I don’t have issues with the EA Handbook’s emphasis on the far future, but I do think Doing Good Better is much more beautifully written and emotionally compelling, so I’d probably still recommend it over the EA Handbook.
Here are some comments I have on individual articles in the EA Handbook:
Introduction to Effective Altruism:
Places too much emphasis on “tested solutions,” which seems to advocate against high risk high reward interventions.
Overall, covers a lot of topics pretty decently.
Efficient Charity – Do Unto Others:
Written in 2010 (although the EA Handbook says 2013), so it has out-of-date cost-effectiveness figures. There is a note at the top which says that and recommends looking at GiveWell, but I think it’d be better to just directly edit the article, so that people who don’t look up GiveWell’s figures don’t walk away with the impression that $5,000 to save a life is ineffective, or that we can save a life from fatal tuberculosis with $100 if we can’t. In addition, while the article claims that it costs $5,000 to save a life from diarrheal disease, I haven’t seen any figures from GiveWell which could provided an updated view.
SHIC uses the following lines in their excerpt of “Efficient Charity”: “According to the World Bank’s analysis, immunising children for dengue fever saves one child’s life for $25,000, but we know that by donating to malaria prevention we could save about five lives for the same cost. If you want to save children, donating bed nets instead of immunising against dengue fever is the objectively right answer, the same way buying a nice car instead of a broken-down one for the same price is the right answer.”
I really like this article though and I think it does well in terms of emotional impact. It might be good to put this before Introduction to Effective Altruism to get readers hooked.
Prospecting for Gold:
Feels kind of long-winded, and at some points the gold metaphor is a slog to read through rather than an actually helpful metaphor. I feel like it’s a lot better for watching as a presentation than reading. We might be able to rewrite this to make it more succinct.
Cites data from DCP2, which has some pretty unreliable figures, and there’s a DCP3 now which we can use instead. I don’t think this point is too important though.
This does cover some important concepts like long-tailed distributions, marginal utility, and comparative advantage.
I’m not going to read/review the rest of the EA Handbook right now, but I think overall, lightly edited transcripts of talks don’t make for great reading material, and we’d want to edit them a lot more to be more succinct and easier to read.
I don’t have issues with the EA Handbook’s emphasis on the far future, but I do think Doing Good Better is much more beautifully written and emotionally compelling, so I’d probably still recommend it over the EA Handbook.
Here are some comments I have on individual articles in the EA Handbook:
Introduction to Effective Altruism:
Places too much emphasis on “tested solutions,” which seems to advocate against high risk high reward interventions.
Overall, covers a lot of topics pretty decently.
Efficient Charity – Do Unto Others:
Written in 2010 (although the EA Handbook says 2013), so it has out-of-date cost-effectiveness figures. There is a note at the top which says that and recommends looking at GiveWell, but I think it’d be better to just directly edit the article, so that people who don’t look up GiveWell’s figures don’t walk away with the impression that $5,000 to save a life is ineffective, or that we can save a life from fatal tuberculosis with $100 if we can’t. In addition, while the article claims that it costs $5,000 to save a life from diarrheal disease, I haven’t seen any figures from GiveWell which could provided an updated view.
SHIC uses the following lines in their excerpt of “Efficient Charity”: “According to the World Bank’s analysis, immunising children for dengue fever saves one child’s life for $25,000, but we know that by donating to malaria prevention we could save about five lives for the same cost. If you want to save children, donating bed nets instead of immunising against dengue fever is the objectively right answer, the same way buying a nice car instead of a broken-down one for the same price is the right answer.”
I really like this article though and I think it does well in terms of emotional impact. It might be good to put this before Introduction to Effective Altruism to get readers hooked.
Prospecting for Gold:
Feels kind of long-winded, and at some points the gold metaphor is a slog to read through rather than an actually helpful metaphor. I feel like it’s a lot better for watching as a presentation than reading. We might be able to rewrite this to make it more succinct.
Cites data from DCP2, which has some pretty unreliable figures, and there’s a DCP3 now which we can use instead. I don’t think this point is too important though.
This does cover some important concepts like long-tailed distributions, marginal utility, and comparative advantage.
I’m not going to read/review the rest of the EA Handbook right now, but I think overall, lightly edited transcripts of talks don’t make for great reading material, and we’d want to edit them a lot more to be more succinct and easier to read.