joshcmorrison

• joshcmorrison 15 Nov 2014 22:47 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Bernadette_Young’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  Bernadette, maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, but the 14 year estimate is for patients 60-64 who receive a transplant (this might be a bit unclear as we wrote it though). Patients 60-64 on dialysis can expect 5.1 years of life, so that gives a 8.9 differential, which when you discount years by disability comes to 8.29 or about 8, which is our (admittedly imprecise) estimate. We don’t think it’s skewed in an optimistic direction though. To be clear, the 14-year overall estimate is 8 per transplant * 1.75 per marginal transplants created by starting a chain.

  Patients 45-49 with a transplant have an average life expectancy of 22.8 years (8.3 if they’re on dialysis). But we’re not assuming they’re the median recipient.

  I haven’t seen half-life outcomes broken out by living related vs. unrelated donors, but 5-year graft survival is similar. See p. 14 of the 2012 OPTN Report -- (http://​​srtr.transplant.hrsa.gov/​​annual_reports/​​2012/​​pdf/​​01_kidney_13.pdf). This makes sense because deceased donor organs are not worse primarily because of mismatching but because (besides the fact that they’re dead) the quality of donor pre-death is worse (they don’t go through rigorous screening; little health data is available; something caused them to die, etc.).

• joshcmorrison 16 Nov 2014 15:02 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Bernadette_Young’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  Got it! Thanks for explaining that, and I do think we wrote it in a confusing way (sorry!). There are two separate facts --1. the half-life for all living donor grafts is 14.2 years (figure 6.7 here http://​​srtr.transplant.hrsa.gov/​​annual_reports/​​2012/​​pdf/​​01_kidney_13.pdf). 2. Expected lifespan for those who receive any kidney transplant between the years of 60 and 64 in particular is 14.0 years. (See p. 266 here—http://​​www.usrds.org/​​2013/​​pdf/​​v2_ch5_13.pdf).

  Expected lifespan can vary from graft survival half-life both because half-lives are different from averages and (moreso) because most patients end up surviving graft failure and going back on dialysis or getting another transplant (thus extending life further).

  We used the 60-64 age as the baseline for the calculation because (1) it’s fairly typical of when patients develop ESRD; (2) the life-spans from both dialysis and transplant treatments fit the average transplant candidate; and (3) the transplant survival figure included both living and deceased, so it skewed conservative compared to a figure that only included living, which gave us a margin of error to avoid bias towards overoptimism.

• joshcmorrison 19 Nov 2014 0:13 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Nicholas_Bregan’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  Politically, it probably wouldn’t be feasible to allow organ sales, but there are a lot of intermediate policy alternatives likely sufficient to end the shortage by supporting donors better (just to start, you could pay lost wages and travel, but you could also provide health insurance, tax credits, or an annuity to donors). If you think that’s a good idea (we think it would save about 160K QALYs annually), donating your kidney gives you unique moral authority and power in advocating that policy.

  Also you might be interested in signing this open letter if you support benefit for donors—http://​​www.ustransplantopenletter.org/​​home.html

• joshcmorrison 19 Nov 2014 2:22 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Austen_Forrester’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  Austen, I see your point but think you have the wrong model of how social movements work. Basically any successful social movement I can think of (e.g. civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights) has had extremists who were important to the movement and has included acts of extremism that were historically important to the movement’s self-identity. More to the point, it’s impossible to know ahead of time what acts will end up considered extremist, so it’s silly to criticize an action that aligns with the movement’s values as being against the movement because of potential PR consequences, particularly when the act is non-violent and widely considered admirable. (Another way of saying all this is that effective movements are internally diverse and should be wary of self-policing).

• joshcmorrison 20 Nov 2014 1:13 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  (re: political credibility) -- Ehhh, let’s say you become a doctor because you think healthcare is important. You want to help people and by being a doctor, you hope to have the status to advocate politically for expanding access to healthcare. I don’t see how your authority is impugned because of your desire for advocacy. I think what you’re going for is the loss of authority if you have an ulterior motive that cuts against the stated motive—e.g. if you join a church for political gain but don’t believe in god. As a kidney donor, though, your desire to give and desire to change policy are aligned.

