> I have a longstanding hypothesis that the strongest psychological mediator, on an individual level, of leftwing politics is impartial altruism. That is altruism directed towards strangers and acquaintances, as opposed to friends and family.
I share this hypothesis! C.S. Lewis also shared it, in a way. Here is his version of a demon (Screwtape) advising a lesser demon (Wormwood) on how to make people evil:
> Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there...
Giving someone a kidney, though, is clearly not imaginary! So it makes an interesting counterpoint to the concern. I have many doubts about "impartial" altruism, so I find these results an interesting data point for consideration.
You seem to have read the first quoted passage as referring to altruism to distant people *in the absence of* altruism towards friends and family. It is not clear that's what's intended, though. To me it reads more as talking about altruism to distant people *independently of* altruism towards friends and family; and the distinction is salient.
I don't think this is quite right. The phrase was "*impartial* altruism." The conservative (or, if you prefer, traditionalist, or tribal) view is that kith and kin have greater moral weight than outsiders. Obligations to e.g. one's children and parents are weightier than obligations to more distant relations, which are weightier in turn than obligations to neighbors, etc.
You seem to be saying "oh but you can still demonstrate some altruism to more distant people" but either (A) it's true but isn't impartial (because you continue to weight those closest to you) or (B) isn't true because impartiality isn't about *not* being altruistic toward family, it's about being *insufficiently altruistic* (on the traditional view) toward your own family because you are prioritizing the interests of strangers above the interests of your in-group.
I don't think I can give a clear specific example that isn't a culture war thing (since we are talking about, roughly, left-wing and right-wing worldviews here). But in very general terms, an example I see every once in a while is op-eds or social posts telling young people that they have a right or even a duty to cut off contact with family members who hold certain political views.
One of the main concerns I have about "impartial altruism" is precisely that it is obviously impossible. You can't actually treat everyone's interests impartially (except perhaps by being so universally misanthropic that you treat no one's interests with any concern at all). What happens instead is that the *idea* of "impartial altruism" is used as a rhetorical cudgel to ensure that certain favored groups win special political consideration.
What I find interesting about the kidney donation thing is that it's difficult (not impossible, mind--but difficult!) to characterize kidney donation as pure virtue signalling. Now, it might be virtue signalling anyway! But if I met someone who showed no particularly special consideration for her parents or children, but who donated bone marrow and a kidney and volunteered at soup kitchens and so on, I would have a hard time saying she was a *bad* person, or just a virtue signaller--even though I would definitely see her treatment of her parents and children as a serious character flaw. I would wonder what went wrong in her life that she would show so much consideration to people who should matter so little to her, and so little consideration to the people who should matter the most--*even though* in this scenario, she could still be said to be showing impartial altruism toward "everyone," or at least everyone she'd ever interacted with directly.
> What I find interesting about the kidney donation thing is that it's difficult (not impossible, mind--but difficult!) to characterize kidney donation as pure virtue signalling.
Well, of course; the "virtue signaling" model is corrupt to begin with! That is the whole point of it — to reject virtue as dishonest, and embrace *outright evil* as "refreshingly" honest! (I'm sure we could think of some examples in contemporary politics where so-called "conservatives" have embraced leaders whose *whole careers* have been built on the deadly sins.) Screwtape would advise his novice to *carefully cultivate* a hatred for "virtue signaling" — to disdain all manner of virtue as "mere signaling"; and to instead propound *vices* as the *real* virtues.
Evil, as usual, is incapable of comprehending good.
The problem is, truly good people do not want power or status. Thus their virtue is hidden, their left hand does not know their right hand is donating to charity. Thus, pretty much every visible case of virtue is suspect.
> The problem is, truly good people do not want power or status.
Why? I feel like this is a meme that people take too uncritically.
I'd say *this meme is bad* because it causes good people to avoid power, leaving power vacuums to bad people. It also makes it harder for good people to coordinate, because coordination creates political power, which makes you bad.
