[Nifty3929]

EA seeks to measure and compare altruistic endeavors, however imperfectly. For example, measuring the good created by donating to your kids school, to the 9/11 fund, or to bed nets in Africa. An EA would likely say that the good for society created by donating to your kids' school is less than the good provided by donating the same amount of money to bed nets. They might quantify that in lives saved, such as a $1000 donation to bed nets saving about 1/5th of a life in Africa. But maybe the $1000 donation to the school improves the lives of 100 students by 1% each, or something like that.

It really forces us to have hard conversations about how we use our collective effort to help each other, based on more than just feelings in the moment. Feelings are an important part of the end goal, but feelings about some particular intervention are not a good way to evaluate it. We're also forced to be clear about what good we think an intervention will provide, and to whom.

[low_tech_love]

Your answer sums up perfectly why I am so strongly against EA. The idea that you can quantify your donation to bed nets in terms of something so arbitrary as “lives saved”, without taking into account the extremely complex social environment at which that donation is arriving, is completely opposite to my beliefs. It is basically the same as measuring something like “what’s the benefit of an individual vote?”

The idea that you really believe that as an EA you are having “harder” conversations and you are more “forced” to be clear about what you do than other non-effective altruists is just baffling to me.