Jonas loves his wife, being in nature, and exploring interesting worlds both fictional and real. He uses his bamboo bike daily to get around in Munich. He’s currently a freelance software engineer, and was working at the Against Malaria Foundation and Google before that. Jonas enjoys playing Ultimate and dancing.
Sjlver
Karma: 292
I find this a fascinating and relevant question. Thanks for asking! Disclaimer first: I work for AMF, but the opinion here is entirely my own. None of the content here is based on inside information or implies anything about the opinions of AMF; In fact, you could probably substitute AMF in my writing with any other effective charity.
Background: This 80000hours podcast episode with Phil @trammell makes a good case for being patient, i.e., investing your money and donating it later. I recommend listening to the episode. Yet I disagree with its conclusion and think that one should donate a significant portion of one’s fund early. This post explains why.
Your presentation (if I understand it correctly) compares two scenarios:
Save your money for 10 years, then buy 3x as many bednets (wow that’s 11.6% interest rate)
Buy the bednets now
I think option 2 will lead to more wellbeing overall. The main reason for this is that many interventions (including bednets) are better than cash. For bednets, GiveWell estimates a “cost-effectiveness in multiples of cash transfers” factor of 14-17. To be clear: you get that boost in both scenarios. But in scenario 1, you get it now and it will immediately start paying dividends. The effects are a stronger economy, better education, and others. Many of these will still be present after 10 years, and it seems highly plausible to me that the net benefit at that time exceeds 3x the price of the mosquito nets.
Let me end with some data to support my arguments:
Fink and Masiye 2015: free ITNs increased the average annual harvest value for a farmer by $76, about 12% of the group’s average annual harvest value at baseline.
Hamory et al 2020: Evaluated a deworming campaign 20 years after the intervention. “Given deworming’s low cost, a conservative annualized social internal rate of return estimate is 37%.”
I’d be really interested to hear other people’s thoughts and arguments. This is a question that is important to me, both for work and personal reasons :)
The disincentives listed here make sense to me. I would just add that people’s motivations are highly individual, and so people will differ in how much weight they put on any of these points or on how well their CV looks.
Personally, I’ve moved from Google to AMF and have never looked back. The summary: I’m much more motivated now; the work is actually more varied and technically challenging than before, even though the tech stack is not as close to the state of the art. People are (as far as I can tell) super qualified in both organizations. I’m happy to chat personally about my individual motivations if anyone who reads this feels that it would benefit them.
I like this post, thanks for writing!
I often consider two things when giving advice: (1) the quality of the advice and (2) my relationship with the person to whom I’m giving advice. Point (1) seems natural: by default, ideas are cheap and we shouldn’t necessarily share them. The more an idea has helped me, the more readily I’ll share it. Also, +1 to the risk aspect that jimrandomh mentioned.
Regarding point (2): I think that we need to somehow earn the right to speak into the lives of others. Advice is often demanding, as in “I think you should do X”. Advice without a good relationship to the other person is just advertising or propaganda, and I’m skeptical when strangers give me advice. However, once I know and respect someone, that person has earned the right to give me advice, and I’ll be ready and happy to follow it.
This post seems to fall victim to the planning fallacy.
One explanation for why people commonly underestimate project completion time is this: people consider a best-case scenario where everything goes smoothly. Like the “happy timeline” in this post. Alas, reality is not like this at all.
When people are asked for a “realistic” scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes—the same vision as their “best case.”
Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the “worst case.”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, in the post linked above.
The popular solution for countering the planning fallacy is taking an outside view (aka reference class forecasting). In that light, Covid vaccines looks surprisingly good. As you note at the top of your post, Covid vaccines were developed quickly compared to the reference class of vaccines.
I’m very sympathetic to the idea of writing down our collective mistakes and trying to learn from them. It just seems to me that this post contrasts our mistakes with a highly unrealistic, idealized timeline. My guess is that more realistic expectations might lead to better goals for improving the world 🤔
Here’s why the post reminds me of the planning fallacy: When people make flawed plans, these plans don’t seem unrealistic. They often consist of detailed steps, each of which is quite likely to succeed. And yet, in most cases, the world takes a different turn and the planned project ends up late and more expensive.
You describe a “happy timeline” that’s analogous to such a plan. For it to work, we would have to make many good decisions; many unknown obstacles would have to be overcome; and many novel ideas (like human challenge trials) accepted. None of these is unrealistic when looked at individually. But collectively, it is very unlikely that all these factors could realistically come together to form your happy timeline.