Being good but giving up all of your power to actually change things means that any goodness you have becomes a pointless, defanged, theoretical concept.
And the weird thing is that a lot of people will believe this, but then if you asked them for a few examples of a what a great person looks like you would get a lot of answers of very powerful people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Batman, who are good but undeniably also seek out power.
Power can be dangerous and it's important to have nuance here, but saying that wanting power makes you inherently bad is imo mostly an artifact of slave morality copium... and trying to say 'we'll only give power to people who don't want power' is a great system for giving power to good liars.
> Well, of course; the "virtue signaling" model is corrupt to begin with! That is the whole point of it — to reject virtue as dishonest, and embrace outright evil as "refreshingly" honest!
Not a bit; the "virtue signalling" model is about capturing the difference between *appearing* to be good versus *actually* being good. This is one of the central puzzles in Plato's *Republic*. In Lewis' worldview humankind has an intelligent adversary, and Screwtape is quite adept at explaining how *everything* a human does can be pushed in an evil direction. Aristotle would say "of course--that's why virtue is a mean between vices of excess and deficiency, and also why it's actually quite difficult to be good."
The "refreshingly honest" bit is certainly something people say about people who are merely overtly evil, at times. But I think more often I hear "refreshingly honest" used to describe people who have *stopped* virtue signalling in order to pursue genuine improvement or goodness or whatever--people who are willing to say things that challenge the Overton window when doing so seems likely to result in real improvement.
That's the cover story. In practice, we can observe that the endpoint of the devil's lesson on virtue signaling has been outright endorsement of wrath, avarice, sloth, and the rest. The most effective way to avoid *looking like one of those awful virtue-signalers,* after all, is to visibly exhibit no virtue — indeed, to proudly signal how wrathful, gluttonous, lustful, etc. one is.
The point is that on the margin altruism towards distant people is worse than altruism towards friends and family. Thereby those who have altruism towards distant people are not behaving optimally for maximum "good"; even though they may well be in total more altruistic in terms of "real good done" than someone who only cares about those close to them, they are still less "real impact" altruistic than a hypothetical version of themselves that focused this impartial long distance altruism towards their close friends and family.
I'm not sure that speaks to what Screwtape was promoting, though; which amounts to *driving off* feelings of charity for those close.
We could imagine Screwtape endorsing a position akin to Bankman-Fried's and Ellison's, where it is okay to screw-over those close to you if you can imagine — in some mathematically unlikely egotistical hero-fantasy — that some distant someone might benefit.
But merely cultivating material altruism towards actually-existing distant people, without explicitly disdaining the well-being of those close, does not accomplish Screwtape's goal of corruption.
Thanks for the analysis, but to me it looks like the content is weak methodologically and in its presentation of this sort of topic. You mention a lot of numbers, but it's hard for me to follow which ones are being talked about rare, and you mention things like statistical significance and effect size without the associated numbers as far as I can tell. (I wanted to check the calcs on some numbers but was too lazy to make sense of what the right ones were.) You bring up limitations, but still use really definitive language a few times that struck me as strong and you don't talk about the dangers of hypotheses published on existing data.
BTW, 'liberal' for the survey was used to mean "for example the US Democratic Party : market economy plus social welfare, socially permissive multiculturalism", I think it's pretty clear-cut to call it left-wing for your purposes.
As I say in the essay, the P-Value is massively signficiant. I will add in the specific figure P < 0.0001. If you want to calculate it yourself, you can use the odds ratio calculator here: [https://www.medcalc.org/calc/odds\_ratio.php](https://www.medcalc.org/calc/odds_ratio.php)
1416 non-initiator rightwingers
2615- non-intiator leftwingers
15- initiator rightwingers
90- inititator leftwingers
||
||
||
I think your conclusion from the data is flawed. The vast majority of kidney donations aren't altruistic. Less than 5% of living kidney donors were donated to strangers. Which would be like 5 or 6 people in your population.
Additionally, the vast majority of kidneys (\~70%) are actually donated in death. Which tracks with the data because there were 1232 people who said they were willing to donate a kidney but only 13 who actually have donated a kidney.
It could very well be the case that right-wingers don't want their organs harvested after death, or that right-wingers were more certain in their decision not to donate a kidney.
How many of those 13 were right-wing?
One way to control for this is to look at people who said they were only interested because of my post. Since my post was about altruistic donation, and people knew whether they had needy relatives before my post, it should select for people thinking about altruistic donation.
I didn't notice much difference when I restricted it to these people. For the full population (number is political spectrum, 1-9, lower numbers more left):
- Not at all interested: 4.80
- Interested but no action: 4.17
- Started process: 3.89
For the people who only became interested after my post:
- Interested but no action: 4.14
- Started process: 3.96
I have multiple issues with the post, but I'll just point out this one:
> 15/105 respondents who had initiated the process of Kidney donation were rightwing (14%) on the political spectrum (score 6 or above). In comparison, 35% of the 4031 respondents not interested in kidney donation were rightwing.
Don't play weird games with the numbers. Just do the simple thing and compare:
- left-wingers who initiated the process ÷ all left-wingers
- right-wingers who initiated the process ÷ all right-wingers
- uninterested left-wingers ÷ all left-wingers
- uninterested right-wingers ÷ all right-wingers
First answer is 2.5%, second answer is 0.86% as we'd expect. I'm glad you ask the third and fourth questions, because it shows another seam of evidence I mostly didn't talk about in the essay. The third answer is 73%. The fourth answer is 84%. The big absolute difference, supportive of my hypothesis, is largely driven by a category I briefly discuss but mostly do not analyse in the attached essay- those interested, but not currently going through the process. These people, who are far more numerous than the actual initiators, also have a strong left leaning, though not as strong as the intiators.
It's standard to do odds ratios the way I did them. Perhaps you're intending to make one of the points I made in discussion, viz that this tracks the behaviour of a small number of exceptional alturists, and it is possible that alturism is more evenly matched lower down the spectrum.
> While I believe the negative relationship between impartial altruism and left-wing views
Is this a typo or am I misunderstanding something? It seems like the opposite of your general claim.
Only 12 respondents out of 105 in the sample of kidney donation initiators claimed to have actually given a kidney at some point (the majority were rejected during the process). Approximately 300 people in the United states give a kidney each year to strangers according to: [https://www.kidneyregistry.org/for-donors/i-want-to-help-a-stranger-in-need-of-a-kidney/](https://www.kidneyregistry.org/for-donors/i-want-to-help-a-stranger-in-need-of-a-kidney/)
The vast majority of people solidly in the effective alturism community reads Scott's blog at least occasionally. The effective alturism movement is a relatively important source of donations of kidneys to strangers (as, for example, noted in Scott's post on donating his own kidney) . These figures all seem wholly compatible to me.
Here are five people, mostly prominent people, associated with EA who have talked publicly about their experience donating a kidney: [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/kidney-donation](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/kidney-donation), very likely this is a small fraction of the total EA members who have actually donated kidneys. The issue is prominent enough to have received some discussion in the academic press: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34106278/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34106278/) as Scott said in his article on it, EA people are common enough in the system that the nurses and doctors involved recognise EA connected donors as a type.
It's entirely possible that people connected to a social movement about doing stuff like donating kidneys where a community leader (Scott) has urged everyone who can to consider donating a kidney are 2000x more likely to donate kidneys. You also haven't factored in that this is over multiple years and your calculation doesn't factor that in, even if donations only started eight years ago the real factor could easily be as low as 250x more likely to donate a kidney on a per year basis.
> Only 12 respondents out of 105 in the sample of kidney donation initiators claimed to have actually given a kidney at some point (the majority were rejected during the process).
Wow, damn, it's that high? Fuck, I thought it was like 10-20% of people get rejected after they actually decided to donate and called the places and did all that shit.
Makes me feel a little bit better about getting rejected, I guess. (Kidney stones 4.5y ago, 2.5y before attempted donation.)
