This game can go on endlessly. What if hiring the teenagers mean they’re getting a salary, can help their families, and without the job they’d run off into the jungle to join the warlord who runs a murder cult army? Turns out the community theatre prevented a massacre and one of the kids wins the Nobel Prize for her plays in fifty years.

I don't understand the purpose of your what if.

Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives.

It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters.

It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.

You did straw man the example though. It's very different to say that building the theater will kill the workers, as to say that the money could be used elsewhere to save someone in an immediately dire situation.

Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many.

It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?

Sorry, I'm confused as to what you mean by a mugging? Genuinely not sure what you meant by that.

Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.

The point is you wouldn't endanger the lives of teenagers to build a community theater because you believe the lives of teenagers are more valuable than a community theater.

But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for.

So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.

No. This ignores the effect of donating locally and helping local causes. Your comparison does not account for global differences in needs.

But the theatre has a chance of spawning a future movie star who also has a chance of being an EA advocate. Directly through their $50million movie paycheques they will be saving 10,000 lives at a future date.

Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.

The same argument means that any luxury that any person indulges in. Let’s say thanksgiving, christmas, craft beer, VR headset, calling their mother, etc. is costing X lives (X is not necessary integer) and so isn’t the rationalist thing to do.

“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…”

Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!

Effective alturism vs luxury alturism?

Yes I guess!

I think this is fitting in that context:

Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ

In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.

Pascal’s mugging is a popular thought experiment amongst rationalists and EA people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging