Rick Baker
Comments3
Someone should commission new moral weights work in the next year
I strongly agree with the author’s point about the danger of relying too heavily on one study, especially given the importance of moral weights in estimating cost effectiveness. I also think that there is value in reexamining moral weights within GHD (eg health relative to income).
I found this comment (and the post by Danny) really interesting and helpful. I am new to EA and have been persuaded by its arguments to donate to the Malaria Consortium. But I am also an environmental economist and an surprised by the EA communities apparent lack of interest in biodiversity (while acknowledging that some of the other commenters' points re comparative importance and whether it is overly neglected may have some validity).
One issue that interests me is the potential to make environmental interventions (both investments and regulations) more effective. EA examples like it being 1,000s of times more effective to donate to preventing or curing blindness than donating to training guide dogs are important. I think this scale of improvement in effectiveness is possible with environmental interventions. In both areas wildly inefficient interventions can be supported because people are sometimes satisfied by things that sound good or signal their concern, with little or no thought to maximising impact.
In short, I think that:
- the EA community should consider rating the importance of biodiversity more highly
- EA-type thinking could be used to make biodiversity interventions much more effective .
I am not sure what would be involved in writing arguments with you about this or whether I would be suited to doing this, but I'm happy to talk .
Although I’m not an expert my current belief is that the welfare of these things doesn’t matter at all because their utility = 0. Also, the article suggests that the people supporting this are fine with eliminating much of the world’s biodiversity, and I think that would be terrible.