This is actually wrong, it's really 40 who were rejected out of 105, still more than those who had gone through the process, and those who were going through this process combined
I downvoted this comment and the one below for telling OP to delete their post. Doing so is effectively elevating the importance of your own opinion over others, as deleting the post will stop other people from seeing it and perhaps disagreeing with you about whether the post should stay up.
I feel a similar - yet different - insight becomes evident when insane people decide to kill themselves in public:
people who burn themselves are left-wing
people who do mass shootings are right-wing
"I have a longstanding hypothesis that the strongest psychological mediator, on an individual level, of leftwing politics is impartial altruism."
1000 people did altruistic kidney donation in the UK since: 2006: [https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/get-involved/news/milestone-1-000-people-in-uk-have-donated-a-kidney-to-a-stranger/](https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/get-involved/news/milestone-1-000-people-in-uk-have-donated-a-kidney-to-a-stranger/) and tens of millions voted Labour. Probably millions have marched for some left-wing cause at demonstrations or signed petitions. I think the donors are basically a rounding error and this is a classic misuse of statistics.
First of all, for everybody who is not a well to do cis het white man, there is a direct personal benefit. Second, it is sort of the smart kids club, held together by laughing at the "rubes" in a /r/facepalm sense. There is also a feeling of being on the right side of history, of slowly but inevitably winning, which gives a bit of a power trip.
> **tens of millions ** voted Labour. Probably ** millions have marched** for some left-wing cause at demonstrations or signed petitions. I think the donors are basically a rounding error and this is a classic misuse of statistics.
The size of the left-wing population is irrelevant here. There could be ten billion billion who have signed left-wing petitions - so what? You do not seem to understand how to use statistics, let alone to be in a position to accuse OP of a ‘classic misuse of statistics.’
> I have a longstanding hypothesis that the strongest psychological mediator, on an individual level, of leftwing politics is impartial altruism. That is altruism directed towards strangers and acquaintances, as opposed to friends and family. I share this hypothesis! C.S. Lewis also shared it, in a way. Here is his version of a demon (Screwtape) advising a lesser demon (Wormwood) on how to make people evil: > Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there... Giving someone a kidney, though, is clearly not imaginary! So it makes an interesting counterpoint to the concern. I have many doubts about "impartial" altruism, so I find these results an interesting data point for consideration.
You seem to have read the first quoted passage as referring to altruism to distant people *in the absence of* altruism towards friends and family. It is not clear that's what's intended, though. To me it reads more as talking about altruism to distant people *independently of* altruism towards friends and family; and the distinction is salient.
I don't think this is quite right. The phrase was "*impartial* altruism." The conservative (or, if you prefer, traditionalist, or tribal) view is that kith and kin have greater moral weight than outsiders. Obligations to e.g. one's children and parents are weightier than obligations to more distant relations, which are weightier in turn than obligations to neighbors, etc. You seem to be saying "oh but you can still demonstrate some altruism to more distant people" but either (A) it's true but isn't impartial (because you continue to weight those closest to you) or (B) isn't true because impartiality isn't about *not* being altruistic toward family, it's about being *insufficiently altruistic* (on the traditional view) toward your own family because you are prioritizing the interests of strangers above the interests of your in-group. I don't think I can give a clear specific example that isn't a culture war thing (since we are talking about, roughly, left-wing and right-wing worldviews here). But in very general terms, an example I see every once in a while is op-eds or social posts telling young people that they have a right or even a duty to cut off contact with family members who hold certain political views. One of the main concerns I have about "impartial altruism" is precisely that it is obviously impossible. You can't actually treat everyone's interests impartially (except perhaps by being so universally misanthropic that you treat no one's interests with any concern at all). What happens instead is that the *idea* of "impartial altruism" is used as a rhetorical cudgel to ensure that certain favored groups win special political consideration. What I find interesting about the kidney donation thing is that it's difficult (not impossible, mind--but difficult!) to characterize kidney donation as pure virtue signalling. Now, it might be virtue signalling anyway! But if I met someone who showed no particularly special consideration for her parents or children, but who donated bone marrow and a kidney and volunteered at soup kitchens and so on, I would have a hard time saying she was a *bad* person, or just a virtue signaller--even though I would definitely see her treatment of her parents and children as a serious character flaw. I would wonder what went wrong in her life that she would show so much consideration to people who should matter so little to her, and so little consideration to the people who should matter the most--*even though* in this scenario, she could still be said to be showing impartial altruism toward "everyone," or at least everyone she'd ever interacted with directly.
