Conventional effective altruism wisdom is that however much money you are donating, you should give 100% to the best charity, because it is the best. I think that is one perfectly good choice among several. Until recently my explanation was “the estimated difference in effectiveness between these charities is many orders of magnitude smaller than the confidence interval of the estimates, so they are functionally the same, so I might as well do what makes me happy.” Scope insensitivity makes donating $n to two charities twice as satisfying as $2n to one charity. I would have given to several more charities this except my job matches donations by hand and the admin has other shit to do. But recently I realized it is more complicated than that.
Synergies
I spend a lot of time reminding people that estimates of genetic influence and heritability are only valid for the environment in which they are measured. The same is true for charitable interventions. The effects of any one intervention depend on the environment, which depends in part on other interventions.
Free condoms and instruction on their use doesn’t appear to make a big difference in teen pregnancy- but that study measured a single free condom program that existed in an environment with lots of existing programs. Anyone who wanted condoms already had them. That doesn’t mean such a program wouldn’t be useful in a population with no knowledge of condoms.
Interventions are synergistic. Tostan’s educational programs won’t do much for anyone who died of malaria, but I’m also not excited about saving infants from death only to spend their entire lives in misery. We could run around funding whichever need is most dire at any given moment, but organizations are costly to set up and a lot is lost when they disband. Keeping the operational capital of the second and third best things live will let us react faster when we hit diminishing returns on the first.
And that’s when we know what to do. Tostan and even GiveDirectly are very much works in progress, and because Tostan is so complex and culturally specific it’s slow to scale. GiveDirectly can scale much faster, but too fast and corruption will become an enormous problem. If we want those solutions ready to go when disease and nutrition are solved, we have to work on them now. And that’s before taking into account the synergies.
Predictability
100 small donors each dividing their donations among 5 charities is better for the charities than 20 small donors giving 100% to five different charities, because it’s more stable. If a minuscule change in numbers causes half your donors to abandon your cause (and maybe come back two years later), your funding will swing wildly. This is terrible for operational capital.
Risk of Neglect
And that’s assuming favorites are properly distributed. If there’s an organization or cause that’s everyone’s second choice it should probably get some money, but under a favorites only system it never will. My source at Effective Altruism Outreach says that’s exactly what the recent EA survey showed is happening to metacharities*; everyone has their favorite real cause, and then likes metacharities. I’ve increased my estimate of metacharities’ value recently**, so I now think they’re underfunded, so this seems bad.
If you’re a very large donor none of this applies to you because you’re in a position to change charities’ behavior rather than just react to it. If you’re a small donor who’s happiest donating to the charity with the single best numbers, keep going, I don’t think you’re doing any harm at the scale you currently operate on. But if you’re like me or Brian and will have more fun spreading your donations around, I think you’re doing a good thing and shouldn’t change.
*The publicly accessible survey summary doesn’t give numbers for individuals’ second choices. This is still a good example if it’s not literally true so I haven’t bothered looking up the numbers, although I should do so before I actually donate to metacharities.
**I’ve also increased the number of friends I have working at metacharities. This means I hear about the really cool stuff they do that can’t be publicized, but also that I’m more likely to be suffering from a halo effect or cognitive dissonance or simply a desire for my housemates to have more money because hiring a cleaner would make everyone’s lives easier.
GiveWell: $6,000
I needed to use up company matching quickly before quitting and GiveWell is never a bad choice. Raising for Effective Giving: $5,000
I am generally fairly skeptical of fundraising charities, especially fundraising charities targeting EAs. Their mechanisms for evaluating effectiveness seem pretty weak (e.g. Giving What We Can counting donations pledged to be made in 40 years by people who have never donated once).* That doesn’t mean they’re ineffective or can’t become effective, but I didn’t sign up for this movement to throw money and hope it was at the right place.
REG is different. First, they started with an extremely specific mission: convincing poker players to pledge small portions of their winnings to effective charities. This is a group that was donating minimally before, and is much more susceptible to quantitative arguments than the general population. They count only money already donated, not pledges. And their plans for expansion seem similarly crafted for very specific niches. (More or less the same model for fantasy football, microtransactions in video games). The money raised goes to charities I like
Tostan: $5000
Continuing education courses in small African villages teaching things like literacy, numeracy, cell phone usage, basic medical info, human rights… a lot of different stuff, basically. That makes them hard to measure, and they turned down GiveWell when they tried. But! They did share their data with someone at the Gates Foundation, who found them extremely effective, and I trust his judgement. My focus isn’t “who is producing the highest numbers right now”, it’s “who has the best system for improving themselves and is aimed at the right thing.” Tostan’s classes grew out of requests from the community, so it some ways this is the continuing ed version of GiveDirectly.
