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I honestly don't think this is true. A lot of people who start charities choose a cause that has impacted them personally with little thought to whether this is a cause where dollars go the furthest. EA means more than just not actively trying to waste your donation. It means giving rigorous thought to the tradeoffs involved.
The only rigor required is whatever bullshit statistical model EAs design to ‘prove’ that their approach technically saves 2.07% more lives than something else.
Consider that EAs spend a lot of money on AI doom research, how do they calculate that this is more effective at saving lives than malaria nets? I’m sure some LessWrong autist has done ‘the math’, but it essentially amounts to a sincere belief that the chance of Yudkowsky saving the human race by coming up with thought experiments outweighs the lives saved by putting the money into nets. There’s nothing empirical to that tradeoff, the Christians likewise believe they’re saving x lives from damnation, Soros might well believe he’s saving x lives from police brutality, what do EAs do differently?
I think that realistically speaking, they don't. Mathematical arguments that attempt to make predictions about AI risk cannot avoid running into the "garbage in, garbage out" principle. The data is simply not there to make any good predictions on this topic. And there is no way to obtain the data without clairvoyance.
I do believe that effective altruists are probably, however, much more rational when they address more well-understood topics such as the characteristics of various diseases when compared to one another.
In general all non-trivial long-term utilitarian arguments about human society are nonsense. For example, you might save 10000 people from dying in a flood next year, but then one of them turns out to be the next Hitler and kills 10000000 people.
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