The Nonlinear Library EA - Extended Navel-Gazing On My 2023 Donations by jenn
Jan 1, 2024
12:36
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Extended Navel-Gazing On My 2023 Donations, published by jenn on January 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Previously: Donations, The First Year
Here's an update on what my household donated to this year, and why. Please be warned that there is some upsetting content related to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in this post, in the first section.
The Against Malaria Foundation
Around 90% of our donations ($15,000 of $16,500 total, all amounts in CAD) went to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). I remain a very old school EA mostly committed to global health and poverty reduction interventions for humans.
If I was a US citizen I'd donate a portion of this to GiveWell's Unrestricted Fund for reasons I'll touch on below, but as a Canadian the key consideration for me was which GiveWell-recommended charities and funds had a Canadian entity, and unfortunately (or fortunately for eliminating analysis paralysis?) the AMF was the only recommended charity registered in Canada. This meant I could donate tax-deductibly, which meant I can donate ~20% more.
(Or so I thought at the time. I've now discovered CAFCanada, but that's a problem for my 2024 donations.)
The AMF almost didn't get my donation this year.
According to Givewell's 2021 analysis, the AMF saves in expectation one life for every $7300 CAD donated. In the days after the onset of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I began researching nonprofits offering medical aid to Palestinians, thinking that there's a chance their impact might surpass that benchmark[1].
I read many annual reports for many charities, focusing extra on their work in previous years of conflict. In the end none of them were anywhere close to how effective the AMF is (like at least an order of magnitude off), with one exception.
Glia Gaza is a small team of Canadian doctors who are providing emergency care and 3D printed tourniquets to wounded Palestinians. The tourniquets came in different sizes for women and children in addition to men (most suppliers only supply tourniquets in adult male sizes).
I researched the efficacy of tourniquets in saving lives. If you are dealing with bullet wounds, they help a lot when you use them to staunch bleeding and prolong the time you have to get to a hospital. They help, too, if there are no hospitals, just by significantly reducing the chance that you bleed out and die right there.
Tying a tourniquet is challenging; it's easy to make mistakes that could worsen the situation or fail to apply them tightly enough. Glia created a new kind of 3D printed tourniquet that made it easier to tie properly, quickly. You can read some harrowing field reports that they wrote about their prototypes in 2018. There are some disturbing pictures, and worse stories. But the conclusion was that the tourniquets worked, and that they worked well.
Their 3D printers were solar powered so they weren't dependent on grid access and the plastic was locally sourced. They're just printing out a whole bunch of them and leaving strategic caches for medical professionals to use, and to use themselves. Each tourniquet would cost $15 CAD to produce and distribute. With $7300 CAD they'd be able to distribute 486 tourniquets.
I thought the chances were good that 486 additional tourniquets translated to more than one life saved on expectation (though I'm not an expert and I had some pretty huge error bars, and there was some questions around scalability with additional funds and the like). I decided to sleep on it before donating.
I woke up to an update to their fundraising page. Their office where they had all their 3D printers (they didn't have that many) was caught in the blast of a bomb, and they had no ability to fix them. And because of the blockade there was no chance that they'd be able to fix them any time soon.
Also, because of the bl...
Previously: Donations, The First Year
Here's an update on what my household donated to this year, and why. Please be warned that there is some upsetting content related to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in this post, in the first section.
The Against Malaria Foundation
Around 90% of our donations ($15,000 of $16,500 total, all amounts in CAD) went to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). I remain a very old school EA mostly committed to global health and poverty reduction interventions for humans.
If I was a US citizen I'd donate a portion of this to GiveWell's Unrestricted Fund for reasons I'll touch on below, but as a Canadian the key consideration for me was which GiveWell-recommended charities and funds had a Canadian entity, and unfortunately (or fortunately for eliminating analysis paralysis?) the AMF was the only recommended charity registered in Canada. This meant I could donate tax-deductibly, which meant I can donate ~20% more.
(Or so I thought at the time. I've now discovered CAFCanada, but that's a problem for my 2024 donations.)
The AMF almost didn't get my donation this year.
According to Givewell's 2021 analysis, the AMF saves in expectation one life for every $7300 CAD donated. In the days after the onset of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I began researching nonprofits offering medical aid to Palestinians, thinking that there's a chance their impact might surpass that benchmark[1].
I read many annual reports for many charities, focusing extra on their work in previous years of conflict. In the end none of them were anywhere close to how effective the AMF is (like at least an order of magnitude off), with one exception.
Glia Gaza is a small team of Canadian doctors who are providing emergency care and 3D printed tourniquets to wounded Palestinians. The tourniquets came in different sizes for women and children in addition to men (most suppliers only supply tourniquets in adult male sizes).
I researched the efficacy of tourniquets in saving lives. If you are dealing with bullet wounds, they help a lot when you use them to staunch bleeding and prolong the time you have to get to a hospital. They help, too, if there are no hospitals, just by significantly reducing the chance that you bleed out and die right there.
Tying a tourniquet is challenging; it's easy to make mistakes that could worsen the situation or fail to apply them tightly enough. Glia created a new kind of 3D printed tourniquet that made it easier to tie properly, quickly. You can read some harrowing field reports that they wrote about their prototypes in 2018. There are some disturbing pictures, and worse stories. But the conclusion was that the tourniquets worked, and that they worked well.
Their 3D printers were solar powered so they weren't dependent on grid access and the plastic was locally sourced. They're just printing out a whole bunch of them and leaving strategic caches for medical professionals to use, and to use themselves. Each tourniquet would cost $15 CAD to produce and distribute. With $7300 CAD they'd be able to distribute 486 tourniquets.
I thought the chances were good that 486 additional tourniquets translated to more than one life saved on expectation (though I'm not an expert and I had some pretty huge error bars, and there was some questions around scalability with additional funds and the like). I decided to sleep on it before donating.
I woke up to an update to their fundraising page. Their office where they had all their 3D printers (they didn't have that many) was caught in the blast of a bomb, and they had no ability to fix them. And because of the blockade there was no chance that they'd be able to fix them any time soon.
Also, because of the bl...