EA - Altruism and Development - It's complicated... by DavidNash

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: Altruism and Development - It's complicated..., published by DavidNash on December 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.An interesting post from Shruti Rajagopalan looking at the trade off between legibility and complexity in evaluating philanthropic efforts.As December rolls in, my inbox is filled with requests for donations, often from organizations I have given to in the past. This holiday season is also bittersweet because I cannot visit Delhi, where I was born and my parents still live, because of the air pollution and smog during the winter months. In Delhi, I find it hard to breathe, and usually lose my voice because of inflammation caused by particulate matter pollution. This year, I am under doctor’s orders to avoid travelling to Delhi in the winter; I’ve been struggling with respiratory problems from long Covid.With air pollution dominating my thoughts and nudges for charitable giving in my inbox, my first instinct is to give to causes that help mitigate pollution in Delhi. But I am also aware of the literature on emotional giving or ineffective altruism. In their 2021 paper, Caviola, Schubert and Greene explain why both effective and ineffective causes may attract dollars. People often give emotionally to a cause that has personally impacted them in some way.This paper resonated with me because I am exactly the sort of irrational dog lover likely to support the best training programs for guide dogs. These super dogs have my lifelong admiration. My Labrador retrievers can barely fetch a ball.We all know air pollution is bad. But how bad? And compared to what?As an alternative, I looked up the top charities recommended by GiveWell—the top two work on reducing Malaria deaths. Malaria kills between 600,000 and 700,000 each year. And GiveWell is considered one of the most credible evaluators in the philanthropic space. Should I be thinking less about air pollution in Delhi and more about malaria in Africa?So, I thought it best to evaluate 1) my priors on air pollution, 2) whether air pollution mitigation in Delhi merits my dollars/rupees. And if Delhi air pollution merits intervention, then it would be good to 3) identify the reasons air pollution became such a big problem in Delhi (you would be surprised), which would lead to uncovering 4) how to mitigate the problem of air pollution so I can decide where to send my dollars. And since I got to #4, to understand 5) why people think that giving to malaria charities is “higher impact” than solving air pollution.6. Back to Malaria—Is It Really That Simple?While writing this post, I also thought more about malaria and whether malaria prevention is more complex than impact evaluations lead us to believe. If legibility is the consequence of a narrowing of vision to make a complex problem tractable, then are these malaria mitigation interventions too simple?95% of all malaria deaths are in Africa, and that malaria disproportionately kills children.This is probably why the effective altruism community, which believes in helping those far removed from one’s situation, measures by lives saved per dollar when thinking about long-term and high-impact efforts, and rates malaria prevention charities so highly. In his latest column, Ezra Klein defends the basic principles of effective altruism and separates it from the SBF-FTX mess.It is impossible not to feel for the children in Africa dying from malaria. But suggesting that distributing nets and antimalarial medication is the best way to save lives and prevent illness compared to anything else we know is narrow. Regions outside Africa only account for 4% of malaria deaths. But I don’t see high use of mosquito nets and antimalarial medication in Europe and the U.S. Outside of camping equipment stores, I don’t think I have seen any mosquito nets bought or sold...