Since I have likely drawn people's attention recently for charity purposes - and thanks for giving me the chance to bring those to more people's attention - let me take this opportunity to also plug two causes that are adjacent to this space but still worthy of donations for different reasons.
The first is the one that I publicly pledged to in regards to your challenge with Walt Bismarck - MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is an Effective Altruism organization focused on reducing the existential risk of unaligned artificial intelligence. I realize some people may regard this as a little abstract or theoretical or futurist rather than something that can be immediately addressed by giving; but it is in the same category as preventing a nuclear war as far as extraordinarily bad outcomes for humanity goes, and MIRI is one of the groups most effectively working to ensure that future AI developments are actually aligned for a better tomorrow.
The second that I will recommend to you and your audience is DKT International - a family planning, prenatal care, and AIDS prevention charity focused primarily on the third world: credited with averting 43 thousand maternal deaths (in 2024), preventing 26 million unintended pregnancies, and fighting human trafficking. Though, ironically, they had to sue the US government to be able to do so - you see, they were supplying contraceptives to save people's lives and refused to sign the Bush era pledge to avoid distributing them to sex workers; even to this day they are ineligible for US government funding because they still continue to work with doctors internationally who provide abortion services as part of family planning and that's on the not-permitted list. This one charity has reduced worldwide maternal mortality rate by ten percent - https://www.dktinternational.org/resources/results/ - and the origin of the group is rather lively as well, I'll probably write a Substack about DKT and Phil Harvey at some point.
I've been giving to Givewell for years, even though I am not completely on board with the whole EA/utilitarian project. I'll just be honest, I do it for the children, not for the bugs.
"That means every penny spent adds two days of life. Surely a year of life is worth more than $150 and a day of happy life is worth spending more than two cents."
I think that means that a day of live costs 50 cents. Still an incredible bargain.
You miss that this is going to save virtually only futur non-vegans. Hence making it highly plausibly immoral, or at the very least, very doubtful morally to do. For further details, check my excellent article on this : https://benjamintettu.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-effective-altruism
Taimaka received money like a Grant or something from givewell.
About a couple weeks ago I ( I donated a little over a thousand company matched another little over a thousand) DONATED A LITTLE OVER TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS TO https://taimaka.org/
Sorry for copypasta didn't feel like retyping it
THEY SAVE A LIFE FOR $1,644
I SAVED A LIFE OF A YOUNG CHILD WHO WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE DIED!
NOT ONLY THAT BUT I ALSO IMPROVED MANY LIVES
>In this shallow report, we evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a CMAM programme in Nigeria delivered by the organisation Taimaka. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis of the impact of CMAM on long-term wellbeing. We also think this is the first wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis of a nutrition charity (along with our analysis of Fortify Health).
>This forms part of our broader work to assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions and charities based on their impact on subjective wellbeing, measured in terms of wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs). One WELLBY is equivalent to a 1-point increase on a 0-10 wellbeing scale for one person over one year. We focus on subjective wellbeing because we believe it best captures what ultimately matters, wellbeing. By using wellbeing as a common outcome, it allows us to make apples-to-apples comparisons between very different interventions.
>Taimaka estimates they can treat a child with malnutrition in 2025 for ~$87. We estimate Taimaka’s life-improving cost-effectiveness (after discounts) as ranging from 60 to 72 WELLBYs per $1,000 (WBp1k) with a central estimate of 66 WBp1k. The cost is $15 per WELLBY, or in other terms 9 times as good as GiveDirectly cash transfers. The exact figure depends on which indirect evidence sources we extrapolate from: causal evidence of famine or two nutritional interventions related to RUTF.
I'VE PROVIDED AT LEAST 120 WELLBYs !!!
I DESERVE TO BE AT LEAST A COUPLE INCHES TALLER
I WASN'T FED ENOUGH AS A CHILD AND I WAS POISONED WITH UNNECESSARY PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATIONS AS A CHILD
I WOULD BE TALLER IF I WEIGHED MORE WHEN I WAS DEVELOPING
I HELPED SAVE A CHILD'S LIFE AND HELPED HIM GROW TO ADULTHOOD INSTEAD OF DYING A CHILD little person
I've also given a few hundred dollars to against Malaria foundation and I've given money to other charities as well
I'm a biological man but my voice isn't deep. This is probably because I was underweight as a child and teenager and being medicated with psychiatric medications during my childhood and teenage years may have also contributed to it. I don't take any psychiatric medications now or as an adult
I wish to have a much much permanently or long term deeper and also if possible raspier voice.
