There are charities where “lives saved” is probably the wrong metric. It’s hard to tell how much good Amnesty International does, but Torture and Democracy argues that international monitoring is the reason democracies have moved to no-marks torture. This isn’t much, but a world where governments feel free to cripple people’s bodies as well as their brains is a worse world.
In general, limiting the arrogance of governments—convincing people that there’s an alternative to enduring very bad government—is going to save live, but the statistics are a lot harder than measuring the effects of fighting an infectious disease.
Campaigns for women’s education have had good effects which weren’t predicable when the campaigns started. I don’t know if this can be used to estimate which non-obvious projects are important.
Medical research is another area of unpredictability. Even mediocre longevity tech (getting the default to be good health till age 90) would be a huge win, but it’s hard to tell what approach is worth attempting, or if it’s better to work on current problems.
Likewise for X-risks, with the possible exception of asteroid defense. this doesn’t mean that trying to create FAI is a bad idea, it’s just that there isn’t a statistical universe to work with.
Oh, right, back to the greedy bastards. Market economies in India and China have done a tremendous amount to lower the misery level (and, I assume, to increase life spans), but how would you measure the efficiency in lives saved of improving legal systems?
I think what you’re saying here is that there are some great causes that can be genuinely hard to quantify, and that the majority of those are essentially R&D where profit isn’t the motive.
Those are great points, no doubt about it. Obviously we’d want to quantify as much as possible, but in the end, especially for R&D type situations, it ain’t gonna happen.
(Though you can at least estimate what can be gained in the government case—start with available statistics for people in that country, and compare for those in a roughly similar country with a different political structure—that’s probably your best-case improvement)
Estimating the efficacy of an overthrow plot, or the long term benefit of pro-?archy education would still be difficult… but with the above you’d still be closer to calculating EV :p
That said, for most people looking into those causes, donating isn’t a good idea—they’d probably mis-allocate the funds. My grandma doesn’t know how to rank life-extending therapies by promise, let alone correct for the population size of those who could be treated.
Much better to simply donate to the low hanging fruit, causing the cost of saving a human life to rise… and thereby causing more educated/R&D-competent philanthropists to investigate the causes you discussed.
My only point of disagreement is that I don’t think the majority of charities whose good effects are hard to quantify (HtQ) in terms of lives saved are R&D, unless you count something like education for women before the effects on reproduction were observed as R&D.
I think HtQ projects might fall into two categories, R&D and improving qualia.
It’s R&D until we have a known, repeatable way to get the result we want :p
Improving qualia strikes me as giving up too soon—sure we can’t perfectly quantify quality of life, happiness, social adjustment, music appreciation, and well-roundedness—but it’s still useful to use what we can when deciding to improve the world on these axis.
There are charities where “lives saved” is probably the wrong metric. It’s hard to tell how much good Amnesty International does, but Torture and Democracy argues that international monitoring is the reason democracies have moved to no-marks torture. This isn’t much, but a world where governments feel free to cripple people’s bodies as well as their brains is a worse world.
In general, limiting the arrogance of governments—convincing people that there’s an alternative to enduring very bad government—is going to save live, but the statistics are a lot harder than measuring the effects of fighting an infectious disease.
Campaigns for women’s education have had good effects which weren’t predicable when the campaigns started. I don’t know if this can be used to estimate which non-obvious projects are important.
Medical research is another area of unpredictability. Even mediocre longevity tech (getting the default to be good health till age 90) would be a huge win, but it’s hard to tell what approach is worth attempting, or if it’s better to work on current problems.
Likewise for X-risks, with the possible exception of asteroid defense. this doesn’t mean that trying to create FAI is a bad idea, it’s just that there isn’t a statistical universe to work with.
Oh, right, back to the greedy bastards. Market economies in India and China have done a tremendous amount to lower the misery level (and, I assume, to increase life spans), but how would you measure the efficiency in lives saved of improving legal systems?
QALY (Quality-adjusted-life-years) goes some way to solving some of these problems, especially regarding torture.
Hey Nancy,
I think what you’re saying here is that there are some great causes that can be genuinely hard to quantify, and that the majority of those are essentially R&D where profit isn’t the motive.
Those are great points, no doubt about it. Obviously we’d want to quantify as much as possible, but in the end, especially for R&D type situations, it ain’t gonna happen.
(Though you can at least estimate what can be gained in the government case—start with available statistics for people in that country, and compare for those in a roughly similar country with a different political structure—that’s probably your best-case improvement)
Estimating the efficacy of an overthrow plot, or the long term benefit of pro-?archy education would still be difficult… but with the above you’d still be closer to calculating EV :p
That said, for most people looking into those causes, donating isn’t a good idea—they’d probably mis-allocate the funds. My grandma doesn’t know how to rank life-extending therapies by promise, let alone correct for the population size of those who could be treated.
Much better to simply donate to the low hanging fruit, causing the cost of saving a human life to rise… and thereby causing more educated/R&D-competent philanthropists to investigate the causes you discussed.
Cheers, -wfg
My only point of disagreement is that I don’t think the majority of charities whose good effects are hard to quantify (HtQ) in terms of lives saved are R&D, unless you count something like education for women before the effects on reproduction were observed as R&D.
I think HtQ projects might fall into two categories, R&D and improving qualia.
It’s R&D until we have a known, repeatable way to get the result we want :p
Improving qualia strikes me as giving up too soon—sure we can’t perfectly quantify quality of life, happiness, social adjustment, music appreciation, and well-roundedness—but it’s still useful to use what we can when deciding to improve the world on these axis.