Yeah the call out of the blue with someone effectively saying "we need your help ASAP for someone in dire straits with a blood cancer" was extremely morally clarifying. My reaction was essentially the same as yours. That was one of the reasons I felt uncomfortable trying do a traditional EA cost-effectiveness breakdown for this (although I have it in a private google doc) -- why wouldn't you just try to help save the other person's life?
Donating right around the start of COVID lockdowns sounds like it would have been crazy! I'm very glad to hear your donation went well and you took the leap with kidney donation - I hope you had a positive experience with that one too.
Some folks in the comments on Scott Alexander's piece on kidney donation were speculating that you would have an easier time getting kidney donations if there was some sort of similar matching process like for bone marrow (although it would have to be mostly artificial of course)
I did some back-of-the-envelope type calculation as well and found it to be quite cost-effective per QALY, imho. (I can post my reasoning if there's interest, but I'm new to that sort of analysis so I left it out of the post.) @Joey has a favorable cost-effectiveness breakdown in his comment as well. It looks like there were some disagreements in the comments of the old post on the cost-effectiveness
Hey, glad to hear you had a good experience with it as well. Your post really resonated with me - I certainly feel more inclined to donate in other ways since I donated PBSC. Most notably, it pushed me more towards kidney donation, although I'm still on the fence about it too.
Thank you, I'm very happy to hear that!
Yeah the call out of the blue with someone effectively saying "we need your help ASAP for someone in dire straits with a blood cancer" was extremely morally clarifying. My reaction was essentially the same as yours. That was one of the reasons I felt uncomfortable trying do a traditional EA cost-effectiveness breakdown for this (although I have it in a private google doc) -- why wouldn't you just try to help save the other person's life?
Donating right around the start of COVID lockdowns sounds like it would have been crazy! I'm very glad to hear your donation went well and you took the leap with kidney donation - I hope you had a positive experience with that one too.
Some folks in the comments on Scott Alexander's piece on kidney donation were speculating that you would have an easier time getting kidney donations if there was some sort of similar matching process like for bone marrow (although it would have to be mostly artificial of course)
Yeah, looks like there's an older post about Be The Match, with some more conventional EA cost-benefit analysis: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dnXPjagqyKKtYSrWv/be-the-match-a-volunteer-list-for-bone-marrow-donation
I did some back-of-the-envelope type calculation as well and found it to be quite cost-effective per QALY, imho. (I can post my reasoning if there's interest, but I'm new to that sort of analysis so I left it out of the post.) @Joey has a favorable cost-effectiveness breakdown in his comment as well. It looks like there were some disagreements in the comments of the old post on the cost-effectiveness
Hey, glad to hear you had a good experience with it as well. Your post really resonated with me - I certainly feel more inclined to donate in other ways since I donated PBSC. Most notably, it pushed me more towards kidney donation, although I'm still on the fence about it too.
Thanks for the kind words! I just added the UK registry to the post as well, thank you for sharing
Thanks for providing this! I've just added it to the TLDR & end section