The identifiable victim thing is interestingly alien. My impression is that I work the opposite of that: when people talk about identifiable victims, my instinct is to go "ah, I'm being manipulated" and discount whatever they're saying until I can look at underlying statistics (which I won't necessarily ever get around to); whereas, when people lead with statistics, it's much easier to go "alright, here's how much good I can do per dollar, this is useful information!" about it. If people-in-aggregate work in a manner opposite from me in that regard, that's good to know; it'll stop me from typical-minding in an anti-helpful direction, if I ever want to try to convince people-not-selected-for-psychological-similarity-to-me to do more charity-donations.
This is a useful thing to know for me. I'm reluctant to talk about donations because it feels like bragging or virtue signaling. But it's also important to me that other people learn about EA, so knowing this is motivation to push past my discomfort.
The identifiable victim thing is interestingly alien. My impression is that I work the opposite of that: when people talk about identifiable victims, my instinct is to go "ah, I'm being manipulated" and discount whatever they're saying until I can look at underlying statistics (which I won't necessarily ever get around to); whereas, when people lead with statistics, it's much easier to go "alright, here's how much good I can do per dollar, this is useful information!" about it. If people-in-aggregate work in a manner opposite from me in that regard, that's good to know; it'll stop me from typical-minding in an anti-helpful direction, if I ever want to try to convince people-not-selected-for-psychological-similarity-to-me to do more charity-donations.
This is a useful thing to know for me. I'm reluctant to talk about donations because it feels like bragging or virtue signaling. But it's also important to me that other people learn about EA, so knowing this is motivation to push past my discomfort.