• joshcmorrison 20 Nov 2014 1:15 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  In terms of opt-out, I only know the data in the U.S. but basically while it might be a good idea, it’s unlikely to yield significant increases: it seems like such an attractive decision architecture/​nudge type intervention, but when you dig in, it’s a much closer call (which is why Sunstein and Thaler don’t recommend it, for example).

  The current American system is more of a hybrid than clear opt-in. Right now, about 75% of those who could become deceased donors ultimately consent to do so (about 40-50% are registered as organ donors and of the remainder, the family consents about 40-50% of the time). Thus even if an opt-out system worked as intended, the marginal upside isn’t so high (and the downside to it failing or being counterproductive would be quite severe). Spain, the country with the highest deceased donation rates in the world, ostensibly has an opt-out system, but the families are very empowered to say no to donation, and the actual difference between Spain and the U.S. is that in Spain a lot of their deceased donors are over 70 and here very few are.

  There’d also be some risks of going to an opt-out system. So imagine what happens when someone is actually eligible to become a deceased donor—they’re brain dead, so their death is often sudden and unexpected to their family. Let’s say the donor didn’t choose to opt out. What do you tell the family who’s in the room with a brain-dead patient whose heart is still beating—“she’s dead. Now you have to leave the room so we can harvest her organs”? If they have no control over what happens to their loved ones body, you can imagine a lot of people becoming pretty upset, even people who might have been persuaded to say yes to donation. The deceased organ donation relies on the public’s support and good graces, so if you have repeated instances of grieving families publicly decrying the opt-out system, that creates a significant risk that the change will be counterproductive.

• joshcmorrison 24 Nov 2014 22:39 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Alexander_Berger’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  To follow up on Alexander’s point a bit, I think applying the charitable benefits standard to non-charity decisions leads to some really weird results. For example, say someone who identifies as an EA chooses to give 10% of her income each year to a GW charity, and she’s choosing employment between being a schoolteacher for $50K a year or a job that’s not especially prosocial that pays $55K a year; say she has no innate preference between them, prefers to make more money all things being equal, and that being a schoolteacher would be worthmore than the $500 donation.

  According to the logic Alexander points to about kidney donation, when deciding whether to forgo the $5000 to choose a socially beneficial job, the right calculus is -- 1. does giving up that money do as much good as donating to a GW charity (i.e. saving a life) and 2. if no, EAs shouldn’t do it. That leads to the really weird result, though, of committing EA ideology to rejecting socially positive choices even if they involve fairly small sacrifices (here $5,000).

  Let me give one final thought experiment on this point, which can be a variant of the child-drowning-in-the-puddle—let’s say instead of a child drowning, it’s an older woman, and you’re wearing expensive clothing that’ll be ruined. If the EA standard is—don’t do altruistic acts that aren’t of similar value to GW charitable donations—that principle could very well commit you to not saving the older woman, which, again, seems bizarre.

  To be clear, that’s not to say that should mean donating a kidney—far from it. Instead considering kidney donation is a way of broadening the options available to EAs beyond giving money.

• joshcmorrison 29 Sep 2015 23:07 UTC

  0 points

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  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  If you were try to adapt the EA message to be more successful in the Spanish context, how do you think you’d do so?

• joshcmorrison 16 Oct 2015 20:54 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  The U.S. is third in the world for deceased donation per million persons. The difference between us and the #1 (Spain, which has a suite of good deceased donation policies, one of which is a version of presumed consent) can be explained by our generally not accepting deceased donors over 70 and Spain doing so. http://​​onlinelibrary.wiley.com/​​doi/​​10.1002/​​lt.23684/​​full

  Also, the kidney shortfall is 20K/​yr. Total deceased donor kidneys are about 12K per year. Opinions differ as to what percent of those eligible to be deceased donors donate, but the official government estimate is 75% (I think a range of 50-75% is probably credible), so even if all eligible deceased donors donated, there would still be an enormous shortfall in kidney transplants each year.

• joshcmorrison 16 Oct 2015 22:06 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: rpdrewes’s comment on: Kid­ney dona­tion is a rea­son­able choice for effec­tive al­tru­ists and more should con­sider it

  The claim about donor survival is more based off of Segev, 2010, which does use controls matched on health (http://​​jama.jamanetwork.com/​​article.aspx?articleid=185508&resultclick=1). (There was an editing error in the footnote above, sorry about that).