That said, I’m working on getting numbers from them. There’s a few different charities I’ve given money to that called me to thank me and ask for my input on their long term plans. My response is usually “but I gave you the money on the assumption you were better at curing poverty than me”, but this year I’m hoping to leverage it into getting them to talk to one of the evaluator charities.** It is not my only plan for accomplishing this, but it seemed worth a shot. And I’d like to offer that as an argument for donating to charities that do things uniquely right while falling down in other ways: once they’re paying attention to you you can nudge them to do better.
*This was uncomfortable to write given that I have friends that work at fundraising charities, but I think they will understand that that is why I had to publish it.
**Specifically Giving What We Can, whose wildly optimistic numbers could theoretically be part of the puzzle that gets Tostan to publish more public data. I’m also trying to get Treehouse to talk to Impact Matters, on the strength of last year’s donation.
There is a particular failure pattern I’ve seen in many different areas. Society as a whole holds view A on subject X. A small sub-group holds opposing view B. Members of the sub group have generally put more thought into subject X and they have definitely spent more time arguing about it than the average person on the street. Many A-believes have never heard of View B or the arguments for it before.
A relative stranger shows up at a gathering of the subgroup and begins advocating view A, or just questioning view B. The sub-group assumes this is a standard person who has never heard their arguments and launches into the standard spiel. B doesn’t listen, A gets frustrated and leaves the subgroup, since no one is going to listen to their ideas.
One possibility is that the stranger is an average member of society who genuinely believes you’ve gone your entire life without hearing the common belief and if they just say it slowly and loud enough you’ll come around.* Another possibility is they understand view B very well and have some well considered objections to it that happen to sound like view A (or don’t sound that similar but the B-believer isn’t bothering to listen closely enough to find out). They feel blown off and disrespected and leave.
In the former scenario, the worst case is that you lose someone you could have recruited. Oh well. If the latter, you lose valuable information about where you might be wrong. If you always react to challenges this way you become everything hate.
For example: pop evolutionary psychology is awful and people are right to ignore it. I spent years studying animal behavior and it gave me insights that fall under the broad category of evopsych, except for they are correct. It is extremely annoying to have those dismissed with “no, but see, society influences human behavior.”
Note that B doesn’t have to be right for this scenario to play out. Your average creationist or anti-vaxxer has thought more about the topic and spent more time arguing it than almost anyone. If an ignorant observer watched a debate and chose a winner based on fluidity and citations they would probably choose the anti-vaxxer. They are still wrong.
Or take effective altruism. I don’t mind losing people who think measuring human suffering with numbers is inherently wrong. But if we ignore that entire sphere we won’t hear the people who find the specific way we are talking dehumanizing, and have suggestions on how to fix that while still using numbers. A recent facebook post made me realize that the clinical tone of most EA discussions plus a willingness to entertain all questions (even if the conclusion is abhorrent) is going to make it really, really hard for anyone with first hand experience of problems to participate. First hand experience means Feelings means the clinical tone requires a ton of emotional energy even if they’re 100% on board intellectually. This is going to cut us off from a lot of information.
There’s some low hanging fruit to improve this (let people talk before telling them they are wrong), but the next level requires listening to a lot of people be un-insightfully wrong, which no one is good at and EAs in particular have a low tolerance for.
Sydney and I are spitballing ideas to work on this locally. I think it’s an important problem at the movement-level, but do not have time to take it on as a project.** If you have thoughts please share.
*Some examples: “If you ate less and exercised more you’d lose weight.” “If open offices bother you why don’t you use headphones?”, “but vaccines save lives.”, “God will save you…”/”God isn’t real”, depending on exactly where you are.
**Unexpected benefit of doing direct work: 0 pangs about turning down other projects. I can’t do everything and this is not my comparative advantage.
On one hand, I think the Giving What We Can pledge (10% of your income to the most effective charities) is an excellent idea and I’d be thrilled if me plugging it led to an additional pledge. On the other hand, I haven’t signed it and don’t plan on doing so. This makes me feel kind of awkward suggesting other people do.
