I research a wide variety of issues relevant to global health and development. I also consult as a researcher for GiveWell (but nothing I say on the Forum is ever representative of GiveWell). I’m always happy to chat—if you think we have similar interests and would like to talk, send me a calendar invite at karthikt@berkeley.edu!
Karthik Tadepalli
Karma: 4,048
I think Jason is saying that the “support to emigrate” was limited to recommendations.
Got it, yes I agree now.
Yes, continuity doesn’t rule out St Petersburg paradoxes. But i don’t see how unbounded utility leads to a contradiction. can you demonstrate it?
Continuity doesn’t imply your utility function is bounded, just that it never takes on the value “infinity”, ie for any value it takes on, there are higher and lower values that can be averaged to reach that value.
Maximizing expected utility is not the same as maximizing expected value. The latter assumes risk neutrality, but vNM is totally consistent with maximizing expected utility under arbitrary levels of risk aversion, meaning that it doesn’t provide support for your view expressed elsewhere that risk aversion is inconsistent with vNM.
The key point is that there is a subtle difference between maximizing a linear combination of outcomes, vs maximizing a linear combination of some transformation of outcomes. That transformation can be arbitrarily concave, such that we would end up making a risk averse decision.
Long-distance development policy
Apt time to plug an analysis I did a while ago of paying farmers in India not to burn their crop stubble. It’s primarily a (pretty effective) air quality intervention, but I pulled together some numbers that suggest it also averts GHGs at $36/ton of CO2e, which would probably satisfy a lot of climate funders!
I’m referring to why it doesn’t get brought up by the opposers of Trump tariffs, who clearly do not think that trade is zero sum (unless they somehow think that tariffs benefit foreigners and hurt Americans). The liberal American opposition to tariffs is totally silent on their effects abroad.
Tariffs on manufactured goods are likely incident on manufacturing workers, which is a way in which they can increase poverty, though probably not extreme $1/day poverty. Regardless the general point goes through, that they will reduce the incomes of a generally not-well-off group of people.
Love this analysis and I’ve been wondering why no one talks about it. There are two motivations that makes sense to me for why analysts don’t talk about this:
Political framing—putting American interests first is the way to persuade policymakers to listen to you.
Genuine nationalism—these analysts actually care more about the harms to Americans than to foreigners.
It bothers me to not be able to distinguish between these.
If you haven’t read it, this article is a convincing argument for why containing harmful policies by the West should be a main focus for development policy.
Shooting from the hip here—if the future of AI progress is inference-time scaling, that seems inherently “safer”/less prone to power-seeking. Expensive inference means that a model is harder to reproduce (e.g. can’t just upload itself somewhere else, because without heavy compute its new version is relatively impotent) and harder for rogue actors to exploit (since they will also need to secure compute for every action they make it do).
If this is true, it suggests that AI safety could be advanced by capabilities research into AI architecture that can be more powerful yet also more constrained in individual computations. So is it true?
The Humane League, EA Animal Welfare Fund, GiveWell. Amounts were small but I have something planned for next year...
I think your position compels you to say that not only is it better to donate to AW over GHD, it is actually better to set money on fire rather than donate it to GHD. Or spend it on a yacht, or a castle, or a pile of video games. With that framing, I think you’re back down to 1% territory.
Merely subsidizing nets, as opposed to free distribution, used to be a much more popular idea. My understanding is that that model was nuked by this paper showing that demand for nets falls discontinuously at any positive price (60 percentage points reduction in demand when going from 100% subsidy to 90% subsidy). So unless people’s value for their children’s lives are implausibly low, people are making mistakes in their choice of whether or not to purchase a bednet.
New Incentives, another GiveWell top charity, can move people to vaccinate their children with very small cash transfers (I think $10). The fact that $10 can mean the difference between whether people protect their children from life threatening diseases or not is crazy if you think about it.
This is not a rare finding. This paper found very low household willingness to pay for cleaning up contaminated wells, which cause childhood diarrhea and thus death. Their estimates imply that households in rural Kenya are willing to pay at most $770 to prevent their child’s death, which just doesn’t seem plausible. Ergo, another setting where people are making mistakes. Another; demand for motorcycle helmets is stupidly low and implies that Nairobi residents value a statistical life at $220, less than 10% of annual income. Unless people would actually rather die than give up 10% of their income for a year, this is clearly another case where people’s decisions do not reflect their true value.
This is not that surprising if you think about it. People in rich countries and poor countries alike are really bad at investing in preventative health. Each year I dillydally on getting the flu vaccine, even though I know the benefits are way higher than the costs, because I don’t want to make the trip to CVS (an hour out of my day, max). My friend doesn’t wear a helmet when cycling, even at night or in the rain, because he finds it inconvenient. Most of our better health in the rich world doesn’t come from us actively making better health decisions, but from our environment enabling us to not need to make health decisions at all.
Felt a little scared realizing that that episode is over 3 years old. It’s such a great one and I return to it often!
there’s a difference between choosing to ignore the Drowning Child because there are even more children in the next pond over, and ignoring the drowning children entirely because they might grow up to do bad things.
This is a fantastic summary of why I feel much more averse to this argument than to statements like “animal welfare is more important than human welfare” (which I am neutral-to-positive on).
I don’t really route my moral reasoning through EA principles (impartiality and welfarism) and I don’t claim it is great. I own up to my moral commitments, which are undeniably based on my life experiences. I am Indian. I’m not going to be convinced that the world would be better if children around me were dead. I’m just not! If that’s motivated reasoning, then so be it.
The purpose of my comment was to engage with Vasco’s argument in the way that is most resonant with me, and I suspect with other people who prioritize GHD. You’re saying it’s discouraging that people aren’t engaging with the argument analytically. I’m saying that analytical engagement is not the only legitimate kind of engagement.
In fact, I think that when analytical disagreement is the only permitted form of disagreement, that encourages much more motivated reasoning and frustrating argumentation. Imagine I had instead made a comment questioning whether GiveWell beneficiaries are really eating factory farmed meat, and Vasco then did a bunch of careful work to estimate how much that was a concern. I would be wasting their time by making an argument that doesn’t correspond to my actual beliefs. Is that a better discursive norm?
I’m not sure what you’re looking for. I’ve made it clear that I’m not here to persuade you of my position, and I’m not going to be philosophically strongarmed into doing so. I was just trying to elaborate on a view that I suspect (and upvotes suggest) is common to other people who are not persuaded by Vasco’s argument.
I am using reason and evidence to do the most good within my circumscribed moral framework, of which I don’t aim to persuade anyone at all.
I don’t understand this view. Would they want their initiative to be run by incompetent people? If not, in what world do they not train their staff? The fact that they also tacked on an expectation that they would not migrate does not mean that expectation was pivotal in their decision.