And do you think the probability of the thing you describe (or anything analogous to it but still arising from the same intervention) is substantial?

I’m not claiming that all charity should be done in such an attempt-to-be-expected-utility-maximizing way, as there may be some like, component of how donations for more local causes might do more to improve the character of the person donating, and other things like that,

but I don’t see your view of “but-serendipity, and but-mosquito-nets-is-no-fun” don’t seem like compelling reasons to not look at QALYs and such.

That being said, I personally haven’t made any substantial donations, so if you’ve made even fairly inefficient donations (as long as they were at least a little effective, and not e.g. counterproductive) then your donations have likely done more good than mine have.

So, we should fund entertainment venues for privileged people instead of saving lives or preventing suffering?

EA does not need the assumption that you can precisely plan out an optimal path. Just that simply accounting for the good you do and comparing it to other outlets will give you better outcomes than not. Which is a far weaker premise than you can precisely plan out every optimal path.

Several orders of magnitude more children would be saved from mosquito nets than community theater, and each of them has a chance to find a cure to cancer. Then there's a couple orders of magnitude of children who wouldn't die, but whose lives would have otherwise been significantly disrupted by malaria, hookworm or vitamin A deficiency. All these children could go on to find cures to cancer or at the very least live more meaningful lives.

Obviously, this isn't to say we should donate any less to community theaters, though I think that's a different type of donation. That is partially altruistic, but on some level it fulfills the same satisfaction as a purchase.

What if closing the community theater caused them to drop art, pursue biology and then cure cancer?

> The idea that the moon is made out of cheese is stupid.

Agreed, but you are the only one that claimed this was the idea because clearly you are not the "arrogant and fundamentally wrong" one.

What if when jumping off a roof, I spontaneously developed the ability to fly? And yet I will not attempt it, and worse, strongly evangelize that roofhopping should be avoided by everyone. How arrogant of me, how presumptuous!

Though we cannot tell in every case what the outcome will be, that is no excuse to not consider the odds.

But lots of people did jump off of things with various contraptions and we did eventually develop the ability to fly that way.

Almost like we should try to make advance predictions about outcomes given particular circumstances and continuously test them against reality :)

These people after all pursued theoretical means by which the risk of death could be reduced, and then put them into practice in order to improve their understanding.

You can die in the air. You can die on the ground! Sometimes jumping off a cliff is safer than staying there. There is no safe path, no guarantee of survival; you have to speculate, to make theories, to test them, to choose the path that seems best to you. There is nothing arrogant about this.

By all means speculate all you like about your own actions and act accordingly. The original comment was about how effective altruism is intentionally looking down on others (as they are implicitly ineffective) and holding themselves up as the ideal that everyone should follow.

Aren't you making a general point here against public arguments that certain things lead to better outcomes than others? Do you reserve the same rancor for these little warning labels printed on packs of cigarettes about cancer risk? (Look at these non-smokers looking down on others...)

Public debate is, to a first approximation, nothing but arguing about which actions lead to better outcomes.

I could see an argument that the claim is that EA is insulting because it's akin to calling a chocolate brand "asbestos-free!"; you're implicitly suggesting that competitors contain asbestos. But note that this depends on whether the other brands do, in fact, contain asbestos, and EA is not shy about its claims that many charities do not effectively pursue good outcomes. It's hard to accuse EA of trying to sneak in this point when it's a central part of its rhetoric. And of course, such debate is an entirely ordinary part of discourse.

I draw a distinction between a particular charitable organization being effective, i.e. the amount spent on overhead vs going to cause they claim to support and a particular charitable cause itself being effective (mosquito nets vs. community theater).

For the former I agree, seek out charities that most effectively support what you want to support.

For the latter, I don't think it's worthwhile to deride people for supporting a cause just because you think there's some other cause that might technically result in more living humans. Raw population is not a worthwhile metric to optimize for. People should be free to support things they care about and believe make the world a better place as long as it's not harming anyone.

I still think there is a fundamental internal inconsistency here. I agree that people will, for instance, hold the moral belief that their community theater is worth more than five foreign lives. However, explicitly espousing this belief is politically unviable. The "common knowledge" moral view is that all humans are of equal moral worth. EA, as I understand it, is largely pursued by people who internalize this view; who recognize the mismatch and as a result, will prefer to sacrifice their community theater rather than admit inconsistency.