If also possible optionally a lower hairline, pinned back less prominent ears and a more symmetrical face and nose.
On this topic, everybody should read Thomas Crisp's paper Jesus and Altruism, which I learned about via an interview Dustin Crummett did on Christianity and EA: https://thomasmcrisp.com/unpublished-papers-on-love/
Better to invest in eliminating mosquitos as a species.They carry malaria and other awful diseases, and aside from being a food source to bats, etc., they serve no good purpose.
This type of charity makes the world strictly worse. As Robin Hanson argued, you can always do more good by investing your charitable donation and donating more in the future. That's because ROI is a direct indicator of how much good your money is doing.
Sending money from a first-world economy to a third world economy is a deadweight loss of value to the world. Lives saved is a linear function of money but future wealth is an exponential function of time. The exponential will always win. You should invest in the thing that you want more of. Do you want more first-world economic growth or do you want more third world people dying of malaria? Choose wisely.
These are two completely separate points. To the latter, I would like more third world people NOT dying of malaria. Also, obviously the marginal utility of such donations is way higher. Moreover, one could quite plausibly choose to donate some money now and invest some for future donation, and it seems quite plausible that this is the highest EV approach.
>obviously the marginal utility of such donations is way higher
I strongly disagree with this. IMO it's very obvious that the marginal utility of donating is far lower. To first order, money is an indication of utility. Therefore the way to maximally increase utility is to maximize your ROI.
Givewell estimates that it costs about $5000 to save a life in sub-Saharan Africa. So, you can either have a marginal dirt-poor low IQ African or 5k invested at the historical average market nominal return of 7%. At the end of 20 years you can have either $20k or three dirt-poor low IQ Africans, all of whom will still need your charity. I know which option I think makes the world better.
the vagueness of "makes the world better" is carrying a lot here---seems pretty obvious that the lives of three low-IQ people carry more utility than whatever you'll do with 20k adjusted for purchasing power
granting hereditarianism and the most damning interpretations of its implications for development, I think that it's still good to donate, esp since I think donations will be sufficiently small and spaced out such that the impact on domestic consumption will be small and the actual opportunity cost for any individual donator will be small
As such benefits from donation seem to exceed the costs
Ah you edited. "It's small" isn't a viable justification. Bad things don't become good when done in small increments. The negligible impact on domestic investment is still larger than the even more negligible impact on third world suffering.
It's not vague at all. Pick any concrete measure of value and I'll demonstrate that it's better to have $20k than 3 sub-saharan Africans. I can do that because money is fungible with any objectively-measurable thing that humans think of as good. If something yields more money than an alternative then that thing is better than the alternative (assuming externalities are appropriately accounted for).
2. Your reasoning is a little circular and "objectively measurable" is doing a lot of carrying. I could expound on why it's circular but the more important point is that something (a life for instance) can have objective but not easily measurable value.
Even if your measure is "number of lives" then I still win. I can save 4 lives with 20k. 4 lives is better than 3.
>I could also claim that you're just not appropriately accounting for externalities.
Then make a concrete definition of value and make the claim. The point of debate isn't to gesture towards possible arguments, it's to make actual arguments.
You tell me that giving money to charities that provide cheap anti-malaria medication is a cost-effective way to save lives. If it’s so cheap and so effective, why don’t the governments of these countries produce these medicines, or hire people to produce them, and distribute the medicines to their own citizens?
Because the dysfunctional societies create this constant need for charity. Fixing the societies would be a way to save the children and reduce the need for charity in the first place.
If I constantly discovered drowning children on my way to work, I’d take up a collection to give swimming lessons to kids in my village.
I don’t really have one. If I knew how to fix the Third World, I’d tell the world. Well, I actually do know how they could do it — adopt market based capitalism with clearly defined laws of property and contract with honest courts. But getting them on that path seems unlikely.
I just wish that the EA people would at least acknowledge that the Third World is really screwed up and that the charity won’t actually fix anything. I also suspect that, on the whole, aid to Africa does more harm than good.
You know in the US children aren’t constantly drowning. I mean, it happens some. But we hire lifeguards for the beaches and the YMCA offers swimming lessons. We don’t just rely on random strangers in business suits.
Our obligations to far away people are weaker than those close to home, because, the moral basis of properly helping others is reciprocity and not the suffering they are undergoing per se. Our lives are to be lived for our own happiness - not to be serfs to people in far away lands. To quote Ayn Rand: 'I swear by my life and my love it I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine'
Moreover, this is article, according to your own moral reasoning has to be questionable at best, because, it's promoting ineffective altruism insofar as the shrimp are missing out on donations. Or, worse, wild animals.
Then there would be no reason per se to push the button. This would seem to make my extreme individualism implausible, but ethics is a comparative game.
The utilitarian system on which you actually ground your effective altruism has three implausible results.
1. You'd torture 10 trillion people if that meant that 100 quintillion shrimp each gained a penny's worth of pleasure. You're no more opposed to torture than I, and, whoever allows more torture of us is entirely down to the nature of the world.
2. We should destroy the world via nuclear war, or, hope for it, to stop wild animal suffering, especially for the insect's sake.
3. There is no prerogative on the part of people which is straight up implausible, meaning, should I really enjoy running my ice cream business, but converting it to a humane shrimp farm would produce more pleasure, I'd have to devote my life to farming shrimp. No existing person or animal is better off in this example
You don't have to be a utilitarian to think you have some impartial reason to promote good things. That's utterly obvious. You can even be an extreme deontologist and also hold that there are goods that are worth promoting.
Well you're getting a result just as crazy in torturing 10 trillion people to give the 100 quintillion shrimp a warm feeling worth a penny. That's very crazy!
Denying the existence of agent neutral values as Eric Mack, Ayn Rand and Jarvis Thomson does, gives a solid rationale to prerogatives for people to pursue their own interests over other's interests, because, there simple is no such thing as good for everyone per se. The moment you start to get involved with thresholds and weights then ad hocness creeps in.
Since I have likely drawn people's attention recently for charity purposes - and thanks for giving me the chance to bring those to more people's attention - let me take this opportunity to also plug two causes that are adjacent to this space but still worthy of donations for different reasons.
The first is the one that I publicly pledged to in regards to your challenge with Walt Bismarck - MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is an Effective Altruism organization focused on reducing the existential risk of unaligned artificial intelligence. I realize some people may regard this as a little abstract or theoretical or futurist rather than something that can be immediately addressed by giving; but it is in the same category as preventing a nuclear war as far as extraordinarily bad outcomes for humanity goes, and MIRI is one of the groups most effectively working to ensure that future AI developments are actually aligned for a better tomorrow.
The second that I will recommend to you and your audience is DKT International - a family planning, prenatal care, and AIDS prevention charity focused primarily on the third world: credited with averting 43 thousand maternal deaths (in 2024), preventing 26 million unintended pregnancies, and fighting human trafficking. Though, ironically, they had to sue the US government to be able to do so - you see, they were supplying contraceptives to save people's lives and refused to sign the Bush era pledge to avoid distributing them to sex workers; even to this day they are ineligible for US government funding because they still continue to work with doctors internationally who provide abortion services as part of family planning and that's on the not-permitted list. This one charity has reduced worldwide maternal mortality rate by ten percent - https://www.dktinternational.org/resources/results/ - and the origin of the group is rather lively as well, I'll probably write a Substack about DKT and Phil Harvey at some point.
I've been giving to Givewell for years, even though I am not completely on board with the whole EA/utilitarian project. I'll just be honest, I do it for the children, not for the bugs.
"That means every penny spent adds two days of life. Surely a year of life is worth more than $150 and a day of happy life is worth spending more than two cents."
I think that means that a day of live costs 50 cents. Still an incredible bargain.
Oops, fixed.
Thanks for the reminder and encouragement. As a christian I really ought to make this monthly.
You miss that this is going to save virtually only futur non-vegans. Hence making it highly plausibly immoral, or at the very least, very doubtful morally to do. For further details, check my excellent article on this : https://benjamintettu.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-effective-altruism
Taimaka received money like a Grant or something from givewell.
About a couple weeks ago I ( I donated a little over a thousand company matched another little over a thousand) DONATED A LITTLE OVER TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS TO https://taimaka.org/
Sorry for copypasta didn't feel like retyping it
THEY SAVE A LIFE FOR $1,644
I SAVED A LIFE OF A YOUNG CHILD WHO WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE DIED!
NOT ONLY THAT BUT I ALSO IMPROVED MANY LIVES
>In this shallow report, we evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a CMAM programme in Nigeria delivered by the organisation Taimaka. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis of the impact of CMAM on long-term wellbeing. We also think this is the first wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis of a nutrition charity (along with our analysis of Fortify Health).
