Dec 5, 2018 in Model, Quick Fix
Every year, I check in to see if we’ve eradicated polio or guinea worm yet. Disease eradications are a big deal. We’ve only successfully eradicated one disease – smallpox – so being so close to wiping out two more is very exciting.
Still, when I looked at how much resources were committed to polio eradication (especially by the Gates Foundation), I noticed they seemed incongruent with its effects. No polio eradication effort can be found among GiveWell’s top charities, because it is currently rather expensive to prevent polio. The amount of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs, a common measure of charity effectiveness used in the Effective Altruism community) you can save with a donation to preventing malaria is just higher than for polio.
I briefly wondered if it might not be better for all of the effort going to polio eradication to instead go to anti-malaria programs. After...
Jun 5, 2017 in Ethics, Philosophy
I’m a person who sometimes reads about ethics. I blame Catholicism. In Catholic school, you have to take a series of religion courses. The first two are boring. Jesus loves you, is your friend, etc. Thanks school. I got that from going to church all my life. But the later religion classes were some of the most useful courses I’ve taken. Ever. The first was world religions. Thanks to that course, “how do you know that about [my religion]?” is a thing I’ve heard many times.
The second course was about ethics, biblical analysis, and apologetics. The ethics part hit me the hardest. I’d always loved systematizing and here I was exposed to Very Important Philosophy People engaged in the millennia long project of systematizing fundamental questions of right and wrong under awesome sounding names, like “utilitarianism” and...
Feb 20, 2017 in Data Science, Politics
The other day, I posed a question to my friends on Facebook:
Do you think countries with higher taxes see more charitable donations or fewer charitable donations? What sort of correlation would you expect between the two (weak positive? weak negative? strong positive? strong negative?). I just crunched some numbers and I'll post them later. First I want to give people a chance to guess and test their calibration.
I was doing research for a future blog post on libertarianism and wanted to check one of the fundamental assumptions that many libertarians make: in the absence of a government, private charity would provide many of the same social services that are currently provided by the government.