[Certhas]

What an uncharitable reply. Not op, but you seem to miss the basic point of the article, I.e. you fail at your own criterion of making understanding your goal.

As someone not in this space I found the argument succinct and easy to follow. QF is optimal if you only have direct utility. To illustrate that this assumption is problematic, confront it with a hypothetical where direct utility is zero. Then you can clearly and immediately see that in this hypothetical it's not optimal.

Maybe the argument is hard to parse if you're not used to reading theoretical literature?

[nkmnz]

But OP did not follow his own terms: he refuses to take the direct utility of giving your money to charity into account and instead calculates some arbitrary utility of the saved lives, which is indirect utility.