Two other important points (perhaps for a different article) are 1) your intuition about charitable projects is very bad 2) many people do not realize how hard it is to evaluate charitable projects in these terms. GiveWell talks about these issues a fair amount, but I am not sure if they have an essay I can point to.
The reasons are related. 2 is because the charity givers are not usually on the receiving end of charity so they don’t get feedback on which to evaluate what improves people’s lives and what doesn’t without explicitly trying to measure this. 1 follows from 2 because you don’t get good feedback for similar decisions to help calibrate your intuition. It is also exacerbated by the fact that the people you are trying to help have very different circumstances from you (in many ways wealth level, culture, economic opportunities etc.).
I’d like to clarify that your intuition is bad not only because you’re not built to think about large situations (though that’s certainly an issue) but because you are not the person who gets to see the results.
And sometimes the results or non-results aren’t very “see-able”. For example, if you donate to a puppy rescue charity instead of, say, donating to the running of Givewell, it is kind of hard to visualize what was lost.
Two other important points (perhaps for a different article) are 1) your intuition about charitable projects is very bad 2) many people do not realize how hard it is to evaluate charitable projects in these terms. GiveWell talks about these issues a fair amount, but I am not sure if they have an essay I can point to. The reasons are related. 2 is because the charity givers are not usually on the receiving end of charity so they don’t get feedback on which to evaluate what improves people’s lives and what doesn’t without explicitly trying to measure this. 1 follows from 2 because you don’t get good feedback for similar decisions to help calibrate your intuition. It is also exacerbated by the fact that the people you are trying to help have very different circumstances from you (in many ways wealth level, culture, economic opportunities etc.).
Great points Jsalvatier. I will include these in the original post!
I’d like to clarify that your intuition is bad not only because you’re not built to think about large situations (though that’s certainly an issue) but because you are not the person who gets to see the results.
And sometimes the results or non-results aren’t very “see-able”. For example, if you donate to a puppy rescue charity instead of, say, donating to the running of Givewell, it is kind of hard to visualize what was lost.