David Hammerle

• David HammerleMar 21, 2025, 11:40 AM

  1 point

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  on: Dis­cus­sion Thread: Ex­is­ten­tial Choices De­bate Week

  Yes, because it seems like extinction or near-extinction is a major possibility.

My Per­spec­tive on An­i­mal Welfare

• David HammerleMar 19, 2025, 10:34 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Es­ti­mat­ing Global Health Over­head Costs

  I’ve only spoken to a few donors, mostly friends and family. They seemed to especially like the idea of donating to charities that are local to their communities, which most highly cost-effective charities don’t, because they are mostly in low income places, not the USA. They were also concerned with what portion of the donated money would be spent on the charity’s own overhead or administration. And they especially didn’t want to receive spam mail or email from charities as a result of donating.

  I suppose my assumption is that I should start with an argument I think would work on myself, if I hadn’t studied global health as much as I have, and then try to figure out what part of that people are resistant to. If I hadn’t studied global health, and wanted to be able to donate effectively without having to study it, I would have been looking for that upper limit with a likelihood of somewhere around 95% that the cost would be below it, even if the upper limit needed to be pretty high in order to reach that level of certainty. So now I’m trying to figure out such an upper limit myself.

My Per­spec­tive on Happiness

• David HammerleMar 17, 2025, 1:13 AM

  5 points

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  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Es­ti­mat­ing Global Health Over­head Costs

  Thanks for the response, Mo.

  I have also spent a significant amount of time looking at cost-effectiveness analyses from GiveWell and I think they’re great. I even wrote a summary of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis for Against Malaria Foundation similar to yours, although I think yours might be better. Mine is on this webpage (https://​​davehammerlecoder.com/​​against-malaria-foundation) on my personal website under the section ‘Appendix A: GiveWell’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis for the Against Malaria Foundation’.

  I’m not so much concerned with finding a really accurate measure of the cost per DALY averted or life saved as I am with finding an upper limit, even if the upper limit is pretty far above the estimated average. For example, looking at the Against Malaria Foundation, according to GiveWell, it looks like the upper end cost to save a life would be $14,493, specifically in Chad. If that’s the upper end of GiveWell’s estimate, then it seems like $50,000 cost per life saved might be a pretty reasonable upper limit. Meaning it seems plausible to me that someone could have a 95% confidence that AMF will save a life for less than $50,000 on average.

  And if I were a normal person living in a rich country like the US, considering donating some money, saving a life for $50,000 would seem like a really good deal to me. Even if saving that life only averts 35 DALYs, that would translate into ~$1,400 per DALY or ~$4 per day of life added. So if I work an extra 1 hour for about $30/​hour, I can extend someone’s life by 7 days, or 168 hours. Which means that for whatever span of time extra I spend working, somebody else gets to live for ~168 times that span time. From an altruistic perspective, that’s an amazingly good deal.

  I can also definitely understand that being able to donate money and have it be as cost-effective as it probably is, is very impressive. I’m sure it takes a lot of work from a lot of different people in order to make that possible, including the people at GiveWell and many government entities, both African and not.

  But it took me a lot of time and effort, including a bachelor’s degree and a trip to EA Global in Boston to attain the degree of confidence that I currently have in my donations. To me it seems like maybe we could get more normal people interested in donating if it didn’t require as much free time and effort.

  I think maybe the reason most people don’t want to donate to these kinds of charities is that they don’t consider charities trustworthy enough. And that seems like a reasonable response to me, especially considering the kinds of ads from African charities pop up in my web browser. But I think if we can get a more consistent message out to more normal people who don’t want to spend as much time on this, donating money to global health charities could become more normal in rich countries like the USA.

  I think in order to accomplish that, we need a message that is consistent, and that can be verified by people who decide to really look into it. This way, normal people would have more of a reason to trust highly cost-effective global health charities. And I think a fairly consistent upper limit on the cost to avert a DALY or save the life of a kid under 5 via any given charity could help with this.

  I want to account for the money spent by organizations like GiveWell, the WHO, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Open Philanthropy in an attempt to improve these upper limits. I’m especially concerned about these costs because I recently started donating to family planning global health charities. These charities can be viewed as highly cost-effective just by reducing maternal mortality and from various other positive impacts.

  But the thing I really like about family planning is that it can avert births.
  Each averted birth avoids the 7.4% chance kids in sub-Saharan Africa have of dying before the age of 5 years old.
  Looking at it this way, these charities can avert the death of a kid under 5 years old for under $1000, and probably substantially less.
  The amount depends on odd things like which utilitarian theory one subscribes to. I go by an average-based utilitarian theory.
  If you want more info about that, my post on the EA forum about it is here: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​stWZ26t9W7qi3ieJS/​​why-aren-t-relocated-births-accounted-for-in-cost

  My problem now is that, at that degree of cost-effectiveness, costs from organizations like the WHO and GiveWell become much more significant relatively. And that’s why I started trying to figure out how to estimate applicable costs from those kinds of organizations.