I have many aborted paragraphs written about why I think the pledge is a good idea but not for me, but in retrospect they’re mostly fluff. It boils down to: I have a strong need to create my own number.
Scott Alexander talks about how satisfying having A Number that he can reach and then feel done is to him. This seems extremely valuable, and 10% seems like a reasonable number. But it doesn’t do that for me. If I had billion dollars I’d need to give more, and if I accepted a job that paid $20,000/year but saved the bottom billion, I would hang on to that $2,000, thank you very much. Not just because I earned it, but because spending the money on myself would actually do more good for the world, by freeing up my time and energy.
In order to feel done, I need to exhaustively examine my income, spending, and choices. That means the pledge can’t possibly save me work or increase my emotional satisfaction. But if I signed it and circumstances arose such that me giving less than 10% was the right thing to do, I would feel awful about breaking it. To the point I might subconsciously prevent myself from even considering the option.*
The other common reasons I hear for signing are to push better behavior in future!you, to create a community of giving, and as a useful conversation starter. These are all excellent goals. In my particular case, future!Elizabeth has been so consistently smarter and kinder than past!Elizabeth that think she will make better decisions than me and I don’t want to constrain her. Given that, I think I’ll do a better job contributing to a culture of giving by fostering a culture of deep thought around giving (which not everyone will or should participate in).***
So basically, signing the Giving What We Can pledge is incompatible with my version of scrupulosity. But it might be extremely compatible with yours. If the idea of having a target and then being done appeals to you, I highly suggest you consider signing. But if having a hard target feels awful and spending several hours thinking about exactly much to donate feels fun or satisfying, consider coming to Seattle EA’s donation decision day (in person, but we’ll create a virtual meeting room if there’s interest) or creating your own.
*I did in fact take a pay cut to work for Sendwave, which enables people to send money to their families in Africa cheaply and easily. I am going back and forth on how that affects giving. Last year I did 10% + offsets for things with negative externalities (eating meat and my bullshit patent). This year I took a way more than 10% paycut to do way, way more good than I could possibly have done with donations. So in a certain sense I’ve already given 10% of my potential income and could consider that obligation met. On the other hand, I would have accepted the same pay from puppies-killing-kittens.org if it meant working from home**, so there’s a strong argument that doesn’t count against my born-lucky tax. On the third hand, I’m starting with UI testing and I hate UI testing, so doesn’t that count for something? On the fourth hand, in the grand scale of human suffering, no, it does not.
The plan I made last year means donations this year are against last year’s tax return, so for now I can just follow that. Except some of it will be in January so I can use more employer matching. But I don’t know what I’m going to do next year.
**Which is everything I ever dreamed it could be.
***Obviously they’re not mutually exclusive. Unit of Caring has pledged 30% and contributes a fabulous amount to discourse.
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a biography of Paul Farmer, an American doctor who founded a small clinic in Haiti and ended up saving hundreds of thousands of lives, possibly millions. But that’s at the end. The beginning is spent with him doing obviously suboptimal things like spending $5000/year per patient treating AIDS patients in a country where people were constantly dying of malnutrition and diarrhea (average cost to treat: <$30), while baiting me by bragging about how cost ineffective it was. I was very angry at him for a while, until it dawned on me that getting angry at a man for distributing lifesaving drugs probably said more negative things about me than it did about him. Plus he did maybe avert a worldwide epidemic of untreatable tuberculosis, so perhaps I should stop yelling at the CD player and figure out what his thinking was.
Let’s take tuberculosis. At some point in the story (it’s frustratingly vague on years), Farmer’s friend brings him to Peru, which had what was widely considered the world’s best TB containment system (called DOTS). The WHO held it up as what the rest of the world should aspire to. DOTS did many things right, like ensuring a continuous supply of antibiotics to patients and monitoring them to ensure compliance (intermittent treatment breeds resistance). On the other hand, the prescribed response to someone failing to get better on drugs (indicating their infection was resistant to them) was “give them all the same, plus one more.” This is exactly the right thing to do, if what you want is to make sure the bacteria evolve resistance to the new drug without losing its existing resistance. The protocol specifically banned testing to see which drugs a particular patient’s infection was susceptible to, because that is expensive and potentially difficult in the 3rd world.
