Good point. I think you would probably only consider the direct costs to those donors (pain/morbidity/risk) and not foregone donations, since presumably the typical liver donor participating in a chain is not devoting a lot of their earnings to impactful charity.

I only am familiar with the US system unfortunately. I think this evaluation holds up pretty well for EAs even though its some years old. 

Yes,  I agree it's frustrating. I did a more detailed one when considering living kidney donation. Plus, living liver donation is less common.

My fast liver donation BOTEC assumes 80k hours of working hours (reduce if older?).

1 in 250 chance of death (source, maybe too high)= -320 work hours

About a month of work lost due to recovery (source)= -160 work hours. 

So maybe spending 500 work hours to extend one persons life. 

Ignoring time off work due to potential reimbursment, if you netted $15 per hour for the hours lost to risk of death and donated you could probably save a life via AMF. My take is that liver donation probably falls below normal EA effectiveness for most EAs. In contrast, I think kidney donation makes sense for at least some EAs

If you think you have stronger obligation to Americans than other people, it might work out. Or if you think your donation could inspire others. It also depends on how impactful you think your job is directly. I will say I really admire liver donors even if it might not clear the bar of cost-effectiveness for many. 

More sympathetic to biosecurity issues than at the start of the year. Pretty convinced there are clear things that would be useful to do and help a lot of people. Plus, FTX situation cut out a lot of money that went to the general area such as SBF's brother's group-Guarding Against Pandemics.

Sales tax: Interesting. I live in a state with sales tax but it doesn't apply to lottery tickets.

Could also make sense for people who don't itemize so don't benefit from charitable deduction but would itemize if they won the larger prizes.

I didn't downvote you. I think you're using Pascal's Mugging idiosyncratically.

Pascal's Mugging is normally for infinitesimal odds and astronomical payouts, with both odds and payouts often being really uncertain.

Here odds and payout are well-defined. The odds while extreme aren't infinitesimal.

I think we should be doing lots of things with one in a million chances. Start-ups that could change the world, promising AI research paths, running for president or prime minister. :)

Not quite a discipline, but I think American Christianity lost cultural influence by denominations ceding control of their colleges (based off this book).

Had the men's right movement established men's studies as more distinct from women's studies maybe they would have benefited (hard to believe they ever had the political power to achieve this.)

I can imagine a world where sociobiology became its own discipline. It did not.

I think the establishment of chiropractic schools legitimized the practice in the United States compared to other alternative medicines. Also, allowed the practice to survive despite opposition to physicians.

I don't have any criticisms of the GPI. Having a center seems to really free up the time of important researchers and gives them a lot more flexibility. But trying to create dozens of EA centers around the country/world would be less promising to me than trying to foster a discipline.

UNC Chapel Hill, a prestigious state school in the US, lets you endow a distinguished professorship for $2M. A major donor could endow several departments worth of professorships. The  Agricultural and Applied Association has annual revenue less than $2M.  The money to kickstart this discipline seems high but not outrageous.