I was going to post this question in the charities thread, but it's a big enough issue to deserve a topic of its own.

When consequentialists think about worthy goals of donations, we have a number of key (and sometimes contradictory) possibilities:

1) Reducing poverty (and directly related problems such as disease, famine) - another way to describe this improving the quality of life for as many existing people as possible.

2) Preserving a habitable environment - typically, looking for ways to reduce climate change.

3) Preventing (or reducing) overpopulation - focusing more on improving the quality of life for future generations.

4) Animal welfare - trying to prevent massive state-sanctioned animal cruelty, usually focussing on developed countries.

5) Effecting political change in democracies - donating to political campaigns where one side seems far preferable to the others.

6) Effecting political change in non-democracies - ie. Amnesty International, and other political groups that seek to reduce the impact of oppressive governments.

Can anyone think of other plausible-sounding causes, and/or does anyone know of any compelling evidence to help us pick between the various aims?

A

A good list.

As for compelling evidence remember we are all individuals with different skills, interests, capacities and resources. Chose the one where you could be most effective given your abilities. These can all be covered if we encourage each other to pursue our specific interests in this domain, and to encourage others who are not interested to become interested and for them to do the same to those they know, and so on.

I was mainly thinking in terms of money. Volunteering your time must be a very different calculation, which would be much harder to give confident answers to (though presumably effectiveness is weighted a lot more towards doing things in your immediate vicinity).

It's not exactly taken for granted that there is an overpopulation problem. It's also unknown if people have any significant effect in global warming, or if it's even a bad thing.

I suggest we split each item into its own thread for how effective a charity about it can be (in terms of dollars per QALY, not how well it would help fight that problem.)

QALY is an interesting measure. I have looked at various happiness statistics and that is an interesting topic in its own right. I will start a thread on that when I have time (unless anyone else beats me to the punch). And yes I agree the issue of over-population is an indeterminate question at this point in time, again another topic for discussion especially IMHO regarding the Malthusian Trap.

I meant in terms of expected utility rather than in terms of how likely the charity will do what it's supposed to. I don't know any units other than QALY besides DALY, which is the same thing, and QALM, which I made up for a thought experiment on the old website. I suppose there should be one for probability of infinite utility, if you go by that philosophy.

Speaking of which, I just noticed Arepo left out prevention of existential danger. This could include nuclear disarmament, putting more effort into the search for existentially dangerous astroids, building a permanent space colony (which could recolonize the Earth if worst comes to worst), and preventing research into potentially risky fields (such as bioengineering, which may be used to create a virus to wipe out humanity).

Does anybody know what Charity International is doing?

Well my approach argues that the absolute measurement of utility is indeterminate and so do not bother. DU is an approach that aims to increase utility sort of like velocity (speed and direction) rather than distance (traditional utility).

Still there is space for various approximations based on factual data to estimate at the least 1st order changes in "well-being" which matches either approach?

DanielLC wrote:It's not exactly taken for granted that there is an overpopulation problem.

It depends what you mean. It's probably true that the earth could support more humans than it currently does, but that doesn't mean that they'd have a high quality of life or that several current social and environmental problems wouldn't resolve themselves if several people disappeared suddenly. Overpopulation can function at a local level as well as a global one.

It's also unknown if people have any significant effect in global warming, or if it's even a bad thing.

Technically unproven, maybe, but I'm not sure what you want to argue here. Naomi Oreskes published an essay in Science looking at the proportion of peer reviewed scientific papers relating to the subject (selected by searching 'global climate change') that accepted, rejected, or remained neutral on anthropogenic climate change.