  Good point about the age-matching, which I’ll update our website to reflect. Agree that the Mjoen piece definitely has value (which is why we included it), but there are other reasonable criticisms (like the controls all being drawn from the same region and from an earlier time period) raised as well.

• joshcmorrison 1 Nov 2021 18:00 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Daniel_Eth’s comment on: Should Effec­tive Altru­ists Sign Up for Oxford’s COVID Challenge Study?

  Thanks for the comments! Just wanted to quickly say that Larks’s interpretation of our intention was correct: we view participation in this study is superogatory (and are really making the argument that this study might be in the range of actions that are considered effective altruist).

EA Should Spend Its “Fund­ing Over­hang” on Cur­ing In­fec­tious Diseases

• joshcmorrison 18 Nov 2021 0:31 UTC

  11 points

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  in reply to: Matt_Sharp’s comment on: EA Should Spend Its “Fund­ing Over­hang” on Cur­ing In­fec­tious Diseases

  Not opposed to EA anti-aging research, but my intuition would be targeting infectious disease allows for more rapid iteration and proof of concept because the solutions are easier to publicly demonstrate in the short term. So I think it provides better training for EA methods (which could in turn enhance aging research).

  Also, infectious disease affects poor people disproportionately and as such there’s more likely to be a market failure and undersupply of resources rather than aging, which is a proportional problem between the rich and poor.

• joshcmorrison 27 Nov 2021 21:31 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Path­ways to im­pact for fore­cast­ing and evaluation

  I’m very much not a visual person, so I’m probably not the most helpful critic of diagrams like this. That said, I liked Ozzie’s points (and upvoted his post). I’m also not sure what the proper level of abstraction should be for the diagram—probably whatever you find most helpful.

  A couple preliminary and vague thoughts on the substantive use cases of forecasting that insofar as they currently appear do so in a somewhat indirect way:

  • Developing Institutionally Reliable Forecasts: This seems to fall under the “track record” and maybe “model of the world” boxes, but my idea here would be if you can develop a track record of accurate forecasting for some system, you can use that system as part of an institutional decision-making process when it forecasts a result at a certain probability. Drug development would be a good example: the FDA could have a standard of authorizing any drug that a reliable forecaster gave a >95% probability of licensure (or of some factual predicate like efficacy). Another set of applications could be in litigation (e.g. using reliable forecasters in a contract arbitration context). The literature around prediction markets probably has a lot of examples of use cases of this type. It might be difficult, though, to create a forecasting system robust to the problem of becoming contaminated and gamed when tied to an important outcome.

  • Predictive Coding: There’s an idea in neuroscience that perception involves creating a predictive model of the world and updating the model in response to errors reported by sensory data. Some people (like Karl Friston and Andy Clark) argue that action and perception are largely indistinct and run on the same mechanism—so you act (like lifting your hand) via your brain predicting you will act. SlateStarCodex has a good summary of this. It seems like developing more fine-grained, reliable, and publicly legible forecasting machinery may have useful applications in policy-making by perhaps allowing the construction of a rudimentary version of something analogous. Some of the ideas under my first bullet might fit this concept, but you could also imagine having mechanisms that target the reliable forecast (using the forecast as a correlate of whatever actual change you’re trying to achieve in the world). Another way of thinking of this might be to use forecasting to develop a more sophisticated perceptual layer in policy-making.

1Day Sooner Town Hall (Thurs 12.2, 1 pm est) + Some Thoughts on Omicron Challenge Studies

• joshcmorrison 1 Dec 2021 23:26 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Path­ways to im­pact for fore­cast­ing and evaluation

  thanks!

• joshcmorrison 11 Jan 2022 15:28 UTC

  10 points

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  on: The Bioethi­cists are (Mostly) Alright

  Thanks for writing this! I run 1Day Sooner (and have a lots of thoughts about bioethics), so I have a special interest.

