Linking some prior discussion here -- the accused person's last name isn't spelled correctly in that quick take, so you may have missed it on search.

Vasco's post isn't a clear example of naive utilitarianism in this sense because he isn't recommending any action that is clearly highly conventionally immoral and norm-breaking. The only action he is recommending, if any, is not donating to global health charities. 

While it would be unfair to compare Vasco's possible recommendation to a recommendation for "conventionally highly immoral and norm-breaking actions like stealing and murder," conceding that exclusion doesn't really help me that much. There's still a wide scope of action in which one could act on a principle what looks something like young children's lives as a class are likely net-negative and so we should generally avoid saving those lives unless it would be rights-violating to do so. ^[1]

For example, I could vote against costless consumer-safety laws because they are lifesaving, or vote against hospitals having to provide unfunded lifesaving charity care to those who are unable to pay for that care (EMTALA in the US). There are other reasons one might conceivably vote against such legislation (e.g., heavy libertarian ideology, or awareness of the rather significant costs of EMTALA).  

But if I'm going to apply the reasoning of Vasco's post when evaluating lifesaving global health charities, I'm going to need a good reason not to apply it to strangers drowning in a pond or votes on legislation. And I'm not thrilled with the candidate arguments that I can come up with to confine the post's logic to the narrow grounds of charitable donations (even though I accept the reasons for not extending them to murder, theft, etc.). Without a convincing way to cabin the post to charitable donations, I think most of us are not willing to consider biting the bullet and (e.g.) voting to repeal lifesaving legislation even though having more people die of exploding toasters and emergency-room refusals would presumably lead to fewer factory-farmed animals.

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   I went with rights-violating with a nod to this post (the top result for naive utilitarianism on Google), and because I wanted to minimize strong effect of partiality commonly associated with conventional morality.

So that makes me wonder if our disapproval of the present case reflects a kind of speciesism -- either our own, or the anticipated speciesism of a wider audience for whom this sort of reasoning would provide a PR problem?

Trolley problems are sufficiently abstract -- and presented in the context of an extraordinary set of circumstances -- that they are less likely to trigger some of the concerns (psychological or otherwise) triggered by the present case. In contrast, lifesaving activity is pretty common -- it's hard to estimate how many times the median person would have died if most people would not engage in lifesaving action, but I imagine it is relatively significant.

If I am in mortal danger, I want other people to save my life (and the lives of my wife and child). I do not want other people deciding whether I get medical assistance against a deadly infectious disease based on their personal assessment of whether saving my life would be net-positive for the world. That's true whether the assessment would be based on assumptions about people like me at a population level, or about my personal value-add / value-subtract in the decider's eyes. If I have that expectation of other people, but don't honor the resulting implied social contract in return, that would seem rather hypocritical of me. And if I'm going to honor the deal with fellow Americans (mostly white), and not honor it with young children in Africa, that makes me rather uncomfortable too for presumably obvious reasons.

We sometimes talk about demandingness in EA -- a theory under which I would need to encourage people not to save myself, my wife, and my son if they concluded our reference class (upper-middle class Americans, likely) was net negative for the world is simply too demanding for me and likely for 99.9% of the population too.

Finally, I'm skeptical that human civilization could meaningfully thrive if everyone applied this kind of logic when analyzing whether to engage in lifesaving activities throughout their lives. (I don't see how it make sense if limited to charitable endeavors.) Especially if the group whose existence was calculated as negative is as large as people who eat meat! In contrast, I don't have any concerns about societies and cultures functioning adequately depending on how people answer trolley-like problems.

So I think those kinds of considerations might well explain why the reaction is different here than the reaction to an academic problem.

As a non-vegan, I noticed myself becoming at least somewhat more aware of my dietary consumption choices after pulling the trigger on my first animal-welfare donation (and likely because of doing so). I don't have a great explanation of why, but it might be worth seeing if you experience the same effect.

I do not think it is good to create taboos around this question. Like, does that mean we shouldn't post anything that can be construed as concluding that it's net harmful to donate to GiveWell charities? If so, that would make it much harder to criticise GiveWell and find out what the truth is. What if donating to GiveWell charities really is harmful? Shouldn't we want to know and find out?

The taboo would be around advocacy of the view that "it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist." Here, innocent group X would be under-5s in developing countries who are/would be saved by GiveWell interventions. That certain criticisms of GiveWell couldn't be made without breaking the taboo would be a collateral effect rather than the intent, but it's very hard to avoid over-inclusiveness in a taboo.