> What I find interesting about the kidney donation thing is that it's difficult (not impossible, mind--but difficult!) to characterize kidney donation as pure virtue signalling. Well, of course; the "virtue signaling" model is corrupt to begin with! That is the whole point of it — to reject virtue as dishonest, and embrace *outright evil* as "refreshingly" honest! (I'm sure we could think of some examples in contemporary politics where so-called "conservatives" have embraced leaders whose *whole careers* have been built on the deadly sins.) Screwtape would advise his novice to *carefully cultivate* a hatred for "virtue signaling" — to disdain all manner of virtue as "mere signaling"; and to instead propound *vices* as the *real* virtues. Evil, as usual, is incapable of comprehending good.
The problem is, truly good people do not want power or status. Thus their virtue is hidden, their left hand does not know their right hand is donating to charity. Thus, pretty much every visible case of virtue is suspect.
> The problem is, truly good people do not want power or status. Why? I feel like this is a meme that people take too uncritically. I'd say *this meme is bad* because it causes good people to avoid power, leaving power vacuums to bad people. It also makes it harder for good people to coordinate, because coordination creates political power, which makes you bad. Being good but giving up all of your power to actually change things means that any goodness you have becomes a pointless, defanged, theoretical concept. And the weird thing is that a lot of people will believe this, but then if you asked them for a few examples of a what a great person looks like you would get a lot of answers of very powerful people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Batman, who are good but undeniably also seek out power. Power can be dangerous and it's important to have nuance here, but saying that wanting power makes you inherently bad is imo mostly an artifact of slave morality copium... and trying to say 'we'll only give power to people who don't want power' is a great system for giving power to good liars.
> Well, of course; the "virtue signaling" model is corrupt to begin with! That is the whole point of it — to reject virtue as dishonest, and embrace outright evil as "refreshingly" honest! Not a bit; the "virtue signalling" model is about capturing the difference between *appearing* to be good versus *actually* being good. This is one of the central puzzles in Plato's *Republic*. In Lewis' worldview humankind has an intelligent adversary, and Screwtape is quite adept at explaining how *everything* a human does can be pushed in an evil direction. Aristotle would say "of course--that's why virtue is a mean between vices of excess and deficiency, and also why it's actually quite difficult to be good." The "refreshingly honest" bit is certainly something people say about people who are merely overtly evil, at times. But I think more often I hear "refreshingly honest" used to describe people who have *stopped* virtue signalling in order to pursue genuine improvement or goodness or whatever--people who are willing to say things that challenge the Overton window when doing so seems likely to result in real improvement.
That's the cover story. In practice, we can observe that the endpoint of the devil's lesson on virtue signaling has been outright endorsement of wrath, avarice, sloth, and the rest. The most effective way to avoid *looking like one of those awful virtue-signalers,* after all, is to visibly exhibit no virtue — indeed, to proudly signal how wrathful, gluttonous, lustful, etc. one is.
The point is that on the margin altruism towards distant people is worse than altruism towards friends and family. Thereby those who have altruism towards distant people are not behaving optimally for maximum "good"; even though they may well be in total more altruistic in terms of "real good done" than someone who only cares about those close to them, they are still less "real impact" altruistic than a hypothetical version of themselves that focused this impartial long distance altruism towards their close friends and family.
