Thanks for engaging with this post! I appreciate the seriousness with which you engage with the question “is this actually good?” If it’s not, I don’t want to celebrate this donation or encourage others to do the same; the answer to that question matters.
I think your arguments are plausible, and I agree with the comment you make elsewhere that the EA Forum should be a place for such (relatively) unfiltered push back.
But in the absence of any inside view on this topic and the fair push back Nick made, I still feel solid about holding the outside view that donation to GiveWell top charity = good. Neither the specifics of GiveWell charities nor subjective well-being in LMICs are my areas of expertise, so I‘m mostly deferring to GiveWell. But I also think most lives are worth living, and I’m weary (although I could be wrong) about “lives not worth living” lines of reasoning in countries and cultures I don’t understand well.
Thanks for engaging with this post! I appreciate the seriousness with which you engage with the question “is this actually good?” If it’s not, I don’t want to celebrate this donation or encourage others to do the same; the answer to that question matters.
I think your arguments are plausible, and I agree with the comment you make elsewhere that the EA Forum should be a place for such (relatively) unfiltered push back.
But in the absence of any inside view on this topic and the fair push back Nick made, I still feel solid about holding the outside view that donation to GiveWell top charity = good. Neither the specifics of GiveWell charities nor subjective well-being in LMICs are my areas of expertise, so I‘m mostly deferring to GiveWell. But I also think most lives are worth living, and I’m weary (although I could be wrong) about “lives not worth living” lines of reasoning in countries and cultures I don’t understand well.