They probably do value spending $10,000 on making one dying kid happy higher than $10,000 worth of medical research.

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.

$10k worth of malaria nets will save a couple of lives.

That's a fair point, but ultimately people are going to care more about children that are 'closer' to them. You're free to criticize people for this, but it probably won't do you any favours.

> That's a fair point, but ultimately people are going to care more about children that are 'closer' to them. You're free to criticize people for this, but it probably won't do you any favours.

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.

Our intuition regarding communities stems from a history where we only ever communicated with those near us. Right now, we are able to go anywhere in the world within a day. We are able to communicate worldwide within seconds. Clearly our intuition has not caught up, but maybe given these changes in our community (which is now far less defined just by some kind of radius around our location), we should update our actions to reflect this?

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.

That’s true but also what makes EA interesting. Ineffective charity is as good as nothing and sometimes worse. All the money poured into former colonies is a good example where it may be doing more harm than good.

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

not if they never reach their target. effective altruism is a joke, its just rationalism applied to charity, with all the idiocy the rationalist movement possesses. People who talk endlessly about problems like dolphins who obsess over hang gliding.

Are you saying the Against Malaria Foundation is a scam and they don't actually get nets to people?

Medical Research saves a lot of lives over time.

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.

While that's true something like $10,000 would at best accelerate medical research a bit, ultimately it will only save those people for whom medical research would have otherwise been too late. It's not entirely clear what this figure would be, but with billions spend each year it's probably not several per $10,000.

I guess it just comes down to at what number the effectiveness flips. I'd much rather spend €2 on a bar of chocolate for some kid I encounter who just heard that he's terminally ill or something, than donate that to research. (Though perhaps at that point it's the gesture that's most valuable, not the money.)

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.

Discovery is by it's nature a random process, so a single 10,000$ investment could with some low probability make a 30 year difference for some drug.

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.

Yeah, how dare donors use their money in ways they see fit! Let's make an organization that shames other organizations for spending in ways we find unsavory or inefficient.

The donors should be free to use their money in ways they see fit, and everyone else should be free to point out that there are several orders of magnitude more effective ways to help people.

You appear to be using innuendo, but I don't know what you're implying. Here is my answer reading you literally:

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.

I think it boils down to having or not having, let's call it "religious mindset".

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.

>Are you suggesting donors to make-a-wish actually value making one dying kid (and his support network) happy more than saving the lives of several?

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?