I think examining the number of low hanging fruits is important. I’m not yet sure if this analysis is correct, but I too would like to know exactly how many low hanging fruits there are, and exactly how low hanging they are, and whether this information is consistent with EA org’s actions. If your analysis is true, people should put more energy into expanding cause areas beyond health stuff.
I think it might be nice if someone attempted a per-intervention spreadsheet / graph estimating how much more expensive the “next marginal life saved / qaly / disease prevented / whatever” would get, with each additional dollar spent...while sort of assuming that that currently existing organizations can successfully scale or new organizations can be formed to handle the issue. (So, sort of like “room for more funding”, but focusing instead on the scale of the problem rather than the scale of the organization that deals with the problem). Has someone already done so? I know plenty of people have looked at problem scales in general, but I haven’t seen much on predicting the marginal-cost changes as we progress along the scales.
Okay, that said: this last paragraph was in the original post but not the cross-post
As far as I can see, this pretty much destroys the generic utilitarian imperative to live like a monk and give all your excess money to the global poor or something even more urgent. Insofar as there’s a way to fix these problems as a low-info donor, there’s already enough money. Claims to the contrary are either obvious nonsense, or marketing copy by the same people who brought you the obvious nonsense. Spend money on taking care of yourself and your friends and the people around you and your community and trying specific concrete things that might have specific concrete benefits. And try to fix the underlying systems problems that got you so confused in the first place.
I think there’s potentially a much deeper problem with this statement, which goes beyond any in the impact analysis. Even if one forgets all moral philosophy, disregard all practical analyses, and use nothing but concrete practical personal experience and a gut sense of right and wrong to guide one’s behavior...well, for me at least, that still makes living frugally to conserve scarce resources for others seem like a correct thing to do?
I know people who live in poverty, personally—both in the “below the American poverty line” sense (I guess I’m technically below that line myself in a grad student sort of way, but I know people who are rather more permanently under it), and in the “global poor” sense. Even by blood alone, I’m only two generations removed from people who have temporarily experienced global poverty of the <$2/day magnitude. So for me at least, it remains obvious on a personal face-to-face level that among humans the global poor are the ones who can make best personal use of scarce resources. I imagine there are people whose social circles don’t include people in local or global poverty, but that’s not an immutable fact of life—one can change that, if one thinks social circles are essential ingredients to making impact.
I don’t really agree with the framing of “Spend money on taking care of yourself and your friends and the people around you and your community and trying specific concrete things that might have specific concrete benefits” as something obviously distinct from helping the global poor. I don’t feel like I or my lived ones could never experience global poverty. I feel like I’m part of a community and friendly with people who might directly experience or interact with global poverty. If being a low info donor doesn’t help...are there not things one can do to become a “high info donor” or direct worker for that matter?
I think that if I believed similarly to you—and if I understand correctly, you think: that abstractions are misleading, that face-to-face community building and support of loved ones and people you actually know is the important thing here, that it’s important to build your own models of the world rather than trust more knowledgeable people to do impact evaluations for you, that it’s really hard to overcome deceptive marketing practices by donation seekers......then, rather than claiming that there is no imperative to live frugally and engage with global poverty. If I believed this I think I’d advocate that more EAs set some time aside to get some hands-on, face to face involvement in with the people who generate impact evaluations (or at least, actually read the impact evaluation), that donors spend more time meeting people who do direct work, and that both donors and direct work spend more time interacting with the supposed direct beneficiaries of their work. That seems really different from saying that the “utilitarian imperative” is wrong. (And maybe you do advocate all these other things as well, I don’t mean to imply you don’t...but why advocate for just staying within yourself and your circle?)
If there’s a lot of misinformation and misleading going on, I do think there’s ways to get around that by acting to put oneself in more situations where one has more opportunities for direct experience and building one’s own models of the world. Going straight to the idea that you should just take care of yourself and people you currently know seems …a bit like giving up? And even if you don’t think a global scope is appropriate, is there not enough poverty within your immediate community and social circle that there remains an urgency to be frugal and use resources to help others?
I just don’t see how your analysis, even if totally correct, leads to the conclusion that the imperative to frugality and redistribution is destroyed. I mean, as long as we’re calling it “living like a monk”, at least some of the actual monks did it for exactly that purpose, in the absence of any explicit utilitarianism, with the people they tried to help largely on a face to face basis. it’s not an idea that rests particularly heavily on EA foundations or impact evaluations.
