Just sharing a quick link in case it's of interest: Many will recall Leif Wenar's WIRED article from last year, which attacked charitable giving from a philosophical perspective of valorizing status quo bias. There was plenty of discussion of his substantive arguments at the time. One thing that people mostly just politely overlooked was his very public attack on Will MacAskill as a philosopher. My latest post revisits the controversy to assess whether his charges against MacAskill were reasonable.

(The bulk of the post is paywalled, but you should be able to activate a 7-day free trial if you aren't otherwise interested in my work.)

I'm also curious whether anything ever came of this.

Compare Doing Good Effectively is Unusual, for a more positive take on this phenomenon. (E.g. the abstract EA mission is actually pretty important for some to pursue, because otherwise humanity will systematically neglect causes like Shrimp Welfare that don't have immediate emotional appeal.)

It's sad that not many people care about doing good as such, but I still think it's worth: (i) trying to co-ordinate those who do, (ii) trying to encourage more others to join them, and (iii) co-operating with others who have more cause-specific motivations that happen to be good ones (whether that's in global health, animal welfare, AI safety, or whatever).

Overall, I'm not sure why you would think "EA needs a cultural shift" rather than "we need more EA-adjacent movements/subcultures for people who don't feel moved by the core EA mission but do or could care more about specific causes." Isn't it better to add than to replace?

I agree with your first couple of paragraphs. That's why my initial reply referred to "reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell".

Conspiracy theorists do, of course, have their own distinct (and degenerate) "webs of trust", which is why I also flagged that possibility. But mainstream academic opinion (not to mention the opinion of the community that's most invested in getting these details right, i.e. effective altruists) regards GiveWell as highly reputable.

I didn't get the sense from John's comment that he understands reasonable social trust of this sort. He offered a false dichotomy between "thorough and methodical research" and "gut reactions", and suggested that "trust comes from... [personally] evaluat[ing] the service through normal use and consumption." I think this is deeply misleading. (Note, for example, that "normal use and consumption" does not give you any indication of how much lead is in your turmeric, whether your medication risks birth defects if taken during pregnancy, etc etc. Social trust, esp. in reputable institutions, is absolutely ubiquitous in navigating the world.)

You're conflating "charity" and "charity evaluator". The whole point of independent evaluators is that other people can defer to their research. So yes, I think the answer is just "trust evaluators" (not "trust first-order charities"), the same way that someone wondering which supplements contain unsafe levels of lead should trust Consumer Reports.

If you are going to a priori refuse to trust research done by independent evaluators until you've personally vetted them for yourself, then you have made yourself incapable of benefiting from their efforts. Maybe there are low-trust societies where that's necessary. But you're going to miss out on a lot if you actually live in a high-trust society and just refuse to believe it.

I'm sorry, but those are just excuses. Nobody requires claims to be "proven" beyond all possible doubt before making decisions that are plausibly (but not definitely) better for themselves (like going to college). They only demand such proof to get out of making decisions that are plausibly better for others.

Unless you're a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit. And then a >50% chance of saving lives for something on the order of ~$5000 is plainly sufficient to justify so acting. (Assuming that saving a life with certainty for ~$10k would obviously be choice-worthy.)

If one is unusually skeptical of life-saving interventions, the benefits of direct cash transfers (e.g. GiveDirectly) are basically undeniable. No "huge mental investment" or "leap of faith" required. (Unless by "leap of faith" you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)

I'm open to the possibility that what's all things considered best might take into account other kinds of values beyond traditionally welfarist ones (e.g. Nietzschean perfectionism). But standard sorts of agent-relative reasons like Wolf adverts to (reasons to want your life in particular to be more well-rounded) strike me as valid excuses rather than valid justifications. It isn't really a better decision to do the more selfish thing, IMO.

Your second paragraph is hard to answer because different people have different moral beliefs, and (as I suggest in the OP) laxer moral beliefs often stem from motivated reasoning. So the two may be intertwined. But obviously my hope is that greater clarity of moral knowledge may help us to do more good even with limited moral motivation.

How does averting a birth cause an extra child to be born somewhere else?

Just sharing my 2024 Year in Review post from Good Thoughts. It summarizes a couple dozen posts in applied ethics and ethical theory (including issues relating to naive instrumentalism and what I call "non-ideal decision theory") that would likely be of interest to many forum readers. (Plus a few more specialist philosophy posts that may only appeal to a more niche audience.)