Dear EA, please be the reason people like me will actually see a better world. Help me make some small stride on extreme poverty where I live -- by the end of 2024.

[Warning: long comment] Thanks for the pushback. I think converting to lives is good in other cases, especially if it's (a) useful for judging effectiveness, and (b) not used as a misleading rhetorical device [1].

The basic point I want to make is that all interventions have to pencil out. When donating, we are trying to maximize the good we create, not decide which superficially sounds better between the different strategies "empower beneficiaries to invest in their communities' infrastructure" and "use RCTs to choose lifesaving interventions" [2]. Lives are at stake, and I don't think those lives are less important simply because it's harder to put names and faces to the ~60 lives that were saved from a 0.04% chance of reduction of malaria deaths from a malaria net. Of course this applies equally to the Wytham Abbey purchase or anything else. But to point (a), we actually can compare the welfare gain from 61 lives saved to the economic security produced by this project. GiveWell has weights for doubling of consumption, partly based on interviews from Africans [3]. With other projects, this might be intractable due to entirely different cause areas or different moral preferences e.g. longtermism.

Imagine that we have a cost-effectiveness analysis made by a person with knowledge of local conditions and local moral preferences, domain expertise in East African agricultural markets, and the quantitative expertise of GiveWell analysts. If it comes out that one intervention is 5 or 10 times better than the other, as is very common, we need a very compelling reason why some consideration was missed to justify funding the other one. Compare this to our currently almost complete state of ignorance as to the value of building this plant, and you see the value of numbers. We might not get a CEA this good, but we should get close as we have all the pieces.

As to point (b), I am largely pro making these comparisons in most cases just to remind people of the value of our resources. But I feel like the Wytham and HPMOR cases, depending on phrasing, could exploit peoples' tendency to think of projects that save lives in emotionally salient ways as better than projects that save lives via less direct methods. It will always sound bad to say that intervention A is funded rather than saving X lives, and we should generally not shut down discussion of A by creating indignation. This kind of misleading rhetoric is not at all my intention; we all understand that allowing a large enough number of farmers access to sorghum markets can produce more welfare than preventing 61 deaths from malaria. We have the choice between saving 61 of someones' sons and daughters, and allowing X extremely poor people to perhaps buy metal roofs, send their children to school, and generally have some chance of escaping a millennia-long poverty trap. We should think: "I really want to know how large X is".

[1] and maybe (c) not bad for your mental health?

[2] Unless you believe empowering people is inherently better regardless of the relative cost, which I strongly disagree with.

[3] This is important-- Westerners may be biased here because we place different values on life compared to doubling consumption. But these interviews were from Kenya and Ghana, so maybe Uganda's weights slightly differ.

I think that kind of thinking is appropriate in all these cases. The Whytham abbey purchase was an investment, but it is reasonable to compare the cost compared to other investments in these terms.

On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the differential scrutiny applied to different projects.

On the other hand, there are conceptual models in which this scrutiny makes sense. In one of them, money has been pre-committed by donors ex ante to cause areas. So money in the global health/development (GH/D) bucket (or maybe the neartermism bucket) is only competing for funding against projects in the same bucket (while the HPMOR and Wytham projects were in something like a "longtermism community growth" (LCG) bucket).

As a practical matter, this is approximately true -- in the context of an appeal on the Forum for funds, Anthony's project is very likely to receive funds that would counterfactually have gone to other GH/D work (and there's a good chance they would have counterfactually gone to GiveWell-style work). In contrast, the odds of someone like me giving money to HP fanfic distribution or Wytham are ~0.

Relatedly, one could see the GH/D and LCG fields as too methodologically different for this kind of comparison to be fitting. There's a certain appeal to that, since the numbers in LCG cost-effectiveness analyses tend to be much less grounded in data than GH/D numbers. And if you make the "number of future lives potentially saved" high enough, the LCG project will always win even if the "chance of preventing catastrophe" is miniscule indeed. Of course, one extension to this approach would be to argue that (e.g.) EA-style GH/D projects and non-EA-style GH/D projects are also too methodologically different for this kind of analysis -- and that would leave us with no common yardstick to evaluate projects in GH/D itself. 

I understand the sentiment but disagree. For global health interventions, cost effectiveness analysis is doable and adds value. Most CE orgs and other aspirational cost effective orgs like my own have done some form of CEA as part of making their case

For Whytham Abby and Harry potter fan fiction that may be more difficult to do.

