Previously Operations Manager at Family Empowerment Media
BA Economics/âPhilosophy
Rowan Clements đ¸
Karma: 473
Yes, youâre rightâ most of the examples are more in the absolute advantage camp. Would be keen to hear suggestions for NZâs comparative advantage in the technical/âeconomic sense too though đ
2^ Also a line in my recent EA-themed rap track
Keen for the latest NickLaing album!
Understood!
Yes, Iâm a big fan of New Incentives tooâ even if your numbers were spot on, 13000+ lives saved is still an incredible result. And theyâre amazing to work with. (Shout-out to Liz Hixson if she happens to be reading this đ)
Thanks for sharingâ always good to have a sanity check!
Iâm currently doing EA NZâs annual review of our partner charities. Is it okay if I include a note about your calculations in our review of New Incentives?
Thanks for sharing! Australia and NZ have a lot of similarities, so thereâs probably some overlap.
Thatâs an interesting point re: the west/âChina. Both having a colonial background and being in Asia-Pacific opens up some interesting sets of relationships.
Awww. Yes!
Fascinating! I didnât know that wasnât standard
Loving all the kidney donation posts lately! Iâve been considering it for a while, and hearing peopleâs experiences is really helpful.
The point about pre-eclampsia was new to me. I wonder if thereâs a case for delaying donation until after childbearing? Though maybe the risks of donating at a later age outweigh the risks of a single-kidney pregnancy...
What is NZâs comÂparÂaÂtive adÂvanÂtage?
Agreed that idolatry is unhelpful. *And* I donât think having role models is inherently/âalways harmful, as long as we remember that everyone is fallible.
Both posts are great, especially in conversation with each other.
Love this question! Some role models for me:
@Julia_Wiseđ¸ â both in terms of bridge-building and personal sacrifice. Juliaâs writing was pivotal in making me feel welcome in EA. Seeing many of my own interests/âconcerns/âways of being reflected in her work reassured me there was a place for me in the community. I also greatly admire + aspire to her (and Jeffâs) level of giving.
@Catherine Lowđ¸ â a local mentor/ârole-model for me, though many outside NZ know her too! Sheâs an amazingly warm and welcoming super-connector/âbridge-builder. As my predecessor at EA NZ, I often think about whether Iâm living up to her example. I also love her story as a reminder that life (and impact) doesnât end at 30. Given how young the community skews, there can be a sense that youâve failed if you havenât achieved something amazing by age 25. Catherine is a great counter to this: she didnât discover EA until well after 25, and is having a fantastic impact regardless.
@GraceAdamsđ¸â another local-ish mentor/ârole model. I really appreciate her example of balancing a high-impact career alongside ongoing health issues. (Not sure which theme this fits under. Maybe we need one for sustainable engagement with EA?) I also really admire what sheâs achieved at GWWC. She was the one who ultimately persuaded me to take the pledge, as someone whoâd already been giving 10% for many years, and didnât feel the need for an external commitment device.
There are many others in/âaround the community who I greatly admire and respect, but donât think of as personal role models. E.g. Paul Farmer did incredible work, but I donât especially see myself reflected in him, or aspire to live like him in the particulars. I guess I tend to gravitate towards role models who are in some sense âme-but-betterâ.
There are also many people who exemplify particular virtues/âprinciples, but who I wouldnât call âEA role-modelsâ per-se. E.g. I consider Darwin a role model in terms of intellectual humility and truth seeking, but he wasnât exactly EA.
Understandableâ many things in EA can feel counter-intuitive at first!
Itâs entirely possible that there are charities/âcases where itâs cheaper to prevent a disability, but itâd take some significant research to establish that.
Iâm not an expert on Forum etiquette, but the more specific and detailed your question is, the more likely you are to get a response. It also helps to lay out your current thinking/âany research youâve done/âany answers youâre considering. That gives people something to engage with, and shows youâve put some effort in, rather than just asking a question without trying to answer it for yourself.
It sounds like you want to be the one who creates a tipping point. E.g. in your election analogy, if 51â100 people voted for your preferred candidate, youâd want to be the 51st person who made the difference between them winning and losing. Or if it cost $5000 to save a life (every time, not on average), youâd want to be sure you donated the 5000th dollar.
Thatâs totally understandable (if Iâm interpreting you correctly), but Iâm not sure itâs a helpful way of thinking about things in this case.
Yes, marginal cost effectiveness is importantâ thatâs why we think about neglectedness. But once youâve selected a cost effective charity, the usefulness of the concept breaks down a bit. (At least in IMO).
Sure, perhaps in some sense the 5000th dollar is more valuable than the other 4999, because it ticked the counter over. But it wouldnât have been the 5000th dollar if the first dollar hadnât been donated. In that sense, each dollar is equally valuableâ they all have an equal chance of creating that tipping point.
Thatâs why we think probabilistically. Itâs impossible to know ahead of time which dollar will make the marginal difference. So we look for the charities which give the best odds. Thatâs part of what GiveWell doesâ their recommended charities are ones they think can make the best use of marginal funding.
At that point, every dollar counts, whether itâs the 1st or the 5000th. This is a team effort, and your contributions arenât less valuable just because someone else happened to give the final dollar đ
Obviously, people are welcome (and encouraged to!) apply EA principles to any virtually any area. If you want to prevent male circumcision, using EA ideas can help you do that more cost effectively. Thinking about precedent might be helpfulâ Julia has some useful suggestions there.
