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This is a retarded standard that nobody who has to work with more than a handful of people at a time holds. Do you think doctors look up new arrivals to the ER to ascertain whether they're accidentally treating murderers and rapists?
It's the net impact that matters, and unless you're exclusively attempting to save the denizens of a prison, or maybe Hamas, you will find almost no population where they predominate, such that by saving the entire lot you've done something worse.
Great. An accusation that of all the people in the world, EAs don't know the concept of disability adjusted life years (DALY) and quality adjusted life years (QALY).
I will go with the "good things are good, and bad things are bad, actually" over this galaxy-brained advocacy for letting people starve to death or die of malaria.
I'm sure those are all laudable, character building exercises.
I'm not an EA, I just think that of all the people I strongly disagree with, they're doing what they believe to be right thing with the right amount of rigor, as opposed to nothing but vibes.
Which is a lazy dismissive assumption. You have faith that lives are good or that they are in aggregate good and therefore maximizing them is positive, you don't know that. As far as I can tell you can't know that.
I'm not arguing against helping people, just that helping people you actually know is better, especially en masse (what if everyone logged off social media and did that?), than industrial philanthropy or w/e.
You are welcome to demonstrate your conviction that lives are terrible and worth terminating on average, as they must be if the aggregate is, but I suspect you can't, for the same odd reason most antinatalists or misanthropes don't start with themselves.
Faith? Why? I can clearly see that most people have lives worth living and extending, at least if it comes to the expenditure of funds I can't repurpose for things I personally care about more. To the extent that governments and charities spend their money on that, I'd prefer they save as many lives as cheaply as effectively as possible, and EAs do that. Would be even better if they handed all the cash to me, but since there's no advocacy group for the same, I'll take it.
Go ahead and help whoever you like, if you care to. By the same process where you don't care about most people, I don't particularly care about you and yours, and thus EA beats you in terms of net people I minimally consider worth existing saved. Sure, sucks that a large number of them are Sub-Saharan Africans with low IQs I suppose, but that's hardly all of them, there is a non-zero tradeoff for the same with Westerners or any other kind of human really.
ah yes, "KYS" nice to see the motte's standard of petty insults in as many words as possible is still around.
I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.
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