> How can you know that if you don't know them? What if it would be more effective to teach them how to make their own nets? Or to make something they can trade for mosquito nets at a profit? (In other words, to teach them how to create wealth, instead of just giving things to them.) To know whether or not that's the case, you have to know the people.

Or, you can trust the people who know the people. Or if you're willing to risk it a little bit more, you can trust the people who know and trust the people who know the people, and that gives you http://www.givewell.org/.

The problem is, none of us has enough time and resources to research everything, nor it would be the most effective use of our time. That's why, in general, humans invented professional specialization.

> I don't agree with this as a blanket statement.

I didn't really intended it to be a blanket one. I was trying to point out that among the possible effective ways of helping, there are a lot of easy things that do not require you to know the person you're helping, because the projects are resource-starved, not care-starved.

> Individual human beings don't average; every single one of us is a unique individual. Reducing 7 billion human beings to a bunch of aggregate numbers is ignoring so much information that the claim that those aggregate effects are "what matters" seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

Oh yes they do, they do average quite well. I don't mean that you should always treat people as numbers, but there are cases when you absolutely must. You must because neither our heads nor our tools have enough computing power to account for every single person's differences and idiosyncrasies. In problems of scale, like saving lives effectively, you have to simplify, or you won't be able to do anything at all. [[...]]

> My family is worth more to me than someone I don't know in Africa because I have a close relationship with them. But the family of that person in Africa is worth more to them than I am. Saying that every single person must be "worth" exactly as much as every other, once again, ignores so much information about the individual people and their relationships that it seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

I get this sentiment. My family is worth "more" to me than some random African family in so far that I have stronger emotional ties with people I know better. And true, ceteris paribus, I would be able to help people I know personally much more. But I suppose I was talking about a different concept under the word "worth". What I'm aiming at is that for me, it is immoral to hurt an innocent stranger badly in some way, in order to save myself or someone close to me from some lesser hurt. Or if I had a choice to make, whether save 1000 strangers or 100 people I know, among which there are my friends, then however badly this would hurt I still feel that I need to choose 1000 strangers. In this way, human lives are equivalent. (In practice one also has to adjust for things like QALY, or alternative strategies, etc., but that's just deeper structure of the same general point.)

> And just so it's clear where I'm coming from: this whole viewpoint of insisting that we have to apply exactly the same standards to everyone, seems to me to be a cop-out; it's a way of allowing oneself to feel good while avoiding the actual hard work of knowing individual people and their needs, so that you can actually help them. People want an easy solution; they want to be able to just send money and believe that that's enough, that they're helping in the most effective way they can.

I understand. But for me, insisting that we should care about only those we know is also a cop-out, a refusal to live in a society. Moreover, for most of the first-worlders, sending money is the most effective way they can help save lives. The actual help needs to be delivered by people personally involved with the recipents, but we have enough of them already. Most of the projects aren't constrained by personnel, they are constrained by resources. The "easy way" is indeed the right way for most, and if you look at people you'll notice that it's actually the hardest. People want to do everything but spend money. They'll happily volunteer, or participate in activism, or educate, or do absolutely anything as long as it doesn't involve them paying in hard cash. In so far as money is the unit of caring, they don't care.

It may be so that in the future, the biggest problems that need to be solved will require everyone to invest themselves personally. But right now, the most important problems involve producing and delivering life-saving medicine and tools to people in need. What they need the most is cold, hard cash. Mosquitoes don't care if you know the poor child they bit and infected. What they respond to is mosquito nets, and those aren't made of care, they're paid for by money.