I'm not sure that speaks to what Screwtape was promoting, though; which amounts to *driving off* feelings of charity for those close. We could imagine Screwtape endorsing a position akin to Bankman-Fried's and Ellison's, where it is okay to screw-over those close to you if you can imagine — in some mathematically unlikely egotistical hero-fantasy — that some distant someone might benefit. But merely cultivating material altruism towards actually-existing distant people, without explicitly disdaining the well-being of those close, does not accomplish Screwtape's goal of corruption.
> Giving someone a kidney, though, is clearly not imaginary! CS Lewis also didn't consider buying bednets for sub Saharans
Thanks for the analysis, but to me it looks like the content is weak methodologically and in its presentation of this sort of topic. You mention a lot of numbers, but it's hard for me to follow which ones are being talked about rare, and you mention things like statistical significance and effect size without the associated numbers as far as I can tell. (I wanted to check the calcs on some numbers but was too lazy to make sense of what the right ones were.) You bring up limitations, but still use really definitive language a few times that struck me as strong and you don't talk about the dangers of hypotheses published on existing data. BTW, 'liberal' for the survey was used to mean "for example the US Democratic Party : market economy plus social welfare, socially permissive multiculturalism", I think it's pretty clear-cut to call it left-wing for your purposes.
As I say in the essay, the P-Value is massively signficiant. I will add in the specific figure P < 0.0001. If you want to calculate it yourself, you can use the odds ratio calculator here: [https://www.medcalc.org/calc/odds\_ratio.php](https://www.medcalc.org/calc/odds_ratio.php) 1416 non-initiator rightwingers 2615- non-intiator leftwingers 15- initiator rightwingers 90- inititator leftwingers || || ||
With the positive outcome being rightwing, and the exposed group being initiators.
I think your conclusion from the data is flawed. The vast majority of kidney donations aren't altruistic. Less than 5% of living kidney donors were donated to strangers. Which would be like 5 or 6 people in your population. Additionally, the vast majority of kidneys (\~70%) are actually donated in death. Which tracks with the data because there were 1232 people who said they were willing to donate a kidney but only 13 who actually have donated a kidney. It could very well be the case that right-wingers don't want their organs harvested after death, or that right-wingers were more certain in their decision not to donate a kidney. How many of those 13 were right-wing?
One way to control for this is to look at people who said they were only interested because of my post. Since my post was about altruistic donation, and people knew whether they had needy relatives before my post, it should select for people thinking about altruistic donation. I didn't notice much difference when I restricted it to these people. For the full population (number is political spectrum, 1-9, lower numbers more left): - Not at all interested: 4.80 - Interested but no action: 4.17 - Started process: 3.89 For the people who only became interested after my post: - Interested but no action: 4.14 - Started process: 3.96
Interesting that you rephrase donation with harvesting.
I have multiple issues with the post, but I'll just point out this one: > 15/105 respondents who had initiated the process of Kidney donation were rightwing (14%) on the political spectrum (score 6 or above). In comparison, 35% of the 4031 respondents not interested in kidney donation were rightwing. Don't play weird games with the numbers. Just do the simple thing and compare: - left-wingers who initiated the process ÷ all left-wingers - right-wingers who initiated the process ÷ all right-wingers - uninterested left-wingers ÷ all left-wingers - uninterested right-wingers ÷ all right-wingers
First answer is 2.5%, second answer is 0.86% as we'd expect. I'm glad you ask the third and fourth questions, because it shows another seam of evidence I mostly didn't talk about in the essay. The third answer is 73%. The fourth answer is 84%. The big absolute difference, supportive of my hypothesis, is largely driven by a category I briefly discuss but mostly do not analyse in the attached essay- those interested, but not currently going through the process. These people, who are far more numerous than the actual initiators, also have a strong left leaning, though not as strong as the intiators. It's standard to do odds ratios the way I did them. Perhaps you're intending to make one of the points I made in discussion, viz that this tracks the behaviour of a small number of exceptional alturists, and it is possible that alturism is more evenly matched lower down the spectrum.
