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by heckanoobs 2942 days ago
> Can you try to formulate those values?

This is an issue I see with effective altruism and other (new atheism, veganism) hyper-rational movements. It's not enough to establish a viable alternative; they also have to exterminate every other line of thinking, in the pursuit of the almighty rationalization.

There's a lot of charities out there and I think it's enough if EA creates a marketing channel for some of them to have a unique advantage. "No one paid attention to us until we showed we save the most lives per dollar". If everyone agreed donating was entirely about maximizing lives/dollar then maybe this truly is the most important stat. But people donate for scads of less-than-rational but still well-meaning reasons.

It works against EA's (new atheism's, veganism's) best interests to draw a line in the sand and alienate everyone else. To me this feels as rational a conclusion as you can get, which makes it funny to me that the people particularly taken up by hyper-rationalism behave the way they do.