Journalist and media studies professor, virtual communities consultant, activist
drbrake
Karma: 43
You are right—I wrote in anger and take that part back (have edited above).
The EA movement has no single leader but communication and recruitment are of course vital to its continuation, so there are mechanisms for senior figures to make their views known. It is not necessary for the movement to “take sides” in particular political battles, but the fact that Musk has funded EA work, is friends with key EA figures and has taken actions (like the all-out attack on USAID) that run directly counter to mainstream EA thinking suggests to me EA needs to make its concerns clear.
If a public figure or organization (political or not) is aligned with the EA movement in the public mind (because of donations, common positions or their stated adherence to EA principles) and does things that are not consistent with EA values, the movement needs to condemn those actions.
Framing this as taking a political stand is misleading and misguided. I happen to oppose Musk’s politics but that is not why I urge EA leadership to oppose him—it’s the ethical lapses I expect EA to condemn. If a populist left wing leader in the US scrapped USAID because it was an instrument of American imperialism and the money was needed at home to fund social programming, I’d argue EA should condemn that in a similar manner.
The EA movement needs to be able to disown rogue “supporters”, starting with Musk
“it does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. ”… actually, this is just one more reason why what the CATF is doing is retrograde. Supporting and aiding development of CCS for, say, cement making is OK in my book and there is plenty of room for experiments there that are directly applicable to future need. This podcast is good on this point. The danger is that learning how to capture emissions from near end of life coal plants in the US may not tell us all that much that is useful to deploy CCS where it is needed.
This is the kind of thing I would like to see more of. I would not invest myself because all investments seem to be in individual projects—I would want to be able to invest in some fashion in a “basket” of companies and/or projects (ideally through a large, well-known investment company like Vanguard...)
[Question] Investing in climate mitigation in Africa
I know your long run goals are the least “binding” but I would encourage you to be a little more cautious and evidence-based in your approach to growth as an intervention. Economic growth clearly offers benefits overall in developing countries but it would surely be safer to say your objective should be to study the relationship between economic growth and human development and work to understand the circumstances in which aid that enhances economic growth in particular circumstances is more effective than alternative forms of aid.
You’ve reminded me about Dollar Street: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/matrix which does the same thing as Children Just Like Me but online and interactive.
EA gifts for kids?
Hadn’t thought of that—seems a likely explanation!
The discussion about Fistulas was here https://blog.givewell.org/2008/08/20/fistula/
In one of the discussions, a founder of Operation Fistula turned up. It’s a horrible-sounding condition—described in the disability weighting as “has an abnormal opening between her vagina and rectum causing flatulence and feces to escape through the vagina. The person gets infections in her vagina, and has pain when urinating.” It’s caused if you don’t have access to a C section when giving birth and can be remedied for $288. (The report’s a little unclear, suggesting that the operation value lasts for 10 years—perhaps it stops working? Perhaps the lifespan of typical sufferers is in any case low?) Anyway, worth looking at if you are interested in this area.
Thanks for the additional readings. I think Paul Dolan is asking the right questions. I am disappointed that after a promising initial discussion eight years ago, Holden doesn’t seem to have spoken again on the subject and to the best of my knowledge there is still no way on GiveWell to put different weights on “impact” to give different results.
I don’t understand your last paragraph though. DALYs don’t seem to measure economic effects on others at all, so if you do start to consider them wouldn’t that be a big argument to make some DALYs negative?
Getting past the DALY: different measures of “positive impact”
Suffering relief vs life extension
NB smile.amazon.com works like smile.amazon.co.uk. Having written to Amazon Smile they responded: ” We are currently working on expanding the AmazonSmile program to other countries.
You are correct in stating that customers can currently support organizations in one of the 50 United States, Germany, Austria, or the United Kingdom.”
And moreover it doesn’t just improve vision, it removes a source of intense pain.
A note on OPIS—might I suggest finding a way to separate your work on animal suffering from that on human suffering—at least for potential funders? Of course I can understand that you see work on both as important but there will be potential donors/supporters (myself included) who would be very inclined to support your advocacy work on easing provision of opioids for humans but who don’t see the relief of animal suffering as a priority and who would not wish their support for one to be used for the other.
I applaud you for your initiative in taking this forward and I do think you seem to have identified an important gap in the existing EA approaches. They appear to see lives saved as the key metric where I would at least offer potential donors/actors the chance to prioritise life quality. I wonder, however (and apologies if this has already been discussed and considered—if it has please point me to it) whether it might not be still more cost-effective to target easily cured very painful illnesses like Trachoma. See this for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16019692 which finds providing surgery costs from I$13 to I$78 per DALY averted.
This does not address one possible use of alternative proteins—feeding them to domesticated carnivorous animals. Obviously many EA folks might prefer that we don’t eat such animals or have them as pets but if we do it would be better if their food did not have an adverse climate impact or did not involve more animal suffering (or both!). Alt proteins here would not need to have the same taste as the foods they replace, be tasty to humans, or pass strict safety guidelines—they would just need to be minimally acceptable to (and digestible by/safe for) their ‘target’ animals. I recall those breeding insects as food (not alt proteins of course) are targeting this marketplace. Any thoughts? Research? Evidence of success?