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The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#31

Post by orangecat »

reagency wrote: post #21
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering. The problems facing the wealthy elites are not the problems most people face.

Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering.

Actually, it is. A huge amount of resources is spent on trying to treat the symptoms of aging, and much of that comes out of the pockets of younger people.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#32

Post by foolinaround »

one angle not addressed is there could be a social contract and relationship between the donor and the recipient.

This currently assumes a single transaction, but what if the recipient had a way to pay it back and/or pay it forward? If the donor had the opportunity to view the results of the donation, the satisfaction from it and the relationship obtained makes the sacrifice worth it.

If there was a system that helped to track it with the various privacy and other concerns, that would be so awesome!

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#33

Post by bhouston »

reasonattlm wrote: post #27
bhouston wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SENS Research Foundation is made for relatively wealthy people who already have money and health who want to live longer. Do they have any successes or measures of efficiency? It seems like science fiction pie in the sky research by a small group of true believers.

Who suffers the most from age-related disease? The rich or the poor? Are novel medical treatments forever only available to the rich, or do they become ever cheaper, more widespread, and more effective over time? How much of your own personal future are you willing to sacrifice to spite rich people who might get access to early, inefficient technologies before you do? How much of everyone else's future are you willin…

What products has this SENS group ever produced besides a bunch of talk? Have they even produced one research result paper in a top journal? Or is it just a bunch of talk.

I guess maybe you can argue that funding people to advocate for anti-aging research can encourage more people to engage in it? Is that your argument on why this is a useful charity to fund?

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#34

Post by rayiner »

reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage. The aggregate joy of society will go down if SENS is successful.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#35

Post by smitherfield »

smitherfield wrote: post #25
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

I'm a cynic on this subject, but my first thought when I see a young or youngish person do something like joining the Peace Corps is that they're resume-padding. A lot of that is because pretty much everyone I know who's done some kind of long-term charity work clearly was doing that (went off to the third world because they didn't get the internship/job they were applying for, or are angling to get into DC/politics…

As long as I'm making controversial statements, you can probably extend that to people who join the military in a role that isn't likely to see combat and who don't intend to make a career of it. That's a lot less common than the Peace Corps, Teach for America etc. amongst my very non-representative social milieu (urban, East Coast, liberal), however.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#36

Post by kijin »

baddox wrote: post #19
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.

This is very important. The chance of being able to eliminate nearly all age-related diseases in the foreseeable future is very small. The chance of any single donation making a difference there is also fairly small, whereas other donations go more directly toward saving lives.

If I had to choose between contributing 0.1% of the cost of a project that has a 1% chance of saving 100,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.0 lives a day), versus contributing 0.2% of the cost of a project that has a 60% chance of saving 1,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.2 lives a day), I might choose the latter.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#37

Post by ThrustVectoring »

rayiner wrote: post #34
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marri…

And so your solution is killing people? Seriously?

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#38

Post by merpnderp »

philipn wrote: post #26
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

This is a really common argument that people make, but I think it's missing some essential externalities. I've worked in the nonprofit space for ~7 years now, and this is the most common over-cocktails argument folks tend to make. First of all, and most importantly, most people do not give very much of their income away. And as you accumulate more money, your rate of giving tends to decrease. There are counter exampl…

How is turning boreal peat forests into palm oil plantations equal to capital extraction? Isn't it the exact opposite in that land of less value has been turned into land of more value? I think I'm missing something here.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#39

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mattmanser wrote: post #9
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

You've redefined a word. There's nothing selfish about doing something selfless because it's not being done in the 'optimum' way (as defined by you). It might be inefficient, but it's not selfish. Regardless of your linguistic tricks, would they even have the motivation to make money on wall street? Would your 'optimum' plan even work with their personality? Is it actually optimal or merely fantasy? You'd be better o…

Oh well, you're not convinced. It is however the entire point of the OP.

We might consider similar acts like eco-tourism, or disaster tourism, and so on. Where one spends enormous effort and money to visit the less-fortunate and go through the motions of helping. Arguably, to feel better about oneself. In those cases its clearly pretty selfish, and clearly better to have simply donated the money to a real charity instead.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#40

Post by reasonattlm »

kijin wrote: post #36
baddox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.

This is very important. The chance of being able to eliminate nearly all age-related diseases in the foreseeable future is very small. The chance of any single donation making a difference there is also fairly small, whereas other donations go more directly toward saving lives. If I had to choose between contributing 0.1% of the cost of a project that has a 1% chance of saving 100,000 lives a day (effectively saving…

The trouble is you'll never know what the actually numbers were until after the fact - the best you can do is make some educated investments at an 80/20 point. So either you learn yourself or you rely on consensus and authority, etc. You give to a middleman charity that has people who spend the time or do the work based on a theory of what should be done. You're relying on their expertise, and the expertise of those who say that, yes, you should put your money with charity A rather than charity B. But you'll never know if you could have got that 0.2% doing something else. Really, the best you should expect is that you can make a good enough choice to do good versus wasting your donation.

I started supporting SENS pretty early, so I had to actually go read the primary literature and take a few years to figure out that yes, I think that this is the best fulcrum to make progress in changing the research community, building the right tech, etc.

Nowadays, you can actually rely upon more distributed middle man expertise. E.g. that Peter Thiel invested millions in SENS, or that the SRF advisory board includes numerous researchers who are at the tops of their fields, names appearing in the media, all of whom endorse the SENS approach (http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board), and so on and so forth.

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