Of 928 papers,
75% accepted
25% took no position
0% rejected

Benny Peiser then tried to replicate the experiment, and got the following results:

Of 1117 essays,
41% accepted
57% took no position
3% rejected

(numbers presumably rounded, hence the 101 total)

Science declined to publish Peiser's paper, on the grounds that its methodology didn't meet their standards. When bloggers examined the rejections, they found many of them inexplicable, for example the conclusion that 'one root method cannot be stated to be the best and the method of choice will be determined from researcher's personal preference, experiences, equipment, and/or finances', in an article titled Analysis of some direct and indirect methods for estimating root biomass and production of forests at an ecosystem level is, according to Peiser, a rejection.

Peiser subsequently revised his claim, to say that only one of the papers he looked at actually rejected anthropogenic climate change, and that one turned out not to be a peer reviewed piece.

The whole subject is still depressingly acrimonious, but it seems clear that the scientific consensus is overwhelming, even if you only look at Peiser's paper and take it at face value. The pertinent question isn't whether it's happening, but which would be more efficient to put our efforts into mitigating it now, or working around its effects later. A couple of years ago, Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the world bank, published a report on that question, which concluded that would be at least five times more efficient to prevent it now than fight it later.

The report didn't make any mention of existential risk, which climate change will increase quite dramatically - both directly, with the more extreme predictions claiming it could make the earth uninhabitable to humans, and indirectly, by harming crop yields, reducing biodiversity, displacing large populations and similar outcomes that increase the circumstances that provoke wars.

Arepo wrote:

DanielLC wrote:It's not exactly taken for granted that there is an overpopulation problem.

It depends what you mean. It's probably true that the earth could support more humans than it currently does, but that doesn't mean that they'd have a high quality of life or that several current social and environmental problems wouldn't resolve themselves if several people disappeared suddenly. Overpopulation can function at a local level as well as a global one.

If the Earth had a higher population, there would be faster technological advancement, and we'd burn through our limited resources faster. Just doing those two, it would be the same as a lower population, but faster. Besides that, on the one hand most things are cheaper to produce in bulk, but on the other there are things that get more expensive as you produce more, such as geothermal energy. Lack of food is commonly cited as a problem of overpopulation. The more you grow the worse the land will have to be, as you can no longer use the best, on the other hand the machinery gets cheaper and the costs of researching new genetic modifications gets more spread out. Also, we will never run out of power. We will either eventually use something renewable, like solar, or something where the world will end before we run out, like fusion.

How does overpopulation function at a local level? I don't think shipping costs are that high. If an area is unwilling or unable to trade, it's in a pretty bad position no matter what its population.

What exactly are those two meta-studies saying? My instinct is they're just about whether or not anthropic climate change exists, but there shouldn't be a rejected section. You can't show that it doesn't exist; just that its effect is small. If they're about whether or not it's significant, than I'd still like to know how significant they meant, though it would still prove your point.

You made a quote about the costs of global warming will outweigh the costs of avoiding it by a factor of five. It didn't mention how long that would be. If it was 33 years, for example, that would be 5% interest. Also, organizations will tend to exaggerate their importance, both to increase funding and because people will tend tend to think they're important. Government organizations also have additional bias when they don't pay well as people will only work for less if they think it's important. The big problem is that's just one person's quote. You could have just as easily quoted the part at the beginning where Sir Nicholas Stern said it would decrease our economy by 1% now, but 20% later. There's a huge variation in what people will say with this. The fact that it's a source of political tension doesn't help. Thanks to that, you can probably pretty easily find meta-studies with large variation.

The report didn't make any mention of existential risk...

Any chance you have one that does? I know people talk about the Large Hadron Collider being existentially dangerous. I know runaway global warming is more likely than that, but what isn't? The Earth's conditions have been varying for billions of years without reaching a condition causing runaway global warming. At least, nothing that ended it all. It has had the icecaps melt a few times and may or may not have frozen over once. Unless our condition is quite extreme, or it's changing orders of magnitude faster than normal, I don't see how there'd be any real existential risk.

...harming crop yields...

I was under the impression that it raised crop yields, what with more CO2 and less in the way of freezes. Any chance you have another meta-study?