Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent.

> Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars?

I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?

Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people.

It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or weird "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives.

So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is it really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd that anybody would even think about that question for longer than a millisecond.

250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.

Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists".

Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves.

It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)

I am fairly confident that stopping people dying of preventable diseases is an actual thing that happens in the real world. There's certainly prestige and feel-good involved in saving lives, but are you sure that makes saving lives bad? What's an acceptable exchange rate? If somebody saves a thousand lives and feels only slightly good about it, would that be acceptable? How many people would you have to watch die of preventable diseases, before you'd start to think it was OK for somebody to feel good about preventing them, or even enjoy a bit of prestige?

> every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors

Givewell's current list of top "high-impact, cost-effective" charities has two Malaria charities, vitamin A supplements and cash incentives for vaccinations. GiveDirectly (which "gives money to the poors") was there until a couple of years ago.

The main take is that "doing good "is not their motivation. They are pursuing their own selfish interests. And when those interests align with the general good, they use that opportunity to do some marketing and say "look, we are doing good." Which is true but they fail to mention "because it’s in our own interest and we are also doing very nasty stuff in our own interest but we will, of course, try to hide it as much as we could".

Even if they are doing 90% good stuff, it is really scary to realize that those people have so much power because they had the luck to won at what Cory Doctorow call the "lucky orifice lottery" (they had rich parent then they compounded on that to become even richer). Which means we can’t trust them, we should not trust them. Elon Musk is an excellent example : what he was doing seemed good (electric cars, space stuff) until you realize what he really did (founding the hyperloop project as a scam to prevent, on purpose, any big scale public transportation project that would compete with Tesla).