believe are reasonable, then claimed that StrongMinds > AMF on almost all of those assumptions. And then said you donât take a stance on these assumptions. But you have to actually defend the range of assumptions youâve defined as reasonable. And in my view, theyâre not.
âEmpirical work on how individuals interpret the scale could be helpful but is extremely limited. A small (n = 75) survey in the UK found that respondents would choose death over life at a life satisfaction level of about 2â10 (Peasgood et al., unpublished, as referenced in Krekel & Frijters, 2021). A survey of people living in poverty in Ghana and Kenya estimated the neutral point as 0.56 (IDinsight, 2019, p. 92; n = 70). There are also preliminary results from a sample of 600 in the USA, Brazil, and China that finds a neutral point of 25â100 (Jamison & Shukla, private communication). At the Happier Lives Institute, we are currently working on our own survey to explore this topic further and hope to share our results soon.â Elephant in the bednet
âApproximately one third of respondents stated that itâs not possible to have a life thatâs worse than death. These respondents cited deontological frameworks such as the inherent and immeasurable value of life regardless of other factors. The remaining respondents (close to two thirds) indicate that there are points on the ladder where life is worse than death. For these respondents, this point is substantially lower than their current life satisfaction scores âthe average point identified was 0.56 on a ladder from 0 to 10, compared to their current average life satisfaction score of 2.21â IDInsight 2019, pg 94
Iâm not sharing the full reasoning because it was private correspondence and I havenât asked the authors if theyâd be comfortable with me sharing.
âOther wellbeing researchers, such as Diener et al. (2018), appear to treat the midway point on the scale as the neutral point (i.e., 5 on a 0-10 scale).â Elephant in the bednet
âAlthough what we might call strong Epicureanism, the view that death is not bad at all, has few takers, there may be more sympathy for weak Epicureanism, where death can be bad, but relatively more weight is given to living well than living longâ Elephant in the bednet
Epicureanism is discussed in almost every philosophy course on the badness of death. Itâs taken seriously, rather than treated as an absurd position, a non-starter, and whilst not that many philosophers end up as Epicureans, Iâve met some that are very sympathetic. I find critics dismiss the view too quickly and Iâve not seen anything thatâs convinced me the view has no merit. I donât think we should have zero credence in it, and it seems reasonable to point out that it is one of the options. Again, Iâm inclined to let donors make up their own minds.
On what HLI actually believes
HLI is currently trying not to have a view on these issues, but point out to donors how having different views would change the priorities so they can form their own view. We may have to develop a âhouse viewâ but none of the options for doing this seem particularly appealing (they include: we use my view, we use a staff aggregate, we poll donors, we poll the public, some combo of the previous options).
You bring up this quote
Weâre now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money.
I regret this sentence, which is insufficiently nuanced and I wouldnât use it again (you and I have discussed this privately). That said, I think weâre quite well-caveated elsewhere. You quote this bullet point:
We conclude that the Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions. We expect this conclusion will similarly apply to the other life-extending charities recommended by GiveWell.
But you didnât quote the bullet point directly before it (emphasis added):
In our new report, The Elephant in the Bednet, we show that the relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make. This issue is usually glossed over and there is no simple answer.
The backstory to the âwe confidently recommend StrongMindsâ bit is that, when we did the analysis, StrongMinds looked better under almost all assumptions and, even where AMF was better, it was only slightly better (1.3x). We thought donors would want an overall recommendation, and hence StrongMinds seemed like the safe choice (given some intuitions about donorsâ intuitions and moral uncertainty). Youâre right that weâll have to rethink what our overall recommendations are, and how to frame them, once the dust has settled on this debate.
Finally, whilst you say
But you have to actually defend the range of assumptions youâve defined as reasonable. And in my view, theyâre not.
This feels uneasily like a double standard. As Iâve pointed out before, neither GiveWell nor Open Philanthropy really defends their views in general (asserting a view isnât the same as defending it). In this report, GiveWell doesnât defend its assumptions, point out what other assumptions one might (reasonably) take, or say how this would change the result. Part of what we have tried to highlight in our work is that these issues have been mostly ignored and can really matter.
Our aim was more to cover the range of views we think some reasonable people would believe, not to restrict it to what we think they should believe. We motivated our choices in the original report and will restate that briefly here. For the badness of death, we give the three standard views in the literature. At one end, deprivationism gives âfull valueâ to saving lives. On the other, Epicurianism gives no weight to saving lives. TRIA offers something in between. For the neutral point, we used a range that included what we saw as the minimum and maximum possible values. Including a range of values is not equivalent to saying they are all equally probable. We encourage donors and decision-makers to use values they think are most plausible (for example, by using this interactive chart).
In our new report, The Elephant in the Bednet, we show that the relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make. This issue is usually glossed over and there is no simple answer.
We conclude that the Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions. We expect this conclusion will similarly apply to the other life-extending charities recommended by GiveWell.
In suggesting James quote these together, it sounds like youâre saying something like âthis is a clear caveat to the strength of recommendation behind StrongMinds, HLI doesnât recommend StrongMinds as strongly as the individual bullet implies, itâs misleading for you to not include thisâ.
As a result of this framing, despite the caveat that HLI â[does] not advocate for any particular viewâ, I think itâs reasonable to interpret this as being strongly supportive of StrongMinds, which can be true even if HLI does not have a formed view on the exact philosophical view to take.[2]
If you did mean the former (that the bullet about philosophical assumptions is primarily included as a caveat to the strength of recommendation behind StrongMinds), then there is probably some tension here between (emphasis added):
-âthe relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make...there is no simple answerâ, and
-âWe conclude StrongMinds > AMF under almost all assumptionsâ
Additionally I think some weak evidence to suggest that HLI is not as well-caveated as it could be is that many people (mistakenly) viewed HLI as an advocacy organisation for mental health interventions. I do think this is a reasonable outside interpretation based on HLIâs communications, even though this is not HLIâs stated intent. For example, I donât think it would be unreasonable for an outsider to read your current pinned thread and come away with conclusions like:
âStrongMinds is the best place to donateâ,
âStrongMinds is better than AMFâ,
âMental health is a very good place to donate if you want to do the most goodâ,
âHappiness is what ultimately matters for wellbeing and what should be measuredâ.