The WHO ignored the possibility of drug resistant TB because it was considered an evolutionary dead end. Resistance had to evolve anew in each patient, and rendered the infection noncontagious. I don’t know what evidence they based this on, but at best it was a case of incorrectly valuing evidence over reason. At worst, it indicates a giant sentient TB cell has infiltrated the WHO and is writing policy.
Hello fellow humans. I sure do hate death and suffering.
If your evidence says a contagious disease spontaneously becomes completely noncontagious at a convenient moment, your first thought should be “who do I fire?” because obviously something went wrong in the study design or implementation. If you check everything out and it genuinely is noncontagious, your next thought should be “wow, we really lucked out having all this extra time to prepare before it inevitably becomes contagious again.” At no point should it be “sweet, cross that off the list”, because while you are not looking it will redevelop virulence and everyone will die.
Farmer’s response to the ban on treating multiple drug resistant TB was to steal >$100,000 worth of medicine and tests from an American hospital to treat a handful of patients. When caught, a donor bailed him out.
Or take cancer. A young child with weird symptoms shows up at his clinic. He drops a few thousand dollars on tests to determine the child had a rare form of cancer. 60-70% survival rate in the US, no chance in Haiti. He convinced an American hospital to donate the care, but when the child becomes too ill to travel commercially he spends $20,000+ on medical transport.
Both of these went against standard measures of cost effectiveness, as did Farmer’s pioneering work treating AIDS patients in the 3rd world. But let’s look at his results:
The WHO’s “yeah, it’s probably fine” approach to drug resistant TB worked as well as you would think. Farmer proves it is contagious, is treatable, and drives down the price of treatment (to the point it is $/DALY competitive with standard health interventions). He goes on to change the international standard for TB treatment and lead the effort in several countries. Book gives no numbers but I estimate 142,000 lives and counting, plus avoiding an epidemic that could cost 2 million lives/year.*
Kid’s cancer is inoperable, he dies in the US. American hospital agrees to take a few more cases each year.
In retrospect his actions in the TB case seem pretty damn effective. But he didn’t set out to change the world. He stole those drugs for the exact reason he flew that boy to the US: someone was dying in front of him and it made him sad. It’s possible you couldn’t correct his answer in the cancer case without also “correcting” his answer in the TB case. And while someone more math driven could have launched the world changing anti-MDR TB campaign, they didn’t. Farmer did, and we need to respect that.
Lots of people in the philanthropic space, including Farmer and most EAs, say that it’s unreasonable to expect perfect altruism from everyone. People need to spend money on themselves to keep themselves happy and productive, and constant bean counting about “do the morale effects of name brand toilet paper make up for the kids I won’t be able to deworm?” is counterproductive. You put aside money for charity, and you put aside money for you to enjoy life, and you make your choices. What if we view Farmer’s need to save the life in front of him as a morale booster that enables our preferred work (averting world wide incurable TB pandemic), rather than the work itself? By that measure, $150,000 on a single kid’s cancer and 7 hours doing a house call for one patient in Haiti is a steal. Given that I pay my cats more (in food and vet care) than what 1/6 of the world survives on, I do not have a lot of room to judge Paul Farmer’s “saving children from cancer” hobby.
Farmer himself raises this point, in a way. It turns out that effective altruism did not invent the phrase “that’s not cost effective.” Lots of people with a lot of power (e.g. the WHO) have been saying it for a long time. From Farmer’s perspective, it seems to be used a lot more to justify not spending money, rather than spending it on a different thing. He also rejects the framing of the comparison: cancer treatment may save fewer lives per dollar than diarrhea treatment but it saves way more per dollar than a doctor’s beach house, so how come it only gets compared to the former? Those are fair points.
It’s not clear he could have redirected the money even if he wanted to. Most of the care for the cancer patient was donated in kind; there was no cash he could redirect to a better cause (although that’s not true for the cost of the medivac). No one gave him $100,000 to spend on TB treatment, he stole drugs and got bailed out. It’s not clear the donor would have been as moved to rescue him if he stole $100,000 worth of cheap antibiotics.
In essence, I’m postulating that Farmer operated under the following constraints.
Evaluating cost effectiveness is emotionally costly even in the face of very good information.
Low quality information on effectiveness
Financial discipline was emotionally costly
Some money was available for treatments of less relative effectiveness but could not be moved to the most effective thing. But the money was not clearly labeled “the best thing” and “for warm fuzzies only”, he had to guess in the face of low information.
Under those things, evaluating cost effectiveness could easily be actively harmful. Judging by the results, I think he did better following his heart.
Doing The Most Effective Thing is great, and I think the EA movement is pushing the status quo in the right direction. But what Farmer is doing is working and I don’t want to mess with it. At the same time, his statement that “saying you shouldn’t treat one person for cancer because you could treat 10 people for dysentery is valuing one life over another.” (paraphrased) is dangerously close to Heifer International’s “we can’t check how our programs compare to others, that would be experimenting on them and that would be wrong.” (paraphrased), which is dangerously close to Play Pump’s “fuck it, this seems right.” (paraphrased) as they rip out functional water pumps and replace them with junk. So while Farmer is a strong argument against Effective Altruism as “the last social movement we will ever need” (because some people do the most good when they don’t compare what they’re doing to the counter-factuals), he’s not an argument against EA’s existence. Someone has to run the numbers and shame Play Pump until they stop attacking Africans’ access to water.
It doesn’t even make sense as a toy. The fun part of carousels is the coasting, not the wind up
And just like you couldn’t improve Farmer by forcing to him do accounting, you can’t necessarily improve a given EA by making them sadder at the tragedy immediately in front of them. EA is full of people who didn’t care about philanthropy until it had math and charts attached, or who find doing The Best Thing motivating. We’re doing good work too. I understand why people fear doing the math on human suffering will make them less human, but that isn’t my experience. I cry more now at heroism and sacrifice than I ever did as a child.
Ironically the one thing I was still angry at Farmer for at the end of the book was his most effective choice: neglecting his children in favor of treating patients and global health politics. I could forgive it if he felt called to an emergency after the children were born, but he had kids knowing he would choose his work over them. For me, no amount of lives saved can redeem that choice. Maybe that is what he feels about letting that Haitian child die of cancer.
*This paper (PDF) estimates 142,000 deaths averted 2006-2015 by the program Farmer pioneered, and the program is still scaling up. I estimate a drug resistant TB epidemic would cost a minimum 2.3 million lives/year (math below), although how likely that is to occur is a matter of opinion. That’s ignoring his clinical work in Haiti, the long term effects of his pioneering HIV treatment in the 3rd world,the long term effects of his pioneering community-based interventions that increased treatment effectiveness, infrastructure building in multiple countries, and refugee care. I would love to give you numbers for those but neither Paul Farmer nor PIH believe in numbers, so the WHO evaluation of the TB program was the best I could do.
TB rates have been dropping since ~2002, but that’s due to aggressive
treatment. New infection rate held steady at ~150 people/100,000
from 1990-2002, so let’s use that as our baseline. With 7.3 billion people, that’s 11 million cases/year. 11 million * .7 chance of death = 7.7 million deaths. Per year. 25% of those are patients with AIDS who arguably wouldn’t live very long anyway, so conservatively we have ~5.7 million deaths. If I’m really generous and assume complete worldwide distribution of the TB vaccine (efficacy: 60%), that’s down to 2.3 million deaths. Per year.
For comparison, malaria causes about 0.5 million deaths/year.
In the span of a few months, three intro-to-effective-altruism books came out- Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, Nick Cooney’s How to be Great at Doing Good, and Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better. After reading all three, my preference order is: How to be Great… > Doing Good Better > The Most Good…, with fairly large gaps between the three. I actively disliked reading The Most Good…. On the other hand, if you measured the impact each person has had on moving money to effective charities, the order is most certainly Peter Singer >> Will MacAskill > Nick Cooney.* This leads me to believe my preferences are not wildly predictive and shouldn’t be given much weight. But I think I understand why I like How to be Great… best, and that information might be useful.
In a nutshell: Peter Singer tells you what to do, Nick Cooney teaches you a way to think about the problem.** In particular: I hate the argument from a drowning child. It works by evoking a primitive instinct that is almost impossible to translate to rigorous analysis completely separate from the part of my brain that plans effective giving. The same instinct that tells you to ruin your suit to save a child will tell you to skip a one time opportunity to earn billions of dollars for charity to save a child. We like saving children. Meanwhile, Nick Cooney’s book is about building up the skills so you can look at tough choices without blinking. To me, this came off as simultaneously less judgmental of my faults and yet a stronger push for me to do better.
