Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,308
Thanks for posting this question. Often not much global health/âpoverty discussion on the forum.
GiveWell and Life You Can Save have different evaluation methods. @The Life You Can Save describes their evaluation framework here. @GiveWell explains theirs here.
From my quite ignorant outsider view, the difference seem to be:
1. GiveWell aims to find the most cost-effective charities based on calculations of cost-per-life-saved or cost-per-economic-benefit. The Life You Can Save seems to consider these sorts of calculations to be too uncertain and dependent on subjective assumptions to allow for charities to be ranked reliably, so they recommend an unranked collection of generally very good charities. The Life You Can Save says that they...
do not try to claim that an intervention or the organization that implements it is the most cost-effective. We consider that cost-effectiveness calculations are built on subjective valuations such as the value of life at different ages, the extent of suffering alleviated by a given intervention, and our best guesses about recipient utility and preferences. Small changes in many of these underlying assumptions can lead to widely differing answers. Our goal is to provide donors assurance that giving money to an organization is a great bet, highly likely to do good, and cheap enough to be scalable, durable, and/âor have a deep impact on peopleâs lives
2. GiveWell is more hard-line about gaps in evidence being disqualifying. With the example of Fred Hollows, GiveWell says:
Our analysis is limited by the fact that we have not yet identified high quality estimates of the cost of providing an additional cataract surgery. We had conversations with 17 organizations that work to expand access to cataract surgery and we concluded that it would be costly to measure or estimate how many additional surgeries each of these organizations cause to happen that would not have happened in the absence of its work
The Life You Can Save seems to be more willing to accept gaps in the evidence as long as some good evidence exists and the charity fits other, softer criteria, like how convincing their theory of change is (explained in their long and sort of convoluted evaluation framework). For this reason they do recommend Fred Hollows.
TL;DR: In sticking to hard evidence and cost-effectiveness calculations, GiveWell is potentially leaving behind highly effective charities whose effectiveness is harder to prove or producing questionable rankings because of questionable assumptions, while The Life You Can Saveâs more holistic evaluation approach is potentially including charities whose evidence has holes in it and they draw no distinction in quality between Malaria Consortium and the Fred Hollows Foundation, even though a substantial difference in effectiveness might exist
You donât seem to account for inflation. $10 buys a bed net now. $10 will buy a lot less in 60 years.
Helping people accrues its own compound interest: saving someone from death, disability or grief now makes them happier, healthier, more productive members of society, better able to contribute and lift up those around them. Better to have these benefits sooner rather than later.
By your same logic, why stop at death? Put it in some trust fund to compound and be distributed in 100, 1000, 1 Billion years
I think you write with too much certainty. You lean heavily on Rethink Prioritiesâ estimates. Sure theyâve put more effort into estimating bee or shrimp suffering than anyone else has ever bothered to but they are towers of questionable assumptions* that shouldnât give you the confidence to make statements like âIf you⌠restrict your animal-product consumption to large animals, you can easily eliminate 90% or more of the suffering you causedâ
Be uncertain. I think if youâre honest about the error bars on these analyses, it becomes obvious why people like me bristle at the idea of bulldozing a Chestertonâs fence like âfactory farming of cows is more important than honey/âshrimpâ
*e.g. âbeesâ behaviour tells us something about their capacity for sufferingâ, âdeath by stinger is painfulâ, âpremature bee death means more sufferingâ, âhealth of bees is a proxy for sufferingâ⌠it goes on (a lot)
I think if you see desertification as good (you seem to be saying it is), you should have very high suspicion that your ethical framework has led you astray somewhere.
Taking the most effective actions to help these beings
More targeted interventions directly focused on helping soil life are likely to be far more impactful
Seems like weâre far from a consensus even on whether more or fewer of these organisms is the goal. You suggest that biodiversity loss is bad but Vasco Grilo suggests more monoculture farms is better because that leads to fewer microorganisms and he considers their lives net negative.
Give 1000 researchers 1000 years to study nematodes and demodex mites and I donât believe theyâll be able to tell you whether their lives are worth living, let alone exactly what interventions would improve them.
A road to nowhere with great reputational cost
my best guess that they have negative lives
Why not advocate for massive desertification efforts and spreading radioactive material to sterilise the soil.? Bring CFCs back to eradicate ozone.
same could be said, although to a lesser extent, about caring about invertebrates
Yep agree. Invertebrates is approximately the point on the moral consideration spectrum at which the huge numbers * tiny numbers with highly uncertainty makes the ethics too fuzzy and volatile to be fruitful.
Somewhere between lobsters and maggots the numbers shoot off towards infinities and the whole thing becomes not worth thinking about.
Organisations using Rethink Prioritiesâ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.
1. Reductio ad absurdum: If we consider the lives of nematodes and mites meaningful, suddenly all human welfare questions become meaningless compared to the question of how our behaviour affects nematode/âmite welfare. The conclusion will be that we either need to nuke ourselves or completely restructure society around maximising nematode wellbeing. This is impractical, and like many internally consistent but impractical philosophies (nihilism, antinatalism, Kaczynskiism) arenât conducive to a functioning society.
2. Poor analysis: The calculations are always the same: huge numbers multiplied by tiny numbers, all of which are highly uncertain and unlikely to become more certain with âmore researchâ (highly doubt any study is going to illuminate the moral value of mite suffering)
3. Looks crazy: Even mentioning the issue to say why it doesnât matter has a significant cost: the fact that it was considered seriously enough to warrant rebuttal makes the organisation look crazy to normal people, in the same way that Rethink Priorities running an analysis on whether nuking Australia would be net good or bad would look crazy.
