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RomeoStevens comments on Robustness of Cost-Effectiveness Estimates and Philanthropy - Less Wrong
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Seems like good news?
Bad:
* Estimates were off
Good:
* If it costs more to save a life that means people are better off than previously thought
* Should shift marginal giving towards x-risk
I agree with this statement. I've considered redirecting my own donations in light of GiveWell's recent writings about how most good public health interventions are already funded. (I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with AMF and/or GiveDirectly, but it took me a lot of thought to decide that, and I now require less additional evidence to persuade me to switch.)
That said, putting this under the "good" category seems like a minor case of treating the argument as a soldier. Evidence is evidence; whether it supports your previous conclusion doesn't make it good or bad.
(a) Note the "Do these considerations argue against donating to AMF?" section of my post.
(b) Those points not withstanding, I believe that it's probably best to hold out on donating for now (putting money in a donor advised fund if you're worried about not following through, and precommitting to donating to one of GiveWell's future recommendations if you're worried about reducing GiveWell's money moved) rather than giving to AMF/GiveDirectly now. Quoting from this GiveWell blog post:
... we would guess that the best giving opportunities are likely to lie outside of our traditional work...Our traditional criteria apply only to a very small subset of possible giving opportunities, and it’s a subset that doesn’t seem uniquely difficult to find funders for.... While we do believe that being able to measure something is a major plus holding all else equal – and that it’s particularly important for casual donors – we no longer consider ourselves to be “casual,” and we would guess that opening ourselves up to the full set of things a funder can do will eventually lead to substantially better giving opportunities than the ones we’ve considered so far.
(c) I don't think that x-risk reduction is the most promising philanthropic cause, even in the astronomical waste framework. More on this point in a future post.
Money spent on traditional charity doesn't directly benefit me, money spent on x-risk reduction does.
Money spent on traditional charity benefits you more than x-risk reduction does.
based on?
Money spent on x-risk reduction benefits everyone who will live, while traditional charity benefits people who are currently alive. Since you make up a larger percentage of the latter than the former, it is reasonable to assume that money spent on traditional charity benefits you more. I suppose you might have special circumstances that make you an exception, but given a choice between an expenditure optimized to reduce x-risk, and an expenditure optimized to improve the standard of living of people currently alive, the latter, by definition, helps the average currently-alive person by an amount equal to, or greater, than the former does.
Who wouldn't have information that would strongly suggest which side of this divide they fall on? It looks to me like most people in the position to donate to charity are more likely to accrue benefits from x-risk reduction than traditional charity that doesn't support research, education, or political advocacy. (That is, comparing asteroid deflection and African malaria reduction.)
Did you mean "traditional charity that doesn't support ..."?
First of all, the subject matter was charity in general, not your particular subset. Second, malaria reduction has effects that influence everyone. Third, asteroids are not a significant x-risk. "Massive catastrophe" and "x-risk" are very different things. Fourth, if one is focusing one the x-risk, it's not clear that deflection is the most efficient strategy. Underground bunkers would likely be cheaper, and would address other x-risks as well.
Apparently, yes. Editing.
The reason I picked that subset was because I see a split between charities I would cluster as "problems the donor doesn't have" and charities I would cluster as "problems the donor has." If you (are likely to) have Parkinson's, then donating lots of money to Parkinson's research has direct benefits (see Brin). If you're never going to need your own anti-malaria net, then buying them for other people only has indirect benefits.
X-risk, as far as I can tell, should be in the "problems the donor has" cluster.
I'm pretty sure your first "good" point is wrong. Sometimes those two things go together, sometimes not. Thought experiment: You have a deadly disease, but there are pills you can take that will keep you alive. They're really expensive. New information: Oops, you need twice as many as we thought. Does that indicate that you're better off? Nope. (It might mean that the pill-makers are going to be better off, but that's not particularly good news in this context.)
Ceteris paribus. Of course you can construct examples where welfare remains the same with higher costs. On net though this is highly unlikely.
Uh, but in this case we have relatively stable figures on how many people die from various things, so the new information is necessarily of the form "more difficult to fix a known problem" rather than "problem is less bad than we thought".
Ah, I see. So bad news :(