Starting a charity

Charity entrepreneurship has great sources on this.

A book and a course

Plath, Lazarus, and suicide.

I found a recording of Ariel (the collection) read by the lady herself, Sylvia Plath. My favorite is Lady Lazarus, which I thought referred to Emily Lazarus (give me your tired, your poor, you huddled masses) but it actually refers to Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus resurrected after his death. Resurrection is a prominent theme in the poem and it refers to her failed suicide attempts. 

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.   

One year in every ten   

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine   

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin   

O my enemy.   

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be   

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.   

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.   

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.   

The peanut-crunching crowd   

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.   

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands   

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   

The first time it happened I was ten.   

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.   

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.   

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute   

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.   

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.

Blattman: On writing

In a blogpost, the legendary Chris Blattman wrote about the things he usually tells undergrads #2 was

Learn how to write well. Take writing seriously. Consider a course in creative, non-fiction, journalism, or business writing. Read books on writing. You won’t regret it.

 
In that spirit, I compiled a bunch of related content. Start with *

Economical Writing by Deirdre McCloskey

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiGY7aah56HvGXxBJ/rhetoric-for-the-good*

http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-graduate-students/

http://www.columbia.edu/~drd28/Thesis%20Research.pdf

https://chrisblattman.com/2010/02/17/how-to-write-an-essay/*

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/clear-writing/

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-write-well.html*

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1978/03/writing-typing-and-economics/305165/*

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:WitsX+WCMx+3T2019/courseware/3307bf339d6843dbaa2e1cd32cc5e474/0fa79cad6ad24feea333fe138efd55bb/?child=first*

https://www.coursera.org/learn/academic-literacy/lecture/V2XQj/being-critical*


https://oxford.academia.edu/WilliamMacAskill/Teaching-Documents

https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/phd_paper_writing.pdf

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:WitsX+WCMx+3T2019/course/

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/english-for-research-publication-purposes

https://www.coursera.org/learn/advanced-writing?specialization=academic-english
https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-to-research-for-essay-writing?specialization=academic-english

Tyler Cowen's advice to Econ PhD students

A few days ago I was listening to a conversation between Patrick Collison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tyler Cowen.  A quote grabbed my attention as I'm an aspiring econ student myself. Transcript

I think in general, big questions are under-studied. The tenure system, I think, increasingly is broken. A lot of academics do work pretty hard, but that so much of your audience is a narrowly defined set of peers who write you reference and tenure letters, I think we need to change. And the incentive for academics to integrate with practitioners and learn from them and actually try doing things, we need more of that. I’ve often suggested for graduate school, instead of taking a class, everyone should be sent to a not-so-high-income village for two weeks. They can do whatever they want. Just go for two weeks, think about things. No one wants to do this. No one wants to experiment with it. People who do development often do it on their own. But the notion that every economist should have studied the East Asian economic miracle, the Industrial Revolution, and spent two weeks or more in a poor village — it’s just not how things are, and I’d like to change that.

So I searched for some actions based on this advice, and since I don't plan on going to a poor village any time soon. Thoughts on (going to a poor village) welcome.

I collected some sources I thought were relevant.

Books on the East Asian miracle

1. How Asia Works by Studwell
2. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy by Chalmers Johnson
3. Books on Chinese history: e.g. China in World History by Paul S. Ropp

Books on the Industrial revolution

1.  The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective by Allen*
2.  The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 by Mokyr
3. This paper by Crafts discuss both Allen's and Mokyr's views 
4. The Most Powerful Idea in the World William Rosen
5.  The Industrial Revolution in World History by Peter N. Stearns
6. Documentary series on the Industrial Rev (bad resolution ~240p )
7. Article by History.com on the Industrial Rev (beware auto videos ads. Mute the tab)

Poor village part

https://chrisblattman.com/2008/06/02/advice-for-working-in-a-developing-country/

More books here**

* In the EA forum link** you can find an abridged version of Allen's book.

sources:
https://historyofmassachusetts.org/best-books-about-industrial-revolution/

Thoughts related to Kidney donation.

