Living High and Letting Die

I asked Q to create a graphic based on the excerpts below. That's a lot of text, Q!

 
Here is some comic relief to the below serious topic. 😎

Excerpts from Death in a Shallow Pond, mentioned on Friday:

One final point. As already explained, moral mathematics has pretensions to objectivity; but in fact it’s as vulnerable to motivated reasoning as any other approach to ethical questions. Motivated reasoning is the biased assessment of information to justify a position that one is disposed to support, or already supports. Much of this takes place at a subconscious level, and the flabbier the metrics, the more leeway there is to get away with it. The future of AI, for instance, is clearly of fundamental importance. But those especially fascinated by it can easily employ a few perhaps spurious assumptions to “prove” that addressing the threats posed by the technology deserves the highest priority. ...

Motivated reasoning can generate results that at best are self-interested and at worst appear to outsiders to have a whiff of corruption. In April 2022, the Effective Ventures Foundation (at that time the umbrella organization for the growing number of effective altruism offshoots) purchased a stunning fifteenth-century manor house near Oxford, Wytham Abbey, for close to £15 million. That could have paid for around 5 million mosquito bed-nets. On the other hand—or so it was argued—it could turn out to be cost-saving, since money would no longer have to be spent on renting venues. [£15,000,000 could rent a lot of venues! The annual property tax alone could rent a lot of venues.] Moreover, it would encourage EA affiliated groups to hold extra workshops, and this could seed valuable ideas. [LOL. Rationalizing animals....] On the EA Forum, a distinguished academic argued that “the aesthetics, antiquity and uniqueness of the venue can have a significant effect on the seriousness with which people take ideas and conversations, and the creativity of their thinking.” ...

This is a variation of what is known as the “distortion of resources effect.” An NGO sets up, say, a medical facility to treat trachoma. Outcome assessors measure the impact. “During the past year, X number of operations have been successfully performed at a cost of Y.” It seems hugely successful. But what the assessors don’t measure are the spillover effects upon the rest of the healthcare system. To entice local doctors and nurses to work with them, the foreign body funding the trachoma program will have had to offer relatively attractive terms—a higher-than-market salary, for example. This switch of labor may boost trachoma stats, to the detriment of other health measures. In Botswana, many doctors were lured into a generously funded Gates Foundation AIDS program. It was probably no coincidence that, simultaneously, there was a spike in child mortality. ...

If an earnest student approaches [Nobel-Prize-winning economist] Angus Deaton for advice, he suggests involvement in lobbying to alter the terms of trade so that, for example, poor farmers are not forced to compete with subsidized farming in the West: the EU supports farmers to the tune of tens of billions of euros every year. There are other options. Poor countries could benefit from the transfer of knowledge, scientific, medical, technical, and legal. Deaton says that trade treaties can be “unbelievably exploitative.” Mining companies often manage to extract substantial and long-lasting tax concessions in the developing world. In part that’s because they can afford the sharpest lawyers, accountants, and negotiators. With help, negotiations could be conducted on a more level playing field.

Deaton believes that charities are “doing net harm, in effect encouraging bad governments to exist, and encouraging bad governments to put children in ponds to attract aid.” The more positive gloss, from other development economists, is that effective altruism is not, in principle, wrong. There are effective forms of assistance; however, some of these effective forms of assistance are not ones promoted by effective altruists.