2023 LC Thread - It was predetermined that I would change the thread title (Part 1)

I think they do, but expressing it in terms of lives saved is good for marketing. Essentially it is another way to make the charity effective by giving donors a concrete way to think about impact. For example, Peter Singer’s selection of effective charities is called “The Life You Can Save.”

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Yeah, that’s borderline deceptive…although it could be true that the fish is “fresh off the docks of Maine.”

My ex-wife is from the northern Boston suburbs and always found it irritating to find anything called a chowdah that was not made “New England” style.

I’d be more impressed if there was a charity where you give $5,000 and they kill one asshole.

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Wow me too, what are the odds?

If there was, that would solve that “how would you spend a million dollars in 30 minutes” question pretty quickly.

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I understand that it’s good for marketing. But it bugs me.

Other measurement is going to feel wierd too. Person-years? Limbs saved per thousand persons?

I agree that any quantifiable result per dollar is dubious.

LOL at saving lives by giving money when you can donate blood for free.

Losers.

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it’s only free if your time is worthless

You should get $5000 for saving a life. Thats a much more sensible business model imo.

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Ha fuck yeah that’s my job!

Oh wait… my actual job is 95% bullshit. Nvm

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just what everyone needs in their life, a commercial donut maker

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Might be that Facebook has a pixel setup on the site. The share menu has Facebook sharing, which is where they might be picking it up.

Or it knows similar users browse this website and have tracked them looking at that stuff on other webpages.

Facebook and Google know everything about you. I work on ML where I can only use first party data. It’s insane what you can do with everything.

The measurement for non-marketing purposes is done in terms of QALYs.

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So she’s probably just doing the conversion where one “life” = 70 or 80 ish QALYs. Makes sense to me. Any metric will have lots of room for error but you have to choose something to make these decisions. No choice to opt out.

like 12 or 13 years ago, school was already closed the next day for the cold. it was -8 or -9 degrees and the wind chill was -30.

i had never seen it that cold before, was drunk, and wanted to know how cold actual COLD was.

the condo my ex-wife and i lived in at the time had a sort of wind tunnel that went through the parking lot so it was a constant 20-25mph. went out in a hoodie, gym shorts and slides.

after like 10 minutes of leaning against my car, i retreated to the building and was leaning against it. after maybe 15 minutes total, i remember thinking, “fuck, this is seriously how people die.” if i didn’t have anywhere to go, i would have curled up in a corner somewhere and probably fallen asleep and died.

tomorrow it’s supposed to be -30 wind chill again (basically all day), so i’m def wearing a hoodie, shorts and slides to the gym. trying to see how big of a pussy drunk me was.

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I guess my issue with that stuff is that it’s trivially easy to game to shit.

For me anyway, if I give to a charity it’s because I trust them to do good with the money. It’s like giving someone a grant. You just give them the money and hope for the best. You don’t try to put metrics on it.

There is no universe where I feel like I could gain insight by comparing QALYs or lives saved or whatever across charities. If I trust the charity, I don’t care about the numbers. If I don’t trust the charity, I wouldn’t trust the numbers either.

I guess if there’s some trusted third party that’s assigning QALY/$ numbers to charities, that could be useful. But if the third party evaluating service is big enough, then the charities are probably gaming for high #s (like SEO).

How would Facebook have a pixel on this site? And where do you see Facebook sharing?

Easiest way to get tracked here is by logging in with Google, Twitter, or Patreon.