I don’t think it makes sense to think of EA as a monolith which both promoted bednets and is enthusiastic about engaging with the kind of reasoning you’re advocating here. My oversimplified model of the situation is more like:
Some EAs don’t feel very persuaded by this kind of reasoning, and end up donating to global development stuff like bednets.
Some EAs are moved by this kind of reasoning, and decide not to engage with global development because this kind of reasoning suggests higher impact alternatives. They don’t really spend much time thinking about how to best address global development, because they’re doing things they think are more important.
(I think the EAs in the latter category have their own failure modes and wouldn’t obviously have gotten the malaria thing right (assuming you’re right that a mistake was made) if they had really tried to get it right, tbc.)
Thanks a lot that makes sense, this comment no longer stands after the edits so have retracted really appreciate the clarification!
(I’m not sure its intentional, but this comes across as patronizing to global health folks. Saying folks “don’t want to do this kind of thinking” is both harsh and wrong. It seems like you suggest that “more thinking” automatically leads people down the path of “more important” things than global health, which is absurd.
Plenty of people have done plenty of thinking through an EA lens and decided that bed nets are a great place to spend lots of money which is great.
Plenty of people have done plenty of thinking through an EA lens and decided to focus on other things which is great.
One group might be right and the other might be wrong, but it is far from obvious or clear, and the differences of opinion certainly don’t come from a lack of thought.
I think it helps to be kind and give folks the benefit of the doubt.)
I think you’re right that my original comment was rude; I apologize. I edited my comment a bit.
I didn’t mean to say that the global poverty EAs aren’t interested in detailed thinking about how to do good; they definitely are, as demonstrated e.g. by GiveWell’s meticulous reasoning. I’ve edited my comment to make it less sound like I’m saying that the global poverty EAs are dumb or uninterested in thinking.
But I do stand by the claim that you’ll understand EA better if you think of “promote AMF” and “try to reduce AI x-risk” as results of two fairly different reasoning processes, rather than as results of the same reasoning process. Like, if you ask someone why they’re promoting AMF rather than e.g. insect suffering prevention, the answer usually isn’t “I thought really hard about insect suffering and decided that the math doesn’t work out”, it’s “I decided to (at least substantially) reject the reasoning process which leads to seriously considering prioritizing insect suffering over bednets”.
Nice one makes much more sense now, appreciate the change a lot :), have retracted my comment now (I think it can still be read, haven’t mastered the forum even after hundreds of comments...)
I think this has been thought about a few times since EA started.
In 2015 Max Dalton wrote about medical research and said the below.
“GiveWell note that most funders of medical research more generally have large budgets, and claim that ‘It’s reasonable to ask how much value a new funder – even a relatively large one – can add in this context’. Whilst the field of tropical disease research is, as I argued above, more neglected, there are still a number of large foundations, and funding for several diseases is on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars. Additionally, funding the development of a new drug may cost close to a billion dollars .
For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine a marginal dollar having any impact. However, as Macaskill argues at several points in Doing Good Better, this appears to only increase the riskiness of the donation, rather than reducing its expected impact.
In 2018 Peter Wildeford and Marcus A. Davis wrote about the cost effectiveness of vaccines and suggested that a malaria vaccine is competitive with other global health opportunities.
I don’t think it makes sense to think of EA as a monolith which both promoted bednets and is enthusiastic about engaging with the kind of reasoning you’re advocating here. My oversimplified model of the situation is more like:
Some EAs don’t feel very persuaded by this kind of reasoning, and end up donating to global development stuff like bednets.
Some EAs are moved by this kind of reasoning, and decide not to engage with global development because this kind of reasoning suggests higher impact alternatives. They don’t really spend much time thinking about how to best address global development, because they’re doing things they think are more important.
(I think the EAs in the latter category have their own failure modes and wouldn’t obviously have gotten the malaria thing right (assuming you’re right that a mistake was made) if they had really tried to get it right, tbc.)
Thanks a lot that makes sense, this comment no longer stands after the edits so have retracted really appreciate the clarification!
(I’m not sure its intentional, but this comes across as patronizing to global health folks. Saying folks “don’t want to do this kind of thinking” is both harsh and wrong. It seems like you suggest that “more thinking” automatically leads people down the path of “more important” things than global health, which is absurd.
Plenty of people have done plenty of thinking through an EA lens and decided that bed nets are a great place to spend lots of money which is great.
Plenty of people have done plenty of thinking through an EA lens and decided to focus on other things which is great.
One group might be right and the other might be wrong, but it is far from obvious or clear, and the differences of opinion certainly don’t come from a lack of thought.
I think it helps to be kind and give folks the benefit of the doubt.)
I think you’re right that my original comment was rude; I apologize. I edited my comment a bit.
I didn’t mean to say that the global poverty EAs aren’t interested in detailed thinking about how to do good; they definitely are, as demonstrated e.g. by GiveWell’s meticulous reasoning. I’ve edited my comment to make it less sound like I’m saying that the global poverty EAs are dumb or uninterested in thinking.
But I do stand by the claim that you’ll understand EA better if you think of “promote AMF” and “try to reduce AI x-risk” as results of two fairly different reasoning processes, rather than as results of the same reasoning process. Like, if you ask someone why they’re promoting AMF rather than e.g. insect suffering prevention, the answer usually isn’t “I thought really hard about insect suffering and decided that the math doesn’t work out”, it’s “I decided to (at least substantially) reject the reasoning process which leads to seriously considering prioritizing insect suffering over bednets”.
(Another example of this is the “curse of cryonics”.)
Nice one makes much more sense now, appreciate the change a lot :), have retracted my comment now (I think it can still be read, haven’t mastered the forum even after hundreds of comments...)
Makes sense, though I think that global development was enough of a focus of early EA that this type of reasoning should have been done anyway.
I’m more sympathetic about it not being done after, say, 2017.
I think this has been thought about a few times since EA started.
In 2015 Max Dalton wrote about medical research and said the below.
“GiveWell note that most funders of medical research more generally have large budgets, and claim that ‘It’s reasonable to ask how much value a new funder – even a relatively large one – can add in this context’. Whilst the field of tropical disease research is, as I argued above, more neglected, there are still a number of large foundations, and funding for several diseases is on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars. Additionally, funding the development of a new drug may cost close to a billion dollars .
For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine a marginal dollar having any impact. However, as Macaskill argues at several points in Doing Good Better, this appears to only increase the riskiness of the donation, rather than reducing its expected impact.
In 2018 Peter Wildeford and Marcus A. Davis wrote about the cost effectiveness of vaccines and suggested that a malaria vaccine is competitive with other global health opportunities.
Related: early discussion of gene drives in 2016.