I’ll point out that “saving lives” is actually a pretty weird unit, and the more seriously people start to take it the more important that weirdness gets.
For example, suppose there are a thousand people who suffer from Invented Syndrome, a congenital condition that causes periodic life-threatening pulmonary arrests. Suppose I have two treatments available: treatment A ends the pulmonary arrest, saving the person’s life, but does not prevent subsequent arrests. Treatment B not only ends the arrest, but also cures the condition, ensuring that no subsequent arrests occur.
If I’m counting saved lives, it seems I end up favoring treatment A, since each use of it saves a life… I predict more lifesaving events if I manufacture and distribute A than B.
Which, you know, is fine… if that’s what I value, that’s what I value. But I suspect most people who claim to value saving lives wouldn’t actually go for that. (Nor would they go for the middleman-eliminating version where I put a thousand people in a warehouse and forego pressing the button that kills them every few seconds. Heck, I can sell you saved lives at much much cheaper than $800 a head at that point.)
And while they might not admit it, I bet they’d also prefer to save an otherwise healthy seven-year-old with an expected future lifespan of 70 years than an otherwise healthy eighty-year-old with an expected future lifespan of 7 years.
Perhaps what they actually value is human observer-moments?
If you want something that you can use as a metric, the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) would be better. The main problem with the DALY is that it’s not intuitive, combining so much that an estimate can be off by 100x without anyone noticing for years.
What I actually value is something like “human observer-moments * happiness”, or total utility.
The main problem with the DALY is that it’s not intuitive, combining so much that an estimate can be off by 100x without anyone noticing for years.
That was not the conclusion I reached when I read that post. If you want to write something arguing for that claim, I’d be interested to read it, but it seems to me that there is a much simpler explanation that people just don’t care enough about saving lives or years to bother to do calculations correctly. They are only interested in justifying the programs they are already attached to. I suppose you could say that the very idea of quantifying charity is unintuitive, but this doesn’t distinguish DALYs from the Other Dave’s criticism of “lives saved.”
Edit: For example, a widely quoted Peter Unger footnote is off by 3 orders of magnitude. But he never asks himself how Unicef is able to save a billion lives each year.
Given some plausible assumptions, increasing the probability of a future trans-humanist utopia populated by an unimaginably large number of humans should be much higher return in terms of observer moments:
I think it would be fun to rename the dollar to the “lifelessgalaxycluster”. (Though there are potential caveats here about things like aliens and simulations.)
The Dead Child thing isn’t morbid enough. We should figure out how many punches to the face are equal in moral badness to one death. Then if it’s say a thousand, we could rename the dollar to the punch-to-the-face.
Worth noting that the dead baby value is very different from the actual amount which most Westerners regard the lives of white, middle-class people from their own country as being worth. In fact, pretty much the whole point of the statistic is that it’s SHOCKINGLY low. I suppose we could hope that Dead Baby currency would result in a reduction to that discrepancy… although I think in the case of the actual example given, the Malthusians* have a point where it would dramatically increase access to life-prolonging things without increasing access to birth control much, resulting in more population and thus more people to save.
*To clarify: I actually agree with the Malthusian ecology- it’s just a basic fact of ecology, I’m amazed that anyone seriously disagrees with it- but not to the objection to charitable donations on that basis; anyone who actually thinks that would go “you should instead give money to provide birth control”.
If the demographic transition continues, I’m not too worried about Malthusian scenarios. It seems that people who are less worried about their children being wiped out by disease have fewer children.
Another option is interventions that improve lives without saving them, such as deworming.
I’ll point out that “saving lives” is actually a pretty weird unit, and the more seriously people start to take it the more important that weirdness gets.
For example, suppose there are a thousand people who suffer from Invented Syndrome, a congenital condition that causes periodic life-threatening pulmonary arrests. Suppose I have two treatments available: treatment A ends the pulmonary arrest, saving the person’s life, but does not prevent subsequent arrests. Treatment B not only ends the arrest, but also cures the condition, ensuring that no subsequent arrests occur.
If I’m counting saved lives, it seems I end up favoring treatment A, since each use of it saves a life… I predict more lifesaving events if I manufacture and distribute A than B.
Which, you know, is fine… if that’s what I value, that’s what I value. But I suspect most people who claim to value saving lives wouldn’t actually go for that. (Nor would they go for the middleman-eliminating version where I put a thousand people in a warehouse and forego pressing the button that kills them every few seconds. Heck, I can sell you saved lives at much much cheaper than $800 a head at that point.)
And while they might not admit it, I bet they’d also prefer to save an otherwise healthy seven-year-old with an expected future lifespan of 70 years than an otherwise healthy eighty-year-old with an expected future lifespan of 7 years.
Perhaps what they actually value is human observer-moments?
If you want something that you can use as a metric, the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) would be better. The main problem with the DALY is that it’s not intuitive, combining so much that an estimate can be off by 100x without anyone noticing for years.
What I actually value is something like “human observer-moments * happiness”, or total utility.
That was not the conclusion I reached when I read that post. If you want to write something arguing for that claim, I’d be interested to read it, but it seems to me that there is a much simpler explanation that people just don’t care enough about saving lives or years to bother to do calculations correctly. They are only interested in justifying the programs they are already attached to. I suppose you could say that the very idea of quantifying charity is unintuitive, but this doesn’t distinguish DALYs from the Other Dave’s criticism of “lives saved.”
Edit: For example, a widely quoted Peter Unger footnote is off by 3 orders of magnitude. But he never asks himself how Unicef is able to save a billion lives each year.
Given some plausible assumptions, increasing the probability of a future trans-humanist utopia populated by an unimaginably large number of humans should be much higher return in terms of observer moments:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html
I think it would be fun to rename the dollar to the “lifeless galaxy cluster”. (Though there are potential caveats here about things like aliens and simulations.)
The Dead Child thing isn’t morbid enough. We should figure out how many punches to the face are equal in moral badness to one death. Then if it’s say a thousand, we could rename the dollar to the punch-to-the-face.
That would create an interesting schelling point for torts of assault.
Worth noting that the dead baby value is very different from the actual amount which most Westerners regard the lives of white, middle-class people from their own country as being worth. In fact, pretty much the whole point of the statistic is that it’s SHOCKINGLY low. I suppose we could hope that Dead Baby currency would result in a reduction to that discrepancy… although I think in the case of the actual example given, the Malthusians* have a point where it would dramatically increase access to life-prolonging things without increasing access to birth control much, resulting in more population and thus more people to save.
*To clarify: I actually agree with the Malthusian ecology- it’s just a basic fact of ecology, I’m amazed that anyone seriously disagrees with it- but not to the objection to charitable donations on that basis; anyone who actually thinks that would go “you should instead give money to provide birth control”.
If the demographic transition continues, I’m not too worried about Malthusian scenarios. It seems that people who are less worried about their children being wiped out by disease have fewer children.
Another option is interventions that improve lives without saving them, such as deworming.