But the estimate that you can save a life for $5000 remains probably true (with normal caveats about uncertainty) is a really important message to get people thinking about ethics and how they want to contribute.
I mean, the $5K estimate is at least plausible. (I certainly don’t know how to come up with a better estimate than the people at GiveWell, who I have every reason to believe are very smart and hard-working and well-intentioned.)
But I’m a little worried that by not being loud enough with the caveats, the EA movement’s “discourse algorithm” (the collective generalization of “cognitive algorithm”) might be accidentally running a distributed motte-and-bailey, where the bailey is “You are literally responsible for the death of another human being if you don’t donate $5000” and the motte is “The $5000 estimate is plausible, and it’s a really important message to get people thinking about ethics and how they want to contribute.”
$5K is at least a nontrivial amount of money even for upper-middle–class people in rich countries. It takes more than 12 days at my dayjob for me to acquire that much money—it would be many more days for someone not lucky enough to have a cushy San Francisco software engineer dayjob. When I spend twelve days of my life paying for something for me or my friends, I expect to receive the thing I paid for: if I don’t get it, I’m going to seek recourse from the seller. If, when challenged on not delivering the goods, the seller retreats to, “Well, that price was just an estimate, and the estimate was probably true as far as I knew at the time—and besides, it was a really important message to get you thinking about the value of my product,” I would be pretty upset!
To be sure, there are significant disanalogies between buying a product and donating to charity, but insofar as those disanalogies lead to charities being much less constrained to actually accomplish the thing they claim to than businesses are (because all criticism can be deflected with, “But we’re trying really hard and it’s an important message”), that’s not a point in favor of encouraging scrupulous idealists to pledge their lives to the top-rated charities rather than trying to optimize the local environment that they can actually get empirical feedback about.
To be clear, the picture I’m painting is an incredibly gloomy one. On the spherical-cow Econ 101 view of the world, altruists should just be able to straightforwardly turn money into utilons. Could our civilization’s information-processing institutions really be that broken, thatinadequate, for even that not to be true? Really?!
I’m a little worried that by not being loud enough with the caveats, the EA movement’s “discourse algorithm” (the collective generalization of “cognitive algorithm”) might be accidentally running a distributed motte-and-bailey, where the bailey is “You are literally responsible for the death of another human being if you don’t donate $5000” and the motte is “The $5000 estimate is plausible, and it’s a really important message to get people thinking about ethics and how they want to contribute.”
I initially wrote a comment engaging with this, I thought that was one of the primary things Ben was trying to talk about in the post, but then Oli persuaded me Ben was just arguing that the cost-effectiveness estimates were false / a lie, so I removed the comment. I’d appreciate an explicit comment on how much this is one of the primary things Ben is trying to say with the essay.
I mean, the $5K estimate is at least plausible. (I certainly don’t know how to come up with a better estimate than the people at GiveWell, who I have every reason to believe are very smart and hard-working and well-intentioned.)
But I’m a little worried that by not being loud enough with the caveats, the EA movement’s “discourse algorithm” (the collective generalization of “cognitive algorithm”) might be accidentally running a distributed motte-and-bailey, where the bailey is “You are literally responsible for the death of another human being if you don’t donate $5000” and the motte is “The $5000 estimate is plausible, and it’s a really important message to get people thinking about ethics and how they want to contribute.”
$5K is at least a nontrivial amount of money even for upper-middle–class people in rich countries. It takes more than 12 days at my dayjob for me to acquire that much money—it would be many more days for someone not lucky enough to have a cushy San Francisco software engineer dayjob. When I spend twelve days of my life paying for something for me or my friends, I expect to receive the thing I paid for: if I don’t get it, I’m going to seek recourse from the seller. If, when challenged on not delivering the goods, the seller retreats to, “Well, that price was just an estimate, and the estimate was probably true as far as I knew at the time—and besides, it was a really important message to get you thinking about the value of my product,” I would be pretty upset!
To be sure, there are significant disanalogies between buying a product and donating to charity, but insofar as those disanalogies lead to charities being much less constrained to actually accomplish the thing they claim to than businesses are (because all criticism can be deflected with, “But we’re trying really hard and it’s an important message”), that’s not a point in favor of encouraging scrupulous idealists to pledge their lives to the top-rated charities rather than trying to optimize the local environment that they can actually get empirical feedback about.
To be clear, the picture I’m painting is an incredibly gloomy one. On the spherical-cow Econ 101 view of the world, altruists should just be able to straightforwardly turn money into utilons. Could our civilization’s information-processing institutions really be that broken, that inadequate, for even that not to be true? Really?!
I can’t claim to know. Not for certain.
You’ll have to think it through for yourself.
I initially wrote a comment engaging with this, I thought that was one of the primary things Ben was trying to talk about in the post, but then Oli persuaded me Ben was just arguing that the cost-effectiveness estimates were false / a lie, so I removed the comment. I’d appreciate an explicit comment on how much this is one of the primary things Ben is trying to say with the essay.