[I suspect high scrupulousness plays a role here- I constantly felt like Singer was saying I was a bad person because I wasn’t doing the most goodest thing, and it made me want to think about giving less.]
As EA-the-movement grows, I think it’s going to have to have very different inward and outward faces. On one extreme you have the very core- doing or planning on doing direct work, the kind of hardcore earning to give that depends on social support, organizing the movement, or spreading ideas outside it. On the other extreme you have people who are going to donate a modest amount to charity and are choosing based mostly on warm fuzzies, but are influenced by EA to donate more, or more effectively. I picture this group as slightly less rigorous than my parents, who I have convinced to donate to several EA charities, and who have done good research on charities themselves, but also still give money to my dad’s extremely well endowed alma matter. How to be Great… is for preparing people to be core. The Most Good… is for motivating people on the very fringe. I would place Doing Good Better between them, but much closer to The Most Good… If one of my friends wanted to know about EA, I’d give them Doing Good Better, on the theory that my friends are a lot like me. If a stranger wanted to know more I’d probably point them to The Most Good…, based on empirical results (unless they were highly conscientious). If you enjoy my blog I suspect you’re a How to be Great type- even if you don’t want to drink the EA koolaid, you probably like being taught more than being ordered.
*Singer had major influences on Bill Gates and Dustin Moskovitz (funder of GoodVentures) and after he’s done that there’s no point even counting the other people he’s influenced. Will MacAskill cofounded 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can. Nick Cooney runs some relatively small budget animal charities.
** If I had to pick a description for MacAskill’s approach it would be “descriptive”, but it doesn’t contrast with the other books as much as they do with themselves. Peter Singer also spends a lot of time describing the effective altruism movement but I found a lot of it to be wrong.
There’s a number of problems with this. One, it makes deciding what is and is not a non-profit really important. I’m fine with government subsidies (which is what tax breaks are) to help poor people eat, but not for rich people’s entertainment. Those two are easy to distinguish, but there’s a lot of room between homeless shelters and operas, and I’m uncomfortable with the government drawing the line. Or what about charities that have beliefs you find abhorrent? Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status in 1983 due to its ban on interracial dating, and fear of a repeat apparently drives a lot of the religious objection to same sex marriage. I think people who oppose interracial dating or same sex marriage are wrong and should be shamed, but I’m really uncomfortable having that much money riding on values judgments by the government.
The sales tax thing isn’t that big a deal, as witnessed by the fact that a lot of charities don’t even bother with it. But property tax is. It starves the tax base of municipalities with a large percentage of land occupied by non-profits. It’s something of a problem in DC and an enormous one in some university towns, especially if the surrounding area is poor. That’s hard to stomach when prestigious universities have endowments in the billions and a good chunk of their work is making the rich richer. Lack of property taxes pushes charities to buy property when they would otherwise rent (which means it benefits only those charities with consistent funding), and to occupy more valuable real estate than they otherwise would.
I like that I get a tax deduction for my donations, and I’d probably donate less without that. OTOH, it creates a distinct gap between “people organizing to do some good things” and Official Charity, which creates a barrier to entry. It’s not a trivial barrier either- I’ve served in the leadership on both official (my old dojo) and unofficial (Seattle EA) charities. Among other things, official recognition forces a fairly specific kind of hierarchy on you. In Utopia of Rules, David Graeber talks about the strain his autonomous non-hierarchical collective experienced when someone had the gall to give them a car. It ends with them destroying the car with a sledge hammer.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
Removing the benefits of official incorporation would let more organizations find their natural structure, rather than a one size fits all government imposed one, and also lead to fewer car destruction parties.
My opinion on the corporate income tax is a post in and of itself, so let’s put that aside for now. I think there’s a very good case for not exempting non-profits from property tax, and not making charitable contributions tax deductible. I also think it would be extremely disruptive to abruptly switch, so we should ease over gradually, and the change should be revenue neutral.*
*People say I’m cynical but then I write things like “the government should raise this tax and lower another one so they get the same amount of money” so I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Dutch disease is the economic concept that if a country is too rich in one thing, especially a natural resource, every other sector of the economy will rot because all available money and talent will flow towards that sector. Moreover, that sector dominates the exchange rate, making all other exports uncompetitive.* It comes up in foreign development a lot because charitable aid can cause dutch disease: by paying what the funders would consider a “fair wage”, charities position themselves as by far the best employers in the area. The best and the brightest African citizens end up chauffering foreigners rather than starting their own businesses, which keeps the society dependent on outside help. Nothing good comes from having poverty as your chief export.
