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Comment by kdmccormick | Hacker News Reader

Yup. I give to the extreme poverty and animal welfare funds, because they seem like a great way to give to well-vetted high-impact charities.

The longtermism stuff has always struck me oddly alongside those other obviously-beneficial causes. It's a bummer that's all some people think of when they hear EA.

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Maybe because if all you want to do is to support things like that, there is no need for something like the EA movement in the first place?

I still find valuable the idea of evaluating charities based on their effectiveness, but I guess you could rely on charity evaluators for that without taking on the entire conceptual burden of EA.

Donating to causes that resonates with you isn't the same thing as donating to causes that work on the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity.

It is if what resonates with you is whatever you consider "the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity."

That's why there's a whole movement of people dedicated to convincing people to donate to the most necessary and urgent problem of humanity and trying to decide what exactly is that.

What we chose to donate to are organizations like churches, museum, theaters, makerspaces, and the like. They enrich our lives in the neighborhoods we live in, but they're not exactly urgent as someone on the other side of the world dying to something perfectly preventable like cholera.

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