All of joshcmorrison's Comments + Replies

Thanks for writing this Nicole!

Agree about 2ish weeks off work as the standard, though Alexander and I donated ~ten years ago, and I have some (purely anecdotal) sense that the surgery experience (and recovery) for people like Nicole who've donated since then at a big center might be better. 

Also, I think this Annals of Internal Medicine meta-analysis on the risks of kidney donation is a good resource for people who feel comfortable reading academic papers.

thanks! hope you find it useful :)

Yeah it's unclear how much of the 20% reduction is due to OP's work or would happen counterfactually. My main point with that number is that reductions of that size are very possible, which implies assuming a 1-10% chance of that level of impact at a funding level 10-100x OP's amount is overly conservative (particularly since I think  OP was funding like 25%  of American CJR work -- though that number may be a bit off). 

Another quick back of the envelope way to do the math would be to say something like: assume 1. 50% of policy change is due... (read more)

Thanks for putting this together! I think criticizing funders is quite valuable, and I commend your doing so. My main object-level thought here is I suspect much of the disagreement with the OP funding decision is based around the 1%-10% estimate of a $2B-$20B campaign leading to a 25%-75% decrease in incarceration. Since, per this article, incarceration rates in the U.S. have declined 20% (per person) between 2008 and 2019, your estimates here seem somewhat pessimistic to me. 

My guess is at the outset, OP would have predicted a different order of mag... (read more)

Am a bit late to this but wanted to jot down a few thoughts:

1. Does EA Represent Electoral Constituents? Since EA is cosmopolitan and disregards national and possibly temporal boundaries, does that mean  EA politicians will prioritize non-voters over the interest of voters? A lot of EAs may feel like which Americans have health insurance coverage or have a right to an abortion is less important than Africans dying of malaria or humanity going extinct. But 1. is this a legitimate basis for democratic politics and 2. if legitimate, will espousing it inhere

Thanks Caroline for writing this! I think it's a really rich vein to mine because it pulls together several threads I've been thinking a lot about lately.

One issue it raises is should we care about the "altruist" in effective altruists? If someone is doing really useful things because they think FTX will pay them a lot of money or fund their political ambitions, is this good because useful things happen or bad because they won't be a trustworthy agent for EA when put into positions of power? My instinct is to prefer giving people good incentives than selec... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! I run 1Day Sooner (and have a lots of thoughts about bioethics), so I have a special interest. 

I really agree with the point that complaints about bioethics are less about the positions of individual bioethicists than the outcomes of bioethical institutions. So I think it's worth asking why these institutions lead to frustrating outcomes. Some briefly sketched out, somewhat simplistic thoughts:

• Conservatism: Structurally, bioethical scrutiny adds friction to accomplishing whatever action it is being applied to. Providing a just

Yeah I wasn't really talking about EA donors per se: I think EA nonprofits should try to be funded by non EA donors (/expand the EA community) to the extent possible and that we also shouldn't assume there's a clear differentiation between EA and non-EA donors.

That said, I do think the tax effect I outlined would reasonably be of concern to EA donors  or insofar as it's not because the compensation mechanism will definitely create better results, it may make the argument a bit circular. I also think there's a principle/agent problem with donors (maxim... (read more)

thanks!

I'm very much not a visual person, so I'm probably not the most helpful critic of diagrams like this. That said, I liked Ozzie's points (and upvoted his post). I'm also not sure what the proper level of abstraction should be for the diagram -- probably whatever you find most helpful.

A couple preliminary and vague thoughts on the substantive use cases of forecasting that insofar as they currently appear do so in a somewhat indirect way:

• Developing Institutionally Reliable Forecasts: This seems to fall under the "track record" and maybe "model of the world" b

Not opposed to EA anti-aging research, but my intuition would be targeting infectious disease allows for more rapid iteration and proof of concept because the solutions are easier to publicly demonstrate in the short term. So I think it provides better training for EA methods (which could in turn enhance aging research). 

Also, infectious disease affects poor people disproportionately and as such there's more likely to be a market failure and undersupply of resources rather than aging, which is a proportional problem between the rich and poor.

Thanks for the comments! Just wanted to quickly say that Larks's interpretation of our intention was correct: we view participation in this study is superogatory (and are really making the argument that this study might be in the range of actions that are considered effective altruist).

