I don't understand your explanation. You are apparently saying that quale (you seem to deliberately misspell the word, why?) is how the algorithm feels from inside. Well, I agree, but in the same time I think that "quale" is only a philosopher's noble word for "feel from inside". The explanation looks like a truism.

I have always been (and still am) confused by questions like: How other people perceive colors? Do they feel it the same way as I do? Are there people who see the colors inverted, having the equivalent of my feeling of "redness" when they look at green objects? They will call that feeling "greenness", of course, but can their redness be my greenness and vice versa? What about colorblind people? If I lost the ability to recognise blue from green, would I feel blueness or greenness when looking at those colors? What does it in fact mean, to compare feelings of different people? Or even, how does it feel to be a dog? A fish? A snail?

I am almost sure that the questions themselves are confused, without clear meaning, and can be explained away as such, but still I find them appealing in some strange way.

I always wanted to make an experiment on myself, but I am also afraid of it and don't have an opportunity. I would buy glasses which invert colors like on a photographic negative and wear them without interruption for some time. Certainly in the beginning I would feel redness when looking at trees, but it can be that I would accomodate and start feeling greenness instead. Or not. Certainly, it would be a valuable experinence. Has anybody tried something similar?

Ah, okay. Thanks for clarifying.

That phrase did not mean to imply anything about diluted burdens. It is there to ask the question, "Wait, if you're killing all of these people, isn't everyone killing all of these people?" Your response seems to be, "Yes, they are."

The followup question is: If one of the people who receives aid is included in the swath of killers? Theoretically, the recipient could have given the aid to someone else and that person could have lived. Instead, the recipient was selfish and chose to live by killing another person. Actually, everyone who could have received the aid but didn't and died was killed by the one who did receive.

Something is going wrong here. What is it?

(which is not the same as killing somebody but that's a different point)

Actually, this is exactly the point. My comment is directly addressing an explanation for this claim:

[E]very time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you're killing someone.

This claim was backed up with this paragraph:

By spending that money on yourself, instead of sending it to buy bags of rice for a famine-stricken region, or mosquito nets for malaria-ridden countries, or tin wood stoves, or water pumps, or water filters, or transparent plastic bottles, or latrines, or condoms, or any of the various simple and inexpensive supplies or devices that aid agencies are distributing around the world.

Your point is still very valid, which is why I went out of my way to say this:

EDIT: I really don't want to give the impression that you shouldn't give money or help people less fortunate than yourself. I think these are great things. I just don't understand the jump from "I bought a latte" to "I killed people."

I never understood how this morality worked. The problem I see with this view is that you are double counting the value of money.

• You work an hour and get $10, but the employer just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
• You buy a latte and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
• LatteShop pays LatteBoy $10 for an hour of work and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring him instead of sending it for aid

The $10 doesn't leave the system and everyone who touches it just killed a whole slew of people because they sent it somewhere other than aid. Why are you carrying the moral burden?

Even if you did send it to aid you can blame them for charging $10 for their work instead of $9. (Or whatever company that is selling the rice, nets, stoves, filters, bottles, condoms.)

You could even blame the person receiving the aid for using the aid instead of giving it to someone less fortunate. Or using less of it. Or selling it for $11 and putting the extra money back into aid.

Somewhere in here something goes horribly wrong and it gets ridiculous. Where did I misstep?

EDIT: I really don't want to give the impression that you shouldn't give money or help people less fortunate than yourself. I think these are great things. I just don't understand the jump from "I bought a latte" to "I killed people."

Wondrous yes, but not miraculous

Star Trek, Richard Manning & Hans Beimler, Who Watches the Watchers? (reworded)

Some of my predictions are of the sort "the stock market will fall 50% tomorrow with 20% odds" (not a real prediction!). If it did happen I should get huge credit, but would it show up as negative credit since I predicted there was only a 20% chance it would happen? Is there some way it would be possible to do this kind of prediction with PredictionBook?

I predict this comment will get less than 4 points by Oct. 19 with 75% odds.

Same here - once I entered a percentage, I wasn't sure which button to press, I hesitated between "right" (meaning the percentage I was giving was my confidence that it was right) and "my 2 cents" (which I thought only applieds to when you entered a comment). I selected "right", which was wrong.

The interface needs a bit of polishing.

In the footnote, Unger quotes UNICEF's 10 cents and makes up the 40 cents. UNICEF lied to him. Next time UNICEF tells you it can save a life for 10 cents, ask it what percentage of its $1 billion budget it's spending on this particular project.

According to the Copenhagen Consesus cited by SforSingularity, the goal is to provide about 100 pills per childhood and most children would have survived the diarrhea anyhow. (to get it as effective as $64/life, diarrhea has to be awfully fatal; more fatal than the article seems to say) They put overhead at about the same as the cost of the pills, which I find hard to believe. But they're not making it up out of thin air: they're looking at actual clinics dispensing ORT and vitamin A. (actually, they apply to zinc the overhead for vitamin A, which is distributed 2x/year 80% penetration, while zinc is distributed with ORT as needed at clinics, with much less penetration. I don't know which is cheaper, but that's sloppy.)

CC says that only 1/3 of bouts of diarrhea are reached by ORT, but the death rate has dropped by 2/3. That's weird. My best guess is that multiple bouts cumulatively weaken the child, which suggests that increasing from 1/3 to 100% would have diminishing returns on diarrhea bouts, but might have hard to account benefits in general mortality. (Actually, my best guess is that they cherry-picked numbers, but the positive theory is also plausible.)
ETA: there's a simple explanation, since the parents seek treatment at the clinics, which is that the parents can tell which bouts are bad. But I think my first two explanations play a role, too.

I'm very suspicious that all these numbers may be dramatic underestimates, ignoring costs like bribing the clinicians or dictators. (I haven't looked at them carefully, so if they do produce numbers based on actual start-to-finish interventions, please tell me.) It would be interesting to know how much it cost outsiders to lean on India's salt industry and get it to add iodine.

One dollar is the approximate cost if the right treatment is in the right place at the right time. How much does it cost to get the right treatment to the right place at the right time?

According to GiveWell, you can save the life of one African person for $200 - $1000.

How reliable is this information?