There is enormous spread in how much good some interventions do. For example, money spent helping the world’s poorest people to be 100x more effective than money spent helping the typical person in the West. 100x differences are a really big deal, but feel unintuitive and hard to think about—these don’t often come up in every day life. And caring about evidence and effectiveness is our main tool to identify these differences in spread, and focus on the best interventions. So we need to care about effectiveness, because we happen to live in a world where caring about it makes a massive difference in how much good we do
There is enormous spread in how much good some interventions do. For example, money spent helping the world’s poorest people to be 100x more effective than money spent helping the typical person in the West. 100x differences are a really big deal, but feel unintuitive and hard to think about—these don’t often come up in every day life. And caring about evidence and effectiveness is our main tool to identify these differences in spread, and focus on the best interventions. So we need to care about effectiveness, because we happen to live in a world where caring about it makes a massive difference in how much good we do