In practice people arenât able to figure out the the nuances a personâs net wealth and income and expenses are and how much of a sacrifice giving 10k really means to them. So theyâre forced to make a judgement quickly based on limited information.
Being vegan is a less noisy signal of personal commitment than giving 10k to charity, so people will take this more seriously, whether thatâs fair or not.
I intentionally said âsimilarâ, not âthe sameâ.
Itâs slightly easier for Gates to be vegan than me but much much easier for him to give $10k than me
I think youâre spot on with the importance of signalling. Personal sacrifice is a strong signal that you believe in something and are serious about it. This is more inspiring and influential to others.
Donating $10,000 to an animal welfare charity is not good proof of personal sacrifice because $10,000 might be basically nothing for a very rich person. Unless people know how rich you are they canât interpret much from this.
Going vegan, however, is a similar level of inconvenience across most wealth levels. Whether youâre on Struggle St or youâre Bill Gates, giving up eggs and cheese sucks to a similar degree. So when people see that youâre vegan they see personal sacrifice and serious commitment.
utilitarianism isnât taken to have a concept of âpermissibleâ
Donât understand this point. OP is comparing giving $10,000 while killing 2 people to doing neither. Or being vegan to not being vegan while giving $$$ to animal welfare. Clearly by âpermissibleâ they mean âhigher utility than the alternativeâ
Depopulation is Bad
When parents have fewer children it means their attention and resources are stretched across fewer kids. I think this is, on average, gives these kids better opportunities.
Also generationally, wealth will accumulate among a few descendants rather than being diluted.
I think the concerns about lower workforce arenât a big deal because of increased mechanisation and the huge numbers of people in the world that donât currently have the opportunities to work productively.
I think the concerns about fewer people meaning less innovation/âlower chance of geniuses emerging neglects that currently 90% of the world is locked out of these opportunities anyway because of poverty.
Here are some people who are currently particularly inspiring to me:
Nicolas Laing who has worked in Uganda as a doctor for more than a decade and co-founded OneDay Health, which sets up health clinics in under-served parts of Uganda.
Cherry Rainflower and Adam Semple who run Fluffy Torpedo, an ice cream shop in Melbourne that donates 50% of proceeds to effective charities.
Keyur Doolabh, an ED doctor who recently co-founded Healthy Futures Global which is trying to eliminate mother to baby syphilis transmission in the Phillipines.
Akhil Bansil who founded High Impact Medicine and is training to become an infectious diseases specialist with interest in antibiotic resistance.
Kat Dekkar, Calvin Baker and Jeremy Chirpaz, who founded Give Industries, an electrical contracting business in Brisbane/âMelbourne that gives 100% of profits to effective charities ($581,000 given so far).
Those guys that founded Humanitix.
A Pascalâs mugging by nematodes? Nematodes as utility monsters?
@tobycrisford đ¸ âs points about conclusions that are extremely sensitive to small changes in highly uncertain values is very important and this post (which I donât think is parody based on the authorâs previous posts) is a great demonstration of the pitfalls.
Iâve commented before that these sorts of calculations that show astronomical but uncertain numbers for shrimp welfare or insect welfare or wild animal welfare could also lead down this nematode welfare route. Itâs not obvious to me why someone who concludes that shrimps are hugely morally significant would not also conclude that black soldier fly maggots are hugely morally significant, and then that nematodes are hugely morally significant.
(the organism on the far right is Giardia)
Interested to hear from Insect Welfare and Wild Animal Welfare advocates why they disagree that nematodes are the primary moral concern of planet Earth.
Lowering energy costs might have bipartisan support but the approaches to achieve them donât.
Energy prices is a well-treaded political issue that comes out at most elections. Everyone wants cheaper electricity but conservatives lean anti-wind and anti-solar and liberals lean anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel so thereâs a bit of an impasse.
Saying âlower energy costs has bipartisan supportâ is like saying âimproving education outcomesâ or âfixing healthcareâ has bipartisan support. The disagreements and intractability are in the details.
Do you have a more specific idea for how you would use $1M to lower energy costs in way that would have bipartisan support?
Expressing uncomfortable truths is important when itâs useful, but these calculations are so riddled with uncertainty and so lacking in actionable conclusions that this post and posts like it are probably net harmful.
I think itâs reasonable to say that loudly pondering uncomfortable ideas is not useful if it returns an answer with error bars so wide that you might as well have not written the post at all.
Appeal to absurdity is a reasonable objection and shouldnât be discouraged. We need to be able to say clearly why idea X doesnât also imply some similar absurd idea Y.
I didnât say anything about the tractability of insect welfare interventions but Iâm sure there are many things you could do to help insects. Almost all of those things will be at the direct or indirect cost of people. There are very few worlds in which you can consider insects sentient and not go completely off the rails sacrificing human welfare to insect welfare.
If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful
In a world with limited resources, meaningfullness is necessarily measured on a relative scale to triage resources. A toddler dropping their ice cream is âabsolutely importantâ but I donât spend much time daily preventing that when there are families struggling to put food on the table, or 600,000 people dying of malaria annually, or chickens in cages. When one moral issue is magnitudes greater than any existing moral issue it requires a similarly large reorientation of attention and resources. I think youâre too flippant in dismissing how disruptive this would be.
Thanks for this. Itâs great to create maps like this of critiques and responses. Iâve not heard of several of these people and arguments before.