EA - Measuring Good Better by MichaelPlant

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Measuring Good Better, published by MichaelPlant on October 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. At EA Global: San Francisco 2022, the following organisations held a joint session to discuss their different approaches to measuring ‘good’: A representative from each organisation gave a five-minute lightning talk summarising their approach before the audience broke out into table discussions. You can read the transcripts of the lightning talks below (lightly edited for clarity) or listen to the audio recording (30 mins). GiveWell (Olivia Larsen) Why do we need moral weights? GiveWell thinks about measuring good outcomes using a process called ‘moral weights’. That's because GiveWell evaluates charities that do different things. Some charities increase consumption and income, other charities save the lives of children under five, and other charities save the lives of people over the age of five. In order to do what GiveWell wants to do - create a prioritised list of giving opportunities in order from most to least cost-effective and then use the funds we have available to fill it, starting with most cost-effective until we run out of money - we need an exchange rate between different types of good outcomes. That's why we use moral weights as an input into our cost-effectiveness analysis. What are GiveWell’s moral weights? So here are some of our moral weights. These are all in units of ‘the moral value of doubling consumption for one person for one year.’ The specific numbers don't mean that we feel totally confident about each number or that we have the right answer. We need a specific number to put into our cost-effectiveness analysis but that definitely doesn't mean that we have a high level of precision or confidence in these. Table 1: GiveWell’s moral weights Value of doubling consumption for one person for one year 1.0 Value of averting one year of life lived with disease/disability (YLD) 2.3 Value of averting one stillbirth (1 month before birth) 33.4 Value of preventing one 5-and-over death from malaria 83.1 Value of averting one neonatal death from syphilis 84.0 Value of preventing one under-5 death from malaria 116.9 Value of preventing one under-5 death from vitamin A deficiency 118.4 So when we say that the value of preventing an under-five death from malaria is about 117, that means we think it's ~117 times more valuable to save this life than it would be to double someone's consumption for a year. To put it another way, if we were given the choice between doubling the consumption of 118 people or preventing one under-five death from malaria we would choose the 118 people, but if it was 116 people we would choose to save the life of the infant. One question that sometimes comes up is why we have different values for an under-five death from malaria and an under-five death from vitamin A supplementation. This is because the average age of someone dying from vitamin A deficiency versus malaria is different and our moral weights reflect that difference in age. Here is our curve for the differences in our moral values of death at different ages. It starts one month before birth and ends at over 80 years old. I'm in the ‘25 to 29’ bucket so I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm past my ‘moral weightiest’ according to GiveWell. Figure 1: GiveWell’s moral values of deaths at different ages (in units of doubling consumption) What goes into GiveWell’s moral weights? How do we come up with these really specific numbers that we think are valuable, but as I mentioned before, we don't think are as precise as the numbers might suggest? Our moral weights consist of a few different inputs: Figure 2: Components of GiveWell’s moral weights 60% of the moral weights come from a donor survey. In 2020, we surveyed about 80 GiveWell donors to ask them how they would mak...