There have been social movements that assert that "it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist" and encourage people to make legal, non-violent decisions premised on that belief. But I think the base rate of those social movements going well is low (and it may be ~zero). Based on that history and experience, I would need to see a very compelling argument to convince me that going down that path was a good idea here. I don't see that here; in particular, I think advocacy of the reader donating a share of their charitable budget to animal-welfare orgs to offset any potential negative AW effects of the lifesaving work they fund is considerably less problematic.

Relatedly, I also don't see things going well for EA if it is seen as acceptable for each of us to post our list of group X and encourage others to not pull members of group X out of a drowning pond even if we could do so costlessly or nearly so. Out of respect for Forum norms, I'm not going to speculate on who other readers' Group Xs might include, but I can think of several off the top of my head for whom one could make a plausible net-negative argument, all of whom would be less morally objectionable to include on the list than toddlers....

In general, people have complex preferences about their giving, so I think it is better to be transparent instead of assuming no one would care about the additional information.

I think GiveWell is sufficiently transparent here -- its value proposition is that donating a few thousand dollars will, in expectancy, save the life of a child under five in the developing world. Whether or not this is a good thing is largely left as an exercise to the reader. I do not expect GiveWell to do my moral philosophy homework for me. 

I also think it's fairly obvious that people tend to eat meat and cause carbon emissions, that more children in a heavily resource-constrained country means spreading available resources more thinly across the country's children, and so on. Because these things are fairly obvious, donors who are concerned about the sign value of the saving-lives output are free to conduct their own research.

If GiveWell dwelled a ton on the upside collateral effects of saving a life -- such as harping on the possibility that the life you can save will cure cancer -- then I would be more favorably inclined to a view that it was inappropriately selective in its presentation of second-order effects. 

At the risk of being a bit of a downer during a Celebration, I'd like to create a little room to acknowledge people who haven't felt in a position to give as much as they had hoped / expected / planned for due to life circumstances. I'm unfortunately in that camp this year.^[1] So I would like to express empathy with anyone who is in the same boat and feeling sad and/or guilty about it. If we are giving what we can (not in the capitalized sense), sometimes we aren't in a position to give as much and have to radically accept that.

1. ^{^}

    This is due to two separate family-of-origin situations that are consuming a lot of my financial and other resources to mitigate. One of them -- involving a terminally-ill parent -- is also why I've been less active on-Forum as of late.

What is it that makes "I won't donate to save lives because I think it creates a lot of animal suffering" repugnant but "I won't donate to save lives because I prefer to have more income for myself" not?

I think actively advocating for others to not save children's lives is a step beyond a mere decision not to donate. I read it this way:

Action: Write EA Forum post criticizing lifesaving as net-negative activity.

Implied Theory of Impact: Readers decide not to donate to GiveWell et al. --> Fewer lives get saved --> Less meat gets eaten --> Fewer animals suffer.

If I'm reading the theory of impact correctly, innocent children dying is a key part of the intended mechanism of action (MoA) -- not a side effect (as it is with "prefer to have more income for myself").

There are obviously some cruxes here -- including whether there is a moral difference between actively advocating for others not to hand out bednets vs. passively choosing to donate elsewhere / spend on oneself, and whether there is a moral difference between a bad thing being part of the intended MoA vs. a side effect. I would answer yes to both, but I have lower consequentialist representation in my moral parliament than many people here.

Even if one would answer no to both cruxes, I submit that "no endorsing MoAs that involve the death of innocent people" is an important set of side rails for the EA movement. I think advocacy that saving the lives of children is net-negative is outside of those rails. For those who might not agree, I'm curious where they would put the rails (or whether they disagree with the idea that there should be rails).

At least in the US, charity bingo, raffles, etc. are a fairly common thing in some segments of society. I don't think these are generally seen as controversial or problematic, although I also get the impression that they don't raise huge amounts of money per individual event. So I don't think all of the downsides you describe are inherent to the charity-gambling mashup. Whether there is some middle path that brings in significantly more money than bingo at a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post without bringing in the pathologies of for-profit gambling is an interesting question. My guess is that the relatively low stakes and occasional nature of extant charity bingo & raffles go a long way to explaining why those efforts seem unobjectionable.

I had these results in mind.

The proposition asserted upthread was "[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare." If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors' decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.

As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the community's collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. It's of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.

There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me: