I’m sympathetic to a lot of the points you make in this post, but I think your conclusions are far more negative than is reasonable.
Here’s the stuff I largely agree with you on:
-The opportunities to save lives w/ global health interventions probably aren’t nearly as easy as Singer’s thought experiment suggests
-Entities other than GiveWell use GiveWell’s estimates without the appropriate level of nuance and detail about where the estimates come from and how uncertain they are
-There’s not anything close to $50,000,000,000 funding gap for ultra cost-effective interventions to save lives
-GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness estimates are probably overly optimistic
That said, I find a few of the things you say in this post frustrating:
“Either charities like the Gates Foundation and Good Ventures are hoarding money at the price of millions of preventable deaths, or the low cost-per-life-saved numbers are wildly exaggerated.”
I don’t think anyone at GiveWell believes millions of lives could be saved today at an ultra-low cost. GiveWell regularly publishes their room for more funding analyses that indicate it thinks the funding gaps for their recommended interventions amount to way way less than $50 billion/year.
As far as I can tell, people at Good Ventures & Open Phil sincerely believe that funding in cause areas other than global health may be incredibly cost-effective. I think Good Ventures funds other stuff because they think each $5,000 of funding given to those causes may do more good than an additional $5,000 given to GiveWell’s recommended charities. They might be dead wrong, but I don’t think they rationalize their choices with, “Well, GiveWell’s estimates are just BS so let’s not take them seriously.”
“They were worried that this would be an unfair way to save lives.”
I find this way of describing GW’s motivations awfully uncharitable.
“[The cost-effectiveness estimates are] marketing copy designed to control your behavior, not unbiased estimates designed to improve the quality of your decisionmaking process.”
GiveWell puts a ton of effort into coming up with these numbers and drawing on them as they make decisions. None of that would happen if the numbers were just created for the purposes of marketing and manipulation. I have significant reservations about how GiveWell’s estimates are created and used. I don’t have significant reservations about GiveWell’s sincerity when sharing the estimates.
(I used to work for GiveWell)
Hey Ben,
I’m sympathetic to a lot of the points you make in this post, but I think your conclusions are far more negative than is reasonable.
Here’s the stuff I largely agree with you on:
-The opportunities to save lives w/ global health interventions probably aren’t nearly as easy as Singer’s thought experiment suggests
-Entities other than GiveWell use GiveWell’s estimates without the appropriate level of nuance and detail about where the estimates come from and how uncertain they are
-There’s not anything close to $50,000,000,000 funding gap for ultra cost-effective interventions to save lives
-GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness estimates are probably overly optimistic
That said, I find a few of the things you say in this post frustrating:
I don’t think anyone at GiveWell believes millions of lives could be saved today at an ultra-low cost. GiveWell regularly publishes their room for more funding analyses that indicate it thinks the funding gaps for their recommended interventions amount to way way less than $50 billion/year.
As far as I can tell, people at Good Ventures & Open Phil sincerely believe that funding in cause areas other than global health may be incredibly cost-effective. I think Good Ventures funds other stuff because they think each $5,000 of funding given to those causes may do more good than an additional $5,000 given to GiveWell’s recommended charities. They might be dead wrong, but I don’t think they rationalize their choices with, “Well, GiveWell’s estimates are just BS so let’s not take them seriously.”
I find this way of describing GW’s motivations awfully uncharitable.
GiveWell puts a ton of effort into coming up with these numbers and drawing on them as they make decisions. None of that would happen if the numbers were just created for the purposes of marketing and manipulation. I have significant reservations about how GiveWell’s estimates are created and used. I don’t have significant reservations about GiveWell’s sincerity when sharing the estimates.