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So8res comments on Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too) - Less Wrong
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Another note: increasing education and speeding up economic development is actually a very very important form of charity, as far as I can tell. So important that the government collects taxes which are used to provide public education and foreign aid. If there was no public education or foreign aid in the world today, I would strongly consider donating to educational charities and economic charities instead of GiveWell's current top charities.
Unless you think public education and foreign aid should be completely de-funded in order to save more lives then you already support long-term infrastructural charities to some degree. There is certainly a tradeoff between the near term known benefits and the long term risky benefits, and it may well be that the cost effectiveness of saving lives right now outweighs the risk-adjusted cost effectiveness of better infrastructure and more education -- but I hesitate to accept the argument that short-term proven investment always dominates long-term speculative investment.
I don't think it does, especially in situations of value of information.
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I think this is a room for more funding consideration. I think we already have very high evidence that public education actually causes gains in education and foreign aid causes gains in economic development. The reason why I don't want to put money into them directly is not because they're speculative, it's because they're not sufficiently underfunded.
You're right, I spoke too strongly. I was trying to summarize your relevant arguments quickly, and should have quantified e.g. as "sufficiently proven short-term investment always dominates sufficiently speculative long-term investment", which admittedly is tautological.
I agree completely. I was responding mainly to this:
which you write off as an appeal to common sense in a manner that I thought was somewhat unjust.
Your other arguments, that we're often bad at predicting the causes of the future and that it's easy to be overconfident about impressive sounding projects, were well received.
Could you elaborate?
Sure. This
followed by this
followed by your main points, imply an argument that we shouldn't focus on speeding up economic development. It's this connotation that I found unjust, and responded to in the ancestor comment.
I think focusing on speeding up economic development is important. But I disagree that we know of ways to speed up economic development that create more impact than AMF.
(Note: this is not saying AMF is optimal for speeding up economic development; it's that we don't know enough about economic development to say.)
Potential candidates:
So adjust the expected utility of public education and foreign aid downwards in proportion to their risk.
If you want to save the most people with your money then you need to purchase units of the most cost effective charity (after risk adjustment). We already do a lot of economic development (that's what public education and foreign aid are for).
You must believe one of the following:
a) Risk adjusted economic stimulus (in the form of public education / foreign aid) is more cost effective than AMF
b) Risk adjusted stimulus is less cost effective than AMF
c) Risk adjusted stimulus is precisely as cost effective as AMF
Your comment implies you reject a). If b) is the case, then you should want to transfer funds from education to AMF until they equalize. c) implies indifference between them, and is implausible.
Do you believe public education should be defunded to support AMF? It seems to me that you must. That is a fine argument to make, but it is a much less obvious point, and I don't think your casual dismissal of economic stimulus did it justice.
I disagree with your conclusion because there's a difference between...
(1) risk-adjusted stimulus beating AMF and marginal risk-adjusted stimulus beating marginal contributions to AMF
(2) risk-adjusted stimulus beating AMF and risk-adjusted stimulus being done by those who know what they're doing beating AMF
(3) risk-adjusted stimulus beating AMF and $1B in risk-adjusted stimulus beating $1B to AMF
I do think it's quite plausible that public education spending in the developed world is not as cost-effective at producing well-being than spending on AMF (until AMF runs out of room for more funding). But I also think there are far less controversial and less useful places we could get money for AMF from.
Along the same lines as what you've asked me, if you think economic stimulus is important, do you think AMF should be defunded in order to donate to the US government or to developed world education?
No. To developing-world education, probably (given sufficient evidence of effectiveness).
On a mildly related note, I see AMF as an organization that treats the symptom of malaria instead of the cause. I'd rather donate money to an organization that makes measurable progress towards eliminating malaria entirely.
Treating symptoms is important. Immediate feedback is a powerful tool. However, I think it's possible to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Supporting provably-effective short term charities could lead to risk aversion that costs lives in the long run.
None of your post contradicts these statements directly, but I found it uncomfortably dismissive of certain long-term goals. My current feeling is that GiveWell is too risk averse. I haven't inspected that feeling lately as my conclusion w.r.t. MIRI short-circuited further inquiry into GiveWell.
To rephrase my original concern, I feel like it is possible to accept all the arguments in your post and use them to argue in favor of donating to charities that improve third-world education, despite the fact that the connotation of your post implies you disagree. Specifically, the economic-development snipe felt somewhat dishonest.
I think there's an interesting and decently evidenced argument to be made that fighting disease is actually the best way to boost developing-world education, better than direct interventions in education (see here and here, plus GiveWell's concerns about education).
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With 100% bednet coverage, the amount of attack vectors for malaria would be substantially lower, and malaria could be eliminated, so I think AMF is a plausible candidate for malaria elimination as well as malaria reduction.
But what other opportunities are there? I suppose you could try to aim to fund vaccine research, but there aren't any organizations pursuing a malaria vaccine with room for more funding (I've looked, documentation forthcoming on Giving What We Can).
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As much as I've seemingly argued against this, I think the sentiment is important. The problem is, however, there are significant barriers right now to implementing these long-run approaches -- we simply just don't know enough yet. Thus, I prefer a value of information approach.
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Dishonesty, to me, implies malevolence; an intention to deceive or mislead. Do you think I'm being misleading?