The claim about donor survival is more based off of Segev, 2010, which does use controls matched on health (http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=185508&resultclick=1). (There was an editing error in the footnote above, sorry about that).

Good point about the age-matching, which I'll update our website to reflect. Agree that the Mjoen piece definitely has value (which is why we included it), but there are other reasonable criticisms (like the controls all being drawn from the same region and from an earlier time period) raised as well.

The U.S. is third in the world for deceased donation per million persons. The difference between us and the #1 (Spain, which has a suite of good deceased donation policies, one of which is a version of presumed consent) can be explained by our generally not accepting deceased donors over 70 and Spain doing so. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lt.23684/full

Also, the kidney shortfall is 20K/yr. Total deceased donor kidneys are about 12K per year. Opinions differ as to what percent of those eligible to be deceased donors donate, but the official go... (read more)

If you were try to adapt the EA message to be more successful in the Spanish context, how do you think you'd do so?

To follow up on Alexander's point a bit, I think applying the charitable benefits standard to non-charity decisions leads to some really weird results. For example, say someone who identifies as an EA chooses to give 10% of her income each year to a GW charity, and she’s choosing employment between being a schoolteacher for $50K a year or a job that’s not especially prosocial that pays $55K a year; say she has no innate preference between them, prefers to make more money all things being equal, and that being a schoolteacher would be worthmore than the $50... (read more)

In terms of opt-out, I only know the data in the U.S. but basically while it might be a good idea, it's unlikely to yield significant increases: it seems like such an attractive decision architecture/nudge type intervention, but when you dig in, it's a much closer call (which is why Sunstein and Thaler don't recommend it, for example).

The current American system is more of a hybrid than clear opt-in. Right now, about 75% of those who could become deceased donors ultimately consent to do so (about 40-50% are registered as organ donors and of the remainder,... (read more)

(re: political credibility) -- Ehhh, let's say you become a doctor because you think healthcare is important. You want to help people and by being a doctor, you hope to have the status to advocate politically for expanding access to healthcare. I don't see how your authority is impugned because of your desire for advocacy. I think what you're going for is the loss of authority if you have an ulterior motive that cuts against the stated motive -- e.g. if you join a church for political gain but don't believe in god. As a kidney donor, though, your desire to give and desire to change policy are aligned.

Austen, I see your point but think you have the wrong model of how social movements work. Basically any successful social movement I can think of (e.g. civil rights, women's rights, gay rights) has had extremists who were important to the movement and has included acts of extremism that were historically important to the movement's self-identity. More to the point, it's impossible to know ahead of time what acts will end up considered extremist, so it's silly to criticize an action that aligns with the movement's values as being against the movement becaus... (read more)

Politically, it probably wouldn't be feasible to allow organ sales, but there are a lot of intermediate policy alternatives likely sufficient to end the shortage by supporting donors better (just to start, you could pay lost wages and travel, but you could also provide health insurance, tax credits, or an annuity to donors). If you think that's a good idea (we think it would save about 160K QALYs annually), donating your kidney gives you unique moral authority and power in advocating that policy.

Also you might be interested in signing this open letter if you support benefit for donors --http://www.ustransplantopenletter.org/home.html

Got it! Thanks for explaining that, and I do think we wrote it in a confusing way (sorry!). There are two separate facts --1. the half-life for all living donor grafts is 14.2 years (figure 6.7 here http://srtr.transplant.hrsa.gov/annual_reports/2012/pdf/01_kidney_13.pdf). 2. Expected lifespan for those who receive any kidney transplant between the years of 60 and 64 in particular is 14.0 years. (See p. 266 here -- http://www.usrds.org/2013/pdf/v2_ch5_13.pdf).

Expected lifespan can vary from graft survival half-life both because half-lives are different fr... (read more)

Bernadette, maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but the 14 year estimate is for patients 60-64 who receive a transplant (this might be a bit unclear as we wrote it though). Patients 60-64 on dialysis can expect 5.1 years of life, so that gives a 8.9 differential, which when you discount years by disability comes to 8.29 or about 8, which is our (admittedly imprecise) estimate. We don't think it's skewed in an optimistic direction though. To be clear, the 14-year overall estimate is 8 per transplant * 1.75 per marginal transplants created by starting a c... (read more)