How many lives do you think can be saved for between $5k and $10k? The smaller the number, the more "~$5k per life saved" looks like an impact certificate you're buying from Good Ventures at a price assessed by GiveWell, rather than a serious claim that for an extra $5k you can cause a life to be saved through the intervention you funded.

The larger the number, the more the marginal cost looks like the average costs for large numbers of lives saved (and therefore the "why don't they do an experiment at scale?" argument holds).

Claims that you can make the world different in well-specified ways through giving (e.g. more lives saved by the intervention you funded) imply the latter scenario, and substantively conflict with the former one.

Do you disagree with this model? If so, how?

He then argues that the world does not look like it actually has $50B of life-saving opportunities for $5k a piece lying around

This point seems like it's doing a lot of the work, and I'm honestly uncertain. I can imagine it going either way - for example I can imagine the average life saved being very cheap when you're taking advantages of things at scale.

So it seems like a crux whether Gates Foundation's cost effectiveness is comparably low relative to $5k (GiveWell's suggested cost-effectiveness estimate). If it seems higher, then something is going wrong. Oli and I looked into two cases, here's some partial work:

• Gates Foundation spent $1.3 billion on malaria in 2012. For that to be beating GiveWell cost effectiveness estimates, it would have to beat $5k/person saved, which would be 260k people. This is not obviously implausible, given that ~500k people died of malaria that year. This would overall mean they'd have to have reduced malaria instances by around 30%, which seems massive but not implausible.
• Measles has stayed around constant since 2010, around 300-400k deaths per year. It seems like Gates might have put 100s of millions in, which means for GiveWell's recommendations to beat Gates' cost effectiveness, measles cases would have had to counterfactually double in that time period, or something like this, which seems somewhat unlikely.
  • However, I think that Gates was trying to 'kill off' measles, which has a large returns in the long term, so it's not obvious they shouldn't spend a lot of money on high variance bets to maximise coverage of measles vaccines.

OK but (1) what about the fact that to a large extent they're not actually talking about saving lives if you look into the details of the cost-effectiveness estimate? (2) GiveWell's analysis does not account for the kind of publication bias end users of GiveWell's recommendations should expect, so yes this does analytically imply that we should adjust the $5k substantially downwards based on some kind of model of what kinds of effectiveness claims get promoted to our attention.

Could you give an example or two? I don't mean of one person assuming shallow diminishing returns and another assuming steep diminishing returns -- obviously different people may have different opinions -- but of a single person doing the sort of combination you describe.

The actual article doesn't, so far as I can see, at all focus on any such cases; it doesn't say "look, here are some bogus arguments people make that assume two different incompatible things"; rather, it says "EA organizations say you should give money to EA causes because that way you can do a lot of good per unit money, but they are lying to you and you should do other things with your money instead". (Not an actual quotation, of course, but I think a fair paraphrase.)

So I don't understand how your defence here makes any sense as a defence of the actual article.

A couple of other points, while I have your attention.

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The article says this:

My former employer GiveWell in particular stands out, since it publishes such cost-per-life-saved numbers, and yet recommended to Good Ventures that it not fully fund GiveWell's top charities; they were worried that Good Ventures would be saving more than their "fair share" of lives.

All credit to you, once again, for linking to what GiveWell actually wrote. But ... it seems to me that, while indeed they did use the words "fair share", your description of their reasons doesn't at all match what they say. Let me quote from it:

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve had many internal discussions about how to reconcile the goals of (a) recommending as much giving as possible from Good Ventures to top charities, which we consider outstanding giving opportunities; (b) preserving long-run incentives for individuals to support these charities as well. The proposals that have come up mostly fit into one of three broad categories:

... and then the three categories are "funging", "matching", and "splitting", and it's in explaining what they mean by "splitting" that they use the words "fair share". But the goal here, as they say it, is not at all to have everyone save a "fair share" of lives. They give some reasons for favouring "splitting" (tentatively and corrigibly) and those reasons have nothing to do with "fair shares". Also, they never, btw, talk about a fair share of lives saved but of funding provided, and while of course those things are closely connected they are not intensionally equivalent and there is an enormous difference between "we favour an approach that can be summarized as 'donors consider the landscape of donors and try to estimate their share of the funding gap, and give that much'" and "it would be bad if anyone saved more than their fair share of lives".

Could you explain why you chose to describe GiveWell's position by saying 'they were worried that Good Ventures would be saving more than their "fair share" of lives'? Do you actually think that is an accurate description of GiveWell's position?

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A key step in your argument -- though it seems like it's simply taken the place of other entirely different key steps, with the exact same conclusion allegedly following from it, which as I mentioned above seems rather fishy -- goes like this. "If one could do a great deal of good as efficiently as the numbers commonly thrown about imply, then it would be possible to run an experiment that would verify the effectiveness of the interventions, by e.g. completely eliminating malaria in one country. No one is running such an experiment, which shows that they really know those numbers aren't real. On the other hand, if there's only a smallish amount of such good to be done that efficiently, then EA organizations should be spending all their money on doing it, instead of whatever else they're doing. But they aren't, which again shows that they really know those numbers aren't real. Either way, what they say is dishonest PR and you should do something else with your money."

