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CarlShulman comments on Efficient Charity: Cheap Utilons via bone marrow registration - Less Wrong
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Thus the disclaimers.
However, do note that the generalization of that argument would allow a vast number of posts asking for the use of "free time" on various less effective causes. Other matching grants (this one is expiring now, but there will normally be something in the same ballpark), petitions, tasks on Mechanical Turk, and so forth could be summoned.
If there were 100 such posts each month responding to them would clearly on average be a drain on your other activities, requiring willpower/glucose to deal with, etc. Likewise 50. As we get to smaller and smaller numbers the costs are harder to see, but they still exist (this is the flip side of computing benefits to marrow donation by subdividing the aggregate effect;). Likewise, there are costs in terms of page space, taxing some users (non-Americans who can't donate, people who don't want to see such things), and the like.
"Generous" means "probably lower." A bit of Googling suggests that the gain of some transplants (which are nonetheless performed, and thus good candidates for "marginal transplants") is only a few life-years (i.e. sub-10%) and regression (based on general medical ineffectiveness, and overestimation of effects in the medical literature) would drive a best guess lower.
I understand the thought, but it also illustrates the point about accuracy: the actual costs in time from mailing, reading instructions, etc, are more than 3 minutes.
With 20 minutes of work (it took me over 12 minutes to fill out the form, 10 minutes reading the commitment and FAQ, plus the time in mailing, swabbing, more forms, etc) plus rather than 3 required to register, a 1 in 540 chance of donating (less if European ancestry, more otherwise), and a benefit of 10% of a malaria victim saved (after costs of further testing, possible surgery, drug effects, etc) we get the equivalent of a 1 in 1800 chance of saving a life per hour of work. Using AMF to convert between money and time (and AMF itself is not at the frontier; if it is that effective then GiveWell itself has been doing more on the dollar by leveraged direction of funds to AMF, not to mention other causes), that's a wage of $1.11 per hour, less than one can earn on Mechanical Turk. Taking into account more "drag factors" would probably further worsen the picture.
This all makes sense to me. Was I mistaken in posting this? I might say that if things like this happened once a month, the morale bonus from fuzzies would be worth the cost to me, but I don't think that would scale up. But if no-one did things like this, the registry would be empty of donors, and a world where everyone pumped their free time into money for malaria and neglected all other worthy causes seems distasteful to me.
That's unfortunately like the argument that one shouldn't become anything but a farmer, since without farmers we would have no food. One needs to think at the margin. First-world healthcare spending is many, many, times effective international public health expenditures. The major malaria, HIV, etc interventions would be overflowing before this got to be a big dent. If "everyone thought one way" and implemented the rule "first do the things that do the most good by your lights, until diminishing returns drive the good per dollar below the next alternative" you would get a more efficient charitable market, where one could do similar amounts of good in diverse fields, just as stock and bond markets are somewhat efficient.
ETA: Note that AMF is a placeholder here, I don't actually think that's the best way to help the current generation, let alone future generations.
I think that that might make more sense then the way charitable giving tends to happen now, but it seems like it would be an unstable system. As money flooded in to the most efficient charity, it would eventually find itself with more money than it could effectively use (Doctors Without Borders apparently had this problem with Haiti with regards to 'earmarked' money for disaster relief of a specific area), and its efficiency would go down. All of the donors would then direct their money to the next charity on the list until the same thing happens, and then move down again. I see two problems with this. First, how do you know when to move down the list, and second, how do you know when to move back up the list, i.e. when the first charity needs donations again.
Note that GiveWell carefully tracks room for more funding in its charities. They channeled funding to VillageReach until it had a few years worth of funding at the margin, and then moved on in their recommendation. But they keep track, and when VillageReach again shows that it can use money effectively it will be recommended easily. The problem with Haiti was that there were a lot of donors giving because of the TV images and charity fundraising even though it was clear that there was a surfeit of funding.
If those donors had been more sensible they could have used the recommendations of a service like GiveWell to identify the top organizations. Likewise for scientific research one can back a lab or fund that can allocate resources among many different experiments (or unrestricted grants to Doctors Without Borders which it can allocate to locations of greatest need). This doesn't seem to be too much of a problem in practice, as well as theory.
Wow, GiveWell seems to be really good at what it does. The Haiti thing was a problem, but it DID spawn a lot of giving that otherwise wouldn't happen. Perhaps the organizations who advertise during emergencies shouldn't accept earmarked donations and instead take advantage of the surge of sympathy for disaster victims to acquire funding for the entire program. Or are there laws preventing that?
Some people want to give you donations earmarked for Haiti. You tell them you only accept unrestricted funding. Many fewer donate.
Great point.
I can see how things like SIAI or FHI might be better for future generations, but what do you think is better than AMF for current generations?
A few things I would see as better in expectation than AMF in terms of current people (with varying degrees of confidence and EV, note that I am not ranking the following in relation to each other in this comment):
There's an issue of room for more funding.
What information do we have from Poverty Action Lab that we wouldn't have otherwise? (This is not intended as a rhetorical question; I don't know much about what Poverty Action Lab has done).
Even in the face of the possibility of such endeavors systematically doing more harm than good due to culture clash?
Here too maybe there's an issue of room for more funding: if there's room for more funding then why does the Gates Foundation spend money on many other things?
What would the criterion for using the money be? (If one doesn't have such a criterion then one forever holds off on a better opportunity and this has zero expected value.)