if people were following my calculations starting from partway through they would arrive at the same answers

If this is motivated by desire for trustworthiness, linking to the source of the life expectancy figures should have higher priority. (Also, how did you calculate the average? Weighed by overall population of those countries, population under ten, number of AMF clients, simply averaging the four numbers, ... ?)

I'll edit the post to use life expectancy figures from ten years ago.

If you used the ten years old data, you would most probably obtain lower expected age at death for today's ten-years olds* than for today's newborns. But it should be higher. The problem is not that the life expectancy changes during the time. The problem is that the life expectancy at birth is average of life times of all people born, while the life expectancy at age of ten is average of life times* of all people that survived until this age. The latter is higher than the former, since all children who died before their tenth birthday (and who lower the former average) are excluded from the statistics. In e.g. Zambia, about 11% of children die before age of five, so you can imagine how this influences the discussed difference. (I was unable to quickly find data for this to illustrate the difference explicitly.)

* Note that life expectancy at age x usually means the expected remaining time of life, not the expected age of death (which obviously is obtained from the former by adding x).

(Edited.)

~38.81755

What's the point of keeping seven-digit precision? Especially in spite of the fact that your calculation includes a disproportionately rough guess of "an average age of ten", another fact that the life expectancy estimates from different sources can differ up to 10% from each other and the problematic assumption that if you save a ten-year old child, his or her expected survival time is equal to the country's life expectancy minus ten? (The data of life expectancy are usually given at birth. Poor countries have usually relatively high child mortality; if you survive until the age of ten, your life expectancy is much higher than the listed figure.)

your recreation time would need to be ~931 times as valuable as an equivalent amount of time in a third world person's life

It is even more valuable for me.

I had more ideas for Less Wrong posts, including an argument that donating to charity is more beneficial than paying for cryonics, but that assumes that the reader is altruistic. Since most people on Less Wrong are apparently not altruists, should I go ahead and post "For altruists, AMF > cryonics" here, or should I keep altruism-assuming arguments for some community more typically altruistic, like Felicifia?

So you would say that in theory you support lowering third world populations

I don't value increasing third world population. Most obviously because more people starving to death closer to near a Malthusian limit is a bad thing.

but in practice not because in general arguments in favour of genocide are almost always wrong, or just because it seems like the sort of thing a bad person would do and you don't want to be a bad person?

What do you mean "Just"?

I'm not attacking consequentialism, I'm consequentialist myself

I was attacking consequentialism, at least the kind of consequentialism that assumes that killing people is morally equivalent to not saving them (that is most kinds). Extermination and inaction are not the same thing either intellectually or morally. I can only be considered a consequentialist in the sense that I am an agent trying to maximise the value of the state of the universe where that state includes time. ie. Not just the future matters but how you get there. This allows that murder can be bad even if everything ends up the same in 5 years.

, I'm just puzzled by the fact you seem to be assigning negative value to human lives.

I'm not. I'm assigning negative value to squalor and death. Causing more people to be born is a very slight positive which would dominate if there were zero externalities.

I don't want to get into this discussion much further... there is far too much of a default moral high ground of "Yay! Donating to Africans is altruistic!" regardless of whether it results in better outcomes. This just means that such conversations seem like work. I'll donate to existential risk and ignore "breed more africans!" funds.

This is trivial and useless. It's obvious without math that if you spend time helping people instead of having fun, more people will be helped and you will have less fun. This is a trade off that almost no one makes or will make. In the time it took me to to reply to this post, I could've gone to AMF and donated money via paypal, but I didn't. Did you? How much money do you have in your bank account and why isn't it in AMF's bank account?

1. 17- Junior/Senior (third year of school. Have enough credits to graduate this year) (Trying to decide if I want to graduate early)
2. I've been going to the library and maxing out the number of books I can check out. More recently, I've joined LW.
3. Family = none. School = some people who are semi-philosophical but not very LW rational.
4. I've always thought it was more important to know what I want to do rather than where I want to go. That said, I'm either going to try to directly contribute bringing about the singularity by research or help by donating (and maybe trying to reform education).
5. You betcha! I can apply for three years and that's what I'll do until I get in.
6. This seems so long ago

1. 17, senior.
2. Not when thinking about it that way, though recreational research in pop sci, apologetics, and epistemology have gotten me to the point where I'm much more knowledgeable in those areas than my average classmate.
3. None in my family, and one in my school--the calculus and Bible teacher, very into apologetics. We argue for ~45 minutes every Tuesday thanks to my school's shuffling schedule.
4. Highest paying career I can attain, don't know what yet. Whatever school I can enter that gets me to the career.
5. After reading the winners of the grants and noting that they have absurd accomplishments, no.

Have you used Less Wrong's "Send message" functionality?

(Edit: It's a button in the upper right corner of the page you get when you click someone's username.)