[joshjob42]

It's a real shame that she has wasted her money so catastrophically. You can save a life via GiveWell for what 5k or so? At best she saves one year of life for a dozen times that. On a QALY basis, she's probably 300x or more worse. I'm not saying someone has to give all their charitable giving to GiveWell or similar, but if you're not you should probably have a very strong argument why not (for instance, high risk basic research you find unusually promising, or trying to solve an engineering challenge that would unlock huge value etc), or admit to yourself that you aren't primarily trying to help people but to further some particular value to yourself. You could donate $5k to the local school so they can renovate the art room, but in doing so you're deciding to do that rather than save a life. That's fine, but it's functionally more like buying concert tickets or a new TV -- the improvements you're making in others lives are tiny by comparison to what you could have bought with that money instead (a save life with GiveWell), so that part obviously has negligible weight in your decision, it's primarily about your personal enjoyment of furthering particular values. Again, that's fine, we all do that. She's just decided to take a course of action that is much closer to buying giant yachts and football teams or a vanity run for office than try to make the world a better place while trying to look like she's trying to make the world a better place.

[mlyle]

There's room for lots of improvement to our world, and "lives saved" is not the only metric.

[Starman_Jones]

For the cost to develop the polio vaccine, March of Dimes could have bought enough iron lungs to save 12,000 lives. Of course, they had no idea what the actual number would be beforehand; all they knew is that they were spending enormous sums of money on something that could turn out to be a catastrophic waste, rather than saving thousands of lives. At the end of the day, they felt that was a worthwhile risk. With hindsight, we can see that they right.

[joshjob42]

Sure and if she was funding high cost high risk high reward research I'd say that's a good case for that being higher in expected value but higher variance than GiveWell, but she is mostly not doing that, instead giving to basically normal causes and institutions to spend money on the things they were anyway.

The value of a billionaire lies on their ability to concentrate large sums of capital on high risk projects with enormous upside. Spending money instead on fairly pedestrian applications of money for philanthropy doesn't do that, she has more closely approximated taking an index fund or generic philanthropy. That's fine but has none of the benefits of concentrated wealth to kick us over local maximuma and none of the enormously higher utility of genuinely effective causes.