I like your attitude.
On a side note: worth trying to slip some numbers into these articles. you had a list of names, for the emotional argument, but maybe someone at givewell can comment on some good looking numbers worth sharing on the issue of helping/QALY.
"I fell for it, and" could be removed (replace with "I"). Portraying any charity as a "bad charity" is likely to offend that charity. And I firmly believe that EA's are not trying to do that.
By comparison, Max told me to consider the Against Malaria Foundation. It buys malaria nets that protect children in developing countries from mosquitoes carrying this deadly disease. Would not my goal of helping kids have good lives be achieved better by protecting them from death?
I had to think hard about why I gave to Make-A-Wish. I realized it was because they had heartwarming stories and great marketing that brought the stories to my attention. Our brains focus on things that come to our attention and not necessarily on things that are actually important for our goals, a thinking error called attentional bias.
I don't like "by comparison", as that really is dangerous thinking. And runs the risk of putting "giving to charity" into the too-hard-basket. Signalling that people need to compare charities is going to first cause people to withdraw before it causes them to re-invest.
"Max told me to about the Against Malaria Foundation. AMF buys malaria nets that protect children in developing countries from mosquitoes carrying this deadly disease. I considered my goal of helping kids have good lives and realised the same cost of one Disneyland trip could go towards (Include real numbers) malaria nets.
What I failed to consider was the stories of children saved from malaria. I imagined a specific child, Mary, who did not get malaria because of my donation. I envisioned how Mary's mother rocked Mary to sleep. I imagined Mary's fifth birthday party, with her family all around. I imagined Mary's first day of school. I imagined her first kiss. I imagined Mary growing up, becoming an adult, getting married, and having her own kids. My last mental image was of Mary knitting in a rocking chair, enjoying her grandchildren's laughter.
"What I failed to consider was the stories of children saved from malaria. It's particularly hard to understand a life where there is a real risk of malaria every day; I just can't picture it compared to a holiday to Disneyland. I imagined a specific child, Mary, who did not get malaria because of my donation. I envisioned how Mary's mother rocked Mary to sleep. I imagined Mary's fifth birthday party, with her family all around (kind of like my own child's Xth party). I imagined Mary's first day of school. I imagined her first kiss. I imagined Mary growing up, becoming an adult, getting married, and having her own kids, maybe she grows up in a world where we already cured malaria... My last mental image was of Mary knitting in a rocking chair, enjoying her grandchildren's laughter."
Now I have nothing against Make-A-Wish Foundation. They do what they promised to do. It was a failure of my imagination that caused me to make bad decisions. From this experience, I learned that charities that are most effective in achieving my actual goals for donations are often not the ones with the best stories, and thus do not get funded.
I hope this shows the minor-level of the type of edits needed, and yet how massively it sways the tone of the story, as well as what matters. The use of modelling thinking, the failure to imagine, the repeat on analysing a goal;
I could comment more on more paragraphs; but it takes a fair bit of time to do. I am worried I don't have the time to make all the improvements that I would like to see in this kind of thing, and can't give you the kind of help that I really want to. I am not sure how to help better, other than to say; I don't like where your writing is at; and it needs improving towards the vein of more steel manned content, because you can't expect the reader to do that for you.
Signalling that people need to compare charities is going to first cause people to withdraw before it causes them to re-invest.
You have many good points overall, but I'm not at all sure that we have a real alternative to "signaling that you need to compare charities". This is perhaps the most critical part of effective giving, and trying to avoid it just makes it look like you're pushing your pet cause with no good reasoning behind it. (I mean, just look at the debate within the EA movement. Should you care more about saving lives, promoting a...
Disclaimer: This post is mainly of interest to EA-oriented Less Wrongers
Happy to share that I got this article promoting effective giving, and especially advocating Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save, published in The Huffington Post.
This piece is part of my broader work at Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to promoting effective altruism and rational thinking to a broad audience effectively, by using modern promotion and marketing methods. Our goals with this and similar articles is to channel both money to effective charities and encourage people to think about donations in a rational, science-based, data-driven manner. These articles are also aimed to be a good fit for those supportive of EA ideas to share with others on social media, to help encourage non-EAs to adopt effective giving strategies, since the articles are aimed to be easy to read and engaging.
I'd love your feedback on how well you think this article works in accomplishing the goals outlined above, both strengths and weaknesses, to help me improve my writing and to help Intentional Insights improve its efforts. For those of you who are EA-oriented, would you share this on your social media? Why or why not?
Also, I would value any ideas on how to evaluate the QALYs gained from channeling people's money and thinking toward effective giving, as that's something we at Intentional Insights are trying to figure out. For example, how many QALYs are gained from publishing an article like this in a broad venue such as The Huffington Post? What are good approaches to estimating this number? The best we came up with so far is a first-order intuitive gut reactions of how much would you pay to not have this article and its influence on people disappear, so I'd be curious about your response to this question.
P.S. Note that based on previously-expressed concerns about purity of content and the rationality/Less Wrong brand, we at Intentional Insights have updated and are no longer presenting ourselves publicly as promoting rationality or Less Wrong explicitly, though we are bringing up rationality and Less Wrong to those who have engaged with our content extensively and are guiding them first to ClearerThinking and then to Less Wrong.
P.P.S. I'd be glad to speak to anyone who wants to know more about and collaborate on promoting effective altruism and rationality to a broad audience by using modern promotion and marketing methods, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and the EA Forum.