Last minor update: 17 Sep, 2020

Introduction.

I started thinking about donating a kidney a lot, I attempt to explain and formalize some of my thinking on this, and I think it would be valuable to someone who is also considering donating.

Some simplistic calculations 

Donating a kidney adds about 14 additional QALY's(Quality Adjusted Life Years).
AMF saves a life (35 QALY) for approx 3,500 USD. This is equal to 100$ per QALY.
Donating a kidney is the same as donating 1,400$ to AMF.
Well, what are the costs?
The risk of dying from donating a kidney is approx 1/3000.
You should expect to stay in the hospital for 2 nights and be able to work after 2-4 weeks.
I will assume that you can take paid time off work. Which isn't realistic to many people.

I will also ignore any benefits accrued by relieving the government from paying for Dialysis.
For the kidney donation to make sense, your overall altruistic contribution must be less than the loss to your future impact.
1400/(1/3000) = 4,200,000$ in a lifetime or 105,000 per working year (40 working years).
So if you give (time or money) less than of 105,000$ a year. Donating a kidney may be a good idea.
But if you give more, say 120,000$. Donating a kidney has a negative expected value.

Veg diet

On average a vegetarian spares between 370 - 580 animals per year, I will take 100 because it seems more realistic and because counting wild fish might not be fair, mostly because their lives have unclear signs.

For the 14 QALY, you add by donating a kidney, you indirectly cause 1,400 animals to suffer.*

Let us account for the animals by counting them as an externality and adding them to the price.

An ACE charity can spare 1,400 animals for 350$.

1,400$ - 350$ = 1,050$. This is the benefit of donating a kidney after accounting for animals.

If a veg*n spares 400 animals per year, rather than the 100 I assumed earlier, the benefit of donating a kidney goes to zero. 

And if they spare even more, donating a kidney becomes net negative.

Having clearer estimates of how many animals a veg diet spares will make this much easier.

Offsetting

You wouldn't think that donating enough so that someone's life is saved would justify you in killing a person you really dislike.
https://nothingismere.com/2014/11/12/inhuman-altruism-inferential-gap-or-motivational-gap/
https://freefromharm.org/eating-animals-addressing-our-most-common-justifications/

how does offsetting eating animals compare to offsetting infantile-cannibalism?

Should murderers offset their murders?
Is asking this so annoying it results in fewer animal advocates?

Moral circle expansion.

it could be the case that donating a kidney will expand people's moral circles, but being aware of the underlying indirect costs may result in even more speciesism. Because cognitive dissonance wouldn't let people care about animals and also indirectly harm them. I will be thinking about MCE more in the coming weeks. 

Publicity

I can already see the newspaper headlines:

WOMAN DONATING 30% OF HER INCOME GIVES KIDNEY TO STRANGER!

And this actually reflects reality. 

But even on a personal level, being a live kidney donor will make your ethical lifestyle known to more people, some who may start thinking about giving more themselves. 

However, it could be the case that people will think you're very weird, or worse, a saint.

Quotes from the web

One way I look at it is that I wouldn't donate a kidney in order to get $2,000 (whether that was to be spent on myself or donated to effective charities), or equivalently, that I am prepared to pay $2,000 to keep my second kidney. This means that, for me at least, donating is dominated by extra donations.

The problem with these comparisons is that they're totally made up. There's a potential one-off activity (donating a kidney) which, Thomas argued above, has large benefits to recipients relative to costs to the giver. There's also a question about how much you donate to charity. Based on the rationales you're giving here, someone who is happy with the cost/benefit tradeoff of donating a kidney as a one off, but is convinced that it's not as good cost/benefit as further donations, should actually increase their donations. However, my impression is that that has not been the reaction to these arguments; instead they justify current behavior/levels of altruism. (Toby, Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong here.) But donating a kidney would, according to most parties to the discussion, be net beneficial on its own terms. So the net impact of these arguments is to prevent people from taking positive sum altruistic actions, thereby reducing value.