  I really agree with the point that complaints about bioethics are less about the positions of individual bioethicists than the outcomes of bioethical institutions. So I think it’s worth asking why these institutions lead to frustrating outcomes. Some briefly sketched out, somewhat simplistic thoughts:

  • Conservatism: Structurally, bioethical scrutiny adds friction to accomplishing whatever action it is being applied to. Providing a justification takes time and effort (as does reviewing the quality of that justification and suggesting and making remedial measures). That friction reduces unethical action but it also reduces action of all types, and the cost of that general inaction is not accounted for in bioethical review. One line I like to use about IRBs/​RECs is that they’re like a driver who has only a brake and no gas pedal. But I think more broadly the academic act of ethical inquiry problematizes decisions into potential mistakes, which increases the complexity of the decision being made and therefore the difficulty in making it. (To be clear, one could argue this tradeoff of fewer ethical abuses for reduced dynamism is worthwhile)

  • Parochialism: Because bioethical institutions often exist to translate legal regulations into practice, they are embedded in local concerns and are not cosmopolitan. They are more likely to focus case-by-case (and have insufficient incentive to create rules that would apply globally), and they also are unlikely to take the lives of people outside of rich countries seriously (which matters particularly in a research context).

  • Illiberalism: In many cases, bioethicists are partially acting as agents for subjects (like research participants) who do not choose them and have no ability to appeal their judgments. Because bioethicists are (1) in fact different from the people on whose behalf they are making decisions and (2) (unconsciously) motivated to maintain their power/​resources, their decision-making is imperfect and paternalistic.

  • What Are Bioethics For? I think retreating to the safety of the academy (i.e. separating the generally reasonable intellectual arguments of bioethicist academics from the practical decision-making of translating biomedical regulation into practice) is not a tenable move for the bioethics field to make. Bioethics exists (i.e. is largely funded) to help solve problems in medical and biological spaces. If in practice, those problems are being solved poorly, that seems like something the bioethics field needs to take up and solve. Otherwise, what’s the use? We could just have philosophers, biolawyers, and doctors.

Re­search Help Needed for 1Day/​IFP “Oper­a­tion Warp Speed 2.0” Project

• joshcmorrison 5 May 2022 22:24 UTC

  13 points

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  on: De­mand­ing­ness and Time/​Money Trade­offs are Orthogonal

  Thanks Caroline for writing this! I think it’s a really rich vein to mine because it pulls together several threads I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

  One issue it raises is should we care about the “altruist” in effective altruists? If someone is doing really useful things because they think FTX will pay them a lot of money or fund their political ambitions, is this good because useful things happen or bad because they won’t be a trustworthy agent for EA when put into positions of power? My instinct is to prefer giving people good incentives than selecting people who are virtuous: I think virtue tends to be very situationally dependent and that very admirable people can do bad things and self-deceive if it’s in their interest to do so. But it’s obviously not either-or. I also tend to have fairly bourgeois personal preferences and think EA should aspire to universality such that lots of adherents can be materially prosperous and conventionally successful and either donate ~20% of their income or work/​volunteer for a useful cause (a sort of prosperity gospel form of EA amenable to wide swathes of the professional and working class rather than a self-sacrifice form that could be more pure).

  A separate issue is one of community health. So on an individual level maybe it could be fine if people join EA because the retreats are lit and the potential for power and status is high, but as a group there may be some like tipping point where people’s self-identity changes as the community in fact prizes the perks and status over results. This could especially be a concern insofar as 1. goals that are far off make it easy to self-deceive about progress and 2. building the EA community can be seen as an end in itself in a way that risks circularity and self-congratulation. You can say the solution here is to really elevate people who do in fact achieve good results (because achieving good things for the world is what we care about), but lots of results take a long time to unfold (even for “near-termist” causes) and are uncertain (e.g. Open Phil’s monetary policy and criminal justice reform work, both of which I admire and think have been positive). For example, while I’ve been in the Bahamas, people have been very complementary of 1Day Sooner (where I work and which I think EAs tend to see as a success story). I’m proud of my work at 1Day and hopeful what we’ve already done is expanding the use of challenge studies to develop better vaccines, but despite achieving some intermediate procedural successes (positive press coverage, some government buy-in and policy choices, some academic and bioethics work), I think the jury is very much still out on what our impact will end up being and most of our impact will likely come from future work.

