Is it seriously possible to make $5/hr filling out surveys online? I thought those websites were all scams?
If someone can teach me how to make $5/hr filling out surveys, I'll give the first $10 I earn to the SIAI.
I'll be the first to admit that I value my time at far more than 931x the equivalent amortized-third-world-person-lifespan time. I am wired to care about me, my family, and my friends, and people culturally and physically close to me; that's the way I am, and that's the way you are, too, and so is the first fellow whose lifespan I could be extending, if he were in my position.
When all three of us are ready to re-engineer our values on this axis, then let's talk.
An observation that is not my reason for objecting is that increasing the population of the third world doesn't strike me as desirable even from the perspective of my altruistic ideals. I have no inclination to donate to the AMF.
Would you be in favour of releasing a more virulent strain of malaria, in order to more effectively reduce the population? If not then you may be falling prey to status-quo bias. (If I misunderstand you, and you are not arguing that donating to AMF would have negative value to you, then I apologise).
I think realistically, most people burn out if they don't spend some time relaxing. If your argument had been more extreme, it might argue that people should sacrifice a couple of hours of sleep each day as well, right? But it's plausible that for most people, going off of 6 hours of sleep per day will decrease their cognitive ability and productivity drastically. Or that exercising 1 hour a day has sufficient physical and mental health benefits to justify it. Could some amount of recreation be worth it? I think so. I think I couldn't function without some recreation, although I agree that I should actively work to decrease the dependency.
But of course, you have a point. Everyone is wasting some time. Nobody is being perfectly altruistic, and making the best choices at all times. I don't think anyone ever thought they were...
Everyone is wasting some time. Nobody is being perfectly altruistic, and making the best choices at all times. I don't think anyone ever thought they were...
Scientists have shown that we only use 10% of our time!
an outside observer would conclude that I'm a wasting time maximizer via revealed preference. I'm okay with this.
Suppose that today two bad things happen:
1) The plane you took to come home gets stuck on the runway for 5 hours.
2) An earthquake in a country you had previously never heard of kills 50,000 people.
Tonight your mom calls to ask how your day went. You respond by saying it was terrible. She asks why. What do you tell her? If the answer is (1) then you are probably not wasting your time when you engage in leisure activities.
(Although I would answer (1) I did give $100 to AMF last year.)
As Adam Smith said:
...Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was
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?
~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...
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?
This post uses math to show how working a job and donating the resultant money to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is more beneficial than recreation.
Sounds like donating to the AMF would be valuable for the specific individuals who would get mozzie nets and less valuable to me. The extent to which other people choose to value dontations to the third world relative to their own interests is frankly none of your business. This isn't a fundamentalist utilitarian cult where we get to admonish each other for not being optimized perfect altruists. (Or to otherwise make presumptions on other people's terminal values.)
[Post edited to use life expectancy data from estimated time of birth rather than from 2012 and avoid extra significant digits.]
[Edited again to make the title more to the point and less abrasive, change the math since I found that Uganda is not one of their top four countries aided, include an accurate figure for the average age of an AMF beneficiary, link to sources on life expectancy and mosquito net distribution data, and improve some wording.]
This post argues that working a job and donating the resultant money to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is more beneficial than recreation from a utilitarian standpoint.
AMF, GiveWell's current top rated charity, distributes mosquito nets to people at high risk of contracting and dying from malaria. To find the amount of life saved by donating a dollar to AMF, I use the following formula: (average life expectancy in aided country - average age of beneficiary) / dollars AMF needs to save one life.
According to an email from AMF representative Rob Mather, the average age of an AMF beneficiary is 25-30. I'll pick the age 28 to be conservative on the amount of life saved per donation. I made a weighted average by nets distributed of the life expectancies of the top three countries that AMF has worked in (Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania) to estimate the average life expectancy in a typical AMF-aided country.
Zambia has 332,660 nets distributed, Malawi has 355,400 nets distributed, and Tanzania has 131,293 nets distributed, for a total of 819,353. Zambia has ~41 percent of nets distributed among the top three, while Malawi has ~43 percent and Tanzania has ~16 percent. Zambia's life expectancy for the average 28-year-old beneficiary is 51.56 years, Malawi's is 51.08 years, and Tanzania's is 45.75 years. The average life expectancy for an AMF beneficiary in the top three aided countries multiplies and adds up to ~50.42 years. (Source on life expectancy. Source on net distribution.)
This means that the time saved per life saved is ~22 years. According to GiveWell, AMF needs just under two thousand dollars to save a life. 22 divided by two thousand is ~0.011 years saved per dollar, or ~4.0 days saved per dollar. Suppose that you gave up some recreation time and instead worked some part-time job such as filling out online surveys for five dollars an hour. If each dollar was donated to AMF, that would save ~20 days per hour, or ~480 hours per hour. If the highest-paying job you could work in your recreation time pays five dollars an hour, then to justify your spending time on recreation rather than on working and donating the money to AMF within an altruistic morality, your recreation time would need to be ~480 times as valuable as an equivalent amount of time in a third world person's life. Your recreation time would need to be even more valuable if a higher-paying job was available. Just multiply the available hourly salary by the amount of life AMF can save per dollar to find how much life you can save per hour.
If anyone has more accurate figures, please post them.