All of drbrake 🔸's Comments + Replies
I am sure this has been answered somewhere and it really is a question of more historical relevance but if there's one thing that people with any knowledge of "original" effective altruism knows, it is that anti-malarial bed nets are either the most or nearly the most effective global health intervention. (I believe anti-malarial vaccination may have inched past bed nets by some calculations). AMF has been at or near the top of the charts as a recommended organization tackling this for several years. There are many very wealthy people who claim to have an ...
I notice it receives/pays in Euros, a currency my credit card and bank don't support "natively". Is this liable to cause you problems with your costs? Would you need to support more currencies? Even if the underlying currency were the Euro, you should probably provide an option to see the amounts to be paid in the user's preferred currency as that makes it easier for people to visualise.
It would be nice if there was a way to replace a normal "peer payment" app with GoodWallet so that I could receive a payment as before but with a percentage for effective giving either prompted to the payer or automatically subtracted from what I receive and given to my chosen charity.
Can you afford to continue to sustain the transaction cost of the donations indefinitely if this became popular? What is the percentage it actually costs you/someone to receive and pass on a payment?
...Depopulation is Bad
There are some realities about the problems caused by populations of the size we have now that simply cannot be "technologied around". The wealth of the world is profoundly unequally distributed and if we address this, overall consumption would radically increase as would the burden on the planet's resources. And there are limits to our ability to move around and find space for this many people to live (mainly in cities) in a comfortable way. Population decline needs to be managed to ensure it does not happen too quickly for our systems
I think @conflictaverse is on to something with his notion of "brand confusion". I wish there was an easy, widely understood shorthand I could use that would indicate I am inspired by the "early" EA project although I am now concerned that the movement's centre of gravity seems to have drifted both organizationally and philosophically in directions I am not comfortable with. I am reluctant to abandon the EA label altogether, leaving it to that "wing" of the movement.
I hope you are right but you should be aware that the opposite may also be true. Depending on the weights we give AI in valuing human and non-human thriving, AI may discover new ways that would make humans happier at the expense of non-humans. There are people and organizations who would assign a moral weight of zero to the suffering of some of even all non-humans, and if those people win the argument then you might end up with an AI which is less to your taste than one that just emerges organically with basic guide rails.
For example, leaving aside s...
While this is an important question to consider, it is by no means clear that we could get any short term consensus about how moral alignment should be implemented. In practical terms, if an AI (AGI) intelligence is more long lived and/or more able to thrive and bring benefits to others of its kind, wouldn't it be moral to value its existence over that of a human being? Yet I think you would struggle to get AI scientists to embed that value choice into their code. Similarly, looking 'down' the scale, in decisions where the lives or wellbeing of humans had ...
This does not address one possible use of alternative proteins - feeding them to domesticated carnivorous animals. Obviously many EA folks might prefer that we don’t eat such animals or have them as pets but if we do it would be better if their food did not have an adverse climate impact or did not involve more animal suffering (or both!). Alt proteins here would not need to have the same taste as the foods they replace, be tasty to humans, or pass strict safety guidelines - they would just need to be minimally acceptable to (and digestible by/safe for) their ‘target’ animals. I recall those breeding insects as food (not alt proteins of course) are targeting this marketplace. Any thoughts? Research? Evidence of success?
The EA movement has no single leader but communication and recruitment are of course vital to its continuation, so there are mechanisms for senior figures to make their views known. It is not necessary for the movement to "take sides" in particular political battles, but the fact that Musk has funded EA work, is friends with key EA figures and has taken actions (like the all-out attack on USAID) that run directly counter to mainstream EA thinking suggests to me EA needs to make its concerns clear.
If a public figure or organization (political or not) is ali...
"it does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. "... actually, this is just one more reason why what the CATF is doing is retrograde. Supporting and aiding development of CCS for, say, cement making is OK in my book and there is plenty of room for experiments there that are d...
This is the kind of thing I would like to see more of. I would not invest myself because all investments seem to be in individual projects - I would want to be able to invest in some fashion in a "basket" of companies and/or projects (ideally through a large, well-known investment company like Vanguard...)
I know your long run goals are the least "binding" but I would encourage you to be a little more cautious and evidence-based in your approach to growth as an intervention. Economic growth clearly offers benefits overall in developing countries but it would surely be safer to say your objective should be to study the relationship between economic growth and human development and work to understand the circumstances in which aid that enhances economic growth in particular circumstances is more effective than alternative forms of aid.
In one of the discussions, a founder of Operation Fistula turned up. It's a horrible-sounding condition - described in the disability weighting as "has an abnormal opening between her vagina and rectum causing flatulence and feces to escape through the vagina. The person gets infections in her vagina, and has pain when urinating." It's caused if you don't have access to a C section when giving birth and can be remedied for $288. (The report's a little unclear, suggesting that the operation value lasts for 10 years - perhaps it stops working? Perhaps the lifespan of typical sufferers is in any case low?) Anyway, worth looking at if you are interested in this area.
Thanks for the additional readings. I think Paul Dolan is asking the right questions. I am disappointed that after a promising initial discussion eight years ago, Holden doesn't seem to have spoken again on the subject and to the best of my knowledge there is still no way on GiveWell to put different weights on "impact" to give different results.
I don't understand your last paragraph though. DALYs don't seem to measure economic effects on others at all, so if you do start to consider them wouldn't that be a big argument to make some DALYs negative?
NB smile.amazon.com works like smile.amazon.co.uk. Having written to Amazon Smile they responded: " We are currently working on expanding the AmazonSmile program to other countries.
You are correct in stating that customers can currently support organizations in one of the 50 United States, Germany, Austria, or the United Kingdom."
A note on OPIS - might I suggest finding a way to separate your work on animal suffering from that on human suffering - at least for potential funders? Of course I can understand that you see work on both as important but there will be potential donors/supporters (myself included) who would be very inclined to support your advocacy work on easing provision of opioids for humans but who don't see the relief of animal suffering as a priority and who would not wish their support for one to be used for the other.
I applaud you for your initiative in taking this forward and I do think you seem to have identified an important gap in the existing EA approaches. They appear to see lives saved as the key metric where I would at least offer potential donors/actors the chance to prioritise life quality. I wonder, however (and apologies if this has already been discussed and considered - if it has please point me to it) whether it might not be still more cost-effective to target easily cured very painful illnesses like Trachoma. See this for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16019692 which finds providing surgery costs from I$13 to I$78 per DALY averted.
It's certainly worthwhile that this helps less-well-supported non-profits reach a larger audience, but I find the current ranked list somewhat disturbing and disappointing. As an "EA 1.0" person these are not my priorities and I think they would puzzle many outsiders.