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atorm comments on Efficient Charity: Cheap Utilons via bone marrow registration - Less Wrong
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DISCLAIMER: This is awesome, a great source of fuzzies, and those who register are deserving of praise (I personally registered in the course of gathering data for the comments in this thread). The analysis below is done in the spirit of accurately understanding tradeoffs, and practice in thinking about do-gooding effectiveness. If the argument below convinces you not to register when you otherwise would have, please donate a few bucks to a more efficient charity, or a piggy bank until you think of something better, rather than simply cutting back on do-gooding.
Here's GiveWell's report on its top-rated charity in international health, Against Malaria Foundation:
You say that there is a 1 in 500 chance that one will be called on to donate bone marrow. ETA: the FAQ says it is 1 in 540. If one donates, it surely is not guaranteed to save the life of a young person with 40+ years of life (who would otherwise not get marrow, and would soon die with no other treatments working). A 10% (note: edited figure from 25% based on further Googling, and propagated changes) chance of saving such a life (or that expected value) seems reasonable, for a 1 in 5400 probability. Comparing in terms of direct life-saving, if it costs even 37 cents (in time and demands of registry, expected pain, expected donation hassle and recovery, additional testing, distraction, etc) one might do better by giving to AMF or some better charity.
According to the FAQ, benefits would be higher for US racial minorities (fewer donors to match against) and less for Americans of European ancestry.
Of course, saving the life of a rich person has other spin-off benefits (they may have more positive impact on the world thereafter than a potential malaria victim), and solidarity with other members of one's (rich) community is a perfectly understandable motivation.
Still, I am skeptical that this is near the efficiency frontier, even with the donors covering costs.
Upvoted for calculation. Shakes fist for arguing against my pet cause. Although I didn't do the math, I suspected that it might turn out this way. I didn't mention that because of a chain of thought similar to grouchymusicologist's. I figure that people will not disrupt their money-earning time to sign up for this and for that reason donate less to charity. I think it's far more likely that they will be fooling around on the internet, reading LessWrong, and might feel motivated to use some time that would otherwise be spent unproductively on signing up. I hoped that the easy fuzzies might motivate some people into an act of "charity" that they otherwise might not make.
Even if you get 100 Less Wrongers to register, it seems that the expected number of transplant patient lives saved will be less than the expected number of malaria victims saved by giving $40 yourself to AMF. It seems that wasting people's time (which works in small increments through willpower depletion, interrupting serendipity and other probabilistic or finely graduated effects), or conversely producing an interesting post and discussion about efficient charity (I enjoyed the post), will altruistically dominate the marrow effects.
ETA: Also, if you're going to pitch thousands of people, it's much, much, better for you to do that kind of basic background work rather than make the readers either go on faith or wastefully spend more cycles in parallel. General rule: if you can save the average reader 1 minute of processing with 20 minutes of work, that's a good deal.
The calculation doesn't mention the warm fuzzy feeling of getting personally involved. Registering might be a more involved way of support than donating, and make someone feel good about it. So best do both :-)