Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?

Discovery is by it's nature a random process, so a single 10,000$ investment could with some low probability make a 30 year difference for some drug.

People only investigate a finite number of things, adding just 1 more to the early stage to the millions already tried is not likely to be useful, but we simply don't know.

PS: After that point much larger sums are involved, but even then only a finite number of tests get done and they are very dependent on funding.

Effective altruism is saying one should donate by logic/ROI.

I think the Effective Altruism movement really belies its own values and cause with the fact that one of its own funds is for supporting:

> organizations that work on improving long-term outcomes for humanity. Grants will likely go to organizations that seek to reduce global catastrophic risks, especially those relating to advanced artificial intelligence. [1]

Yes, an argument can be made that it's important to fund prevention of global catastrophes, as while they're unlikely compared to the immediate threat of malaria, they'll cause much greater damage, thus increasing risk. However, to consider artificial intelligence to be a potential global catastrophe at all, let alone the single one requiring extra funding, is mostly unfounded. We currently can barely even define what the actual risk is, let alone how to mitigate it.

It's one thing to walk past homeless people in my city and not give them money, because I know that money could much more easily and effectively safe a life in malaria-ridden parts of the world. I think it's absolutely morally repugnant to walk past them and not give them money, because instead you're paying people to sit around thinking about AI.

[1] https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future

This is something close to what I work with. Ten years ago we started an organisation to help international development organisations use IT tools more effectively. In 2012 we took over the development and operation of a field data collection system from Water for People and together with them released it under an open source license. We work with 20+ governments and 200+ international NGOs in providing them with data solutions.

In my opinion, using data in international development work to see what is effective and how you can improve the work, has by a surprising number of people working in the sector, not been seen as particularly important. This is changing.

The awareness that more and better data, as well as the understanding how to handle the data and working on a sustainable technical infrastructure, has existed for some time in the sector, but has been slow to come to the forefront. At the end of the work with the Millennium Development Goals [1] an independent expert group was set up to give advice to the UN Secretary General [2] and to highlight this problem (Tim O’Reilly was probably the only person you would recognise that was part of the group).

But to actually get the sector to change has been very slow progress. An analysis by a group of organisations have identified the underspending on data and analytics that is essentially endemic. [4] They estimate that to be able to track the indicators chosen for the Sustainable Development Goals [4] we need to spend some US$ 350-500 million/year more than we do today.

(Not that all the indicators in the SDGs are that easy to measure and track. A colleague in the sector said “Of the full set of indicators (232), 88 are not backed up by available data or a suitable method to gather it, and 55 have some form of method but no data. […] Many of them are bordering on the realm of the unmeasurable”.) [5]

However, there is a change coming, but I don’t think it is happening fast enough. My opinion is that we won’t be able to achieve the SDGs for 2030 without data and we are not investing enough.

As part of our work we have since 2012 helped 11 governments collect data about water access and sanitation to cover about 130 million people, mainly in West and East Africa, in South East Asia and the Pacific. And we are working with organisations such as UNICEF and WHO, together with governments, to approach this in a systematic way with long term sustainability for the processes and systems that get put in place, but it is an uphill struggle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals

[2] http://www.undatarevolution.org

[3] Paris21, UNICEF, World Bank, ODI, Earth Institute, Open Data Watch, Simon Fraser University, UNIDO https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&ty...

[4] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&ty...

[5] http://news.trust.org/item/20180524172651-1sjk4/

That is an interesting comparison.

If they adopt either an Ayn Rand-style, "all altruism is selfish", or else a cynical, "altruism is just virtue signaling", then promoters of effective altruism should try to market it as sexy.

They could develop marketing materials portraying effective altruists as hard-working, hard-partying, sophisticated, game-winning, lady-killing, truly conscientious but aspirational millionaires that have developed such complete mastery over their own lives that they now work toward effective as the last game worth playing.

Like a mix between the hunter in "The Most Dangerous Game", Ozymandias from Watchmen, and Gandhi. Or something.