If these are not what you want people to take away, then I think pointing to this bullet point caveat doesnât really meaningfully address this concernâthe response kind of feels something like âyou should have read the fine printâ. While I donât think itâs not necessary for HLI to take a stance on specific philosophical views, I do think it becomes an issue if people are (mis)interpreting HLIâs stance based on its published statements.
-We show how much cost-effectiveness changes by shifting from one extreme of (reasonable) opinion to the other. At one end, AMF is 1.3x better than StrongMinds. At the other, StrongMinds is 12x better than AMF.
-StrongMinds and GiveDirectly are represented with flat, dashed lines because their cost-effectiveness does not change under the different assumptions.
-As you can see, AMFâs cost-effectiveness changes a lot. It is only more cost-effective than StrongMinds if you adopt deprivationism and place the neutral point below 1.
As youâve acknowledged, comments like âWeâre now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money.â perhaps add to the confusion.
Do you think the neutral point and basic philosophical perspective (e.g., deprivationism vs. epicureanism) are empirical questions, or are they matters on which the donor has to exercise their own moral and philosophical judgment (after considering what the somewhat limited survey data have to say on the topic)?
I would graph the neutral point from 0 to 3. I think very few donors would set the neutral point above 3, and Iâd start with the presumption that the most balanced way to present the chart is probably to center it fairly near the best guess from the survey data. On the other hand, if you have most of the surveys reporting âabout 2,â then itâs hard to characterize 3 as an outlier viewâpresumably, a good fraction of the respondents picked a value near, at, or even over 3.
Although I donât think HLI puts it this way, it doesnât strike me as implausible to view human suffering as a more severe problem than lost human happiness. As I noted in a different comment, I think of that chart as a starting point from which a donor can apply various discounts and bonuses on a number of potentially relevant factors. But another way to account for this would be to give partial weight to strong epicureanism as a means of discounting the value of lost human happiness vis-a-vis suffering.
Given that your critique was published after HLIâs 2022 charity recommendation, I think itâs fair to ask HLI whether it would reaffirm those characterizations today. I would agree that the appropriate conclusion, on HLIâs current state of analysis, is that the recommendation is either SM or GiveWellâs top charities depending on the donorâs philosophical assumptions. I donât think itâs inappropriate to make a recommendation based on the charity evaluatorâs own philosophical judgment, but unless HLI has changed its stance it has taken no position. I donât think it is appropriate to merely assume equal credence for each of the philosophical views and neutral points under consideration.
One could also defensibly make a summary recommendation on stated assumptions about donor values or on receipient values. But the best information Iâve seen on those pointsâthe donor and beneficiary surveys as reflected in GiveWellâs moral weightsâseemingly points to a predominately deprivationist approach with a pretty low neutral point (otherwise the extremely high value on saving the lives of young children wouldnât compute).
Thanks Jason, mostly agree with paras 4-5, and think para 2 is a good point as well.
Do you think the neutral point and basic philosophical perspective (e.g., deprivationism vs. epicureanism) are empirical questions, or are they matters on which the donor has to exercise their own moral and philosophical judgment (after considering what the somewhat limited survey data have to say on the topic)?
I think the basic philosophical perspective is a moral/âphilosophical judgement. But the neutral point combines that moral judgement with empirical models of what peoplesâ lives are actually like, and empirical beliefs about how people respond to surveys.
I wonder if, insofar as we do have different perspectives on this (and I donât think weâre particularly far apart, particularly on the object level question), the crux is around how much weight to put in individual donor judgement? Or even how much individual donors have those judgements?
My experience of even EA-minded (or at least GiveWell) donors is that ~none of them have a position on these kinds of questions, and they actively want to defer. My (less confident but based on quite a few conversations) model of EA-minded StrongMinds donors is they want to give to mental health and see an EA-approved charity so give there, rather than because of a quantitative belief on foundational questions like the neutral point. As an aside, I believe that was how StrongMinds first got on EAâs radarâas a recommendation for Founders Pledge donors who specifically wanted to give to mental health in an evidence-based way.
It does seem plausible to me that donors who follow HLI recommendations (who I expect are particularly philosophically minded) would be more willing to change their decisions based on these kinds of questions than donors Iâve talked to.
Iâd be interested if someone wanted to stick up for a neutral point of 3 as something they actually believe and a crux for where they give, rather than something someone could believe, or is plausible. I could be wrong, but Iâm starting out skeptical that belief would survive contact with âBut that implies the world would be better if everyone in Afghanistan diedâ and âa representative survey of people whose deaths youâd be preventing think their lives are more valuable than thatâ
From HLIâs perspective, it makes sense to describe how the moral/âphilosophical views one assumes affect the relative effectiveness of charities. They are, after all, a charity recommender, and donors are their âclientsâ in a sense. GiveWell doesnât really do this, which makes senseâGiveWellâs moral weights are so weighted toward saving lives that it doesnât really make sense for them to investigate charities with other modes of action. I think itâs fine to provide a bottom-line recommendation on whatever moral/âphilosophical view a recommender feels is best-supported, but itâs hardly obligatory.
We recognize donor preferences in that we donât create a grand theory of effectiveness and push everyone to donate to longtermist organizations, or animal-welfare organizations, or global health organizations depending on the grand theoryâs output. Donors choose among these for their own idiosyncratic reasons, but moral/âphilosophical views are certainly among the critical criteria for many donors. I donât see why that shouldnât be the case for interventions within a cause area that produce different kinds of outputs as well.
Here, I doubt most global-health donorsâeither those who take advice from GiveWell or from HLIâhave finely-tuned views on deprivationism, neutral points, and so on. However, I think many donors do have preferences that indirectly track on some of those issues. For instance, you describe a class of donors who âwant to give to mental health.â While there could be various reasons for that, itâs plausible to me that these donors place more of an emphasis on improving experience for those who are alive (e.g., they give partial credence to epicureanism) and/âor on alleviating suffering. If they did assess and chart their views on neutral point and philosophical view, I would expect them to end up more often at points where SM is ranked relatively higher than the average global-health donor would. But that is just conjecture on my part.