>This forms part of our broader work to assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions and charities based on their impact on subjective wellbeing, measured in terms of wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs). One WELLBY is equivalent to a 1-point increase on a 0-10 wellbeing scale for one person over one year. We focus on subjective wellbeing because we believe it best captures what ultimately matters, wellbeing. By using wellbeing as a common outcome, it allows us to make apples-to-apples comparisons between very different interventions.
>Taimaka estimates they can treat a child with malnutrition in 2025 for ~$87. We estimate Taimaka’s life-improving cost-effectiveness (after discounts) as ranging from 60 to 72 WELLBYs per $1,000 (WBp1k) with a central estimate of 66 WBp1k. The cost is $15 per WELLBY, or in other terms 9 times as good as GiveDirectly cash transfers. The exact figure depends on which indirect evidence sources we extrapolate from: causal evidence of famine or two nutritional interventions related to RUTF.
I'VE PROVIDED AT LEAST 120 WELLBYs !!!
I DESERVE TO BE AT LEAST A COUPLE INCHES TALLER
I WASN'T FED ENOUGH AS A CHILD AND I WAS POISONED WITH UNNECESSARY PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATIONS AS A CHILD
I WOULD BE TALLER IF I WEIGHED MORE WHEN I WAS DEVELOPING
I HELPED SAVE A CHILD'S LIFE AND HELPED HIM GROW TO ADULTHOOD INSTEAD OF DYING A CHILD little person
I've also given a few hundred dollars to against Malaria foundation and I've given money to other charities as well
I'm a biological man but my voice isn't deep. This is probably because I was underweight as a child and teenager and being medicated with psychiatric medications during my childhood and teenage years may have also contributed to it. I don't take any psychiatric medications now or as an adult
I wish to have a much much permanently or long term deeper and also if possible raspier voice.
If also possible optionally a lower hairline, pinned back less prominent ears and a more symmetrical face and nose.
Also I'd like to be a couple inches taller
All permanently and irreversibly please.
On this topic, everybody should read Thomas Crisp's paper Jesus and Altruism, which I learned about via an interview Dustin Crummett did on Christianity and EA: https://thomasmcrisp.com/unpublished-papers-on-love/
Better to invest in eliminating mosquitos as a species.They carry malaria and other awful diseases, and aside from being a food source to bats, etc., they serve no good purpose.
This guy bugs me 😎😁😍😂😩
This type of charity makes the world strictly worse. As Robin Hanson argued, you can always do more good by investing your charitable donation and donating more in the future. That's because ROI is a direct indicator of how much good your money is doing.
Sending money from a first-world economy to a third world economy is a deadweight loss of value to the world. Lives saved is a linear function of money but future wealth is an exponential function of time. The exponential will always win. You should invest in the thing that you want more of. Do you want more first-world economic growth or do you want more third world people dying of malaria? Choose wisely.
These are two completely separate points. To the latter, I would like more third world people NOT dying of malaria. Also, obviously the marginal utility of such donations is way higher. Moreover, one could quite plausibly choose to donate some money now and invest some for future donation, and it seems quite plausible that this is the highest EV approach.
>obviously the marginal utility of such donations is way higher
I strongly disagree with this. IMO it's very obvious that the marginal utility of donating is far lower. To first order, money is an indication of utility. Therefore the way to maximally increase utility is to maximize your ROI.
Givewell estimates that it costs about $5000 to save a life in sub-Saharan Africa. So, you can either have a marginal dirt-poor low IQ African or 5k invested at the historical average market nominal return of 7%. At the end of 20 years you can have either $20k or three dirt-poor low IQ Africans, all of whom will still need your charity. I know which option I think makes the world better.
the vagueness of "makes the world better" is carrying a lot here---seems pretty obvious that the lives of three low-IQ people carry more utility than whatever you'll do with 20k adjusted for purchasing power
granting hereditarianism and the most damning interpretations of its implications for development, I think that it's still good to donate, esp since I think donations will be sufficiently small and spaced out such that the impact on domestic consumption will be small and the actual opportunity cost for any individual donator will be small
As such benefits from donation seem to exceed the costs
Ah you edited. "It's small" isn't a viable justification. Bad things don't become good when done in small increments. The negligible impact on domestic investment is still larger than the even more negligible impact on third world suffering.
It's not vague at all. Pick any concrete measure of value and I'll demonstrate that it's better to have $20k than 3 sub-saharan Africans. I can do that because money is fungible with any objectively-measurable thing that humans think of as good. If something yields more money than an alternative then that thing is better than the alternative (assuming externalities are appropriately accounted for).
