[Content warning: effective altruism.]
When I was eleven years old, I whispered over a worn copy of my favorite book and took a pledge:
In Life’s name and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Life’s service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so — till Universe’s end.
Of course, nothing happened.
Nita, Kit, and Dairine couldn’t walk two feet without stumbling over an alien species that had to be rescued from the Lone Power, two trees involved in a territorial dispute, or a dog that was actually God; when I looked at all the problems in the world, I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t even know where to begin. Wizards had magic that gave them great power to do good; I felt like I couldn’t do anything at all, like all I could do was raise awareness of problems that the people I was telling about couldn’t help with either.
To be honest, it sort of filled me with despair. I felt like my life was meaningless. Like I would live an ordinary life, work a boring job and get married and maybe have kids, and nobody outside my immediate circle would even notice that I existed. I wouldn’t get to save the world, like the people in my books. My impact on the world would be zero. I was afraid of sitting on my deathbed and thinking, “my life was useless.”
I have good news! That is definitely not a problem we have right now.
Right now, the median American income for those aged 25 or above is $32,140. If the average American donated ten percent of their income to the Against Malaria Foundation, they would save a child’s life. One child, who would be dead, and isn’t anymore.
And that’s just the effect on children. People other than children get malaria [citation needed]. Distributing malaria nets reduces the rates of anemia, enlarged spleen, poor nutrition, low birthweight, and miscarriage. Because the Against Malaria Foundation’s nets are treated with insecticide, they help kill mosquitoes, which is an important step towards eliminating malaria forever.
But let’s just talk about children. If you’re a median American– a normal person, by definition– and you start giving at age 25 and continue until you’re 62 (the average age of retirement), you will save 37 children’s lives.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems to me to be a pretty good life’s purpose. When you’re sitting on your deathbed, thinking about the impact you had on the world and your legacy and the regrets in your life and what it all, ultimately, meant, you can say to yourself, “I saved the lives of 37 children!”
And I somehow suspect that a lot of my readers aren’t median income earners. If you’re a software developer, you can probably save more than a hundred children.
Most people will never write a brilliant novel, or start a company that makes millions of dollars, or become a neurosurgeon extracting cancers no one else can deal with, or get bitten by a radioactive spider and become a superhero. But everyone– yes, everyone– can save the life of a child.
And that’s pretty amazing.
In an utter cliche, it turned out the magic was within me all along. This New Year, I’m not talking the Wizard’s Oath. I’m taking a different pledge, but one that has the same fundamental spirit:
I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, now and in the years to come. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.
Giving What We Can is holding a pledge drive. I hope you will join me in taking it.
Thing of Things 
I am confused by the idea that the Definitionally Normal person could be so wealthy. Doesn’t everyone live in a lean-to and wonder where their next meal is coming from?
I guess that explains why EA is a thing.
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“…they help kill mosquitoes, which is an important step towards eliminating malaria forever.”
Wow; this gives me a lot of hope! Do we really have a chance of eliminating malaria – not just managing it forever, but actually doing away with it? That’s amazing!
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AFAIK this is the current best knowledge on malaria eradication. It’s possible, but ambitious, and would probably involve the development of new tech.
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New tech being needed is disappointing… but it looks like it’s only incrementally new?
TRIUMPH IS NEAR!
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I hope you will forgive me this self-advertising, but I had virtually the same thought: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1497121570589458&id=100008748870106&pnref=story
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I feel no emotional motivation to save the lives of children I don’t know.
It’s hard for me to pinpoint why. It’s not just edgy posturing either.
One reason is probably that I don’t think the overall consequences will actually be good. Life is overrated and humans are generally pretty evil, which will include most of these children when they grow up. Also they’re replaceable and the more you save/make, the fewer resources are available for each. Maybe if they carried their own weight, it would not be such a zero-sum game. But if these were cultures where people carried their own weight, they wouldn’t need effective altruism in the first place.
None of this makes sense to me.
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Nice intentions, but I don’t see the point.
Fact 1: These children should never have been born in the first place (evidence: their parents can’t even afford bed nets for them).
Fact 2: Saving these children’s lives is not done with bed nets. You also have to pay for their entire lifetime’s cost of living.
Fact 3: If these children survive past puberty, they will in turn make more children. Then you have the same problem all over again.
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You’re welcome to contribute to family planning charities! GiveWell doesn’t have a top-rated one yet, but IPPFAR is quite good!
The current life expectancy at birth for sub-Saharan Africans is 54, and a lot of that is infant mortality, so the children saved can be expected to live almost to sixty without other interventions!
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You’re going to need more than malaria nets to really get rid of malaria.
Consider the Maremma: historically hideously unhealthy, due to the marshes; people got malaria and other fevers.