Es­ti­mat­ing Global Health Over­head Costs

• David HammerleJan 22, 2025, 11:07 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Why aren’t re­lo­cated births ac­counted for in cost-effec­tive­ness analy­ses of fam­ily plan­ning char­i­ties?

  I see. And that IS relevant to my original question regarding family planning in settings with high child mortality.

• David HammerleJan 22, 2025, 2:16 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Why aren’t re­lo­cated births ac­counted for in cost-effec­tive­ness analy­ses of fam­ily plan­ning char­i­ties?

  I read the article you posted a link to, but I still think maximizing average welfare is a good policy goal. To me it seems like maximizing average welfare is entirely what altruism is about. The way I think of it is that each person, when the person is created, has an equal chance of being any one person that has ever or will ever live, so we want such possibilities to be as good as possible, on average.

  The first issue that the article describes is that if there were only one person enduring a lot of suffering, the world could be improved by adding a bunch more people also enduring a lot of suffering, but a little bit less. To me that seems correct. In that world, having a chance to live a life that involves a little bit less suffering would be an improvement. Also, oddly, those people would be exist in a sort of a backwards world where the objective is not to live as long as possible, but to live as short a life as possible.

  The second issue that the article describes is that adding a bunch of lives with positive welfare, but less than the average, could be worse than adding only one life with a very negative amount of welfare. Here, again, this makes sense to me. It’s less of a problem to have a very small chance of living the one really bad life than a much larger chance of living a life that is worse than the average, but not as much worse.

  But thanks for the reply. I didn’t realize this was so much in contention. It’s good to know.

  Regardless, could you possibly tell me which utilitarian theory you ascribe to, and how it would or wouldn’t apply to my question regarding family planning charities? To me it still seems like avoiding that 7.6% chance of dying before the age of 5 years old is a really great advantage of family planning charities in sub-Saharan Africa.

• David HammerleJan 19, 2025, 2:48 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Richard Y Chappell🔸’s comment on: Why aren’t re­lo­cated births ac­counted for in cost-effec­tive­ness analy­ses of fam­ily plan­ning char­i­ties?

  Thank you for the reply. That seems like a very relevant question.

  It wouldn’t, exactly. Most directly, it would reduce the total number of people, past, present, and future, by one. So, for example, if there were 11 total people (past, present, and future) and this one birth was averted, then there would be 10 people. So if we assume that the average total overall welfare of those 10 people are at an ’11′ and the average welfare of the one averted birth was at a ‘1’, the total average welfare with the birth would be a ‘10’ and the total average welfare without the birth would be an ‘11’. So, as long as the total welfare of the person’s birth that wss averted is lower than the average welfare of a person overall excluding the birth, the resulting average would move closer to the average of all those other people and improve.

  So, the next question would be what the average welfare of a person is, and if it is higher or lower than the person who’s birth might be averted and by how much. My best guess regarding that would be that technology will continue to advance over time, improving the quality of life and longevity of people as we move into the future, and I think that improvement will continue for a very long time. And, if that is correct, that would bring up the average welfare of people quite a lot, making it useful to avert births in the present in general, and especially births of people that have ~7.3% chance of dying before the age of 5 years old, like people do in sub-Saharan Africa.

  What do you think?

  I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in my theory of why the average welfare of a person, past, present, and future would be a lot greater than the welfare of a person in sub-Saharan Africa who’s birth might be averted, but I do have a fair amount of confidence that the welfare of a person in sub-Saharan Africa is a lot lower than the average. Do you agree or no?

  I also think it’s fairly likely that reducing the current population of the world would be beneficial by default, and that especially reducing population growth in sub-Saharan Africa would be beneficial, both because the population growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa is so much higher than the average for the rest of the world, and because it’s a very low income area where it’s more difficult to economically support a larger population.

  Or, if I try to look at it more simply, if the person is never born, then the person doesn’t have that 7.3% chance of dying before the age of 5 years old, which seems good.

  I suppose one reason this factor doesn’t tend to be included in cost-effectiveness analyses for family planning charities could just be that it is difficult to explain.

[Question] Why aren’t re­lo­cated births ac­counted for in cost-effec­tive­ness analy­ses of fam­ily plan­ning char­i­ties?

• David HammerleDec 23, 2024, 10:38 PM

  2 points

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  on: Dona­tion Cel­e­bra­tion Post

  MSI Reproductive Choices.

  Because through family planning it can shift births from sub-Saharan Africa to circumstances with lower child mortality, probably saving the life of a kid under 5 years old for less than $1,000.

My The­ory of Con­scious­ness: The Ex­pe­riencer and the Indicator