Software engineer in Boston, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/news/ea
Jeff Kaufman
Karma: 14,012
Keeping choices donation neutral
Haiti and disaster relief
Personal consumption changes as charity
Altruism isn’t about sacrifice
Disability Weights
If you can turn a bunch of “A is worse than B” statements into a cardinal ordering, then why do you need the population equivalence questions at all? Why not just include “perfect health” and “death” among your disabilities? Then we can eventually say “the difference between perfect health and A is X% of the difference between perfect health and death.”
I guess part of my confusion is I don’t really see how you can get this cardinal ordering from the data. So let’s say we find that condition A is universally considered worse than all other conditions. Perhaps it’s “death”, perhaps it’s just clearly the worst of the conditions we’re looking at. How can statistics give us a ratio by which it’s worse? If somehow it were twice as bad we would still see it be considered as “worst” in all it’s comparisons.
Elo scores are based on trying to model the probability the A will beat B. They assume every player has some ability, their performance in a game is normally distributed, the player with the higher performance in that game will win, and all players have the same standard deviation. So each player can be represented by a single number, the mean of their normal distribution. If we see A beat B 75% of the time and A beat C 95% of the time, then we could construct normal distributions that would lead to this outcome and predict what fraction of the time B would beat C.
Trying to apply this to disease weightings is modeling there as being some underlying true badness of a disease that each person has noisy access to. This means that if A and B are close in badness we will sometimes see people rank A worse and other times rank B worse, while if A and B are far apart we won’t see this overlap. The key idea is that the closer together A and B are in badness, the less consistent people’s judgements of them will be. But look at this case:
Condition A is having moderate back pain, and otherwise perfect health.
Condition B is having moderate back pain, one toe amputated, and otherwise perfect health.
Almost everyone is going to say B is worse than A, and the people who rank A worse probably misunderstood the question. But this doesn’t mean B is much worse than A; it just means it’s an easy comparison for people to make, x vs x+y instead of x vs z.
Do we just assume this is rare with disability comparisons? That consistency is only common when things are far apart? Is there a way to test this?
Katja Grace (of Meteuphoric) also did some research for Giving What We Can looking into climate change charities. She wrote up her findings as a blog post.
I’m a programmer at Google, and I’ve been earning to give since 2009. I write about EA sometimes; some favorite posts:
I also help organize EA meetups, so let me know if you’re going to be in Boston!
Legibility is tricky. I want to be able to easily explain my giving, so that when people ask for details on what I mean by “I give half” we don’t get into complex arguments about what counts. For example, if my work has a donation matching program, does that count? What if I do work for someone and ask them to donate instead of paying me? What about money my company puts into my 401k? Luckily the US government already has figured out a set of rules for this, so I can use them. When people want details on how I account for things, I can say “income” is “income on form 1040” and “donations” is “gifts to charity on form 1040 Schedule A”.
First, the claim is that infertility is 98.9% as healthy as full health; this part isn’t much based on tradeoffs. Which is frustrating, since tradeoffs are more useful for the kind of questions we care about.
But even then, I’m not sure most infertile people would take a 1% chance of death to restore their fertility. Another way of putting it: if the maternal death rate in the US jumped from 28⁄100,000 to 1,000⁄100,000 (a level only Sierra Leone hits) how many people would decide not to have kids?
Remote jobs give you the best of both worlds: salary adjusted for high CoL, but low expenses for yourself. One engineer at my company lives in Montana. He makes a Silicon Valley salary...
I had the impression (probably from discussion on HN) that at least in programming working remotely means making substantially less money. This might be only true at the high end: companies who pay the most generally don’t hire remote workers.
It wouldn’t be too hard to find out, though: apply to a bunch of jobs on WeWorkRemotely.
Lawyering to Give
(Images are broken.)
Effective Altruism at Your Work
I’d be curious about specifics for how you go about doing these kinds of things
When I did the effective giving discussion at work last time I sent out an email to an internal “misc” mailing list saying day/time/location and then sat at a table in the cafeteria with a sign. People came over, we talked. For the matching I would do something similar: send something out to an internal mailing list describing and advocating for the charity and offering to match.
(In the case of matching this year there’s a semi-formal program where groups of employees get together and offer to match donations to a specific charity, and a group formed for SCI while I was out on leave, so when I came back I just had to notice the email and say “hey, can I join this matching party?”)
Short version: eating cheaply and eating vegetarian are in tension if you try to hold “enjoyment of food” constant.
eating a diet with no animal products or much less meat gets a lot easier over time—and the preference flips
Does it, in general? Long term vegetarians often say they find meat squicky now, but ex-vegetarians often say wanting to eat meat again was a big part of why they stopped being veg.
Thanks for writing this up! This is why I decided to stop with my idiosyncratic capitalization and write normally.
I really should know this, but is a cardinal ordering one where you can say “A is twice as bad as B” or not? My understanding of their process is they used their stats to put everything in order from least-harmful to most-harmful, but this didn’t get them more than just an ordering. The equivalence questions added not only the information necessary to put this on the 0-1 scale, but also what was needed to say “A costs 3x less than B to treat, but we should still treat B because it’s 5x worse”. An ordering by itself doesn’t get us very far.