Although I think there should be far more CEAs across all fields. Like for Harry Potter giveout I would have done something like (obviously this is full hack)...

DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying this actual BOTEC is meaningful, I'm just giving it as an in example that these kind of CEAs are possible.

650 Students given books, I assume that of these 100-300 of these students will read them, and 0-5 will change their life trajectory towards giving or altruism to a small degree counterfactually due to the book. 0 to 2 will give 50,000 to 500,000 more over their lifetime and 0 to 5 will change their life direction and save 1 more life than they would have otherwise.

So cost effectivenss might be between 0 x $50,000 = 0 raised + 0 x 1 = 0 lives saved  and 500,000 x 2 = 1,000,000 dollars and 1 x 5 lives saved.

So the book handout might be somewhere between completely useless and raising $1,000,000 extra dollars for EA causes and saving 5 lives (I don't stand by this analysis, it's just a brief hack)

So compared with saving 6 children with nets it might be comparable-ish based on my 2 minute math. This kind of math might also have been done and not shared in the grant review!

Again, a disclaimer that I'm not trying to justify the grant here, just mocking up the basic mechanics of the kind of botec you could do.

Thanks so much titotal.

Thanks so much John. I am going to see how best I can modify the original post to include this message. I am also really thankful to know that you are happy to see people like me on the EA forum, and that you wish I would get the needed funding to make my vision a reality. Thanks so much for the encouragement. I joined this forum this month of April, and I would be very happy, too, to make friends here that would help me bring about some change in our region.

Thank you Nick. 

You said: "I don't think you'd find any serious statistician who would consider busoga to be "poorer" or to have a higher poverty rate than places like karamoja".

Here is what you need to know: 

The Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) is Uganda government's official statistics agency. They are staffed with the best statisticians Uganda can find, and in publishing their reports, they do so in collaboration with local teams from agencies like Makerere University, the World Bank, UNDP, and all the global antipoverty agencies operating locally in Uganda.

Here is UBOS speaking live on NTV (one of Uganda's major TV channels) two years ago, pointing out clearly that "Busoga region has the highest levels of poverty." 

In that report, Karamoja and Bukedi are also mentioned towards the end of the video, but the report EXPLICITLY mentions that Busoga leads with 14.5%, followed by Bukedi, and Acholi.

There is totally no "confusion" between the actual numbers of people living in poverty in Busoga and Karamoja, versus the poverty rates (in %) of the two regions. The people publishing these reports can differentiate between the two.

As regards Uganda's lcoal media outlets being unable to interpret figures, what I can say is: The New Vision (Uganda government's official newspaper), and The Monitor, are Uganda's two biggest media outlets. Every single news story they have published in the last few years has EXPLICITLY said Busoga is currently the poorest region in Uganda, and their reports come from press conferences with the concerned people (e.g. UBOS), as seen in the above video. 

You also said "it's important though to be super careful how we frame our statistics so we don't exaggerate, which can help built trust in our argument in general." All I can say is: if anyone is exaggerating the poverty in Busoga (vs that in Karamoja), it isn't me.

You also asked if I have ever been to Karamoja. Here, I think you are trying to suggest that we put aside the officially reported figures and instead judge the two regions with our eyes/opinions.

In that case, I believe the reason you are saying Karamoja is far poorer than Busoga (when judged from our eyes, rather than with official stats) is because:

a) Busoga has a somewhat greener environment, while Karamoja is mostly semi-arid.

b) local people's culture, i.e., the fact that people in Karamoja, whether they are a bit better off or not, mostly sleep in sketchy huts because of their nomadic pastoralism (while people in Busoga have slightly better housing); 

c) the fact that people in Karamoja, whether they are a bit better off or not, mostly wear wrappers rather than full clothes, while people in Busoga wear full clothes even if they are very poor.

d) the fact that Busoga hosts Uganda's most popular tourist city, Jinja, which city only acts as the door to Busoga's crippling poverty -- the moment you dare to venture into Busoga's remote countryside, like my village of Namisita, where most households can't even afford soap and salt.

I really don't know what you are basing on to underestimate the conditions local people here are living in. And I know you are a New Zealander (or so) who has been in northern Uganda for a few years. But Nick, leave local circumstances to those of us who have a firsthand grasp of them.

Thanks so much for sharing this. I will keep an eye at CE, and their upcoming application cycle.