The Humane League, EA Animal Welfare Fund, GiveWell. Amounts were small but I have something planned for next year...

I think your position compels you to say that not only is it better to donate to AW over GHD, it is actually better to set money on fire rather than donate it to GHD. Or spend it on a yacht, or a castle, or a pile of video games. With that framing, I think you're back down to 1% territory.

Merely subsidizing nets, as opposed to free distribution, used to be a much more popular idea. My understanding is that that model was nuked by this paper showing that demand for nets falls discontinuously at any positive price (60 percentage points reduction in demand when going from 100% subsidy to 90% subsidy). So unless people's value for their children's lives are implausibly low, people are making mistakes in their choice of whether or not to purchase a bednet.

New Incentives, another GiveWell top charity, can move people to vaccinate their children with very small cash transfers (I think $10). The fact that $10 can mean the difference between whether people protect their children from life threatening diseases or not is crazy if you think about it.

This is not a rare finding. This paper found very low household willingness to pay for cleaning up contaminated wells, which cause childhood diarrhea and thus death. Their estimates imply that households in rural Kenya are willing to pay at most $770 to prevent their child's death, which just doesn't seem plausible. Ergo, another setting where people are making mistakes. Another; demand for motorcycle helmets is stupidly low and implies that Nairobi residents value a statistical life at $220, less than 10% of annual income. Unless people would actually rather die than give up 10% of their income for a year, this is clearly another case where people's decisions do not reflect their true value.

This is not that surprising if you think about it. People in rich countries and poor countries alike are really bad at investing in preventative health. Each year I dillydally on getting the flu vaccine, even though I know the benefits are way higher than the costs, because I don't want to make the trip to CVS (an hour out of my day, max). My friend doesn't wear a helmet when cycling, even at night or in the rain, because he finds it inconvenient. Most of our better health in the rich world doesn't come from us actively making better health decisions, but from our environment enabling us to not need to make health decisions at all.

Felt a little scared realizing that that episode is over 3 years old. It's such a great one and I return to it often!

I follow a lot of YouTubers and streamers who run large-scale charitable events (example, example, example) and I've always thought about how great it would be to convince them to give the money to an effective charity.

there's a difference between choosing to ignore the Drowning Child because there are even more children in the next pond over, and ignoring the drowning children entirely because they might grow up to do bad things.

This is a fantastic summary of why I feel much more averse to this argument than to statements like "animal welfare is more important than human welfare" (which I am neutral-to-positive on).

I don't really route my moral reasoning through EA principles (impartiality and welfarism) and I don't claim it is great. I own up to my moral commitments, which are undeniably based on my life experiences. I am Indian. I'm not going to be convinced that the world would be better if children around me were dead. I'm just not! If that's motivated reasoning, then so be it.

The purpose of my comment was to engage with Vasco's argument in the way that is most resonant with me, and I suspect with other people who prioritize GHD. You're saying it's discouraging that people aren't engaging with the argument analytically. I'm saying that analytical engagement is not the only legitimate kind of engagement.

In fact, I think that when analytical disagreement is the only permitted form of disagreement, that encourages much more motivated reasoning and frustrating argumentation. Imagine I had instead made a comment questioning whether GiveWell beneficiaries are really eating factory farmed meat, and Vasco then did a bunch of careful work to estimate how much that was a concern. I would be wasting their time by making an argument that doesn't correspond to my actual beliefs. Is that a better discursive norm?

I'm not sure what you're looking for. I've made it clear that I'm not here to persuade you of my position, and I'm not going to be philosophically strongarmed into doing so. I was just trying to elaborate on a view that I suspect (and upvotes suggest) is common to other people who are not persuaded by Vasco's argument.

I am using reason and evidence to do the most good within my circumscribed moral framework, of which I don't aim to persuade anyone at all.

My statement was a bit churlish by glossing over the differences in arguments you make at different points. However, I think it's fair because they all have the same crux (moral weights).

I wonder whether you are also against repeating that the best interventions in global health and development help humans way more cost-effectively than random organisations.

Definitely. I think that could arguably be a valuable message for outreach to ordinary people, but a post on the forum that looked like that would not be a useful or substantive contribution.