One example to illustrate this: Your post strongly favors vaccines and also attributes enormous costs to lockdowns. I think that this is realistic, but I can think so only in hindsight. In early 2020, it wasn’t at all clear that sufficiently strong lockdowns wouldn’t bring the pandemic to a manageable level or at least buy us the time we need for vaccine development. Remember the hammer and the dance? Yet, around that same time in your happy timeline, decisions are made to approve and pre-purchase vaccines at high costs. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that we should have paid these costs; but at the time, it wasn’t obvious at all. The answer to this question wouldn’t have been easier to find with better institutional decision-making, either. It was simply a difficult question with no clear answer at that time.
Hmm… Here’s how I understand your estimate. Is that a fair summary?
If all had gone according to a perfectly happy timeline where everyone makes the right decisions, we could have had enough vaccines in August.
This would be worth approximately 205 million QALYs.
It would also cost approximately 0.7 trillion dollars.
That’s 3400 dollars per QALY.
My concern (expressed in the comments above) is mainly that the happy timeline is unrealistic, so the estimate could be off by a large factor, similarly to how the time and cost estimates of our plans are often off by a large factor.
Your estimate is probably still valuable, even if it is imprecise. We can use it to think about whether vaccine development is cost-effective; I reckon 3400$/QALY puts the cost-effectiveness an order of magnitude below effective charities and some orders of magnitude above many other public health interventions. Is that a fair conclusion?
I’d like to take away more from your post than just the estimate, but am not sure at the moment what other recommendations I can take from it...
For German speakers, there is a fantastic podcast episode that discusses GMOs and potential altruistic uses such as Golden Rice: https://erklärmir.at/2021/06/01/167-erklaer-mir-gentechnik-martin-moder/
I’m posting this here because the episode radically changed my mind. I used to be very cautious when it comes to GMOs, full of reservations about potential unforeseen consequences for ecosystems. After hearing this episode, I understood how the advantages of GMOs massively outweigh the risks that I was concerned of.
My experience is similar to Luke’s.
One of the main benefits of becoming vegan was that it removed a cognitive dissonance from my life—a sadness at the back of my head because my actions had been different from my values. After becoming vegan, my lifestyle and my convictions were more aligned. This was quite a liberating and joyful feeling.
I think that becoming vegan should be a win-win decision. If a vegan diet feels like a burden, or distracts from more important issues, or causes health problems, then by all means stop and eat whatever you like. But chances are that, after a while, you become a happier and healthier person.
My last bit of advice is to not be too dogmatic about veganism. The animal industry is surprisingly elastic*, and so each egg not bought will reduce demand and cause some fraction of a statistical chicken to not be born and not suffer. You don’t have to be 100% vegan to have an impact ;-)
* I wish I’d have good numbers to back this claim...
No Animals Were Harmed
Just wanted to assure you that this has been really useful for me, and will improve the way I’ll approach people at EA Global London.
To me, the message does not come across as entitled or status move at all. It is just plain helpful advice.
A lot of what you have written resonates with me. I think it is amazing that you have thought so deeply about this decision and spoken with many people. In that sense, it looks like a great decision, and I hope that the outcome will be fulfilling to you.
After I’ve finished my PhD, I was torn between doing something entrepreneurial and altruistic, or accepting a “normal” well-paid job. In the end, I decided to accept an offer from Google for reasons similar to yours. It fit well with the growing relationship to my now-wife, and the geographic location was perfect.
I stayed at Google for three years and learned a lot during this time, both about software engineering and about effective altruism. After these three years, I felt ready for a job where I could have a more direct positive impact on the lives of people. I think I was also much better equipped for it; not only in terms of software engineering techniques… Google is also a great place to learn about collaboration across teams, best practices in almost any area, HR processes, communication, etc. One aspect that was absolutely fantastic: I had no pressure at all to leave Google. It was a good job that I could remain in for as long as I wanted, until the perfect opportunity came along.
I could imagine that a few years from now, you might similarly be in a good position to re-evaluate your decision. You will probably be much more stable financially, have a lot more negotiation power, and a lot less time pressure. Plus, I’m sure you’ll be so good then that IBM/Google/Amazon can no longer ignore you ;-)
At Google, most employees who came in touch with EA-related ideas did so thanks to Google’s donation matching program. Essentially, Google has a system where people can report their donations, and then the company will donate the same amount to the same charity (there’s an annual cap, but it’s fairly high, like US$ 10k or so).
