The emerging Effective Altruism movement is full of young people figuring out how to make to make charitable donations go further. The difference in impact between typical charities and carefully targeted intervention spans many orders of magnitude. Top ranked causes tend to be in the areas of global health and catastrophic risk, particularly AI risk. A few links:
For staying in touch there is EffectiveAltruism.org, supposedly a very active FaceBook group (disclaimer: I don't use FaceBook), and upcoming effective altruism conferences at the Googleplex in Mountain View, in Oxford, and in Melbourne.
Just thought I would mention KEI operates on a shoe-string budget.
Anyone with some spare change available could find few better causes.
Just follow the link on keionline.org.
The precautionary principle suggests that even if only antibiotic resistance were capable of spreading from animals to man in a few cases, it would be worth regulating the use of antibiotics in animals. On the one hand we might have 1-2% profits of the meat industry on the other hand we have the long term potential for the death of tens of thousands to millions of individuals because antibiotics stop working.
Fluroquinolines (such as ciprofloxacin) are used to treat Campylobacter infection, a disease which effects 1.4 million people in the United States each year and is contracted from eating undercooked chicken amongst other things. Flouroquinolines (such as enrofloxacin) also started being used in veterinary medicine, where their use led in the number of Camblobacter infections being antibiotic resistant going from 0% in 1992 to 41% in 2001. Based on this, the FDA moved to ban the use of enroflaxacin in poultry. What happened? The manufacturer Bayer, and their trade group, the Animal Health Industry sued. This kept enrofloxacin on the market for a further 5 years, during which time I estimate there would have been an additional 19,000 Fluroquinoline treatment failures, and numerous deaths, in humans. [Nelson, Chiller, Powers, and Angulo, 2007]
And what of the farm industries beloved profits? Let's say the regulation of antibiotics in the agricultural sector increases the price of meat by 5%? Then what? The demand elasticity for beef, chicken and pork, have been estimated at -0.27 to -0.974 [Fiala, 2006]. In every case this is greater than -1.0. What this means is that a 1% increase in the price of meat would result in a less than 1% reduction in the amount of meat consumed. Thus the actual dollar volume, and with it the profits to the industry would actually increase, not decrease under an antibiotic regulation regime. Picking the mid-point -0.6, gives a 0.4 x 5% = 2% increase in the dollar volume of meat sold, or $3b a year for a $160b/year industry. Consumers win, farmers win, why hasn't this happened?
This syncs with what I am trying to do with OsnLive.com - pull control of the
social networks away from proprietary websites and host them on a open
source network that give users the freedoms to do what they want with
their profiles. So far however OSN has yet to achieve a critical
mass.
Obligatory marketing blurb follow: OSN is a shiny new open
source open protocol distributed social network. From a user
perspective all the individual sites in the OSN federation appear as
one. Users can search, browse profiles, send messages, and link to
each other without regard to which sites other users are using.
S/MIME public key cryptography is used to unambiguously identify
senders and is combined with the social network to make the system
resilient to spam. Spammers get voted off the island. User profiles
are based on the FOAF XML
file format and users can migrate their profile from one site to
another. OsnLive.com is the first
site running OSN.
Slashdot Mirror
The emerging Effective Altruism movement is full of young people figuring out how to make to make charitable donations go further. The difference in impact between typical charities and carefully targeted intervention spans many orders of magnitude. Top ranked causes tend to be in the areas of global health and catastrophic risk, particularly AI risk. A few links:
GiveWell - detailed evaluation of top charities
Giving What We Can - people who have pledged to give 10% or more of their income to the most effective causes they can find
Back of the Envelope Guide to Philanthropy - my own website; some very rough math-geek evaluations of charitable endeavors
The Most Good You Can Do - a recent book on the Effective Altruism movement by Peter Singer
Machine Intelligence Research Institute - MIRI focuses on AI risk
For staying in touch there is EffectiveAltruism.org, supposedly a very active FaceBook group (disclaimer: I don't use FaceBook), and upcoming effective altruism conferences at the Googleplex in Mountain View, in Oxford, and in Melbourne.
Just thought I would mention KEI operates on a shoe-string budget. Anyone with some spare change available could find few better causes. Just follow the link on keionline.org.
Fluroquinolines (such as ciprofloxacin) are used to treat Campylobacter infection, a disease which effects 1.4 million people in the United States each year and is contracted from eating undercooked chicken amongst other things. Flouroquinolines (such as enrofloxacin) also started being used in veterinary medicine, where their use led in the number of Camblobacter infections being antibiotic resistant going from 0% in 1992 to 41% in 2001. Based on this, the FDA moved to ban the use of enroflaxacin in poultry. What happened? The manufacturer Bayer, and their trade group, the Animal Health Industry sued. This kept enrofloxacin on the market for a further 5 years, during which time I estimate there would have been an additional 19,000 Fluroquinoline treatment failures, and numerous deaths, in humans. [Nelson, Chiller, Powers, and Angulo, 2007]
And what of the farm industries beloved profits? Let's say the regulation of antibiotics in the agricultural sector increases the price of meat by 5%? Then what? The demand elasticity for beef, chicken and pork, have been estimated at -0.27 to -0.974 [Fiala, 2006]. In every case this is greater than -1.0. What this means is that a 1% increase in the price of meat would result in a less than 1% reduction in the amount of meat consumed. Thus the actual dollar volume, and with it the profits to the industry would actually increase, not decrease under an antibiotic regulation regime. Picking the mid-point -0.6, gives a 0.4 x 5% = 2% increase in the dollar volume of meat sold, or $3b a year for a $160b/year industry. Consumers win, farmers win, why hasn't this happened?
Obligatory marketing blurb follow: OSN is a shiny new open source open protocol distributed social network. From a user perspective all the individual sites in the OSN federation appear as one. Users can search, browse profiles, send messages, and link to each other without regard to which sites other users are using. S/MIME public key cryptography is used to unambiguously identify senders and is combined with the social network to make the system resilient to spam. Spammers get voted off the island. User profiles are based on the FOAF XML file format and users can migrate their profile from one site to another. OsnLive.com is the first site running OSN.