What evidence would you value to help resolve what weight an EA should place on dignity?
Many EAs tend to think that most interventions fail, so if you can’t measure how well something works, chances are high that it doesn’t work at all. To convince people who think that way, it helps to have a strong justification to incorporate a metric which is harder to measure over a well established and easier to measure metrics such as mortality and morbidity.
In the post on happiness you linked by Michael, you’ll notice that he has a section on comparing subjective well being to traditional health metrics. A case is made that improving health does not necessarily improve happiness. This is important, because death and disability is easier to measure than things like happiness and dignity, so if it’s a good proxy it should be used. If it turned out the that the best way to improve dignity is e.g. prevent disability, then in light of how much easier to measure disability prevention is, it would not be productive to switch focus. (Well, maybe. You might also take a close association between metrics as a positive sign that you’re measuring something real. )
To get the EA community excited about a new metric, if it seems realistically possible then i’d recommend following Michael’s example in this respect. After establishing a metric for dignity, try to determine how well existing top givewell interventions do on it, see what the relationship is with other metrics, and then see if there are any interventions that plausibly do better.
I think this could plausibly be done. I think there’s a lot of people who favor donations to GiveDirectly because of the dignity/autonomy angle (cash performs well on quite a few metrics and perspectives, of course) - I wouldn’t be surprised if there are donors who would be interested in whether you can do better than cash from that perspective.
Ishaan, thanks for sharing these thoughts. As you say, cash transfers feel like an opportune one here—I did some thinking to support Jeremy Shapiro’s work on cash and recipient preferences right at the start of this project, published here. Extending that to give an overview of how different interventions compare and how their ranking might change sounds like a really productive possible project!
Many EAs tend to think that most interventions fail, so if you can’t measure how well something works, chances are high that it doesn’t work at all. To convince people who think that way, it helps to have a strong justification to incorporate a metric which is harder to measure over a well established and easier to measure metrics such as mortality and morbidity.
In the post on happiness you linked by Michael, you’ll notice that he has a section on comparing subjective well being to traditional health metrics. A case is made that improving health does not necessarily improve happiness. This is important, because death and disability is easier to measure than things like happiness and dignity, so if it’s a good proxy it should be used. If it turned out the that the best way to improve dignity is e.g. prevent disability, then in light of how much easier to measure disability prevention is, it would not be productive to switch focus. (Well, maybe. You might also take a close association between metrics as a positive sign that you’re measuring something real. )
To get the EA community excited about a new metric, if it seems realistically possible then i’d recommend following Michael’s example in this respect. After establishing a metric for dignity, try to determine how well existing top givewell interventions do on it, see what the relationship is with other metrics, and then see if there are any interventions that plausibly do better.
I think this could plausibly be done. I think there’s a lot of people who favor donations to GiveDirectly because of the dignity/autonomy angle (cash performs well on quite a few metrics and perspectives, of course) - I wouldn’t be surprised if there are donors who would be interested in whether you can do better than cash from that perspective.
Ishaan, thanks for sharing these thoughts. As you say, cash transfers feel like an opportune one here—I did some thinking to support Jeremy Shapiro’s work on cash and recipient preferences right at the start of this project, published here. Extending that to give an overview of how different interventions compare and how their ranking might change sounds like a really productive possible project!