There are kinds of costs that do mix between these two activities - genuinely foregone wages. And if your foregone wages were large and you decided that you would offset donations rather that consumption or savings with them, it would be perfectly appropriate to conduct this comparison. (Similarly, if the financial risk to future donations were higher, that would also make sense to offset.) But idly speculating about how much you'd have to be paid to do something, while taking the current level of donation as fixed, results in net negative impacts. 

Every time you make the tradeoff between giving up a kidney or donating amount "X" to an effective charity, you are left with a kidney 

I think the right framework for thinking about this sort of thing is to decide that there's a certain amount of happiness you're willing to forgo for the sake of others, and then do the most good you can within that bound.
https://www.jefftk.com/p/altruistic-kidney-donation

Extra

The meat-eaters problem is less pronounced when the QALY is in a developing country.

*This may suggest that killing people may be an effective way to reduce animal suffering. While this is the logical conclusion of my argument. I, arbitrarily, stop at not donating my kidney. Mostly because I think not violating rights to be a good morally uncertain bet.

Medical ethics and Restoration

The willingly unhealthy, (fat, smokers, and perhaps even insufficient exercisers) impose externalities by consuming more publically funded healthcare, so it might be a good idea to deprioritize them, or just cut the publically funded bit after fulfilling some criteria, like high enough BMI. 

This would increase the cost of high-risk lifestyles and potentially reduce their incidence.

The discussion below centers only on organs, which I think misses the point, but it's still interesting.

The most promising argument in favor of deprioritizing those with “unhealthy” lifestyles is the Restoration Argument, which goes as follows (Harris 1985; Smart 1994; S. Wilkinson 1999).

1. Some people (risk-takers) knowingly and voluntarily have unhealthy and/or dangerous lifestyles.
2. Risk-takers are more likely to need transplant organs than the general population (non-risk-takers).
3. Transplant organs are in short supply.
4. Because of (2) and (3), if we allocate on the basis of clinical need or clinical outcomes alone, non-risk-takers will be harmed by the risk-takers’ lifestyle choices; the non-risk-takers’ chances of getting a transplant organ will be lower because of the risk-takers’ increased demands on the system.
5. To allow the non-risk-takers to be harmed by the risk-takers would be unfair. Why should non-risk-takers have to pay the price for risk-takers’ lifestyle choices?
6. In order to avoid this unfairness, risk-takers’ entitlements should be reduced such that there is no harm to the non-risk-takers.

Even this argument faces difficulties though. One practical problem is that risk-taking may not generate additional healthcare costs or demand for organs. Indeed, some kinds of risk-taking behavior (motorsports perhaps) could even increase the supply of high-quality cadaveric organs available for transplant.

S. Wilkinson (1999) takes this fact as a point of departure for a deeper critique of the Restoration Argument. He claims that, if it turned out (as is likely) that smokers cost the U.K.’s National Health Service less than non-smokers (because on average they die younger) then proponents of the Restoration Argument would be committed to the unpalatable conclusion that smokers should be given not lower but higher priority than other patients. Otherwise, smokers would be harmed by the non-smokers’ deliberate attempts to extend their own lives by avoiding smoking. His argument is about financial resources but very much the same would apply to organs in relevantly similar situations of scarcity.

Wilkinson concludes that this objection seriously weakens the Restoration Argument. Either it is simply a reductio ad absurdum of the Restoration Argument, in which case the argument must be rejected wholesale. Or at least its defenders will need to appeal to something like moral or social value in order to avoid the argument’s unacceptable consequences—thus making it vulnerable to some of the problems with appealing to the social value noted above (Walker 2010; S. Wilkinson 1999)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-body/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/#Rel

https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6939-6-5

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paternalism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy-medicine/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/clinical-research/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/organs-sale/