[ag8]

Watsi seems to be doing great work, but the title—"you helped save 33k lives"—reads as misleading to me. I guess "helped" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I would be incredibly surprised if the counterfactual number of lives saved was more than 3000. (But don't let this dissuade you from donating; concretely improving someone's life is totally a worthwhile goal, and Watsi seems very good at effecting this)

[wizzwizz4]

"Counterfactual number of lives saved" is not the normal sense of the phrase "save a life". By that logic, each person's life can only be saved once, which is not how people normally use the phrase.

Your definition may be useful for cold hard utilitarian calculus, of the sort that hospital directors need to do if they've run out of fundraising opportunities. However, "effective altruism" – which I suspect you're alluding to here – isn't actually an efficient way to save lives, the way it's usually practised (ignoring second-order effects, and everything that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet).

[ag8]

You're right; I should've been more precise. However, we have tools for dealing with this—that's what quality-adjusted life-years are for! I don't contest that surgeries often significantly increase QALYs, and may do so pretty cost-effectively.

[danparsonson]

You must be fun at parties ;-)

[ag8]

Lol, I just care a lot about saving as many lives as I can; the most effective charities I've been able to find good evidence on save one life for $6–8k. If Watsi had a credible claim at being able to save lives 10x cheaper I would redirect my entire donation budget to them!

That said, once again, Watsi is great. I really appreciate all the hard work they've put into making this happen—this is orders of magnitude more impressive and impactful than most projects I've ever seen!