I can see you don't miss much. You've made some excellent points! > First of all, without some coordinated effort to spread out donations, won't some of the mo

I can see you don't miss much. You've made some excellent points! > First of all, without some coordinated effort to spread out donations, won't some of the more effective charities still suffer? This is almost certainly true. However, it's also true that this is the case in any scenario where there are less than infinite resources. The starvation issue is very real today. With that said, I think adherents to EA hope that their movement will incentivize effectiveness in charities. Some might postulate that there are worse possible outcomes than charities competing for effectiveness. > Second of all, who decides what is the most effective cause (or who interprets the studies that indicate which cause is most effective)? If I could spend 1 dollar and know it would save 5 lives or prevent 50 people from living with horrible mental illness, I would have trouble deciding which one to give to, even if given empirical evidence as to which is cause is the most beneficial to society. This is another excellent point! How people pick causes is a real concern. It's also one people face today. I think it's largely still a matter of personal choice and priorities. The EA approach tries to put a framework in place for explicitly reasoning about what people currently tend to do implicitly. It absolutely is a trolley problem with infinite tracks and infinite victims. Yet, we already live that trolley problem. > Third of all, some of the causes that are not effective might still benefit from some amount of involvement. The example they give - volunteering at a soup kitchen - is one such example. Say giving to the homeless is effective, but volunteering at a soup kitchen is not. Someone still needs to volunteer at the soup kitchen, even if it's not many people. Not to nitpick your example, but a sufficiently well-funded soup kitchen could likely afford to hire some of the homeless to staff it. Then it could be free of the need for volunteers and lift people off of having to live on the streets! It wouldn't be many people, but it also seems like it might be preferable to staffing the kitchen entirely with unpaid volunteers. More broadly, you're once again absolutely right. This is a real and pressing concern in a scenario where Effective Altruism becomes literally the only way any person thinks about charity. However, some might postulate that we are not currently in that scenario.