The basic idea of EA is the same many people have (especially those not used to the idea of nonlinear orders): quantifying everything, even "goodness" or "utility".
Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).
There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.
This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.
The basic idea of EA is that if you want to spend money on improving something, you probably would want to spend it as efficiently as possible because your budget isn't infinite. "Getting the biggest bang for your buck", as the say. Spending millions on a specific way to solve a certain problem when it can be solved in a different way for mere thousands is plain silly. Of course, this idea isn't new at all.
The main problem with the charity from the ultra-wealthy, of course, is that they first materially worsen the world in order to get that wealth, and then they use part of that wealth to partially undo the damage (breaking things is easier than fixing them, after all). Like trying to help to alleviate Africa's problems with clean water when your own mining megacorporation is one of the major drivers of the pollution in the first place.
pfortuny · · focus · HN ↗
Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).
There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.
This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.
Joker_vD · · focus · HN ↗
The main problem with the charity from the ultra-wealthy, of course, is that they first materially worsen the world in order to get that wealth, and then they use part of that wealth to partially undo the damage (breaking things is easier than fixing them, after all). Like trying to help to alleviate Africa's problems with clean water when your own mining megacorporation is one of the major drivers of the pollution in the first place.