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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3334 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

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Perhaps weird comment here as I've just had two bottles of wine for pain relief (not getting into that). But I just wanted to make a comment on EA's bizarre (to me) priorities, with the headline example of malaria nets.

I've had malaria in the DRC, and if I had died, as I came extremely close to doing many times, it would have been about as easy a death as one can get (maybe 1.5/10). By contrast, speaking as someone who gets punched in the face for a living, a bad hit to the liver is 9/10 pain for 30 seconds and if liver disease comes even remotely close in pain levels to that, donating money to cure liver cancer is infinitely more aligned to EA values than, well, basically anything I can think of. I suspect most malaria-net supporters are young enough that they have never experienced actual pain.

Eh, you can get all sorts of bizarre effects if you count negative utility. Accelerationist shit where eliminating humans is the only way to minimize pain in the long run.

On the more sane side, I would guess modern medicine makes liver disease significantly less painful than a liver shot.

Aside form the most drawn-out and excruciating fates, most of the pain related to death is experienced by family and friends, plus the lost investment of society raising someone to that age and then losing productive years.

Are you certain? How many people do you know who have died who can attest to this?

Sounds like EA should work on better pain relievers so folks like you can spare their livers all those bottles of wine. But for real, is supporting the development of better pain relief an EA priority? There's interesting work to be done there, some recent progress being made on sodium channel blockers I think. On top of the whole "make everything less painful for everyone" angle, there's how most of the ongoing opioid trainwreck could have been averted if we had real painkillers that didn't require escalating doses to keep working.

One of Scott's grants has to do with the genetics of altering / removing pain receptors, I belive.

donating money to cure liver cancer is infinitely more aligned to EA values than, well, basically anything I can think of.

If one dollar saved the same number of liver cancer lives as one dollar saved malaria lives, this might be true. It's not. As a reminder, the E in EA stands for "effective". That means do the math, shut up and multiply. One liver cancer death might be worse than one malaria death, but it's not worse than ten malaria deaths, so if you can save ten lives for the same money as one life, you save the ten.

I sometimes too dwell upon this aspect of EA. Your argument is similar to the Utility monster argument. If the goal is to minimize suffering then maybe some neurotics in rich western countries suffer more than Africans, for whom malaria is a tamed aspect of life. But never tried to make it precise.

just had two bottles of wine for pain relief

speaking as someone who gets punched in the face for a living

Log out, Tyson, you need to get ready for your fight with Usyk.

I would rather survive liver disease a thousand times than die of malaria once.

I assume the concern is more around the loss of life (good years not lived) than the dying itself?

How much good will more liver cancer funding do on the margin?

Yeah, malaria nets are cheap and effective, whilst liver cancer research is complicated

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