  The point about self-identity and developing one’s moral personhood really drives me in a direction of wanting to encourage people to make altruist choices that are significant and legible to themselves and others. For example, becoming a kidney donor made me identify myself more with the desire to have an impact which led me further into doing EA types of work. I think the norm of donating a significant portion of your income to charity is an important one for this reason, and I’ve been disappointed to see that norm weaken in recent years. I do worry that some of the types of self-sacrificing behavior you mention aren’t legible enough or state change-y enough to have this permanent character/​self-identity building effect.

  There’s an obvious point here about PR and I do think committing to behavior that we’re proud to display in public is an important principle (though not one that I think necessarily cuts against paying EAs a lot). First, public display is epistemically valuable because (a) it unearths criticisms and ideas an insular community won’t necessarily generate and (b) views that have overlapping consensus among diverse audiences are more likely to be true. Second, hiding things isn’t a sustainable strategy and also looks bad on its own terms.

  Last thought that is imperfectly related is I do think there may be a bit of a flaw in EA considering meta-level community building on the same plane as object-level work and this might be a driving a bit of inflation in meta-level activities that manifests itself in opulent EA college resources (and maybe some other things) that are intuitively jarring even as they can seem intellectually justified. So if you consider object and meta-level stuff on the same plane, the $1 invested in recruiting EAs who then eventually spend $10 and recruit more EAs seems like an amazing investment (way better than spending that $1 on an actual EA object level activity). But this seems intuitively to me like it’s missing something and discounting the object level $ for the $ spent on the meta-level needed for fundraising doesn’t seem to satisfy the problem. I’m not sure but I think the issue (and this also applies to other power-seeking behavior like political fundraising) is that the community building is self-serving (not “altruistic”) and from an view outside of EA does not seem morally praiseworthy. We could take the position that that outside view is simply wrong insofar as it doesn’t take into the account the possibility that we are in fact right about our movement being right. The Ponzi-ishness of the whole thing doesn’t quite sit well, but I haven’t come to a well-reasoned view.

  What links here?

  • If EA Com­mu­nity-Build­ing Could Be Net-Nega­tive, What Fol­lows? by joshcmorrison (2 Jan 2023 19:21 UTC; 153 points)

• joshcmorrison 23 May 2022 12:03 UTC

  9 points

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  on: Some po­ten­tial les­sons from Car­rick’s Con­gres­sional bid

  Am a bit late to this but wanted to jot down a few thoughts:

  1. Does EA Represent Electoral Constituents? Since EA is cosmopolitan and disregards national and possibly temporal boundaries, does that mean EA politicians will prioritize non-voters over the interest of voters? A lot of EAs may feel like which Americans have health insurance coverage or have a right to an abortion is less important than Africans dying of malaria or humanity going extinct. But 1. is this a legitimate basis for democratic politics and 2. if legitimate, will espousing it inherently be a losing electoral strategy (since EA politicians will quickly be branded as doing a suboptimal job representing their voters)?

  2. Should We Be Open to a Chesterton’s Fence Around Money in Politics? One political science mystery (which EA investment in electoral races has tried to exploit) is that there is less money in politics than might be rational from the economic self-interest of motivated stakeholders (i.e. campaign donations and lobbying expenditures are much less than the government spending they help determine). But the Flynn campaign experience implies that at least being identified with a single donor creates strong backlash, so we should perhaps more carefully consider explanations for the “too little money in politics” mystery that aren’t simply “it is rational to spend more money on politics.”

  3. Should We Require Local Buy-In to Run in Electoral Races? I’d love to understand better the local Oregonian organizing and stakeholder building that was done for this campaign. I’m also curious to what extent Nick Kristof (who was running for Governor of Oregon and has written sympathetically about effective altruism) was engaged. I was frankly pretty surprised not to see Kristof publicly on board, particularly because he’d built a gubernatorial campaign that ended up not being used (since he was excluded from the ballot for residency reasons). Given the heavy carpetbagging criticism of Flynn (outside crypto money, hadn’t voted in recent elections, etc.) and some of the issues that have come up (criticism on local reddits, Oregonians posting negatively about the campaign on this forum, perhaps a misguided tactic of bringing in outside volunteers for door-knocking) along with question 1. i raise above, it may be uniquely valuable in future races to have at least some local community groups bought in ahead of time.