One interesting aspect of thinking from the donor perspective is the possibility that survey results could be significantly affected by religious beliefs. If many respondents chose a 0 neutral point because their religious tradition led them to that conclusion, and you are quite convinced that the religious tradition is just wrong in general, do you adjust for that? Does not adjusting allow the religious tradition to indirectly influence where you spend your charitable dollar?
To me, the most important thing a charity evaluator/ârecommender does is clearly communicate what the donation accomplishes (on average) if given to various organizations they identifyâX lives saved (and smaller benefits), or Y number of peopleâs well-being improved by Z amount. Thatâs the part the donor canât do themselves (without investing a ton of time and resources).
I donât think the neutral point is as high as 3. But I think itâs fine for HLI to offer recommendations for people who do.
Hi James, thanks for elaborating, thatâs really useful! Weâll reply to your points in separate comments.
Your statement, 1. I donât think a neutral point higher than 2 is defensible
Reply: I donât think we have enough evidence or theory to be confident about where to put the neutral point.
Your response about where to put the neutral point involves taking answers to survey questions where people are asked something like âwhere on a 0-10 scale would you choose not to keep living?â and assuming we should take those answers at face value for where to locate the neutral point. However, this conclusion strikes me as too fast; I donât think we have enough theory or evidence on this issue. Are we definitely asking the right questions? Do we understand peopleâs responses? Should we agree with them even if we understand them?
Iâm not sure if I told you about this, but weâre working on a pilot survey for this and other wellbeing measuring issues. The relevant sections for neutrality are 1.3 and 6. Iâll try to put the main bits here, to make life easier (link to initial part of report on EA forum; link to full report):
The neutral point refers to the level on a SWB scale at which existence has a neutral value, compared to non-existence for that person (assuming this state is perpetual and considering only the effects on that person). Above this point life is âbetter than deathâ; below it life is âworse than deathâ. This is conceptually distinct, but possibly closely related, to what we call the zero point: the level on a SWB scale at which that type of SWB is overall neither positive nor negative (e.g., someone is neither overall satisfied or dissatisfied). A natural thought is that the zero point and the neutral point coincide: if life is good(/âbad) for us when it has positive(/ânegative) wellbeing, so a life has neutral value if it has zero wellbeing.
As we say in footnote 5, this aligned is straightforwardly entailed by the standard formulation of utilitarianism.
Thatâs why,
[In our pilot survey, w]e test whether respondents put the neutral point and zero point for life satisfaction in the same place, and whether respondents interpret the zero point for life satisfaction as somewhere between 0 and 5. If respondents do both, that would provide an explanation of previous worksâ findings. However, there are several reasons why respondents might not believe that the neutral point and the zero point coincide. Some of these issues are discussed in Section 6.2.
Unfortunately, we find that, on a life satisfaction scale, participants put the zero point at 5â10, and the neutral point at 1.3/â10. Weâre not really sure what to make of this. Hereâs what we say in section 6.2 in full.
Survey questions about the neutral point cannot settle the debate about when a life is not worth living on their own. At most, we can elicit respondentsâ beliefs and preferences about their own lives, which, at least on some moral theories, will be an important determinant of the neutral point.
As noted in Section 1.3, an intuitive thought about the value of extending lives is that living longer is good for you if you would have positive wellbeing, and bad for you if you would have negative wellbeing. Yet, the above result seems in tension with this. We might expect someone who is overall dissatisfied with their life would say that they have negative wellbeing. However, if you have negative wellbeing, shouldnât you also believe that living longer would be bad for you? Note that we have specifically asked respondents to disregard the effects of their existence on others. This should rule out participants thinking their life is âworth livingâ merely because their existence is good for other people (e.g., their family). In light of these arguments, how might we explain the divergences between the reported neutral point and the reported zero point?
One reason participants might not align the neutral point with the zero point on a life satisfaction scale is that participants are not endorsing a life satisfaction theory of wellbeing. That is, respondents do not believe that their wellbeing is wholly represented by their overall satisfaction with life. If, for instance, participants ultimately valued their happiness, and they expect that they would be happy even if they were very dissatisfied, then they would justifiably conclude that even if they were dissatisfied with their life, it would be worth it, for them, to keep living.
A distinct possibility is that there are special theoretical considerations connected to the life satisfaction theory of wellbeing. Part of the motivation for such a theory is that individuals get to choose what makes their lives go well (Sumner 1999, Plant 2020). Hence, perhaps individuals could coherently distinguish between the level of satisfaction at which they would rather stop existing (the neutral point) and the level at which they are neither overall satisfied or dissatisfied (the zero point).13
What the previous two comments reveal is that investigations into the neutral point may substantially turn on philosophical assumptions. We may need a âtheory-ledâ approach, where we decide what theory of wellbeing we think is correct, and then consider how, given a particular theory of wellbeing, the location of the neutral point would be determined. This would contrast with a âdata-ledâ approach where we strive to be theory agnostic.
Another concern is that our survey questions are too cognitively demanding for participants. Perhaps respondents do not, in fact, account for the stipulation that they should discount the effects on others. Alternatively, respondents might answer our questions on the assumption that their life would only temporarily, rather than permanently, be at that level of life satisfaction. In future iterations of our survey, we may try to get a better understanding of this possibility.
Finally, there may be experimenter demand effects. Respondents may think it is important to express the value of human life, and therefore it is wrong to say a life is ânot worth livingâ unless a life is truly miserable.
For these reasons, we remain unsure whether a level of 1.3/â10, which is the sample mean on our neutrality question, indeed gives a valid estimate of the âtrueâ neutral point.
We plan to think about this more and test our hypotheses in the full version of the survey. If you have ideas for what we should test, now would be a great time to share them!
Given the methodological challenges in measuring the neutral point, I would have some hesitation to credit any conclusions that diverged too much from what revealed preferences imply. A high neutral point implies that many people in developing countries believe their lives are not worth living. So Iâd look for evidence of behavior (either in respondents or in the population more generally) that corroborated whether people acted in a way that was consistent with the candidate neutral point.
For instance, although money, family, and other considerations doubtless affect it, studying individuals who are faced with serious and permanent (or terminal) medical conditions might be helpful. At what expected life satisfaction score do they decline treatment? If the neutral point is relatively close to the median point in a country, one would expect to see a lot of people decide to not obtain curative treatment if the results would leave them 1-2 points less satisfied than their baseline.