That said, I doubt preventing male circumcision would be cost effective as a global priority. While there are some good arguments for phasing it out in developed countries (violation of bodily autonomy, loss of sensation etc.) Iâm not aware of it causing many deaths or much ongoing disability. Given that, I imagine the cost/âbenefit ratio would be pretty unfavourable, especially compared to e.g. preventing malaria.
This isnât a critique of your question per seâ itâs great to see people thinking about cost effectiveness regardless of what theyâre working on! But because most people in EA circles are focused on interventions that save the most lives per dollar (or similar), you likely wonât find many established answers for issues like circumcision. Feel free to share what you find if you look into it further!
Itâs not necessarily/âalways cheaper to prevent an ongoing disability than to save a life. Some diseases are more likely to kill you (or leave you unscathed if you survive) than to leave you alive but disabled. E.g. rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms have presentedâ itâs far cheaper to prevent a death from rabies (through vaccination or PEP) than to prevent a disability (only ~7 people are known to have survived).
I donât know if thatâs true for malaria or not. It can cause definitely cause ongoing disability, and itâs far less fatal than rabies. It would be a massive undertaking to properly assess all the possible routes to disability and the cost of preventing them.
But as an example⌠hereâs a very crude back-of-the-envelope approach looking at cerebral malaria, a complication of regular/âgarden-variety malaria which can cause ongoing neurological disabilities:
Letâs imagine a group of 10,000 under-five children, living in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria incidence for under-5s in sub Saharan Africa is around 26%. So without intervention, we can assume that around 2600 of the children will contract malaria. (0.26*10,000)
Cerebral malaria affects about 2% of people with malaria. So letâs say around 52 of our children will develop cerebral malaria. (0.02*2600)
Without treatment, cerebral malaria is invariably fatal. With treatment, 15-20% die. Of those who survive, 11% are discharged with gross neurological deficits. For simplicity, letâs assume that all of our children receive treatment, though this obviously wouldnât be true in real life. And to balance that out a bit, letâs say that 20% of them die. That leaves 41 who survive (0.8*52), and 4 who have ongoing neurological disabilities (0.11*41).
Now letâs imagine we were able to distribute bednets to those children. Bednets reduce malaria cases by around 45%, so this time only 1430 will contract malaria. Of those, only 28 will contract cerebral malaria. (0.02*1430). 22 will survive (0.8*28), and 2 will have ongoing neurological disabilities (0.11*28).
That means our bednet distribution prevented two disabilities! But how much did it cost? GiveWell estimate roughly $18 to $26 for one additional child under age five to sleep under a net. So it would cost $180-26000 to protect our 10,000 children. Divide that by two and you get $90-130,000 to prevent a child developing a neurological disability due to cerebral malaria.
This is obviously far more than the cost to save a life. Even if we focused just on deaths due to cerebral malaria, our imaginary bednet distribution saved 5 lives, at a cost of $36,000-52,000 each. And in reality, it would have saved far more livesâ you can die of plain âole malaria, without developing the cerebral kind.
I donât know whether this would hold true if you combined data for all malaria-related disabilities. Itâs possible that it would be cheaper to prevent a disability due to malaria than a death due to malaria. Regardless, itâs likely more complicated than youâd think at first glance!
As an aside, Iâm curious why itâs important to you to prevent a disability rather than a death. (If Iâm interpreting your question correctly). Do you see death as morally neutral, and only care about the suffering people experience while theyâre alive? If so, you might want to account for the pain etc. involved in dying of malaria. Preventing that suffering is probably morally valuable, even if youâre indifferent to the actual life/âdeath.
Some suggestions off the top of my head:
Join a local group if thereâs one near youâ or check out EA Anywhere if there isnât. Getting to know others in the community is a great way of encountering ideas/âopportunities you wouldnât necessarily come across on your own.
Take a đšTrial Pledge or đ¸10% Pledge. Donating effectively is one of the most impactful things you can do at any stage of your EA journey!
Volunteer to help out with a high-impact project. The EA Opportunities Board lists a bunch of options (you can filter for volunteer roles). Volunteering does some good directly, and can be a great way to test your fit for different roles/âcause areas. And it might lead to paid work in future
If itâs feasible for you, attend an EAG/âEAGx conference. Iâm not sure how valuable repeat attendance is, but someoneâs first conference often supercharges their network of interests/âopportunities/âconnections. (That was definitely the case for me!)
Find an EA friend/âmentor you can chat to about the things youâre learning and what to explore next. They donât necessarily have to be more experienced than youâ just having someone to bounce ideas off helps
This matches my experience:
I spent about a year volunteering for EA NZ before transitioning into a paid role. (First part time, then full time)
I interned with FEM as a research assistant, and was encouraged to apply for a role as operations manager when it came up. They also interviewed external candidates, but ended up hiring me over applicants with significantly more life experience/âeducation. (Not trying to brag: this still surprises me!)
Iâm happy to speak with people who are considering NZ as a relocation option. Obviously I canât give official immigration advice, but I could help narrow down potential options and connect you with locals if needed.
I guess we know what to put on Switzerlandâs list of advantages then! đ¨đ
(Along with good chocolate)