Using a throwaway account to keep judging unbiased

Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?

And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. And a hand-crafted scarf with authentic Inuit tribal patterns woven from organic fibres! Wicked!

...but of course buying any of those items would be insane. The problem is what economists call opportunity costs: buying one thing costs money that could be used to buy others. A hand-crafted designer scarf might have some value in the Arctic, but it would cost so much it would prevent you from buying much more important things. And when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity..

Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people's lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn't have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

If you are to "love your neighbor as yourself", then you should be as careful in maximizing the benefit to others when donating to charity as you would be in maximizing the benefit to yourself when choosing purchases for a polar trek. And if you wouldn't buy a pretty picture to hang on your sled in preference to a parka, you should consider not helping save a famous painting in preference to helping save a thousand lives.

Not all charitable choices are as simple as that one, but many charitable choices do have right answers. GiveWell.org, a site which collects and interprets data on the effectiveness of charities, predicts that antimalarial drugs save one child from malaria per $5,000 worth of bed medicine, but insecticide-treated bed nets save one child from malaria per $500 worth of drugs. If you want to save children, donating bed nets instead of antimalarial drugs is the objectively right answer, the same way buying a $500 TV instead of an identical TV that costs $5,000 is the right answer. And since saving a child from diarrheal disease costs $5,000, donating to an organization fighting malaria instead of an organization fighting diarrhea is the right answer, unless you are donating based on some criteria other than whether you're helping children or not.

Say all of the best Arctic explorers agree that the three most important things for surviving in the Arctic are good boots, a good coat, and good food. Perhaps they have run highly unethical studies in which they release thousands of people into the Arctic with different combination of gear, and consistently find that only the ones with good boots, coats, and food survive. Then there is only one best answer to the question "What gear do I buy if I want to survive" - good boots, good food, and a good coat. Your preferences are irrelevant; you may choose to go with alternate gear, but only if you don't mind dying.

And likewise, there is only one best charity: the one that helps the most people the greatest amount per dollar. This is vague, and it is up to you to decide whether a charity that raises forty children's marks by one letter grade for $100 helps people more or less than one that prevents one fatal case of tuberculosis per $100 or one that saves twenty acres of rainforest per $100. But you cannot abdicate the decision, or you risk ending up like the 11,000 people who accidentally decided that a pretty picture was worth more than a thousand people's lives.

Deciding which charity is the best is hard. It may be straightforward to say that one form of antimalarial therapy is more effective than another. But how do both compare to financing medical research that might or might not develop a "magic bullet" cure for malaria? Or financing development of a new kind of supercomputer that might speed up all medical research? There is no easy answer, but the question has to be asked.

comments have a size limit? It seems they do. Continued in reply.

Moved to http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/37l/how_greedy_bastards_have_saved_more_lives_than/

Per Roko's request

Our norm of ranking charities by % spent on overheads is very very silly.

That sounds rather overstated. Are there any good charities that spend a lot on overhead? The vast majority of charities, especially as weighted by money, are best thought of as frauds. This is a very crude filter, since most well-intentioned charities still fail to accomplish anything, but hardly silly. The most serious criticism of this filter is that one is not going to give to many charities, so filtering 90% is of limited use.

Global poverty is too large a problem for any one person to solve, but each of us can still transform the lives of thousands of people. While it is difficult to help directly, we must not forget our most important advantage: on a world scale, we are very rich. We can thus pay for efficient services in health and education which, though desperately desired, are out of the reach of those in poverty. If the typical US citizen gave 10% of their income to the right NGOs, then each year they could:

* Distribute 700 mosquito nets, preventing 1,900 cases of malaria and 6 deaths
* Cure 170 people of tuberculosis, preventing 8 deaths
* Save 1,100 years worth of healthy life
* Provide 1,100 additional years of school attendance

The median personal income in the US is $35,500 (US Census 2008). Ten percent of this is $3,550.

Mosquito nets can be distributed for $5 each, cases of malaria prevented for $1.80, deaths from malaria prevented for $600 (see note 49 in this GiveWell summary).

Tuberculosis can be cured for $20, and deaths from TB prevented for $150-$750 (see the GiveWell page on the Stop-TB Partnership).

Disability Adjusted Life Years can be averted for as little as $3 each (see our page on neglected tropical diseases).

Treating children for neglected tropical diseases produces an extra year of school attendance for each $3 (see the J-PAL study , but note that this doesn't include the possible need for extra teachers if more class members turn up).

Read through that list again and consider that each of us could each achieve one of these great benefits every single year. Read it through and try to imagine the scale of those numbers: to see the individual names and faces in your mind. Pick out one of these individuals and try to imagine the huge effect this will have on his or her life. It is just staggering. In a single week we can perform something like a miracle: saving a life, or restoring sight to the blind. Over our lives, we can each perform thousands of these ‘miracles’, leaving behind a remarkable legacy. Moreover, we can do all of this without leaving our countries, without leaving our preferred jobs, and without even giving up any parts of our lives that are truly important to us.

We clearly have a duty to do at least this much. We can do something of extreme moral importance without sacrificing anything of comparative value. How could we look these people in the eye and justify our failure to give even such a small amount? Isn't this the least we could do?

Many people flee from these facts and try hard to forget them, but we needn't do so. Instead, we can embrace the facts and simply decide to give generously. This is what the members of Giving What We Can have done. We've each made a public pledge to give at least 10% of our incomes to where we believe it will do the most to fight poverty. Whatever our incomes, we will all have a tremendous effect on thousands of lives. We don't seek any praise for this as it seems to us to be the least we could do. What we do want is for others to join us in this endeavour: to share advice on the most effective ways to help, and to give what we can.

~GivingWhatWeCan.org

(if chosen for the prize, I will donate half to GivingWhatWeCan.org and half to Deworming the World.)

EDIT: Per the request of someone who appears to be heavily involved with GWWC, if chosen for the prize, I will donate the entire prize to Deworming the World.