= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shokwave comments on Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (318)
Unless you have a huge "they are in another country" discount on children's lives, or a huge "they are in my community" boost to the other goals, I can't name any goals off the top of my head that can compete with saving children's lives.
I didn't say that other goals could compete, but there are other goals that can be considered simultaneously. If one charity saves ten children for $100 and another saves nine and accomplishes a few other things, that is not a choice we should make mindlessly. we can't let "saving children become a buzzword that cuts off thought. What if the second charity saves the children from death and gives them some skills that will help them make a living and help their communities? In that case, I would probably choose the second charity. Think of it as a linear algebra problem, with numerous parameters with different weights. You end up with an optimal solution for all variables together rather than for a single variable alone. Just because saving children is the most heavily weighted variable doesn't mean that it is the only one.
This is what I had in mind; I just felt that that the "saving childrens' lives" variable would have a multiplier of a few hundred in front of it (because lives are important) and the other variables like "improves their community" would have multipliers of two or three at best. I couldn't think of any other variable that would have a similar multiplier to "child's life".
Some of those other variables will feed back in to the "child's life" variable, a generation or two down the road.
Feeding back into "child's life" a few generations down the road is not a multiplier of a few hundred. That it feeds back gives it an extra 10% or so; even with the feeding back, doing anything that isn't directly saving as many lives as possible right now is an objectively worse option.