Truly rare talent is not fungible. Without Grigori Perelman, mathematicians would have struggled for a very long time to crack the Poincare Conjecture, even though all of the required tools were already there. The same is true in physics and possibly chemistry (Linus Pauling comes to mind). Maybe biology but I’m not sure. Its possible that Pasteur was fungible, but there is another issue I didn’t mention: the effects of losing great minds isn’t linear. Losing 100 scientists is worse than 100 times as bad as losing one (more on this later).
“However, bell curves tell us that there’s more extraordinary people in the developing countries who could matter way more than people in developed countries, but only if we get them into developed countries where we can tap their potential”
First of all countries differ in their average IQ so the math does not work that way. Also extraordinary students are already able to become scientists if they want in developed countries—universities take students from all over the world. Finally this isn’t what the effective altruist movement is focused on. A QALY based approach would not have us identify the brightest children in developing countries and bring them to developed countries. A full scholarship costs what $100,000 minimum? Clearly a QALY based approach would demand that we instead use that money to save several hundred lives.
Edit: I suspect that I may have come across as suggesting that we divert the effort from EA into saving potential Louis Pasteurs. That was not my intention: I was using an extreme example to show why QALYs (or pretty much anything that amounts to save as many lives as possible) are a poor metric—when you save the lives of a group of people: you have to consider what those people are going to do and how they are going to change society.
I don’t know what the most worthwhile thing to do is: I’m not that arrogant. But I don’t think that public health interventions in very poor countries are the most worthwhile things.
Truly rare talent is not fungible. Without Grigori Perelman, mathematicians would have struggled for a very long time to crack the Poincare Conjecture, even though all of the required tools were already there. The same is true in physics and possibly chemistry (Linus Pauling comes to mind). Maybe biology but I’m not sure. Its possible that Pasteur was fungible, but there is another issue I didn’t mention: the effects of losing great minds isn’t linear. Losing 100 scientists is worse than 100 times as bad as losing one (more on this later).
“However, bell curves tell us that there’s more extraordinary people in the developing countries who could matter way more than people in developed countries, but only if we get them into developed countries where we can tap their potential”
First of all countries differ in their average IQ so the math does not work that way. Also extraordinary students are already able to become scientists if they want in developed countries—universities take students from all over the world. Finally this isn’t what the effective altruist movement is focused on. A QALY based approach would not have us identify the brightest children in developing countries and bring them to developed countries. A full scholarship costs what $100,000 minimum? Clearly a QALY based approach would demand that we instead use that money to save several hundred lives.
Edit: I suspect that I may have come across as suggesting that we divert the effort from EA into saving potential Louis Pasteurs. That was not my intention: I was using an extreme example to show why QALYs (or pretty much anything that amounts to save as many lives as possible) are a poor metric—when you save the lives of a group of people: you have to consider what those people are going to do and how they are going to change society.
I don’t know what the most worthwhile thing to do is: I’m not that arrogant. But I don’t think that public health interventions in very poor countries are the most worthwhile things.