Executive summary: This reflective and persuasive post argues that quantitative reasoning—”doing the math”—is essential to effective altruism because it enables us to make vastly better decisions about doing good, even when the numbers are uncertain or incomplete, and challenges the common perception that numerical thinking is cold or unfeeling.
Key points:
People routinely fail to apply basic quantitative reasoning in daily life (e.g. overestimating risks, underestimating costs), and this failure becomes even more acute in charitable or altruistic contexts where the stakes affect others, not themselves.
Emotional resistance to numerical reasoning in altruism is common, as people often feel moral acts should come from the heart, not from spreadsheets—yet this resistance can lead to dramatically less effective choices.
Quantitative differences in effectiveness can be enormous: within global health alone, some interventions are up to 15,000 times more effective than others, making numerical analysis critical to doing the most good.
Even imperfect cost-effectiveness analyses are valuable, because they help clarify assumptions, assess robustness, and highlight when an intervention is “so cheap it’s worth doing” despite uncertainty (e.g. deworming).
Numbers are a way of caring deeply, not detaching emotionally: effective altruists use quantitative reasoning because they want to maximize impact for others—not in spite of their compassion, but because of it.
Core claim of the post: A defining principle of effective altruism is to “think with numbers”—embracing quantitative tools not as a replacement for empathy, but as an expression of it.
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Executive summary: This reflective and persuasive post argues that quantitative reasoning—”doing the math”—is essential to effective altruism because it enables us to make vastly better decisions about doing good, even when the numbers are uncertain or incomplete, and challenges the common perception that numerical thinking is cold or unfeeling.
Key points:
People routinely fail to apply basic quantitative reasoning in daily life (e.g. overestimating risks, underestimating costs), and this failure becomes even more acute in charitable or altruistic contexts where the stakes affect others, not themselves.
Emotional resistance to numerical reasoning in altruism is common, as people often feel moral acts should come from the heart, not from spreadsheets—yet this resistance can lead to dramatically less effective choices.
Quantitative differences in effectiveness can be enormous: within global health alone, some interventions are up to 15,000 times more effective than others, making numerical analysis critical to doing the most good.
Even imperfect cost-effectiveness analyses are valuable, because they help clarify assumptions, assess robustness, and highlight when an intervention is “so cheap it’s worth doing” despite uncertainty (e.g. deworming).
Numbers are a way of caring deeply, not detaching emotionally: effective altruists use quantitative reasoning because they want to maximize impact for others—not in spite of their compassion, but because of it.
Core claim of the post: A defining principle of effective altruism is to “think with numbers”—embracing quantitative tools not as a replacement for empathy, but as an expression of it.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.