How? I'm curious because the numbers are so specific ($5000 = 1 human life), unclouded by the usual variances of getting the money to people at a macro scale and having it go through many hands and across borders. Is it related to treating a specific illness that just objectively costs that much to treat?

Here is a detailed methodology: https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates. It convinced me that $5k is a reasonable estimate.

A weird corollary to this is that if you work for one of these charities, you’re paid in human lives (say you make $50k, that’s ten people who could have been saved).

That's an extremely weird way to think about it. The same logic applies to anyone doing any job - whatever money you spend on yourself could be spent saving lives instead, if you really want to think about it that way. There's no reason that people working for an effective charity should feel more guilty about their salaries than people working for any other job - if anything it's the opposite, since salaries usually do not reflect the full value of a person's work.

> That's an extremely weird way to think about it

Perhaps, but it's exactly the type of thinking the article is describing.

No it isn't. EA folks do not think that people who work for charities specifically should be paid less or feel guiltier about their salaries (indeed witness the whole Scottish Castle drama, if anything it's the opposite).

The reasonable way to think of it is that if you were not paid those 50k, the chatity eould be less able to deliver on this. It would be amortized over the entire sum of people being helped by the charity, eventually becoming a negligible overhead.

No more than anyone is paid in human lives.