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Notes -
Perhaps weird comment here as I've just had two bottles of wine for pain relief (not getting into that). But I just wanted to make a comment on EA's bizarre (to me) priorities, with the headline example of malaria nets.
I've had malaria in the DRC, and if I had died, as I came extremely close to doing many times, it would have been about as easy a death as one can get (maybe 1.5/10). By contrast, speaking as someone who gets punched in the face for a living, a bad hit to the liver is 9/10 pain for 30 seconds and if liver disease comes even remotely close in pain levels to that, donating money to cure liver cancer is infinitely more aligned to EA values than, well, basically anything I can think of. I suspect most malaria-net supporters are young enough that they have never experienced actual pain.
If one dollar saved the same number of liver cancer lives as one dollar saved malaria lives, this might be true. It's not. As a reminder, the E in EA stands for "effective". That means do the math, shut up and multiply. One liver cancer death might be worse than one malaria death, but it's not worse than ten malaria deaths, so if you can save ten lives for the same money as one life, you save the ten.
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