On the object level, I agree that such interventions can’t scale at stated levels of marginal cost effectiveness. That’s actually one of the main points I wanted to communicate (“such experiments … are impossible”), so while I’m glad you get it, I’m a bit frustrated that you’re thinking of it as a counterargument. It seems really, REALLY difficult to communicate a disjunctive argument—rather than an object-level claim—as primary content.
Where I think we disagree is that I think that in practice it’s extremely common for EAs to elide the distinction between average and marginal cost, and to imply that if Good Ventures were to fully fund everything near this level of cost-effectiveness, there’s a realistic prospect of Good Ventures running out of money in the next couple decades. This is not true, at least because—as you point out—there are limits to how much anyone can scale up programmatic interventions.
I don’t hear EAs doing this (except when quoting this post), so maybe that was the source of my confusion.
I agree Good Ventures could saturate the $5000/life tier, bringing marginal cost up to $10000 per life (or whatever). But then we’d be having this same discussion about saving money for $10000/life. So it seems like either:
1. Good Ventures donates all of its money, tomorrow, to stopping these diseases right now, and ends up driving the marginal cost of saving a life to some higher number and having no money left for other causes or the future, or
2. Good Ventures spends some of its money on stopping diseases, helps drive the marginal cost of saving a life up to some number N, but keeps money for other causes and the future, and for more complicated reasons like not wanting to take over charities, even though it could spend the remaining money on short-term disease-curing at $N/life.
(1) seems dumb. (2) seems like what it’s doing now, at N = $5000 (with usual caveats).
It still seems accurate to say that you or I, if we wanted to, could currently donate $5000 (with usual caveats) and save a life. It also seems correct to say, once you’ve convinced people of this surprising fact, that they can probably do even better by taking that money/energy and devoting it to causes other than immediate-life-saving, the same way Good Ventures is.
I agree that if someone said “since saving one life costs $5000, and there are 10M people threatened by these diseases in the world, EA can save every life for $50B”, they would be wrong. Is your concern only that someone is saying this? If so, it seems like we don’t disagree, though I would be interested in seeing you link such a claim being made by anyone except the occasional confused newbie.
I’m kind of concerned about this because I feel like I’ve heard people reference your post as proving that EA is fraudulent and we need to throw it out and replace it with something nondeceptive (no, I hypocritically can’t link this, it’s mostly been in personal conversations), but I can’t figure out how to interpret your argument as anything other than “if people worked really hard to misinterpret certain claims, then joined them together in an unlikely way, it’s possible a few of them could end up confused in a way that doesn’t really affect the bigger picture.”
How many lives do you think can be saved for between $5k and $10k?
The smaller the number, the more “~$5k per life saved” looks like an impact certificate you’re buying from Good Ventures at a price assessed by GiveWell, rather than a serious claim that for an extra $5k you can cause a life to be saved through the intervention you funded.
The larger the number, the more the marginal cost looks like the average costs for large numbers of lives saved (and therefore the “why don’t they do an experiment at scale?” argument holds).
Claims that you can make the world different in well-specified ways through giving (e.g. more lives saved by the intervention you funded) imply the latter scenario, and substantively conflict with the former one.
On the object level, I agree that such interventions can’t scale at stated levels of marginal cost effectiveness. That’s actually one of the main points I wanted to communicate (“such experiments … are impossible”), so while I’m glad you get it, I’m a bit frustrated that you’re thinking of it as a counterargument. It seems really, REALLY difficult to communicate a disjunctive argument—rather than an object-level claim—as primary content.
Where I think we disagree is that I think that in practice it’s extremely common for EAs to elide the distinction between average and marginal cost, and to imply that if Good Ventures were to fully fund everything near this level of cost-effectiveness, there’s a realistic prospect of Good Ventures running out of money in the next couple decades. This is not true, at least because—as you point out—there are limits to how much anyone can scale up programmatic interventions.
I don’t hear EAs doing this (except when quoting this post), so maybe that was the source of my confusion.
I agree Good Ventures could saturate the $5000/life tier, bringing marginal cost up to $10000 per life (or whatever). But then we’d be having this same discussion about saving money for $10000/life. So it seems like either:
1. Good Ventures donates all of its money, tomorrow, to stopping these diseases right now, and ends up driving the marginal cost of saving a life to some higher number and having no money left for other causes or the future, or
2. Good Ventures spends some of its money on stopping diseases, helps drive the marginal cost of saving a life up to some number N, but keeps money for other causes and the future, and for more complicated reasons like not wanting to take over charities, even though it could spend the remaining money on short-term disease-curing at $N/life.
(1) seems dumb. (2) seems like what it’s doing now, at N = $5000 (with usual caveats).
It still seems accurate to say that you or I, if we wanted to, could currently donate $5000 (with usual caveats) and save a life. It also seems correct to say, once you’ve convinced people of this surprising fact, that they can probably do even better by taking that money/energy and devoting it to causes other than immediate-life-saving, the same way Good Ventures is.
I agree that if someone said “since saving one life costs $5000, and there are 10M people threatened by these diseases in the world, EA can save every life for $50B”, they would be wrong. Is your concern only that someone is saying this? If so, it seems like we don’t disagree, though I would be interested in seeing you link such a claim being made by anyone except the occasional confused newbie.
I’m kind of concerned about this because I feel like I’ve heard people reference your post as proving that EA is fraudulent and we need to throw it out and replace it with something nondeceptive (no, I hypocritically can’t link this, it’s mostly been in personal conversations), but I can’t figure out how to interpret your argument as anything other than “if people worked really hard to misinterpret certain claims, then joined them together in an unlikely way, it’s possible a few of them could end up confused in a way that doesn’t really affect the bigger picture.”
How many lives do you think can be saved for between $5k and $10k? The smaller the number, the more “~$5k per life saved” looks like an impact certificate you’re buying from Good Ventures at a price assessed by GiveWell, rather than a serious claim that for an extra $5k you can cause a life to be saved through the intervention you funded.
The larger the number, the more the marginal cost looks like the average costs for large numbers of lives saved (and therefore the “why don’t they do an experiment at scale?” argument holds).
Claims that you can make the world different in well-specified ways through giving (e.g. more lives saved by the intervention you funded) imply the latter scenario, and substantively conflict with the former one.
Do you disagree with this model? If so, how?