You might be able to approximate that by asking hypothetical questions about specific situations that you believe respondents would assess as reducing life satisfaction by a specified amount (disability, imprisonment, social stigma, etc.), and then ask whether the respondent believes they would find life still worth living if that happened. I donât think that approach works to establish a neutral point, but I think having something more concrete would be an important cross-check on what may otherwise come across as an academic, conjectural exercise to many respondents.
A high neutral point implies that many people in developing countries believe their lives are not worth living.
This isnât necessarily the case. I assume that if people described their lives as having negative wellbeing, this wouldnât imply they thought their life was not worth continuing.
People can have negative wellbeing and still want to live for the sake of others or causes greater than themselves.
Life satisfaction appears to be increasing over time in low income countries. I think this progress is such that many people who may have negative wellbeing at present, will not have negative wellbeing their whole lives.
Edit: To expand a little, for these reasons, as well as the very reasonable drive to survive (regardless of wellbeing), I find it difficult to interpret revealed preferences and itâs unclear theyâre a bastion of clarity in this confusing debate.
Anectdotally, Iâve clearly had periods of negative wellbeing before (sometimes starkly), but never wanted to die during those periods. If I knew that such periods were permanent, Iâd probably think it was good for me to not-exist, but Iâd still hesitate to say Iâd prefer to not-exist, because I donât just care about my wellbeing. As Tyrion said âDeath is so final, and life is so full of possibilities.â
I think these difficulties should highlight that the difficulties here arenât just localized to this area of the topic.
Thanks for these points! The idea that people care about more than their wellbeing may be critical here. Iâm thinking of a simplified model with the following assumptions: a mean lifetime wellbeing of 5, SD 2, normal distribution, wellbeing is constant through the lifespan, with a neutral point of 4 (which is shared by everyone).
Under these assumptions, AMF gets no âcreditâ (except for grief avoidance) for saving the life of a hypothetical person with wellbeing of 4. Iâm really hesitant to say that saving that personâs life doesnât morally âcountâ as a good because they are at the neutral point. On the one hand, the model tells me that saving this personâs life doesnât improve total wellbeing. On the other hand, suppose I (figuratively) asked the person whose life was saved, and he said that he preferred his existence to non-existence and appreciated AMF saving his life.
At that point, I think the WELLBY-based model might not be incorporating some important dataâthe person telling us that he prefers his existence to non-existence would strongly suggest that saving his life had moral value that should indeed âcountâ as a moral good in the AMF column. His answers may not be fully consistent, but itâs not obvious to me why I should fully credit his self-reported wellbeing but give zero credence to his view on the desirability of his continued existence. I guess he could be wrong to prefer his continued existence, but he is uniquely qualified to answer that question and so I think I should be really hesitant to completely discount what he says. And a full 30% of the population would have wellbeing of 4 or less under the assumptions.
Even more concerning, AMF gets significantly âpenalizedâ for saving the life of a hypothetical person with wellbeing of 3 who also prefers existence to non-existence. And almost 16% of the population would score at least that low.
Of course, the real world is messier than a quick model. But if you have a population where the neutral point is close enough to the population average, but almost everyone prefers continued existence, it seems that you are going to have a meaningful number of cases where AMF gets very little /â no /â negative moral âcreditâ for saving the lives of people who want (or would want) their lives saved. That seems like a weakness, not a feature, of the WELLBY-based model to me.
2. I donât think 38% is a defensible estimate for spillovers, which puts me closer to GiveWellâs estimate of StrongMinds than HLIâs estimate of StrongMinds.
I wrote this critique of your estimate that household spillovers was 52%. That critique had three parts. The third part was an error, which you corrected and brought the answer down to 38%. But I think the first two are actually more important: youâre deriving a general household spillover effect from studies specifically designed to help household members, which would lead to an overestimate.
I thought you agreed with that from your response here, so Iâm confused as to why youâre still defending 38%. Flagging that Iâm not saying the studies themselves are weak (though itâs true that theyâre not very highly powered). Iâm saying theyâre estimating a different thing from what youâre trying to estimate, and there are good reasons to think the thing theyâre trying to estimate is higher. So I think your estimate should be lower.
I could have been clearer, the 38% is a placeholder while I do the Barker et al. 2022 analysis. You did update me about the previous studiesâ relevance. My arguments are less supporting the 38% figureâwhich I expect to update with more data and more about explaining why I think that I have a higher prior for household spillovers from psychotherapy than you and Alex seem to. But really, the hope is that we can soon be discussing more and better evidence.
I think donors motivated by EA principles would be making a mistake, and leaving a lot of value on the table by donating to GiveDirectly or StrongMinds over GiveWellâs recommendations
Not going into the wider discussion, I specifically disagree with this idea: thereâs a trade-off here between estimated impact and things like risk, paternalism, scalability. If Iâm risk-averse enough, or give some partial weight to bring less paternalistic, I might prefer donating to GiveDirectlyâwhich I indeed am, despite choosing to donate to AMF in the past.
(In practice, I expect Iâll try to do a sort of Softmax based on my subjective estimates of a few different charities and give different amounts to all of them.)
FWIW I donât think GiveDirectly should be âthe barâ for being considered one of the most effective organizations in the global health and development space.
I think both 5x and 10x differences are big and meaningful in this domain, and I think there are likely billions of dollars in funding gaps between GiveWellâs bar (~10x) and GiveDirectly. I think donors motivated by EA principles would be making a mistake, and leaving a lot of value on the table by donating to GiveDirectly or StrongMinds over GiveWellâs recommendations (I say this as someone whoâs donated to both StrongMinds and GiveDirectly in the past, and hugely respects the work they both do).
Recognize this might be a difference in what we mean by âone ofâ the most effective, but wanted to comment because this sentiment feeds into a general worry I have that a desire for pluralism and positivity within GH&D (both good and important things!) is eroding intensity about prioritization (more important IMO).
Fair points. Iâm not planning to move my giving to GiveWell All Grants to either SM or GD, and donât mean to suggest anyone else does so either. Nor do I want to suggest we should promote all organizations over an arbitrary bar without giving potential donors any idea about how we would rank within the class of organizations that clear that bar despite meaningful differences.
