Hi there! I’m a physician living in Brazil. I’m currently enrolled in an online MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science at MITx.
Diego Oliveira
Hi! I found a typo. I’ll delete the comment once it gets fixed:
“and explore they are so neglected by society”.
Thanks!
I think the principle I want us to abide by is something like ‘if something is an argument for caring more about entities who are widely regarded as not worthy of such care, then even if the argument sounds pretty absurd, I am supportive of some people doing research into it. And if they’re doing that research with the intent of increasing everyone’s well-being and flourishing as much as possible, then they’re part of our movement’.
That’s just beautiful. Thanks for your insight!
Thanks a lot for this carefully compiled information! May all sentient beings benefit from the actions that you folks are organizing there!
Thanks for clarifying this! I really had interpreted it as a threat from funders.
Does it make sense for me to point out the typos here so that they can be fixed? I believe such important texts convey their message better when written without typos. Let me know if there is a better place for me to point them out.
#1: “compare the values any two health benefits”.
#2: “which given rise to a number of subtly different versions”
#3: “is estimated to be 1,400 times as cost-effectiveness as the least good”
#4: “per year before eradication.8”
#5: “costeffectiveness” and “costeffective” appear around 5 times in the text in total
Thank you very, very much for your input, Lorenzo! Very helpful as always. Keep up the good work!
Hi! I have some basic questions that I believe there are well-documented resources I could be linked to. As far as I know, there are currently four EA-aligned meta-charities, i.e., charities that evaluate and recommend other charities based on EA’s core values: GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save. I have the following questions:
(1) Did I miss any other EA-aligned meta-charity?
(2) What are the differences in their evaluation process? I get that GiveWell deals mainly with global health in developing countries, and Animal Charity Evaluators works in the Animal Welfare domain. Apart from that, what are the other differences? Maybe another way to put the question is: Why don’t they have a single list of recommendations?
(3) A simple Google Search returns some meta-charities that are not EA-aligned, like Charity Navigator and Charity Watch. How exactly do these meta-charities differ from the EA-aligned ones?
I think Lorenzo is right: when there is a reply to a comment, I can’t delete the comment. Here’s a screenshot of what I see (it’s the same thing when I click on the three dots in this comment I made (which starts with the words “Hmm, to my surprise”)):
Anyway, that’s no big deal! I’ll leave the comment up. Thank you folks for your kindness!
It’s not clear to me what it would mean to “treasure a non-living thing” in the same way that we should “treasure a living [I’d add ‘sentient’] being”. When I treasure a sentient being, what I mean by this is that:
(1) I recognize that sentient being’s capacity to feel positive and negative states of mind;
(2) I recognize that that sentient being has interests of their own; and
(3) I take the previous two facts into consideration in my decision-making so that I don’t, unnecessarily, make that sentient being feel negative states of mind, or deprive them of their interests.
However, in the case of non-living things, such as rocks, knives, toys, etc, facts (1) and (2) are absent, and therefore I cannot treasure them in the same way I treasure sentient beings.
I can, of course, decide that some non-living thing has value (such as a potato), in so far as it can, for instance, satisfy the interest of a sentient being not to be hungry, and make that sentient being not experience the negative state of mind associated with hunger, but rather experience the positive state of mind associated with satiation, and the ripple effects of nutrition that flow from this.
In your example of reducing waste, who (or what), exactly, is being treasured? The waste, or the future sentient beings who, because of an environmentally friendly disposal of the waste, will have their interests satisfied by not living in a depleted Earth?
The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health—Centre for Global Development (20 mins.)
Hi! This link is broken. Could someone update it? Here’s the new one: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2X9rBEBwxBwxAo9Sd/the-moral-imperative-towards-cost-effectiveness
Agreed! Sounds too good to be true, but I do hope it is! Thanks SiebeRozendal for sharing this news!
Thank you, Ian, for asking the question that was in the back of my mind while I was reading this well-written and accessible post by ryancbriggs. I think it would be nice if the OP could add this caveat (that the evidence concerns a specific type of aid), since I assume some of the people reading this post in the EA forum will possibly update unjustly against aid recommended by, for instance, GiveWell.
Hi, Lorenzo! Thank you, once again, for your kindness!
Hi! Does anybody know where the figure for cataract surgery ($1,000/severe visual impairment reversed) comes from? Is it one eye, or both eyes? I’m making a presentation and I’d like to be assured that the figures are as correct as possible.
For instance, this 2011 article (https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-13-480) provides the following information:
“The average cost of cataract surgery [in Southern Ethiopia] in 2010 was US$141.6 (Range: US$37.6–312.6)”.
- 30 May 2023 21:10 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Open Thread: April — June 2023 by (
I feel questions 1 and 2 are essentially the same, with the second having a more partitioned approach. Did I overlook some important difference between them?
Hi! Just want to point out a typo: “This chapter we’d like you (...)”. Thanks! :-)
Hi! Just want to point out that the [Future Proof report] link is broken.
Thanks for your reply. The possibility of asymmetry suggests even more that we shouldn’t predict in the whole [0%-100%] range, but rather stick to whatever half of the interval we feel more comfortable with. All we have to do is to get in the habit of flipping the “sign” of the question (i.e, taking the complement of the sample space) when needed, which usually amounts to adding the phrase “It’s not the case that” in front of the prediction. This leads to roughly double the number of samples per bin, and therefore more precise estimates of our calibration. And since we have to map an event to a set that is now half the size it was before, it seems easier for us to get better at it over time.
Do you see any reason not to change Open Philanthropy’s approach to forecasting besides the immense logistic effort this implies?
Thanks for sharing this! I’ve been forecasting myself for 5 months now (got 1005 resolved predictions so far), and I adopted a slightly different strategy to increase the number of samples: I only predict in the range [50%-100%]. After all, there doesn’t seem to be any probabilistically or cognitively relevant difference between [predicting X will happen with 20% probability] and [not-X will happen with 80% probability]
What do you folks think about this?
Just trying to get myself comfortable with posting on the forum, since I’m new to it.
I’m from Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul), I consider myself deeply concerned about ethics, and I believe there are analytical methods that can get us closer not only to ethical truths (be they objective or not) but also to the methods whereby we may abide by those truths.
I have a medical degree and I’m currently taking an online MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science at MITx. I plan to take part in public health research, though I’m pretty much open to change gears if presented with sufficient evidence to do so.
Thank you all for supporting the EA community!