I take issue with this attitude. How is this anything but degrading and shaming those who give their time and money to a noble cause? I frankly don't see how your opinion on efficacy matters, it appears you want to make people feel bad for doing good-but-not-good-enough things.

If you want me to stop saying that, prove me wrong. Calling me mean isn't an argument. If what I say makes people feel bad, the solution isn't to start lying to make them feel better.

Me spending $40 to go out to dinner with my wife is motivated by a desire to feel good. Should I instead "set aside my feelings" and spend that on your list of approved charities "in order to do the right thing"? Have you given up all frivolous spending and donate it to causes you believe to be effective?

I should have started by saying that it's good that you're thinking of which charities you find to be a more effective target for donations. It turns from thoughtful to unnecessary when you pass judgment on others for giving differently than you would give.

EA is just doing the same moral judgement using a different accounting metric.

By going out to dinner with you wife, you are making both you and your wife happy. For that, you get 1 morality point in my book.

If you instead took that money and gave it to the make a wish foundation, you get 10 morality points.

And by giving it to the gates foundation, to help prevent Malaria, you get 100 morality points.

It is exactly the same thing it you yourself were to congratulate someone else on donating to a charity that you like. You are making a moral judgement on them.

Me making a moral judgement on you is no different.

Nobody "has" to do anything. I will fully admit that the average doctor is a better person than I am. Just like how I am probably a better person than the average pay day loan scammer.

Everyone makes judgements every day about other people. EA is just saying that these judgements should be evidence based.

I think it is 100% a valid moral stance to care about your community or your nation, and not feel any moral obligation to help people outside of that. The world is too big and chaotic for every human to feel the same degree of moral obligation for every other human.

Moreover, maybe Make-A-Wish's main positive outcome is not that one kid gets a wish, but that everyone gets to 'live in a society where Make-A-Wish exists', thus kindling optimism and community and reminding us that the world is still kind in big ways. It is not hard to see that the net result on one's society of Make-a-Wish could, for some systems of evaluating morality of actions, be far higher than well-intentioned throwing money at some faraway place where you would never see any result, either if you care much more about local effects, or if you think signaling effects can be comparable in magnitude to actual 'good'.

Anyway, the crux of it is that your way of accounting for the morality of actions is actually pretty particular and you're demanding everyone else follow it and then shaming them if they don't. Not your morality, your system of accounting, which is far less 'obviously' right.

> If you want me to stop saying that, prove me wrong. Calling me mean isn't an argument. If what I say makes people feel bad, the solution isn't to start lying to make them feel better.

People aren't robots, and there's no moral obligation for them to act like they are.

I do often see people injecting themselves into discussions of EA once they get defensive about their charity choices.

The people who seem to be judgmental are those who dislike how EA advocates choose to operate.

Freedom of association.

Why would I (willingly) do business with people working against me?

I doubt that's usually the case because if you consider it for a moment is seems so unfair and cruel. No, it's probably something else that motivates their decision...

If you claim $10,000 worth of medical research will save the lives of several people then clearly we're doing something wrong with the other billions we spend on medical research.

Also, making charity too much about distant problems and far off research outcomes factors out the civic and community-level thinking that actually drives and sustains a lot of charity.

It also makes charity solely the domain of experts. Instead of seeing a problem firsthand in your first-world community and reacting to fix it, you have to delegate to someone who you hope knows the highest needs in far off lands.

It makes sense not to feel morally responsible for things that happen out of view when you cannot know what is going on and have no way to impact it. Thing is, we do know a lot about what is going on and we do have tools to impact it. It just doesn't feel intuitively satisfying. It is possible to internalize this satisfaction regardless, though.

The reason EA is not interesting is finding out what’s effective is so hard. Maybe local is much better.

A drug that saves 1,000 lives per year worldwide at the cost of 1 billion dollars seems expensive. But that's 1 million lives over the next 100 years for 10,000$ each and we would still know how to make that drug in 100 years. Dropping that to 1,000$ per life over ~1000 years.

And if you consider 1 billion per 1 thousand lives/year then cancers's 8.2 million deaths/year is clearly worth ~8.2+ Trillion dollars in research to cure or ~4.1 Trillion to cut in half.

PS: Global cancer research only recently hit 100 Billion per year so it's going to take a long time to hit 4.1 trillion yet we already save a large chunk of potential cancer victims.