There is a yearly fundraising event called “giving week” to increase awareness of the donation matching. On multiple occasions during this week, we had people from the EA community come and give talks.
When considering starting an EA community, I might look for similar ideas to the ones mentioned above, in order to try making this part of company culture. There are selfish reasons for companies to do this sort of things (employee satisfaction, tax “optimization”). Also, there might be an existing culture of “tech talks” that you can leverage to bring up EA topics.
Oh… and for some companies, all you need to do to start a community is get some EA-related stickers that people can put on their laptops ;-)
(It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I’m only half joking… most companies have things like this. At Google, laptop stickers were trendy, fashionable, and in high demand. I’m sure that after being at Xanadu for a while, you’ll find an idea that works well for this particular company)
There are a lot of approaches in software engineering that are really answers to governance problems. These got started, perhaps, with https://agilemanifesto.org/.
While the Manifesto only states a few generic principles, there exist more applied approaches like Scrum which mandate specific roles, processes, and decision mechanisms.
I’m far from being an expert here, so I won’t add many more links… ask your favorite “Agile Coach”; they will point you to a lot of research into which of these approaches work and which ones don’t, which exists because questions of software engineering governance have direct impact on the success of organizations. Software engineering is also a space where there is a lot more change and innovation than in political governments.
As a software engineer, I resonate with this post. In software engineering, I regularly have to make the decision of whether to improve existing software or replace it with a new solution.
Obvious caveats: humans are incomparable to pieces of software, and human genes evolve much more slowly than JavaScript frameworks.
I think software engineers succumb to the temptation to “start with a green field and clean slate” a bit too often. We tend to underestimate the value that lies in tried and tested software (and overestimate the difficulty of iterative improvements). Similarly, I think that I personally might underestimate the value, wisdom, and moral weight of existing people, particularly if we could solve most health problems. Yet I do believe that after some amount of life years, the value of a new life—a newborn who can learn everything from scratch and benefit from all the goodness that humanity has accumulated before its birth—exceeds the value of extending the existing life.
The trade-off is even more salient in animal agriculture. Obvious caveat: humans are incomparable to cows, and human genes evolve much more slowly than cow genes.
Because cows are bred to a quite extreme degree, a cow born today has substantially “better” genes than a cow born 10 years ago. This is one of the reasons why it is economically profitable to kill a dairy cow after 4-6 years rather than let it live to its full lifespan.
Just a quick question: You write that the cost for 1 year free from IPV is about US$194, and that this means the intervention costs US$78.4/DALY
If I understand this correctly, it would mean that 1 year free from IPV is about 2.5 DALYs? Is that correct? It seems to imply that experiencing IPV is worse than death… which might well be true, but the more likely explanation is that I misunderstand the DALY conversion. Could you clarify?
Thank you for the explanation! I sincerely appreciate, since I realized that my question could be perceived as trolling or nitpicking on the cost-effectiveness estimates. My intention is rather to understand better the impact of these interventions. Also, these DALY calculations are just hard (at least for me).
I think the answer makes sense.
Do you have a reference to the model that you’ve used (pardon if I missed the link)? I would be interested to look at it in a bit more detail. For example, my gut feeling is that a single or a few instances of IPV might already cause chronic damages; and so to avoid this damage we would be interested more in IPV-free lives than IPV-free years.
EDITED to add: On the other hand, it would seem likely that the effect of an intervention lasts for longer than a year, and thus that the beneficiaries would benefit from a reduced IPV risk for much of their lives.
In addition to the difference in VAWG burden, there are also differences in implementation costs. Interventions will be cheaper in low-income countries than in high-income countries.
A clarification, after having read more about the interventions:
The studies asked women whether they experienced various forms of intimate partner violence over the last year. If a woman reported any form of violence, that was coded as a “case of IPV”. Multiple or repeated experiences within the last year do not change the coding, it is still just one “case of IPV”. The “Unite for a better life” intervention averts one case per US$194.
This means one woman more who did not experience violence in the last year. Which probably also means that she is in a lower-risk relationship, and that this state will persist for some time in the future.
ClickUp might be a good alternative to Asana, particularly if you want to keep costs low. It’s a project management tool for teams, but also works decently well for me as a personal task list.
It is a relatively young project and not as polished as some others like Asana or TodoIst, but has the advantage that the free plan covers a good range of its features.