I was just commenting on a post about the value of maintaining the umbrella organisation and label “Effective Altruism.” This study is a perfect example of why it’s important.
This is an idea that I, and I suspect many others, would never have even thought about, so we come to the EA forum and we learn about new ways to help.
The way you wrote the post (EA-style) enables us to compare this with any other EA work, obviously with increasing degrees of uncertainty as we move further afield, but still in a quantitative way with clear assumptions that can be modified with new data.
Humans often innovate by analogy. Seeing this initiative in the area of health and well-being might trigger ideas in other fields. For example, what is maybe novel (to me) about this approach is that often when we look at poorer countries, we instinctively focus on what we can do to get them to be more like us, to remove the problems they have that we don’t have, because we are not poor. But here you focus on a problem that we in the rich West also have, a problem that is not uniquely due to poverty—but you show that it can still enable a very effective intervention. I ask myself, are there aspects of say AI Safety or Bio-safety where we could make a powerful intervention but we neglect them because they are not immediately obvious? (I don’t know, but it’s good to think like this).
I think the main takeaway for other cause areas would probably just be how impactful changing government policy is—you trade off (a) needing to persuade governments in the first place, for (b) massive scale of impact and also (c) much, much lower counterfactual cost of government expenditure relative to EA expenditure. There’s a lot of stuff that may not be worth doing if the price was less money to GiveWell; but not if the price was the US government running a slightly higher budget deficit.
I really like this post.
I was just commenting on a post about the value of maintaining the umbrella organisation and label “Effective Altruism.” This study is a perfect example of why it’s important.
This is an idea that I, and I suspect many others, would never have even thought about, so we come to the EA forum and we learn about new ways to help.
The way you wrote the post (EA-style) enables us to compare this with any other EA work, obviously with increasing degrees of uncertainty as we move further afield, but still in a quantitative way with clear assumptions that can be modified with new data.
Humans often innovate by analogy. Seeing this initiative in the area of health and well-being might trigger ideas in other fields. For example, what is maybe novel (to me) about this approach is that often when we look at poorer countries, we instinctively focus on what we can do to get them to be more like us, to remove the problems they have that we don’t have, because we are not poor. But here you focus on a problem that we in the rich West also have, a problem that is not uniquely due to poverty—but you show that it can still enable a very effective intervention. I ask myself, are there aspects of say AI Safety or Bio-safety where we could make a powerful intervention but we neglect them because they are not immediately obvious? (I don’t know, but it’s good to think like this).
Thanks, Denis!
I think the main takeaway for other cause areas would probably just be how impactful changing government policy is—you trade off (a) needing to persuade governments in the first place, for (b) massive scale of impact and also (c) much, much lower counterfactual cost of government expenditure relative to EA expenditure. There’s a lot of stuff that may not be worth doing if the price was less money to GiveWell; but not if the price was the US government running a slightly higher budget deficit.
Good perspective. Thanks for answering!