[paxys]

> Does EA offer a specific idea that we should adopt in our thinking?

The specific idea is that while people at large may have the best intentions about charity and social good, the impact of their money and effort could be greatly magnified if they deployed it better.

For example most donations happen to already overfunded causes (say cancer research) where your dollar is getting lost among executive bonuses and generally not having the kind of impact you think. There are tons of more neglected areas where you can do much more immediate, quantifiable good.

Another example from their website is that governments worldwide spend $280B per year on counterterrorism and $8B on preventing public health crises. If you look at the relative human impact from the two, those numbers are laughable.

There are many, many such examples of obvious inefficiency in the system that can be solved with a better thought framework and more research.