The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world? • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by backlava » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 10:49 AM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #94

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ins…

Convinced? You're committed a magestic logical fallacy. Sorry you don't understand the mistake you've made and you're going to continue sneering at good people. Don't switch from volunteering to disaster tourism. There are millions of people who volunteer, and only a handful of people who travel overseas to help. What have you done recently? Do you actually donate? And did you read about the money the Red Cross can't…

Your rhetorical style here is off-putting. I don't think he's committed any logical fallacy. It's perfectly possible to do charitable work selfishly. For example, if you were offered a choice between saving two lives or, for the same money, saving only one life but getting a nice packet documenting the one life saved, it's selfish to choose the latter for the purpose of making yourself feel better. Even though you're still doing good.

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

#102

Post by rictic » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 11:24 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #100

A point on "best." There seems to be a lot of interest, some coming from the tech culture of evaluating charity and its efficiency. This is a good thing and could make a lot of difference. But for an individual that wants to give, you don't necessarily need it. You just need to find a destination for your donation. Try to understand that single organisation. I like the idea of simple things where the money = thing eq…

> You just need to find a destination for your donation.

The effective altruism counterpoint is that the same £400 is just about the amount necessary to save a life from malaria or schistosomiasis. Usually a child. The last number I saw was that ~$800 to one of GiveWell's top charities can be expected to save a life.

The "how to make global donations" problem is hard, but it's important, and we're fortunate that great work and research has been done. Let's use it to put our charitable donations to their best use!

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

#103

Post by technomancy » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 11:42 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #95

technomancy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I get what you're saying, but even in Star Trek this doesn't work without a source of essentially-perpetual energy.

It is pretty lucky that we are only 93 million miles away from exactly that :) I actually did the calculations back in the early 1990s of how many dollars you could generate by capturing all the solar output combined with synthetic labor. It is something on the order of 10^24 times the entire world GDP. When you have that level of resources then scarcity ceases to be a concern.

TBH I do agree that this is possible; I just think we have a long way to go as a civilization just in terms of basic human empathy and decency in addition to the technical challenges. And the technical challenges pale in the face of the sociological ones. I think that a lot of the oppression that happens in the world isn't driven by scarcity but by bigotry and prejudice.

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

#104

Post by netcan » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 12:09 PM UTC

rictic wrote: post #102

netcan wrote: post #100

A point on "best." There seems to be a lot of interest, some coming from the tech culture of evaluating charity and its efficiency. This is a good thing and could make a lot of difference. But for an individual that wants to give, you don't necessarily need it. You just need to find a destination for your donation. Try to understand that single organisation. I like the idea of simple things where the money = thing eq…

> You just need to find a destination for your donation. The effective altruism counterpoint is that the same £400 is just about the amount necessary to save a life from malaria or schistosomiasis. Usually a child. The last number I saw was that ~$800 to one of GiveWell's top charities can be expected to save a life. The "how to make global donations" problem is hard, but it's important, and we're fortunate that grea…

The choices between putting a roof over a family in The Philippines and saving a child from malaria in Myanmar is an impossible one. Information can't solve it.

I have nothing against Give Well's approach. I think it is important. I'm just making the point that at a personal choice level, the "problem" is a lot more solvable. You only need to know about one charity, really.

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

#105

Post by _0ffh » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 12:24 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #28

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…

Americans gave $358 billion in philanthropy last year. https://philanthropy.com/interactives/giving-usa-2015 A trillion dollars every 3 years. Simply trying to make every dollar more effective would go a long way. We probably need fewer, but more effective charities, for example. Identify the best ways to fund medical research.

You mean, like, precisely not stuff like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

On a more constructive note, I have a rather high opinion of Doctors Without Borders.

(I know that negativity in comments is discouraged, but I hope I'll get away with this.)

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

#106

Post by danieltillett » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 12:25 PM UTC

technomancy wrote: post #103

danieltillett wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty lucky that we are only 93 million miles away from exactly that :) I actually did the calculations back in the early 1990s of how many dollars you could generate by capturing all the solar output combined with synthetic labor. It is something on the order of 10^24 times the entire world GDP. When you have that level of resources then scarcity ceases to be a concern.

TBH I do agree that this is possible; I just think we have a long way to go as a civilization just in terms of basic human empathy and decency in addition to the technical challenges. And the technical challenges pale in the face of the sociological ones. I think that a lot of the oppression that happens in the world isn't driven by scarcity but by bigotry and prejudice.

I think it is a bit of a circle - our economic system requires bigotry and prejudice and these in turn help support our current economic system. Break the need for oppression of the poor and my hope is we stop oppressing.

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

#107

Post by mmrasheed » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

My two cents... Open your startup in the third world, developing countries. Or, at least lead some people in those regions to grow their own problem solving skills with IT and engineering. Or, travel to those regions with your targeted donation savings and see the suffering of humans.

If charity means donating the money we think we no longer need, then we should go for any of the charity foundations mentioned in other comments. But the real charity would be to take our butts off our comfort zones, travel to the targeted countries, experience the real suffering of humans, and to find out how we can contribute with our top notch expertise in IT and engineering. Even discovering hidden prospects in those regions and nurturing them for local socio-economic development would be cool charitable work. Even, opening our startups and employing local people would contribute more significantly in those regions than millions of dollars in donations to those named charity foundations. It will not only improve our skill in practical problem solving, it will also enhance our spirituality.

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

#108

Post by technomancy » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 12:44 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #106

technomancy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I do agree that this is possible; I just think we have a long way to go as a civilization just in terms of basic human empathy and decency in addition to the technical challenges. And the technical challenges pale in the face of the sociological ones. I think that a lot of the oppression that happens in the world isn't driven by scarcity but by bigotry and prejudice.

I think it is a bit of a circle - our economic system requires bigotry and prejudice and these in turn help support our current economic system. Break the need for oppression of the poor and my hope is we stop oppressing.

I hope you're right! A lot of the assumptions surrounding scarcity are so deeply-ingrained into the way we think that it's difficult to speculate on what would happen otherwise.

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

#109

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 1:13 PM UTC

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 kills ~100,000 people every day

People die. In other news water is wet.

Now, I'm all for making people live longer, with quality of life

> and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others

Because doctors prop up the sick (often with family support) and artificially extend their life while costing a lot of money in 'treatments' for unrecoverable conditions.

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

#110

Post by fizixer » Sat, Jun 20, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

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.

Just the way we should've estimated the likelihood of curing cancer before we started pouring money in it. Probably we did, and then based on the importance of the matter, poured in billions of dollars anyway.

SENS approach is essentially suggesting something better than that. According to them, pouring billions of dollars into individual age-related diseases (e.g., age-related onset of cancer) is the wrong way to go, because age-related diseases are a symptom of the root cause, which is aging itself, defined to be molecular and cellular damage through out the body. If that is tackled head on, there would enourmous savings in health care costs (both maintenance and research) and a positive impact on the economy as a result of more healthy people being available for work.