Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Evening. I'm expecting to donate 30k to charity this year. I enjoy the resource on TheLifeYouCanSave.org that calculates your impact in terms of outcomes--8 people saved if money given to the Against Malaria Foundation, etc--but I was wondering if there's a calculator that estimates in terms of Disability-Adjusted Life-Years (DALYs) in a similar way?
I'm not aware of a calculator that estimates DALYs based on charitable donations. However, there are calculators you can use to estimate the DALY impact of a disease on someone, so you could combine one of those with The Life You Can Save's calculator to get a DALY estimate.
This is the best-looking DALY calculator I could find. Unfortunately, I think you need to enter an "age of premature death" to use it. But if you enter a number like 130 for a non-lethal disease, the impact of the "premature death" basically zeroes out, and you can see info about disability weights and so on. It's kind of clumsy, but seems like a reasonable thing to try.