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atucker comments on A critique of effective altruism - LessWrong
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See the point about why its weird to think that new affluent populations will work more on x-risk if current affluent populations don't do so at a particularly high rate.
Also, it's easier to move specific people to a country than it is to raise the standard of living of entire countries. If you're doing raising-living-standards as an x-risk strategy, are you sure you shouldn't be spending money on locating people interested in x-risk instead?
I quite agree that if all you care about is x-risk then trying to address that by raising everyone's living standards is using a nuclear warhead to crack a nut. I was addressing the following thing you said:
which I think is clearly wrong: bringing everyone's living standards up will increase the pool of people who have the motive and opportunity to work on x-risk, and since the number of people working on x-risk isn't zero that number will likely increase (say, by 2x) if the size of that pool increases (say, by 2x) as a result of making everyone better off.
I wasn't claiming (because it would be nuts) that the way to get the most x-risk bang per buck is to reduce poverty and disease in the poorest parts of the world. It surely isn't, by a large factor. But you seemed to be saying it would have zero x-risk impact (beyond effects like reducing pandemic risk by reducing overall disease levels). That's all I was disagreeing with.