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Good generals let their soldiers die in vain

Blog post by · Published October 23rd, 2012

In November 1914 Winston Churchill proposed a campaign to turn the tide of war on the Eastern Front. The plan was to fight a land war up the Gallipoli peninsula, secure safe passage for warships up the Dardanelles, and give the Russians access to the Mediterranean.

The land war was a total failure. After landing in April 1915 the Allied troops lost momentum quickly. By August Ottoman forces had tied them into static trench warfare. The Allies couldn’t make any more progress, they had achieved nothing and 220,000 soldiers had died. It was at this point that the allied troops were ordered to evacuate.

Some soldiers said they hoped their dead comrades wouldn’t notice them leaving. The 220,00 soldiers died “in vain”. And yet it was a great decision by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro to let them die in vain. Better that than lose even more men pointlessly.

Illustration par Carrey pour le journal Le Miroir en 1915

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Introducing THINK

Blog post by · Published October 19th, 2012

Not long ago, there were zero organizations focused on effective altruism. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the topic. More and more of us are finding each other to ask not only “How can I help?” but “How can I help better?”

There’s a new organization asking these questions:. The High Impact NetworK, THINK’s goal is to introduce people to ideas and skills that will help them do good more effectively.

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    How much is a volunteer worth?

    Blog post by · Published October 17th, 2012

    The problem with volunteer labour is that it’s free, so a charity has an incentive to recruit volunteers as long as they contribute some value to the charity. In the case of Feed My Starving Children, volunteer labour isn’t just free; it’s a source of revenue. Feed My Starving Children don’t use volunteers in the US for their adept food-handling skills or their convenient location: they use them to attract donations, which volunteers are encouraged to make.

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    The most important unsolved problems in ethics

    Blog post by · Published October 14th, 2012

    In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert published a list of 23 of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. This list heavily influenced mathematical research over the 20th century: if you worked on one of Hilbert’s problems, then you were doing respectable mathematics.

    There is no such list within moral philosophy. That’s a shame. Not all problems that are discussed in ethics are equally important. And often early graduate students have no idea what to write their thesis on – and so just pick something they’ve written on for coursework previously, or pick something that’s ‘hot’ at the time. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine the same is true of many other academic disciplines.

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    How to do one year of work in four hours

    Blog post by · Published October 11th, 2012

    The author, Tim Ferriss, promises to teach you how to cut your working week down to just four hours, using a careful combination of Indian virtual assistants, the 80/20 principle and automatic email responders. But Ferriss has nothing on us. If your goal is to help others, then you can cut your entire working year down to just four hours.

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    Why don’t charities spend more on fundraising?

    Blog post by · Published October 9th, 2012

    People often think it’s bad for their charity of choice to spend money fundraising. This has always been a mystery to me. If a charity can use your money to go out and raise even more money, that’s great! They’ve just multiplied the impact of your donation. It turns out that charities are being pretty rational after all.

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    When should I quantify? – Quantification – Part 4

    Blog post by · Published October 8th, 2012

    Every 48 seconds someone dies of malaria. Every one of those deaths is a human being with passions and loves and feelings. When we talk about quantifying our impact on the world it is important not to forget what those numbers mean. They mean people. Every single year of happy life we can give, is a joyful thing to the person living it. This is ultimately why we what to have as much impact as possible. Because more people living happy joyful lives is better than fewer.

    Mosquito Netting

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      How to do important research

      Blog post by · Published October 4th, 2012

      Many academics want to do important research that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, there’s virtually no guidance out there.

      We’re aiming to build a resource of strategies and ideas for finding high impact research questions, as well as practical information about how to get involved with them.

      In this post, we take a first step and explore how to find research questions that need your talent.

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      Let’s stop building schools

      Blog post by · Published October 3rd, 2012

      I recently came accross Taylor Conroy, who’s using an innovative fundraising technique to let ordinary people to raise $8,500 to build a school with just an evening’s work. The method has since been expanded to include water pumps and libraries. The fundraising is amazing, but I can’t help slightly regretting the goal towards which Taylor has directed his considerable talents. Building a school is a motivating, tangible project, which seems to obviously be a good thing. They can send you pictures of it after it’s built. But is this really where we should be directing our efforts?

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      Quantification as a Lamppost in the Dark – Quantification – Part 3

      Blog post by · Published October 2nd, 2012

      Late one evening a police officer comes across a man on the way home from a party. He is quite drunk and looking for something under a lamppost. “What are you looking for?” asks the policeman. “My keys,” the man replies, pointing down the road a little way, “I dropped them over there.” The policeman is baffled, “Then why are you looking for them here?”. “Because there’s no light over there.”

      The joke is old but it gets to the heart of the debate over quantification. Is it best to look for keys under lampposts?

      Gecko in lamp by night

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        How many lives does a doctor save? – Part 3 – Replacement

        Blog post by · Published September 30th, 2012

        If I become a doctor, I won’t increase the total number of doctors by one. The NHS has a limited budget, so it can’t just hire every qualified person who applies; medical schools have limited places by law, and there are more applicants who are ‘good enough’ than there are places. If I become a doctor, then I’ve just displaced someone else who would have taken the job.

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        Quantum Quest: Pruning Procrastination

        Blog post by · Published September 23rd, 2012

        In a series of posts, I will offer a perspective on the “quantum quest” – the evolving attempt to make tomorrow better than today. Changing the world is certainly a quest. And while the evolution may appear to be smooth and continuous, it happens in discrete steps – hence the “quantum”.

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          Quantification – Part 2 – The Dangers

          Blog post by · Published September 19th, 2012

          Somalia is in crisis. For decades it has been racked by civil war, famine, and political violence. Members of 80,000 Hours who want to help the people of Somalia will most likely explore various ways they can help and assess them quantitatively. Is it obvious that quantitative methods provide the correct tools to deal with a crisis like this? Or instead can quantification limit the kinds of possible interventions we think about, blinding us to significant long term solutions?

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            Does money make you happy?

            Blog post by · Published September 18th, 2012

            If we’re to believe the Internet, various apologists for materialism have quipped that whoever said money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to shop. Indeed, the happiness of others can be bought at bargain-basement prices with a donation to an effective charity. If you’re thinking of donating a substantial portion of your income, though, it’s natural to wonder how your well-being will be affected. What can research tell us about this..?

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            How many lives does a doctor save? – Part 2 – Diminishing marginal returns

            Blog post by · Published September 16th, 2012

            In the first post, I worked out an upper bound for the average direct health impact of a doctor in the UK, and found it amounted to producing about 2600 QALYs. We can think of this, very roughly, as saving 90 lives. This doesn’t, however, show how much difference you make by becoming a doctor. There’s already about 200,000 doctors in the UK. How can we take the figure for the average impact of a doctor and work out the impact of an additional doctor?

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