It looks to me as if basically every step in this argument is wrong. Maybe this is because I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, or failing to see how the logic works. Let me lay out the things that look wrong to me; perhaps you can clarify.

• The "great deal of good" branch: running experiments.
• It doesn't at all follow from "there is an enormous amount of good to be done at a rate of $5k per life-equivalent" that there are nice conclusive experiments like reducing malaria deaths to zero in one country for one year and measuring the cost. Many malaria deaths in a given year may be from infections in earlier years; even if a large fraction of malaria can be prevented at $5k per life-equivalent, the marginal cost will surely increase a lot as you get to the hardest cases; eliminating all malaria deaths somehere will probably require multiple different kinds of intervention, and any given organization has expertise only in a subset of them, and coordination is hard.
• You might want (genuinely, or for rhetorical purposes, or both) EA charities' money to be spent on running nice conclusive experiments, but that is no guarantee that that's actually the most effective thing for them to be doing.
• Still less is it a guarantee that they will see that it is. (It could be that running such an experiment is the best thing they could do because it would convince lots of people and open the floodgates for lots of donations, but that for one reason or another they don't realise this.) So even if (1) there are nice conclusive experiments they could run and (2) that would actually be the best use of their money, that's not enough to get from "they aren't running the experiments" to "they know the results would be bad" or anything like that. They might just have an inaccurate model of what the consequences of the experiments would be. But, for the avoidance of doubt, I think #1 and #2 are both extremely doubtful too.
• It's not perfectly clear to me who is supposed to be running these experiments. In order to get to your conclusion that EA organizations like GiveWell are dishonest, it needs to be those organizations that could run them but don't. But ... I don't think that's how it works? GiveWell doesn't have any expertise in running malaria-net experiments. An organization like AMF could maybe run them (but see above: most likely it would actually take lots of different organizations working together to get the sort of clear-cut answers you want) but it isn't AMF that's making the cost-per-life-equivalent claims you object to, and GiveWell doesn't have the power to force AMF to burn a large fraction of its resources on running an experiment that (for whatever reason) it doesn't see as the best use of those resources. (You mention the Gates Foundation as well, but they don't seem actually relevant here.)
• The "smallish amount of good" branch: what follows?
• If I understand your argument here correctly (which I may well not; for whatever reason, I find all your comments on this point hard to understand), you reckon that if there's (say) $100M worth of $5k-per-life-equivalent good to do, then GiveWell should just get Good Ventures to do it and move on.
• As you know, they have given some reasons for not doing that (the reasons I think you mischaracterized in terms of 'saving more than their "fair share" of lives').
• I think your position is: what they're doing is deliberately not saving lives in order to keep having an attractive $5k-per-life-equivalent figure to dangle in front of donors, which means that if you give $5k in the hope of doing one life-equivalent of good then you're likely actually just reducing the amount GiveWell will get Good Ventures to contribute by $5k, so even if the marginal cost really is $5k per life-equivalent then you aren't actually getting that life-equivalent because of GiveWell's policies. (I'm not at all sure I'm understanding you right on this point, though.)
• Whether or not it's your position, I think it's a wrong position unless what GiveWell have said about this is outright lies. When discussing the "splitting" approach they end up preferring, they say this: 'But they [sc. incentives for individual donors] are neutral, provided that the “fair share” is chosen in a principled way rather than as a response to the projected behavior of the other funder.' (Emphasis mine.) And: 'we’ve chosen 50% largely because we don’t want to engineer – or appear to be engineering – the figure around how much we project that individuals will give this year (which would create the problematic incentives associated with “funging” approaches).'
• Incidentally, they also say this: 'For the highest-value giving opportunities, we want to recommend that Good Ventures funds 100%. It is more important to us to ensure these opportunities are funded than to set incentives appropriately.' So for those "highest-value" cases, at least, they are doing exactly what you complain they are not doing.
• A separate consideration: the most effective things for a large organization to fund may not be the same things that are most effective for individual donors to fund. E.g., there may be long-term research projects that only make sense if future support is guaranteed. I think the Gates Foundation does quite a bit of this sort of thing, which is another reason why I think you're wrong to bring them in as (implicitly) an example of an organization that obviously would be giving billions for malaria nets if they were really as effective as the likes of GiveWell say they are.
• Suppose it turns out that the widely-touted figures for what it costs to do one life-equivalent of good are, in fact, somewhat too low. Maybe the right figure is $15k/life instead of $5k/life, or something like that. And suppose it turns out that GiveWell and similar organizations know this and are publicizing smaller numbers because they think it will produce more donations. Does it follow that we can't do a lot of good without a better and more detailed model of the relevant bit of the world than we can realistically obtain, and that we should all abandon EA and switch to "taking care of yourself and your friends and the people around you and your community and trying specific concrete things that might have specific concrete benefits"? I don't see that it does: to make EA a bad "investment" it seems to me that it has to be much wronger than you've given any reason to think it is likely to be. (Jeff K has said something similar in comments to the original article, but you didn't respond.)

For the avoidance of doubt, I didn't make a character assessment of Ben, I made an assessment of his arguments on this point. I think those arguments are the sort of arguments people make in bad faith, but that needn't mean Ben's making them in bad faith. But he might reasonably care what it looks like; if so, he might want to take a different approach in responding to his critics.