In my opinion it is good to take evidence to analyze data in order to solve big problems in the entire humankind, but sometimes there are good intentions but what you are building or investing in is not solving the biggest problems in humanity from its roots.
We can analyze evidence and data but we have to use our common sense to always think by first principles and to solve problems from its roots.
According to the example in the reading, the scarcity of water in Africa, this is a big problem, yes, it is, among other biggest issues like: bad nutrition, poverty, health, shelter…
But let’s focus on this one, if we solve this problem of water we are also solving malaria and all the illnesses that people get from not getting clean water. (we are solving also health)
With common sense it is obvious that we have to invest billions to build a water public company in Africa and to build the infrastructure to allow every citizen to get fresh and clean water.(this is solve root problem with common sense)
I’am worried about the idea to build playpumps and to use kids and the younger generation to pump water. NO. This is not the solution, who had this terrible idea? We are not solving the root of the problem and worse than that we are creating more damage, kids working instead to be in the school….?
Why didn’t anyone think about kids?
Kids and young generations have to be in school, getting education, preparing for their future, getting the tools for being part of the world. But of course, how to think in education when kids are starving, dying because they do not have clean water, food and health, they are in survival mode, of course they cannot get education when they are dying. This is the biggest problem we have to focus on and solve, they are the future of our world.
Evidence is good, data is good, but we don’t have time to analyze data when kids around the world are dying. We have to analyze quickly, move fast, take action, we have technology for that and we are not using it, we are stuck intellectualizing all in the academy on how we can solve and predict problems but we are not taking action. People are dying.
The world is evolving super fast, faster than ever. We can not predict because tomorrow what we predicted is obsolete. We have to use technology to take action fast, and always focus on solving big problems from their roots, not putting patches and creating more damage than the problem we are solving. We do not have time to waste, I do not care about evidence when people are dying.
Yes, Effective Altruism focuses mostly on solving Global Poverty.
But this is not enough, we are not solving Global Poverty, we are so far from that.
We have Inequality, we have poverty in more than 50% of the global south, there is significant variation in income per head across the world.
We need to start to think globally, we have different economies, different currencies, in different countries. For the same job you can get more money or less money depending on the Nation State you are in, this is not fair, if you are adding the same value, working in the same job, WHY in one country your income is “x” and in another country is “0.5x” related with dollar for instance.
The rich people can buy more goods and I’m not talking about consuming stuff, I’m talking about basic needs, Maslow pyramid. All 8B people around the world have to have food, clean water, healthcare, education, shelter, transport, lighting, electricity…
WHY rich people have more health and wellbeing while poor people are dying because they do not have clean water or food or shelter?
It’s time to think global, in the entire planet earth, beyond nations, beyond borders, is unequal that you are healthy or you can get a wellbeing or a long life depending on where you were born, so what about HUMAN RIGHTS?
These are basic needs that must be covered for all human beings in the entire planet earth.
Why do you have health and wellbeing if you were born in a rich country? And you are ill and will die because you were born in a poor country? At the end your wellbeing and you rights are an accident of where you were born……
We have to solve this problem as soon as possible
We have to think globally.
We are all residents of the same Planet Earth.
We have to take care of each other.
The founding of the Bretton Woods Institutions, IMF, World Bank, UN, Philanthropies showed us they couldn’t solve Poverty and Inequality, these institutions were created after WWII. More than 70 years have passed and we have not solved it from the root, we are doing something wrong.
In my opinion even when all those institutions did so many things, Nations States have not contributed and helped globally, because instead of seeing the entire planet earth and how they are adding value to the entire planet to solve the biggest issues that we face as humanity, they only see themselves, there is nationalism, not cooperativism, nations states help their own nation, solve their own problem without thinking in other Nations.
So it’s time to redefine those institutions beyond nation states, beyond borders, and to start solving those problems altogether, and with technology, we have the internet, we have blockchain, we have artificial intelligence, machines.
The computer world will save the world.
Look at this,
The total annual budget from the IMF is $1,2B.
The World Bank in 2016 invested $50M in all development economics.
The philanthropy impact, other billions.
But this is not enough, we couldn’t solve Global Poverty, and the root of big problems we were talking about, like clean water, the food crisis that is the main point to solve malaria, and to solve health.
This is not enough, we need more money, we need the help of every stakeholder, multi- stakeholders worldwide working together to stop the WAR and to solve Poverty, Inequality, Climate Change, Food crisis, Economy, Inflation, we can do this if we work together.
The reading says that Economic growth has been a major driver of human progress so far. In spite of this, within global development, EAs have largely ignored the question of how to increase growth.
My personal opinion is we can not increase growth if we don’t first solve the basic needs of the Maslow pyramid for all human beings in the entire Planet Earth.
There are more than 50 % of the population in the Global South that are dying because they don’t have access to food, nutrition, clean water, they don’t have shelter, or education.
More than 50% of the population in the Global South live under the line of Poverty.
We have to solve this problem NOW.
So until we are not ready to solve these basic needs globally we can not think of investing money to increase growth. We can solve the economy, we can solve inflation, but priority is the people who are dying because of poverty. Why are we not working altogether yet?
(NOTE: I wrote this response when the post was much shorter, and ended at “I do not care about evidence when people are dying.”)
First off—a linkpost is a link to the exact same post that has been written somewhere else, rather than an inspiration or a source like the original “Against RCT” post. That’s a small thing.
Secondly—people did think about the kids in the PlayPump story. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the PlayPumps were a bad idea, but that’s not how it seemed at the time. It seemed like the kids would get to play (hence the name) and the village would naturally get water as a result. That’s a win-win! No need to take kids out of school, and providing access to clean water would have been a great thing. It didn’t work out that way, but the narrative was compelling—evidence about how it actually works is the thing that was missing.
Thirdly, it seems strange to say that you don’t care about evidence. You claim:
”With common sense it is obvious that we have to invest billions to build a water public company in Africa and to build the infrastructure to allow every citizen to get fresh and clean water.(this is solve root problem with common sense)”
How would we work out how to achieve this, without using evidence? For that matter, how do we know people in Africa need clean water at all? Sure, it’s common knowledge now, but how did the people who originally reported on it find out? Did they close their eyes and think really hard, and then open their eyes and say “I bet there’s a country called Africa, and people live there, and they need clean water”, or did people actually ask Africans or look at conditions in Africa, and find out what was going on?
Less facetiously, there’s a whole bunch of questions that would need to be asked in order to complete this project. Questions like:
Would these countries allow this company to be built?
Who should be in charge of it?
Can we actually provide this infrastructure?
How maintainable is the infrastructure?
What will the expected costs and benefits actually be?
The lesson of the PlayPumps is that you can’t answer all these questions by telling a nice story—you have to actually go out and do the research about how things might go in the real world, and then at least you have a chance of getting it right. The world is complicated—things that seem compelling aren’t always possible or useful. The only way we know about that can even somewhat reliably tell the difference is with evidence, ideally as empirical (i.e, as close to the source of what’s really happening) as possible.
The key insight from this post I am trying to convey is not “You can’t criticise these things”, but rather—if you’re going to criticise these things, you need to present a counterargument against the actual reasons EA believes in these things. Why do the benefits of evidence not apply here? What method can we use, other than evidence-gathering, to be sure that this project is the best project we could be doing and will actually work as intended?
SOLUTION: EA has to allow 8B people to vote where allocate the Charity Money, full stop.
WHY just an elite deciding ?
In addition to raising several further problems, I don’t actually see how this solution actually solves any of the problems I brought up in my previous comment.