Are GiveWell Top Charities Too Speculative?

One response to this is to argue that the best proxy for having a good long-run impact is having a good short-run impact (e.g. via boosting economic growth).

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is still a speculative claim, so if you make it, you can no longer say you're following robust evidence only.

I've heard this "the best proxy for having a good long-run impact is having a good short-run impact" a couple of times now but I haven't seen anyone make any argument for it. Could someone provide a link or something? To me it's not even clear why impact on economy of different charities like Give Directly and AMF should be proportional to their short-term impact.

I didn't argue that AMF's flow-through effects exceed its direct effects because (a) it's widely (although not universally) accepted and (b) it's hard to argue for. But this is probably worth addressing, so I'll try and give a brief explanation of why I expect this to be true. Thanks for bringing it up. Disclaimer: these arguments are probably not the best since I haven't thought about this much.

Small changes to global civilization have large and potentially long-lasting effects. If, for example, preventing someone from getting malaria slightly speeds up scientific progress, that could improve people's lives for potentially millions of years into the future; or if we colonize other planets, it could affect trillions or quadrillions of people per generation.

If you believe non-human animals have substantial moral value (which I think you should), then it's pretty clear that anything you do to affect humans has an even larger effect on non-human animals. Preventing someone from dying means they will go on to eat a lot of factory-farmed animals (although more so in emerging economies like China than poorer countries like Ghana), and the animals they eat will likely experience more suffering than they themselves would in their entire lives. Plus any effect a human has on the environment will change wild animal populations; it's pretty unclear what sorts of effects are positive or negative here, but they're definitely large.

Now, even if you don't believe AMF has large flow-through effects, how robust is the evidence for this belief? My basic argument still applies here: the claim that AMF has small flow-through effects is a pretty speculative claim, so we still can't say with high confidence how big AMF's impact is or whether it's even net positive.

Denise, if you value all time periods equally, then the flow through effects are 99%+ of the total impact.

The flow-through effects then only have to be very slightly negative to outweigh the immediate benefit.

I was just thinking about this again and I don't believe it works.

Suppose we want to maximize expected value over multiple value systems. Let's say there's a 10% chance that we should only care about the current generation, and a 90% chance that generational status isn't morally relevant (obviously this is a simplification but I believe the result generalizes). Then the expected utility of AMF is

0.1 * (short-term direct effects only) + 0.9 * (all effects)

Far future effects still dominate.

You could say it's wrong to maximize expected utility across multiple value systems, but I don't see how you can make reasonable decisions at all if you're not trying to maximize expected utility. If you're trying to "diversify" across multiple value systems then you're doing something that's explicitly bad according to a linear consequentialist value system, and you'd need some justification for why diversifying across value systems is better than maximizing expected value over value systems.

This is a nice idea but I worry it won't work.

Even with healthy moral uncertainty, I think we should attach very little weight to moral theories that give future people's utility negligible moral weight. For the kinds of reasons that suggest we can attach them less weight don't go any way to suggesting that we can ignore them. To do this they'd have to show that future people's moral weight was (more than!) inversely proportional to their temporal distance from us. But the reasons they give tend to show that we have special obligations to people in our generation, and say nothing about our obligations to people living in the year 3000AD vs people living in the year 30,000AD. [Maybe i'm missing an argument here?!] Thus any plausible moral theory will such that the calculation will be dominated by very long term effects, and long term effects will dominate our decision making process.

Why would we put more weight on current generations, though? I've never seen a good argument for that. Surely there's no meaningful moral difference between faraway, distant, unknown people alive today and faraway, distant, unknown people alive tomorrow. I can't think of any arguments for charitable distribution which would fall apart in the case of people living in a different generation, or any arguments for agent relative moral value which depend specifically on someone living at the same time as you, or anything of the sort. Even if you believe that moral uncertainty is a meaningful issue, you still need reasons to favor one possibility over countervailing possibilities that cut in opposite directions.

It is an effective way to help poor people today and unlikely to be a comparably exceptional way to make the long run worse. If you were building a portfolio to do well on many worldviews or for moral trade it would be a strong addition.

If we assign value to future people then it could very well be an exceptional way to make the long run worse. We don't even have to give future people equal value, we just have to let future people's value have equal potential to aggregate, and you have the same result.

You can avoid worry about the sign of its long run effects by remembering relative magnitude.

Morality only provides judgements of one act or person over another. Morality doesn't provide any appeal to a third, independent "value scale", so it doesn't make sense to try to cross-optimize across multiple moral systems. I don't think there is any rhyme or reason to saying that it's okay to have 1 unit of special obligation moral value at the expense of 10 units of time-egalitarian moral value, or 20 units, or anything of the sort.

So you're saying that basically "this action is really good according to moral system A, and only a little bit bad according to moral system B, so in this case moral system A dominates." But these descriptors of something being very good or slightly bad only mean anything in reference to other moral outcomes within that moral system. It's like saying "this car is faster than that car is loud".

Why is it better to look for sufficient evidence rather than maximizing expected value (keeping in mind that we can't take expected value estimates literally)? Or are you just saying the same thing in a different way?

What sort of effects would increasing equality have that just increasing economic welfare wouldn't?

Again, this is an issue where it looks net positive but it's not robustly net positive. Promoting effective giving could be harmful if effective global poverty charities are actually net negative, and promoting effective giving only causes people to cause harm more effectively. (Brian Tomasik once raised the concern that reducing existential risk could lead to astronomical future suffering, and spreading effective altruism might be bad if it causes more people to support existential risk reduction.) I believe this is probably false, but I'm not that confident that it's false, so I can't say with conviction that promoting effective giving is net positive.