I mainly wrote the comment because I think the temperature in other threads about SM has occasionally gotten a few degrees warmer than I think optimally conducive to what weâre trying to do here. So it was an attempt at a small preventive ice cube.
I think youâre right that we probably mean different things by âone of.â 5-10X differences are big and meaningful, but I donât think that insight is inconsistent with the idea that a point estimate something around âabove GiveDirectlyâ is around the point at which an organization should be on our radar as potentially worth recommending given the right circumstances.
One potential definition for the top class would be whether a person could reasonably conclude on the evidence that it was the most effective based on moral weights or assumptions that seem plausible. Here, itâs totally plausible to me that a donorâs own moral weights might value reducing suffering from depression relatively more than GiveWellâs analysis implies, and saving lives relatively less. GiveWellâs model here makes some untestable philosophical assumptions that seem relatively favorable to AMF: âdeprivationist framework and assuming a âneutral pointâ of 0.5 life satisfaction points.â As HLIâs analysis suggests at Section 3.4 of this study, the effectiveness of AMF under a WELLBY/âsubjective well-being model is significantly dependent on these assumptions.
For a donor with significantly different assumptions and/âor moral weights, adjusting for those could put SM over AMF even accepting the rest of GiveWellâs analysis. More moderate philosophical differences could put one in a place where more optimistic empirical assumptions + a expectation that SM will continue reducing cost-per-participant and/âor effectively refine its approach as it scales up could lead to the same conclusion.
Another potential definition for the top class would be whether one would feel more-than-comfortable recommending it to a potential donor for whom there are specific reasons to choose an approach similar to the organizationâs. I think GiveWellâs analysis suggests the answer is yes for reasons similar to the above. If youâve got a potential donor who just isnât that enthuiastic about saving lives (perhaps due to emphasizing a more epicurean moral weighting) but is motivated to give to reducing human suffering, SM is a valuable organization to have in oneâs talking points (and may well be a better pitch than any of the GiveWell top charities under those circumstances).
Thanks Jason, makes sense.
I think Iâm more skeptical than you that reasonable alternative assumptions make StrongMinds look more cost effective than AMF. But I agree that StrongMinds seems like it could be a good fit for some donors.
Interested if you could elaborate here. Iâm not sure which intuitions you consider âreasonableâ and why. As Joelâs figure 4 above indicates, for either HLIâs or GiveWellâs estimates of StrongMinds, talk therapy can be more cost-effective than bednets, and vice versa, but which is more effective depends on the philosophical assumptionsâso that ought to be the debate weâre having, but arenât. Perhaps we have a much more capacious concept of which assumptions are reasonable and youâd want to rule some of those out? If so, which ones?
Iâm not sure if this is what you meant, but if weâre talking about a raw difference in philosophical/âethical intuitions, I am very reluctant to say that some of those are unreasonableâin case any reader isnât aware of this, philosophy seminars often end up with the discussants realising they just have different intuitions. To say, at this point, your intuitions are reasonable and the other personâs are unreasonable is the rhetorical equivalent of banging your fist on the tableâyouâre not making a new argument, youâre just hoping the other person will agree with you anyway!
Sure, happy to elaborate.
Hereâs figure 4 for reference:
I think each part of this chart has some assumptions I donât think are defensible.
1. I donât think a neutral point higher than 2 is defensible.
You cite three studies in this report.[1] My read on what to conclude about the neutral point from those is:
i) IDinsight 2019 (n=70; representative of GW recipients): you highlight the average answer of 0.56, but this is excluding the 1â3 of people who say itâs not possible to have a life worse than death.[2] I think including those as 0 more accurately reflects their preferences, so 2/â3*0.56=0.37/â10
ii) Peasgood et al, unpublished (n=75; UK): you say 2â10 and I canât find the study so Iâm taking that at face value.
iii) Jamison and Shukla, unpublished (n=600, US, Brazil, China): you highlight the average answer of 25â100. In private communication with the author, I got the impression that 1.8/â10 was probably more appropriate because the scale used in this study isnât comparable to typical life satisfaction scales.[3]
So what to make of this? I think you could reasonably put weight in the largest study (1.8/â10). Or you could put weight on the most representative study (0.37). I lean towards the latter, because I intuitively find it quite likely that less well off people will report lower neutral points (I donât feel certain about this, and hoping Jamison & Shukla will have enough sample to test it). But either way, I donât see any way of combining these studies to get an answer higher than 2.
In addition, a neutral point of 5 implies the average person in over 40 countries would be better off dead. A neutral point of 2.5 implies the average person in Afghanistan would be better off dead. I find these both jarring implications.
HLIâs belief that a neutral point of 5 is within a reasonable range seems to come from Diener et al. 2018.[4] But that articleâs not explicit about what it means by âneutral pointâ. As far as I can tell from a quick skim, it seems to be defining âneutralâ as halfway between 0 and 10.
2. I donât think 38% is a defensible estimate for spillovers, which puts me closer to GiveWellâs estimate of StrongMinds than HLIâs estimate of StrongMinds.
I wrote this critique of your estimate that household spillovers was 52%. That critique had three parts. The third part was an error, which you corrected and brought the answer down to 38%. But I think the first two are actually more important: youâre deriving a general household spillover effect from studies specifically designed to help household members, which would lead to an overestimate.
I thought you agreed with that from your response here, so Iâm confused as to why youâre still defending 38%. Flagging that Iâm not saying the studies themselves are weak (though itâs true that theyâre not very highly powered). Iâm saying theyâre estimating a different thing from what youâre trying to estimate, and there are good reasons to think the thing theyâre trying to estimate is higher. So I think your estimate should be lower.
3. I donât think strong epicureanism is a defensible position
Strong epicureanism (the red line) is the view that death isnât bad for the person who dies. I think itâs logically possible to hold this position as a thought experiment in a philosophy seminar, but Iâve never met anyone who actually believes it and Iâd be deeply troubled if decisionmakers took action on the basis of it. You seem to agree to some extent,[5] but by elevating it to this chart, and putting it alongside the claim that âAgainst Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptionsâ I think youâre implying this is a reasonable position to take action on, and I donât think it is.
