Ryan is apparently too modest to link to essay of the above name he wrote for 80K, so I'm going to do it for him

http://80000hours.org/blog/21-professio ... nfluencing

Kudos to Ryan!

For anyone who hasn't read it, I'd suggest it. It's a much more complete look at the problem than is generally attempted.

Hasn't changed my basic: "get rich and donate" plan. Though it could change the area I'm donating to...

My plan is the same, Gedusa. The immediate question seems to be which route to take toward wealth.

Specifically, I think the highest yield question right now is this:
If one is not educated as either a tech entrepreneur or a financier, which path will have the higher mean lifetime income.

Surely many non-utilitarians have sought to answer this question in the past, and perhaps I am not searching hard enough for their answers. This could well drive me in one career direction or another...

If Jane earns a typical American income for forty years and donates 10%, she can expect to save 44,000 years worth of healthy life

Is that really a meaningful metric for utility? It implies healthy life-years can be standardized and that they have the same subjective (positive!) quality, which doesn't need to be examined further. It also seems to ignore the externalities on other people's quality of life, such as less space, fewer resources etc. Are these lives even voluntary? Do these people know how reliable suicide works, that there is no supernatural afterlife, that their suffering is avoidable, what the probabilities for worst-case suffering are etc.?

Are these lives even voluntary? Do these people know how reliable suicide works, that there is no supernatural afterlife, that their suffering is avoidable, what the probabilities for worst-case suffering are etc.?

Suicide rates among atheists who know how suicide works are low. Happiness among the poor is lower, but they also smile (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/p ... smile.html). It's a reasonable assumption that people would not want to die.

Hanson's vision of the future has never made much sense to me. Besides being disconnected, so far as I can tell, from any kind of theory with predictive power, it relies on an archaic conception of personal identity, that thinks that even in an upload society there'll be clear distinctions between one individual and the next. Such a conception seems contrary to both recent phil of mind (eg Parfit's Reasons and Persons)) and cogsci (can't think of a reference at the moment - I think there's a good Less Wrong post about it, which is being frustratingly elusive atm).

I also don’t buy the idea that not committing suicide demonstrates positive utility. (The expectation of) positive utility is just one of various tools our genes use to keep us in line, whereas if we commit suicide it means that *all* their tools have failed. In other words, we’re heavily biased against doing so for evolutionary reasons.

For that reason, I tend to lean heavily towards QALY purchases that buy healthier life, rather than more life-years, since my understanding of QALY interviews is that they do treat ‘willingness to die’ as the sign of negative utility, and thus (IMO) are likely overrate life-saving interventions & underrate life-improving ones.

Fortunately, the neglected tropical diseases that SCI treat are largely non-fatal, so buying QALYs through them seems likely to be a good utility purchase. I don’t know enough about the types of malaria AMF treats to have a sense of whether they would have the same advantage. Anyone have any insight/further knowledge?

CarlShulman wrote:It's a reasonable assumption that people would not want to die.

Even assuming that this is both true and rational on their part, the healthy life-years metric seems lacking. It seems entirely possible to me that a given objectively healthy life-year is perceived as having half or double the hedonistic value of another objectively healthy life-year. It also seems quite plausible that some of the parameters affecting this depend on limited resources like space, energy, clean water etc. Other parameters may be less tangible, and some of these parameters may correlate with the objective health measure, but it still seems underspecified. The assumption that it is utility-maximizing to add as many healthy human life-years to the planet as possible appears implausible to me.

As for poor folk still smile, I know it's a metaphor, but it's not a particularly powerful one, given that smiling people can be generally miserable. It specifically tells me nothing about the stochastical distribution of suffering in the worst cases of illness, violence or social disconnection, including for children who die before they can ever be interviewed, and how to weigh these factors against the average quality of life of others in the respective socioeconomic demographic (assuming it is positive at all). Without any additional data, I would not be keen on experiencing the total set of experiences contained in these lives myself.

By the way Carl, we sometimes have discussions about whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the future, including some potential dystopic scenarios. It was mentioned that you suspect even Negative Utilitarians should be in favor of human survival. Given the large potential increase in total consciousness and therefore potential involuntary suffering unlocked by space-colonization, we were unclear on the reasoning. Could you give a quick comment on your current estimate on this (maybe in one of the associated threads)?

Hedonic Trader, with regard to SCI, I understand that for every $3 given, not only is one year of healthy life saved, also a child will go to school for an additional year (although this stat does not count the potential cost of additional teachers). Now female education is, as far as I can gather, the factor that most reliably decreases fertility rates. So, contrary to immediate appearances, SCI should improve access to limited resources. If you find that the population issue really is a sticking point for you, you can always look in the direction of a charity like PSI, whose pi graph here shows that >50% of its expenditure goes to the distribution of contraceptives.

I don't have time for a long discussion, having intended only a short comment addressing what seemed to me to be the most dubious claim, so I will make this comment and leave the thread. I will say that I agree the global rich are on balance happier than the poor for various reason including various tragedies (although I don't think very many times so). I wasn't talking about the longer-term and indirect effects of such interventions (e.g. on resources, economic growth, existential risk, etc).

Could you give a quick comment on your current estimate on this (maybe in one of the associated threads)?

I don't want to get mired in that discussion, and I was only mentioned in those threads because I seem to have miscommunicated my request to Brian that I not be cited or involved. I will say that I was primarily speaking for myself, and said to Brian that I only had a precise picture of my own views and could not speak with confidence about others I have spoken with.

CarlShulman wrote:I wasn't talking about the longer-term and indirect effects of such interventions (e.g. on resources, economic growth, existential risk, etc).

Yes. Which is of course indispensable for any acutal utilitarian analysis of the value of intervention.

I don't want to get mired in that discussion

No problem. Well, given that this is probably the single most important utilitarian question, and it's surprisingly often answered with less than well-justified optimistic confidence, I'm grateful for any links to in-depth analyses is someone has them.

@RyanCarey, thanks for your point on the effect of charity interventions on fertility rates.