Those two quotes you reproduced sound like they can be summarized as:
Give locally even though it’s less effective.
Giving locally is effective.
These seem contradictory to me. Should you give to effective causes, or not?
A little later he argues that you can’t be perfectly effective all the time and you should give locally to allow yourself some leniency. This is a common EA idea (Eric Herboso argued for it on here recently). This argument is somewhat more plausible to me. It only applies to people who feel a strong desire to give locally; for me personally, giving locally doesn’t feel good, so this argument doesn’t apply to me.
Those two quotes you reproduced sound like they can be summarized as:
Give locally even though it’s less effective.
Giving locally is effective.
These seem contradictory to me. Should you give to effective causes, or not?
A little later he argues that you can’t be perfectly effective all the time and you should give locally to allow yourself some leniency. This is a common EA idea (Eric Herboso argued for it on here recently). This argument is somewhat more plausible to me. It only applies to people who feel a strong desire to give locally; for me personally, giving locally doesn’t feel good, so this argument doesn’t apply to me.
I think it would be more charitable to interpret as the noncontradictory statements:
Even if giving locally isn’t the thing that your calculations say produces the most overall human welfare, we should still do it.
If you’re trying to produce the most human welfare, it can still be worth spending some proportion of your resources locally.