So I think my version of this chart looks quite different: the x-axis is between 0.4 and 2, the StrongMinds estimateâs quite a bit closer to GiveWell than HLI, and thereâs no âepicureanismâ line.
What does HLI actually believe?
More broadly, Iâm quite confused about how strongly HLI is recommending StrongMinds. In this post, you say (emphasis mine)
And
But youâve said elsewhere:
That strikes me as inconsistent. Youâve defined a range of assumptions you believe are reasonable, then claimed that StrongMinds > AMF on almost all of those assumptions. And then said you donât take a stance on these assumptions. But you have to actually defend the range of assumptions youâve defined as reasonable. And in my view, theyâre not.
âEmpirical work on how individuals interpret the scale could be helpful but is extremely limited. A small (n = 75) survey in the UK found that respondents would choose death over life at a life satisfaction level of about 2â10 (Peasgood et al., unpublished, as referenced in Krekel & Frijters, 2021). A survey of people living in poverty in Ghana and Kenya estimated the neutral point as 0.56 (IDinsight, 2019, p. 92; n = 70). There are also preliminary results from a sample of 600 in the USA, Brazil, and China that finds a neutral point of 25â100 (Jamison & Shukla, private communication). At the Happier Lives Institute, we are currently working on our own survey to explore this topic further and hope to share our results soon.â Elephant in the bednet
âApproximately one third of respondents stated that itâs not possible to have a life thatâs worse than death. These respondents cited deontological frameworks such as the inherent and immeasurable value of life regardless of other factors. The remaining respondents (close to two thirds) indicate that there are points on the ladder where life is worse than death. For these respondents, this point is substantially lower than their current life satisfaction scores âthe average point identified was 0.56 on a ladder from 0 to 10, compared to their current average life satisfaction score of 2.21â IDInsight 2019, pg 94
Iâm not sharing the full reasoning because it was private correspondence and I havenât asked the authors if theyâd be comfortable with me sharing.
âOther wellbeing researchers, such as Diener et al. (2018), appear to treat the midway point on the scale as the neutral point (i.e., 5 on a 0-10 scale).â Elephant in the bednet
âAlthough what we might call strong Epicureanism, the view that death is not bad at all, has few takers, there may be more sympathy for weak Epicureanism, where death can be bad, but relatively more weight is given to living well than living longâ Elephant in the bednet
On 3. Epicureanism being a defensible position
Epicureanism is discussed in almost every philosophy course on the badness of death. Itâs taken seriously, rather than treated as an absurd position, a non-starter, and whilst not that many philosophers end up as Epicureans, Iâve met some that are very sympathetic. I find critics dismiss the view too quickly and Iâve not seen anything thatâs convinced me the view has no merit. I donât think we should have zero credence in it, and it seems reasonable to point out that it is one of the options. Again, Iâm inclined to let donors make up their own minds.
On what HLI actually believes
HLI is currently trying not to have a view on these issues, but point out to donors how having different views would change the priorities so they can form their own view. We may have to develop a âhouse viewâ but none of the options for doing this seem particularly appealing (they include: we use my view, we use a staff aggregate, we poll donors, we poll the public, some combo of the previous options).
You bring up this quote
I regret this sentence, which is insufficiently nuanced and I wouldnât use it again (you and I have discussed this privately). That said, I think weâre quite well-caveated elsewhere. You quote this bullet point:
But you didnât quote the bullet point directly before it (emphasis added):
The backstory to the âwe confidently recommend StrongMindsâ bit is that, when we did the analysis, StrongMinds looked better under almost all assumptions and, even where AMF was better, it was only slightly better (1.3x). We thought donors would want an overall recommendation, and hence StrongMinds seemed like the safe choice (given some intuitions about donorsâ intuitions and moral uncertainty). Youâre right that weâll have to rethink what our overall recommendations are, and how to frame them, once the dust has settled on this debate.
Finally, whilst you say
This feels uneasily like a double standard. As Iâve pointed out before, neither GiveWell nor Open Philanthropy really defends their views in general (asserting a view isnât the same as defending it). In this report, GiveWell doesnât defend its assumptions, point out what other assumptions one might (reasonably) take, or say how this would change the result. Part of what we have tried to highlight in our work is that these issues have been mostly ignored and can really matter.
Our aim was more to cover the range of views we think some reasonable people would believe, not to restrict it to what we think they should believe. We motivated our choices in the original report and will restate that briefly here. For the badness of death, we give the three standard views in the literature. At one end, deprivationism gives âfull valueâ to saving lives. On the other, Epicurianism gives no weight to saving lives. TRIA offers something in between. For the neutral point, we used a range that included what we saw as the minimum and maximum possible values. Including a range of values is not equivalent to saying they are all equally probable. We encourage donors and decision-makers to use values they think are most plausible (for example, by using this interactive chart).
In suggesting James quote these together, it sounds like youâre saying something like âthis is a clear caveat to the strength of recommendation behind StrongMinds, HLI doesnât recommend StrongMinds as strongly as the individual bullet implies, itâs misleading for you to not include thisâ.
But in other places HLIâs communication around this takes on a framing of something closer to âThe cost effectiveness of AMF, (but not StrongMinds) varies greatly under these assumptions. But the vast majority of this large range falls below the cost effectiveness of StrongMindsâ. (extracted quotes in footnote)[1]
As a result of this framing, despite the caveat that HLI â[does] not advocate for any particular viewâ, I think itâs reasonable to interpret this as being strongly supportive of StrongMinds, which can be true even if HLI does not have a formed view on the exact philosophical view to take.[2]
If you did mean the former (that the bullet about philosophical assumptions is primarily included as a caveat to the strength of recommendation behind StrongMinds), then there is probably some tension here between (emphasis added):
-âthe relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make...there is no simple answerâ, and
-âWe conclude StrongMinds > AMF under almost all assumptionsâ
Additionally I think some weak evidence to suggest that HLI is not as well-caveated as it could be is that many people (mistakenly) viewed HLI as an advocacy organisation for mental health interventions. I do think this is a reasonable outside interpretation based on HLIâs communications, even though this is not HLIâs stated intent. For example, I donât think it would be unreasonable for an outsider to read your current pinned thread and come away with conclusions like:
âStrongMinds is the best place to donateâ,
âStrongMinds is better than AMFâ,
âMental health is a very good place to donate if you want to do the most goodâ,
âHappiness is what ultimately matters for wellbeing and what should be measuredâ.