(I don’t want to be construed as defending frugality in particular, just claiming the general sense of the ethos of redirecting resources to people who may need it more, and the personal frugality that is sometimes motivated by that ethos, as being positive… and that the foundations of it do not rely on trusting Givewell, Effective Altruism, and so on)
I think examining the number of low hanging fruits is important. I’m not yet sure if this analysis is correct, but I too would like to know exactly how many low hanging fruits there are, and exactly how low hanging they are, and whether this information is consistent with EA org’s actions. If your analysis is true, people should put more energy into expanding cause areas beyond health stuff.
I think it might be nice if someone attempted a per-intervention spreadsheet / graph estimating how much more expensive the “next marginal life saved / qaly / disease prevented / whatever” would get, with each additional dollar spent...while sort of assuming that that currently existing organizations can successfully scale or new organizations can be formed to handle the issue. (So, sort of like “room for more funding”, but focusing instead on the scale of the problem rather than the scale of the organization that deals with the problem). Has someone already done so? I know plenty of people have looked at problem scales in general, but I haven’t seen much on predicting the marginal-cost changes as we progress along the scales.
Okay, that said: this last paragraph was in the original post but not the cross-post
I think there’s potentially a much deeper problem with this statement, which goes beyond any in the impact analysis. Even if one forgets all moral philosophy, disregard all practical analyses, and use nothing but concrete practical personal experience and a gut sense of right and wrong to guide one’s behavior...well, for me at least, that still makes living frugally to conserve scarce resources for others seem like a correct thing to do?
I know people who live in poverty, personally—both in the “below the American poverty line” sense (I guess I’m technically below that line myself in a grad student sort of way, but I know people who are rather more permanently under it), and in the “global poor” sense. Even by blood alone, I’m only two generations removed from people who have temporarily experienced global poverty of the <$2/day magnitude. So for me at least, it remains obvious on a personal face-to-face level that among humans the global poor are the ones who can make best personal use of scarce resources. I imagine there are people whose social circles don’t include people in local or global poverty, but that’s not an immutable fact of life—one can change that, if one thinks social circles are essential ingredients to making impact.
I don’t really agree with the framing of “Spend money on taking care of yourself and your friends and the people around you and your community and trying specific concrete things that might have specific concrete benefits” as something obviously distinct from helping the global poor. I don’t feel like I or my lived ones could never experience global poverty. I feel like I’m part of a community and friendly with people who might directly experience or interact with global poverty. If being a low info donor doesn’t help...are there not things one can do to become a “high info donor” or direct worker for that matter?
I think that if I believed similarly to you—and if I understand correctly, you think: that abstractions are misleading, that face-to-face community building and support of loved ones and people you actually know is the important thing here, that it’s important to build your own models of the world rather than trust more knowledgeable people to do impact evaluations for you, that it’s really hard to overcome deceptive marketing practices by donation seekers......then, rather than claiming that there is no imperative to live frugally and engage with global poverty. If I believed this I think I’d advocate that more EAs set some time aside to get some hands-on, face to face involvement in with the people who generate impact evaluations (or at least, actually read the impact evaluation), that donors spend more time meeting people who do direct work, and that both donors and direct work spend more time interacting with the supposed direct beneficiaries of their work. That seems really different from saying that the “utilitarian imperative” is wrong. (And maybe you do advocate all these other things as well, I don’t mean to imply you don’t...but why advocate for just staying within yourself and your circle?)
If there’s a lot of misinformation and misleading going on, I do think there’s ways to get around that by acting to put oneself in more situations where one has more opportunities for direct experience and building one’s own models of the world. Going straight to the idea that you should just take care of yourself and people you currently know seems …a bit like giving up? And even if you don’t think a global scope is appropriate, is there not enough poverty within your immediate community and social circle that there remains an urgency to be frugal and use resources to help others?
I just don’t see how your analysis, even if totally correct, leads to the conclusion that the imperative to frugality and redistribution is destroyed. I mean, as long as we’re calling it “living like a monk”, at least some of the actual monks did it for exactly that purpose, in the absence of any explicit utilitarianism, with the people they tried to help largely on a face to face basis. it’s not an idea that rests particularly heavily on EA foundations or impact evaluations.
(I don’t want to be construed as defending frugality in particular, just claiming the general sense of the ethos of redirecting resources to people who may need it more, and the personal frugality that is sometimes motivated by that ethos, as being positive… and that the foundations of it do not rely on trusting Givewell, Effective Altruism, and so on)