I posit that a similar process takes place in corporations. Once they are making too much money off a few major things (Windows, Office, AdWords, SUVs), even an exceptionally profitable project in a small market is too small to notice. Add in the risk of reputation damage and the fact that all projects have a certain amount of overhead regardless of size, and it makes perfect sense for large companies to discard projects a start up would kill for (RIP Reader).**
That’s a fine policy in moderation, but there are problems with applying it too early. Namely, you never know what something is going to grow into. Google search originally arose as a way to calculate impact for academic papers. The market for SUVs (and for that matter, cars) was 0 until someone created it. If you insist on only going after projects that directly address an existing large market, the best you’ll ever be is a fast follower.***
Simultaneously, going from zero to an enormous, productive project is really, really hard (see: Fire Phone, Google+, Facebook’s not-an-operating-system). Even if you have an end goal in mind, it often makes sense to start small and iterate. Little Bets covers this in great detail. And if you don’t have a signed card from G-d confirming your end goal is correct, progressing in small iterative steps gives you more information and more room to pivot.
More than one keynote at EA Global talked about the importance of picking the most important thing, and of being willing to switch if you find something better. That’s obviously great in in some cases, but I worry that this hyperfocusing will cause the same problems for us that it does at large companies: a lack of room to surprise ourselves. For example, take the post I did on interpretive labor. I was really proud of that post. I worked hard on it. I had visions of it helping many people in their relationships. But if you’d asked at the time, I would have predicted that the Most Effective use of my time was learning programming skills to increase my wage or increase my value in direct work, and that that post was an indulgence. It never in my wildest dreams occurred to me it would be read by someone in a far better position than me to do something about existential risk and be useful to them in connecting two key groups that weren’t currently talking to each other, but apparently it did. I’m not saying that I definitely saved us from papercliptopia, but it is technically possible that that post (along with millions of other flaps of butterfly wings) will make the marginal difference. And I would never have even known it did so except the person in question reached out to me at EA Global.****
Intervention effectiveness may vary by several orders of magnitude, but if the confidence intervals are just as big it pays to add a little wiggle to your selection. Moreover, constant project churn has its own cost: it’s better to finish the third best thing than have to two half finished attempts at different best things. And you never know what a 3rd best project will teach you that will help an upcoming best project- most new technological innovations come from combining things from two different spheres (source), so hyperfocus will eventually cripple you.
In light of all that, I think we need to stop being quite so hard on the sunk cost fallacy. No, you should not throw good money after bad, but constantly re-evaluating your choices is costly and (jujitsu flip) will not always be most efficient use of your resources. In the absence of a signed piece of paper from G-d, biasing some of your effort towards things you enjoy and have comparative advantage in may in fact be the optimal strategy
My hesitation is that I don’t know how far you can take this before it stops being effective altruism and starts being “feel smug and virtuous about doing whatever it is you already wanted to do”- a thing we’re already accused of doing. Could someone please solve this and report back? Thanks.
* The term comes from the Dutch economic crash following the discovery of natural gas in The Netherlands. Current thought is that was not actually Dutch disease, but that renaming the phenomenon after some third world country currently being devastated by it would be mean.
*Simultaneously, developers have become worse predictors of the market in general. Used to be that nerds were the early adopters and if they loved it everyone would be using it in a year (e.g. gmail, smart phones). As technology and particularly mobile advances, this is no longer true. Nerds aren’t powerusers for tablets because we need laptops, but tablet poweruser is a powerful and predictive market. Companies now force devs to experience the world like users (Facebook’s order to use Android) or just outright tell them what to do (Google+). This makes their ideas inherently less valuable than they were. I don’t blame companies for shifting to a more user-driven decision making process, but it does make things less fun.
**Which, to be fair, is Microsoft’s actual strategy
***It’s also possible it accomplished nothing, or makes it worse. But the ceiling of effectiveness is higher than I ever imaged and the uncertainty only makes my point stronger.
[EAGlobal was a wonderful experience that I haven’t written much about because my brain was too stuffed full of wonderfulness to produce anything useful. I dislike that the first thing I’m writing about it is a controversy/complaint]
There’s a utilitarian thought experiment: would you rather have one person tortured for their entire life, or a googolplex of people experience a single dust mote in their eye? I always viewed it as too theoretical to be anything but an ideological purity test, but I think I’m seeing a version of it in action right now, in the debate around serving animal products at EA Global.