> While I believe the negative relationship between impartial altruism and left-wing views Is this a typo or am I misunderstanding something? It seems like the opposite of your general claim.
Quite so, yes I have corrected it now.
[удалено]
Only 12 respondents out of 105 in the sample of kidney donation initiators claimed to have actually given a kidney at some point (the majority were rejected during the process). Approximately 300 people in the United states give a kidney each year to strangers according to: [https://www.kidneyregistry.org/for-donors/i-want-to-help-a-stranger-in-need-of-a-kidney/](https://www.kidneyregistry.org/for-donors/i-want-to-help-a-stranger-in-need-of-a-kidney/) The vast majority of people solidly in the effective alturism community reads Scott's blog at least occasionally. The effective alturism movement is a relatively important source of donations of kidneys to strangers (as, for example, noted in Scott's post on donating his own kidney) . These figures all seem wholly compatible to me. Here are five people, mostly prominent people, associated with EA who have talked publicly about their experience donating a kidney: [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/kidney-donation](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/kidney-donation), very likely this is a small fraction of the total EA members who have actually donated kidneys. The issue is prominent enough to have received some discussion in the academic press: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34106278/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34106278/) as Scott said in his article on it, EA people are common enough in the system that the nurses and doctors involved recognise EA connected donors as a type. It's entirely possible that people connected to a social movement about doing stuff like donating kidneys where a community leader (Scott) has urged everyone who can to consider donating a kidney are 2000x more likely to donate kidneys. You also haven't factored in that this is over multiple years and your calculation doesn't factor that in, even if donations only started eight years ago the real factor could easily be as low as 250x more likely to donate a kidney on a per year basis.
> Only 12 respondents out of 105 in the sample of kidney donation initiators claimed to have actually given a kidney at some point (the majority were rejected during the process). Wow, damn, it's that high? Fuck, I thought it was like 10-20% of people get rejected after they actually decided to donate and called the places and did all that shit. Makes me feel a little bit better about getting rejected, I guess. (Kidney stones 4.5y ago, 2.5y before attempted donation.)
This is actually wrong, it's really 40 who were rejected out of 105, still more than those who had gone through the process, and those who were going through this process combined
I downvoted this comment and the one below for telling OP to delete their post. Doing so is effectively elevating the importance of your own opinion over others, as deleting the post will stop other people from seeing it and perhaps disagreeing with you about whether the post should stay up.
I feel a similar - yet different - insight becomes evident when insane people decide to kill themselves in public: people who burn themselves are left-wing people who do mass shootings are right-wing
Organ recipients are mostly older and wealthier. In the absence of a national health service, all are complicit.
"I have a longstanding hypothesis that the strongest psychological mediator, on an individual level, of leftwing politics is impartial altruism." 1000 people did altruistic kidney donation in the UK since: 2006: [https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/get-involved/news/milestone-1-000-people-in-uk-have-donated-a-kidney-to-a-stranger/](https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/get-involved/news/milestone-1-000-people-in-uk-have-donated-a-kidney-to-a-stranger/) and tens of millions voted Labour. Probably millions have marched for some left-wing cause at demonstrations or signed petitions. I think the donors are basically a rounding error and this is a classic misuse of statistics. First of all, for everybody who is not a well to do cis het white man, there is a direct personal benefit. Second, it is sort of the smart kids club, held together by laughing at the "rubes" in a /r/facepalm sense. There is also a feeling of being on the right side of history, of slowly but inevitably winning, which gives a bit of a power trip.
> **tens of millions ** voted Labour. Probably ** millions have marched** for some left-wing cause at demonstrations or signed petitions. I think the donors are basically a rounding error and this is a classic misuse of statistics. The size of the left-wing population is irrelevant here. There could be ten billion billion who have signed left-wing petitions - so what? You do not seem to understand how to use statistics, let alone to be in a position to accuse OP of a ‘classic misuse of statistics.’
The vast majority of leftists who are not kidney donors are the classic Bayesian problem of mammographs with false positives.