If these are not what you want people to take away, then I think pointing to this bullet point caveat doesnât really meaningfully address this concernâthe response kind of feels something like âyou should have read the fine printâ. While I donât think itâs not necessary for HLI to take a stance on specific philosophical views, I do think it becomes an issue if people are (mis)interpreting HLIâs stance based on its published statements.
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
As youâve acknowledged, comments like âWeâre now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money.â perhaps add to the confusion.
Do you think the neutral point and basic philosophical perspective (e.g., deprivationism vs. epicureanism) are empirical questions, or are they matters on which the donor has to exercise their own moral and philosophical judgment (after considering what the somewhat limited survey data have to say on the topic)?
I would graph the neutral point from 0 to 3. I think very few donors would set the neutral point above 3, and Iâd start with the presumption that the most balanced way to present the chart is probably to center it fairly near the best guess from the survey data. On the other hand, if you have most of the surveys reporting âabout 2,â then itâs hard to characterize 3 as an outlier viewâpresumably, a good fraction of the respondents picked a value near, at, or even over 3.
Although I donât think HLI puts it this way, it doesnât strike me as implausible to view human suffering as a more severe problem than lost human happiness. As I noted in a different comment, I think of that chart as a starting point from which a donor can apply various discounts and bonuses on a number of potentially relevant factors. But another way to account for this would be to give partial weight to strong epicureanism as a means of discounting the value of lost human happiness vis-a-vis suffering.
Given that your critique was published after HLIâs 2022 charity recommendation, I think itâs fair to ask HLI whether it would reaffirm those characterizations today. I would agree that the appropriate conclusion, on HLIâs current state of analysis, is that the recommendation is either SM or GiveWellâs top charities depending on the donorâs philosophical assumptions. I donât think itâs inappropriate to make a recommendation based on the charity evaluatorâs own philosophical judgment, but unless HLI has changed its stance it has taken no position. I donât think it is appropriate to merely assume equal credence for each of the philosophical views and neutral points under consideration.
One could also defensibly make a summary recommendation on stated assumptions about donor values or on receipient values. But the best information Iâve seen on those pointsâthe donor and beneficiary surveys as reflected in GiveWellâs moral weightsâseemingly points to a predominately deprivationist approach with a pretty low neutral point (otherwise the extremely high value on saving the lives of young children wouldnât compute).
Thanks Jason, mostly agree with paras 4-5, and think para 2 is a good point as well.
I think the basic philosophical perspective is a moral/âphilosophical judgement. But the neutral point combines that moral judgement with empirical models of what peoplesâ lives are actually like, and empirical beliefs about how people respond to surveys.
I wonder if, insofar as we do have different perspectives on this (and I donât think weâre particularly far apart, particularly on the object level question), the crux is around how much weight to put in individual donor judgement? Or even how much individual donors have those judgements?
My experience of even EA-minded (or at least GiveWell) donors is that ~none of them have a position on these kinds of questions, and they actively want to defer. My (less confident but based on quite a few conversations) model of EA-minded StrongMinds donors is they want to give to mental health and see an EA-approved charity so give there, rather than because of a quantitative belief on foundational questions like the neutral point. As an aside, I believe that was how StrongMinds first got on EAâs radarâas a recommendation for Founders Pledge donors who specifically wanted to give to mental health in an evidence-based way.
It does seem plausible to me that donors who follow HLI recommendations (who I expect are particularly philosophically minded) would be more willing to change their decisions based on these kinds of questions than donors Iâve talked to.
Iâd be interested if someone wanted to stick up for a neutral point of 3 as something they actually believe and a crux for where they give, rather than something someone could believe, or is plausible. I could be wrong, but Iâm starting out skeptical that belief would survive contact with âBut that implies the world would be better if everyone in Afghanistan diedâ and âa representative survey of people whose deaths youâd be preventing think their lives are more valuable than thatâ
What do you think?
From HLIâs perspective, it makes sense to describe how the moral/âphilosophical views one assumes affect the relative effectiveness of charities. They are, after all, a charity recommender, and donors are their âclientsâ in a sense. GiveWell doesnât really do this, which makes senseâGiveWellâs moral weights are so weighted toward saving lives that it doesnât really make sense for them to investigate charities with other modes of action. I think itâs fine to provide a bottom-line recommendation on whatever moral/âphilosophical view a recommender feels is best-supported, but itâs hardly obligatory.
We recognize donor preferences in that we donât create a grand theory of effectiveness and push everyone to donate to longtermist organizations, or animal-welfare organizations, or global health organizations depending on the grand theoryâs output. Donors choose among these for their own idiosyncratic reasons, but moral/âphilosophical views are certainly among the critical criteria for many donors. I donât see why that shouldnât be the case for interventions within a cause area that produce different kinds of outputs as well.
Here, I doubt most global-health donorsâeither those who take advice from GiveWell or from HLIâhave finely-tuned views on deprivationism, neutral points, and so on. However, I think many donors do have preferences that indirectly track on some of those issues. For instance, you describe a class of donors who âwant to give to mental health.â While there could be various reasons for that, itâs plausible to me that these donors place more of an emphasis on improving experience for those who are alive (e.g., they give partial credence to epicureanism) and/âor on alleviating suffering. If they did assess and chart their views on neutral point and philosophical view, I would expect them to end up more often at points where SM is ranked relatively higher than the average global-health donor would. But that is just conjecture on my part.
One interesting aspect of thinking from the donor perspective is the possibility that survey results could be significantly affected by religious beliefs. If many respondents chose a 0 neutral point because their religious tradition led them to that conclusion, and you are quite convinced that the religious tradition is just wrong in general, do you adjust for that? Does not adjusting allow the religious tradition to indirectly influence where you spend your charitable dollar?
To me, the most important thing a charity evaluator/ârecommender does is clearly communicate what the donation accomplishes (on average) if given to various organizations they identifyâX lives saved (and smaller benefits), or Y number of peopleâs well-being improved by Z amount. Thatâs the part the donor canât do themselves (without investing a ton of time and resources).