Of course, that's also not often a choice I (have to) make. I've a set amount of donations to a few regular charities, whereas a situation as above would "count" towards my regular daily expenses rather than charitable givings.

It's probably also related to always being able to do more. Yes, maybe giving €x to one of the Givewell organisations is more effective than giving it to Make-A-Wish, but often it's not a game of either-or. I'm sure a lot of people donate to Make-A-Wish because they encounter it and sympathise with it, rather than spending effort looking for the most efficient way to spend <arbitrary amount designated for charitable donations>, so it's not even a question of effective charity vs. MAW, but MAW vs. sitting there in your savings account.

People only investigate a finite number of things, adding just 1 more to the early stage to the millions already tried is not likely to be useful, but we simply don't know.

PS: After that point much larger sums are involved, but even then only a finite number of tests get done and they are very dependent on funding.

Yes. Your argument, while presented against make-a-wish, actually applies to all artistic endeavors. Yes, it is good and right to make life worth living.

If you have religious mindset (it doesn't matter if you are an atheist) you donate to "save your soul", or, to be less vague, to alleviate your moral distress. If that's the goal it doesn't really matter whether the charity you give to is effective or not. It only matters if it makes you feel like a better person.

If you, on the other hand, care about actually helping people, it matters very much who you donate to.

Yes.

>I doubt that's usually the case because if you consider it for a moment is seems so unfair and cruel.

Hmm? What about all the discretionary money you spend on dates, living in a nicer than necessary apartment, money spent on hobbies, etc? Do you value those things more than the lives of African children who will die if you don't donate your discretionary spending? Well of course you do because you do one and not the other.

>No, it's probably something else that motivates their decision...

And what would that be?

EDIT: Make-a-Wish seems more like a giant pr-machine. Granted it's helping some, but wasting a lot of resources that could be better allocated. I guess I am part of the movement, without ever thinking about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

Can you try to formulate those values?

> I would add that the Make-A-Wish foundation has a very significant quality of life impact on the kids AND their support network

But given the costs per instance that impact is only on a small fraction of all cases. A smaller impact for everyone or one that only materializes in the future would likely generate more utility if you add them up.

  Can you try to formulate those values?

But I might also donate to the charity that supports my cousin who has cerebral palsy, because I can see with my own eyes that they're doing good work; and because it's work I'd like to see continue.

Or I might donate to the charity that gave me a scholarship when I was younger, to repay them and so other people can benefit like I did.

Or I might donate to Wikipedia, because although it's hard to value wikipedia page views in terms of quality-adjusted life years saved, you can surely get a great many page views for your dollar.

Or maybe my colleague in work is running a marathon for charity, and although our professional relationship wouldn't be damaged at all if I didn't donate, our professional relationship would be improved if I did; perhaps I see a possibility to leverage better relationships into success at work.

Or I might consider that I have fully discharged my moral duty for this financial year by donations I've already made; and hence I can spend money on things that are utterly uncharitable if I feel like it, and spending money on things that are inefficiently charitable is relatively better than that.

Or I might donate to a political organisation, because I think I directly benefit from their activism....

This is an issue I see with effective altruism and other (new atheism, veganism) hyper-rational movements. It's not enough to establish a viable alternative; they also have to exterminate every other line of thinking, in the pursuit of the almighty rationalization.

There's a lot of charities out there and I think it's enough if EA creates a marketing channel for some of them to have a unique advantage. "No one paid attention to us until we showed we save the most lives per dollar". If everyone agreed donating was entirely about maximizing lives/dollar then maybe this truly is the most important stat. But people donate for scads of less-than-rational but still well-meaning reasons.

It works against EA's (new atheism's, veganism's) best interests to draw a line in the sand and alienate everyone else. To me this feels as rational a conclusion as you can get, which makes it funny to me that the people particularly taken up by hyper-rationalism behave the way they do.

Perhaps your question is phrased poorly, but it appears you're asking OP to rationalize every value a donor has when they donate to an organization like Make-A-Wish. Is that what you meant? If so, where would one even start to answer this question?

I have a small amount of cash in my pocket, which will (given enough time) purchase junk food with. However, I see a random charity donation box so I put my money in that and feel happy that I've done two good things.