I could also claim that you're just not appropriately accounting for externalities.
1. See edit, somewhat salient
2. Your reasoning is a little circular and "objectively measurable" is doing a lot of carrying. I could expound on why it's circular but the more important point is that something (a life for instance) can have objective but not easily measurable value.
Even if your measure is "number of lives" then I still win. I can save 4 lives with 20k. 4 lives is better than 3.
>I could also claim that you're just not appropriately accounting for externalities.
Then make a concrete definition of value and make the claim. The point of debate isn't to gesture towards possible arguments, it's to make actual arguments.
> That means every penny spent adds two days of life.
Every dollar, no?
Every fifty cents--fixed.
You tell me that giving money to charities that provide cheap anti-malaria medication is a cost-effective way to save lives. If it’s so cheap and so effective, why don’t the governments of these countries produce these medicines, or hire people to produce them, and distribute the medicines to their own citizens?
They're rather poor and often not engaged in maximally effective giving
Why are they poor? The economic, cultural, and physical technology for being at least not-poor is widely available.
Has lots to do with institutions. But why does that matter?
Because the dysfunctional societies create this constant need for charity. Fixing the societies would be a way to save the children and reduce the need for charity in the first place.
If I constantly discovered drowning children on my way to work, I’d take up a collection to give swimming lessons to kids in my village.
Okay so what's the way you propose fixing the societies? What's the practical strategy?
I don’t really have one. If I knew how to fix the Third World, I’d tell the world. Well, I actually do know how they could do it — adopt market based capitalism with clearly defined laws of property and contract with honest courts. But getting them on that path seems unlikely.
I just wish that the EA people would at least acknowledge that the Third World is really screwed up and that the charity won’t actually fix anything. I also suspect that, on the whole, aid to Africa does more harm than good.
You should save the child from drowning (charity) and also give people swimming lessons. Why let children drown and only give swimming lessons?
Solution: let people die while they are implementing such technology and until its benefits have reached everyone?
There is also technology available for not drowning, and still people are drowning, and we still come and rescue them.
You know in the US children aren’t constantly drowning. I mean, it happens some. But we hire lifeguards for the beaches and the YMCA offers swimming lessons. We don’t just rely on random strangers in business suits.
Our obligations to far away people are weaker than those close to home, because, the moral basis of properly helping others is reciprocity and not the suffering they are undergoing per se. Our lives are to be lived for our own happiness - not to be serfs to people in far away lands. To quote Ayn Rand: 'I swear by my life and my love it I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine'
Moreover, this is article, according to your own moral reasoning has to be questionable at best, because, it's promoting ineffective altruism insofar as the shrimp are missing out on donations. Or, worse, wild animals.
Money to givewell majorly reduces insect suffering as I say in the article.
Suppose you could press a button that would cost a penny and save 10 trillion people from torture. Would there be a strong moral reason to press it?
Fair enough on the first point.
Yes, because, reciprocity would dictate that you spend the penny to save the 10 trillion.
Elaborate? Assume the ten trillion people are in distant galaxies and can't help you.
Then there would be no reason per se to push the button. This would seem to make my extreme individualism implausible, but ethics is a comparative game.
The utilitarian system on which you actually ground your effective altruism has three implausible results.
1. You'd torture 10 trillion people if that meant that 100 quintillion shrimp each gained a penny's worth of pleasure. You're no more opposed to torture than I, and, whoever allows more torture of us is entirely down to the nature of the world.
2. We should destroy the world via nuclear war, or, hope for it, to stop wild animal suffering, especially for the insect's sake.
3. There is no prerogative on the part of people which is straight up implausible, meaning, should I really enjoy running my ice cream business, but converting it to a humane shrimp farm would produce more pleasure, I'd have to devote my life to farming shrimp. No existing person or animal is better off in this example
Well that's very crazy!
You don't have to be a utilitarian to think you have some impartial reason to promote good things. That's utterly obvious. You can even be an extreme deontologist and also hold that there are goods that are worth promoting.
Well you're getting a result just as crazy in torturing 10 trillion people to give the 100 quintillion shrimp a warm feeling worth a penny. That's very crazy!
Denying the existence of agent neutral values as Eric Mack, Ayn Rand and Jarvis Thomson does, gives a solid rationale to prerogatives for people to pursue their own interests over other's interests, because, there simple is no such thing as good for everyone per se. The moment you start to get involved with thresholds and weights then ad hocness creeps in.