I donât think the neutral point is as high as 3. But I think itâs fine for HLI to offer recommendations for people who do.
Hi James, thanks for elaborating, thatâs really useful! Weâll reply to your points in separate comments.
Your statement, 1. I donât think a neutral point higher than 2 is defensible
Reply: I donât think we have enough evidence or theory to be confident about where to put the neutral point.
Your response about where to put the neutral point involves taking answers to survey questions where people are asked something like âwhere on a 0-10 scale would you choose not to keep living?â and assuming we should take those answers at face value for where to locate the neutral point. However, this conclusion strikes me as too fast; I donât think we have enough theory or evidence on this issue. Are we definitely asking the right questions? Do we understand peopleâs responses? Should we agree with them even if we understand them?
Iâm not sure if I told you about this, but weâre working on a pilot survey for this and other wellbeing measuring issues. The relevant sections for neutrality are 1.3 and 6. Iâll try to put the main bits here, to make life easier (link to initial part of report on EA forum; link to full report):
As we say in footnote 5, this aligned is straightforwardly entailed by the standard formulation of utilitarianism.
Thatâs why,
Unfortunately, we find that, on a life satisfaction scale, participants put the zero point at 5â10, and the neutral point at 1.3/â10. Weâre not really sure what to make of this. Hereâs what we say in section 6.2 in full.
We plan to think about this more and test our hypotheses in the full version of the survey. If you have ideas for what we should test, now would be a great time to share them!
Given the methodological challenges in measuring the neutral point, I would have some hesitation to credit any conclusions that diverged too much from what revealed preferences imply. A high neutral point implies that many people in developing countries believe their lives are not worth living. So Iâd look for evidence of behavior (either in respondents or in the population more generally) that corroborated whether people acted in a way that was consistent with the candidate neutral point.
For instance, although money, family, and other considerations doubtless affect it, studying individuals who are faced with serious and permanent (or terminal) medical conditions might be helpful. At what expected life satisfaction score do they decline treatment? If the neutral point is relatively close to the median point in a country, one would expect to see a lot of people decide to not obtain curative treatment if the results would leave them 1-2 points less satisfied than their baseline.
You might be able to approximate that by asking hypothetical questions about specific situations that you believe respondents would assess as reducing life satisfaction by a specified amount (disability, imprisonment, social stigma, etc.), and then ask whether the respondent believes they would find life still worth living if that happened. I donât think that approach works to establish a neutral point, but I think having something more concrete would be an important cross-check on what may otherwise come across as an academic, conjectural exercise to many respondents.
This isnât necessarily the case. I assume that if people described their lives as having negative wellbeing, this wouldnât imply they thought their life was not worth continuing.
People can have negative wellbeing and still want to live for the sake of others or causes greater than themselves.
Life satisfaction appears to be increasing over time in low income countries. I think this progress is such that many people who may have negative wellbeing at present, will not have negative wellbeing their whole lives.
Edit: To expand a little, for these reasons, as well as the very reasonable drive to survive (regardless of wellbeing), I find it difficult to interpret revealed preferences and itâs unclear theyâre a bastion of clarity in this confusing debate.
Anectdotally, Iâve clearly had periods of negative wellbeing before (sometimes starkly), but never wanted to die during those periods. If I knew that such periods were permanent, Iâd probably think it was good for me to not-exist, but Iâd still hesitate to say Iâd prefer to not-exist, because I donât just care about my wellbeing. As Tyrion said âDeath is so final, and life is so full of possibilities.â
I think these difficulties should highlight that the difficulties here arenât just localized to this area of the topic.
Thanks for these points! The idea that people care about more than their wellbeing may be critical here. Iâm thinking of a simplified model with the following assumptions: a mean lifetime wellbeing of 5, SD 2, normal distribution, wellbeing is constant through the lifespan, with a neutral point of 4 (which is shared by everyone).
Under these assumptions, AMF gets no âcreditâ (except for grief avoidance) for saving the life of a hypothetical person with wellbeing of 4. Iâm really hesitant to say that saving that personâs life doesnât morally âcountâ as a good because they are at the neutral point. On the one hand, the model tells me that saving this personâs life doesnât improve total wellbeing. On the other hand, suppose I (figuratively) asked the person whose life was saved, and he said that he preferred his existence to non-existence and appreciated AMF saving his life.
At that point, I think the WELLBY-based model might not be incorporating some important dataâthe person telling us that he prefers his existence to non-existence would strongly suggest that saving his life had moral value that should indeed âcountâ as a moral good in the AMF column. His answers may not be fully consistent, but itâs not obvious to me why I should fully credit his self-reported wellbeing but give zero credence to his view on the desirability of his continued existence. I guess he could be wrong to prefer his continued existence, but he is uniquely qualified to answer that question and so I think I should be really hesitant to completely discount what he says. And a full 30% of the population would have wellbeing of 4 or less under the assumptions.
Even more concerning, AMF gets significantly âpenalizedâ for saving the life of a hypothetical person with wellbeing of 3 who also prefers existence to non-existence. And almost 16% of the population would score at least that low.
Of course, the real world is messier than a quick model. But if you have a population where the neutral point is close enough to the population average, but almost everyone prefers continued existence, it seems that you are going to have a meaningful number of cases where AMF gets very little /â no /â negative moral âcreditâ for saving the lives of people who want (or would want) their lives saved. That seems like a weakness, not a feature, of the WELLBY-based model to me.
I could have been clearer, the 38% is a placeholder while I do the Barker et al. 2022 analysis. You did update me about the previous studiesâ relevance. My arguments are less supporting the 38% figureâwhich I expect to update with more data and more about explaining why I think that I have a higher prior for household spillovers from psychotherapy than you and Alex seem to. But really, the hope is that we can soon be discussing more and better evidence.
Not going into the wider discussion, I specifically disagree with this idea: thereâs a trade-off here between estimated impact and things like risk, paternalism, scalability. If Iâm risk-averse enough, or give some partial weight to bring less paternalistic, I might prefer donating to GiveDirectlyâwhich I indeed am, despite choosing to donate to AMF in the past.
(In practice, I expect Iâll try to do a sort of Softmax based on my subjective estimates of a few different charities and give different amounts to all of them.)