Thread by @s_r_constantin

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg I think this article understates how big the disconnect is between how people think about charity/altruism and how they think about effectiveness or causal reasoning.

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg Years after being personally familiar with the EA movement I *finally* grokked, after a friend showed me some equations on paper, that these people were trying to spend LESS money to get a desired result (like lives saved.)

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg I had thought the point of charity was to prove you were a good person who was willing to sacrifice.

If you were going to think about it in budgeting/efficiency terms, like you would for personal consumption or business purchases, why would you give to charity at all?

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg Of course the answer is “because you actually care about the desired result of the charity.”

But some part of me says “yeah I guess...but then it’s just a thing you want, it doesn’t make you a good person.”

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg I don’t really endorse this perspective — this notion of “good person” that excludes intrinsic motivation is a person who won’t actually *get anything done in the real world*, and I don’t want to live in a world run by people who don’t care about outcomes.

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg But like...if a lot of people think this way intuitively, the reason they’re not EAs is not ignorance of the importance of “overhead” to nonprofits or the existence of variance in charity cost-effectiveness. It’s not even that they succumb to emotional rhetoric.

@SteveStuWill @anderssandberg It’s that the idea of “second-guessing whether well-meaning people’s projects work” or “getting more value for money” feels like a “selfish” or “professional” concern, not applicable at all to altruistic endeavors.