You have a small number of animal rights activists saying “this is torturing and consuming a sentient being and that’s morally abhorent”, and a much larger number of omnivores going “but seriously, they’re delicious”. The ARAs don’t understand why aesthetic preferences are overriding morality (and either don’t believe that animal products are ever medically necessary or don’t believe that outweighs the cost to the animal), and the omnivores don’t see why such a small group is getting to override their preferences because of a principle they don’t believe in.
I think the moral weight of the ARA’s concerns may actually be working against them here. I don’t think many people would object if the organizers said “the local cuisine is vegan and shipping in meat is just too expensive, bring some in your luggage if you must.” But the fact that the morality arguments exist and tend to resonate with people even if they don’t agree makes people defensive, and then aggressive. Allowing the organizers to drop meat for morality reasons is an implicit endorsement of the idea that meat is indeed immoral, which has unpleasant implications for omnivore’s moral standing the rest of the week. By the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, better to deny that there is a problem than participate in an incomplete solution.
My original position, based mostly on the fact that I am simultaneously really bothered by and completely immune to ARA’s disgust-based arguments, was that EA Global had made the right call: vegan or at least vegetarian options in the main line, a small amount of meat hidden off to the side. But now that I think the insistence on meat is strongly Copenhagen-driven, I’ve changed my mind. Admitting unpleasant things about ourselves and making incremental progress is supposed to be one of our things.
[By that same token I think ARA’s should be a little happier about how much meat consumption was reduced that weekend, even if it didn’t go to zero. But then, I’m an incrementalist]
At the same time, some people need animal products. The definition of need is tricky here- my doctor has told me to eat small amounts of meat, but going three days without any will be fine, but in practice what was served at EA Global was too hard on my stomach and I wouldn’t have been able to eat enough calories from that alone. Some people are on paleo and even if that wasn’t the healthiest choice, a sudden drop off in meat will be physically hard on them. Some people have a lot of things they can’t eat such that meat is the easiest way to get them a nutritionally complete meal- especially when you have a lot of different people with a lot of different exclusions. But even if meat were served, it’s impossible to fulfill 600 people’s dietary requirements with a reasonable amount of effort and money. The best solution may have been to announce the menu ahead of time so people could plan, and then let the chips fall where they may.
But I think we can do one better. My new favorite solution is to offer both meat and whatever vegans nominate as the best fake meat and offer both without a way to distinguish between the two at the time. Omnivores would be given one at random with a code that they could later use to register 1. how much they liked what they were served and 2. whether they think it was real meat or not. If they really don’t like what they got they could go to a back room somewhere with their code and ask for the other one (still not telling them which they got). The same back room could serve people who medically need meat and people who want the definitively vegan option.
This gives people who want but don’t need meat (and are able to eat !meat) a way to get it, and vegans a way to advance the cause of veganism, possibly further than they would get by banning it (by showing people how good !meat tastes). In most circles neither side would find this adequate, but Experimenting and Using Data are What Effective Altruists Do, and I think that could convince/pressure enough people (on both sides) into it that it would be worth trying.
As you may have guessed from the previous two posts I’m not happy at my current job and looking for a better one. Some of that is figuring out what kind of environment I work best in and some of it is developing skills, but I also needed to figure out what problems I wanted to solve. This was where So Good They can’t Ignore You was so helpful- it helped me realize I needed to look at what would make me feel most impactful, rather than what I would find entertaining.
I know what things interest me: health, poverty, education, psychology, video games, mental health, nutrition, medicine… but no one else seems to think these things are as linked as I do. I think I finally what they have in common, for me: they waste potential. People who could have done great things die or don’t have the money to pursue them or are too sick or pained or no one will teach them the necessary skills. That’s tragic. That’s loss on an enormous scale.
I don’t find anti-poverty work as emotionally compelling as the intricacies of mental health or CFAR. But if I bother to think it through, I realize there’s a lot of people who will never get to the level of calibrating their predictions because they’re starving, or because all of their mental energy is going to keeping them from starving. In a very real sense, giving money to poor people is one of the most effective rationality-raising interventions possible.
So that’s my goal. Remove things that are keeping the most people from being all they can be.
Aceso Under Glass 