A combination of draining the marshes and an intense programme of malaria eradication during the late 40s meant that malaria was no longer a problem.
So the first lesson here: malaria nets alone aren’t going to cut it. You need other interventions, such as draining stagnant water reservoirs.
However, after a sixty year gap, the possibility of the re-introduction of malaria is now a risk.
Climate change is part of that, with warmer temperatures, but the main driver seems to be the intensive rice cultivation that has become a staple of the area. Because rice fields are large bodies of stagnant water, lovely breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
So the second lesson is: constant vigilance. And even a third lesson: if we’re pushing for everyone to be vegan (for ethical reasons of animal suffering), then food crops such as rice are going to be what humans will eat. And as we can see, the places where rice thrives are also going to be the places where malaria thrives.
So this is my problem with the naiveté of Effective Altruism: putting all your eggs into the GiveWell basket, trusting them (or another organisation like them) to evaluate the most effective charity on various metrics (because stats are maths and maths is science and science is magic!), and falling for catchy simple solutions like “Malaria nets will change the world!”
I recognise that as humans we want catchy simple solutions. But life is not that easy. That’s mainly why I’m grumping away here: you’re all (relatively) young and techy, so the notion of one
magicscientific solution is very, very appealing. But children, the fight never ends that simply. You have to wash the dishes every day, like it or lump it. You have to keep on solving the same problems in every generation.Malaria nets are good, don’t get me wrong. But they are not going to be the saviour this kind of “Donate to a charity that will help get rid of malaria forever” message promotes.
Do donate if you want to “save a child’s life. One child, who would be dead, and isn’t anymore” because yes, that’s good. But don’t think “Well, that’s that problem killed dead!” because no. It won’t be.
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For what it’s worth, I completely agree with you, Ozy. Furthermore, I think it is better that their parents do not have to grieve for a dead child, I would rather live in a world that’s less INSANE than the one we live in now, etc., etc.
I have trouble imagining people who, on reflective equilibrium, prefer a state of world where there is more suffering than one where there is less, but hey. Takes all sorts to make the world.
I guess this comment is rather low in information value, but I figured I should support you and let you know that not all of your commentators feel the way Sam does.
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“You have to keep on solving the same problems in every generation.” Hmm…how many friends do you have die of smallpox?
Also, in general, the best thing to do on the margin is not equivalent to the best thing for everybody to be doing, and equivocating between the two is silly.
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“You’re welcome to contribute to family planning charities!”
Good suggestion. Maybe I will. I’ve just never come across any that I think actually make much of a difference. People need to change their actual behavior, but maybe subsidizing contraception is better than doing nothing.
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Please don’t phrase it like that. It may be true, but it’s not helpful.
There are people who will whip themselves bloody in a frenzy of “I am not giving the maximum I could give! I am not living on tins of beans and working three jobs so I can donate more and more! Children are dying and it is my fault – I am killing them!”
And quite frankly, those are the kind of people for whom this appeal would be most effective, so having them melt down via scrupulosity and freeze into ineffectual guilt is probably not going to help the cause of effective altruism.
On the other hand, there are those (like myself) who are sufficiently robust they will go “Oh, a child will die? So what?” (For myself, it ties in nicely with my self-hatred and suicidal ideation linked to depression, so yay! more things to feel bad about the next time I’m experiencing baseless sadness!)
Things like “a child will die if you don’t do this” work both too well (on the scrupulous) and not well enough (on those who like facts but refuse to be emotionally arm-twisted into giving to cause X rather than cause Y).
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I’m going to take a leaf out of your mindfulness posts:
Experience the statement “One child, who would be dead, and isn’t anymore.” Do not judge the statement. Do not let associations colour your experience of the statement. Do not consider if the experience described is good or bad; simply accept it.
Remember that any emotions elicited in you by this statement are merely thoughts, and thoughts are not necessarily true just because you are thinking them. Feeling sad, guilty, angry, determined to act, or other emotions are responses to be observed, described, and participated in for the moment.
Do not make plans for the future or have memories of the past based on the statement. Experience it in the moment, in the now, nothing else.
Practice regarding the statement nonjudgmentally. This means recognising that the feelings associated with the statement (“death is bad! cute children are dying! I must help cute children!”) are not facts about the thing described but facts about you, your value system, and your preferences.
Be one-minded about the statement. Do not get caught up in plans, pledges, or other things. Bring your mind back when it wanders.
Be effective. Focus on what works, not on what your emotional urges are telling you to do (“give money to charity to save cute children!”) Is it better for that child to die early and avoid a life of poverty, other diseases, hunger and war?
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Yes, I’ve done that, I still want to give money to the Against Malaria Foundation, because my preference is that fewer children be dead.
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That would depend on the circumstances of the child that you are ‘saving’. How can we tell that? And could we not also give to charities which try to combat poverty?
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