You have personified EA, but it isn't a person. Some EA people are into long-termism, but it is an error to pretend EA is a monolith that speaks with one voice.

You have personified EA, but it isn't a person. Some EA people are into long-termism, but it is an error to pretend EA is a monolith that speaks with one voice. I think the core idea is simply: since resources for helping the poor/sick is not unlimited, we should try to allocate those resources in the most effective way. Before EA charity evaluation came along, the only metric for most people was simply looking at the charity overhead via Charity Navigator. But that isn't a great metric. A charity with only a 1% overhead with a mission to make balloon animals for children dying in a famine will score well on Charity Navigator but does nothing to help the problem. To be honest I haven't looked deeply into long-termism, but from what I've heard (eg, hearing Will MacAskill on a few podcasts) it seems to ignore a few things. Just like a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, long-termers have no good way to estimate the likelihood of future events, and that discounting needs to increase greatly the further out one looks. At best many of these estimates are like the Drake Equation -- better than nothing, but with multiple orders of magnitude error bars. There are other second-order reasons which don't seem to factor in, or at least haven't come across in the few hours of listening to long-termers talk about the issue. One is that by working to make a better world now, it effects the trajectory of future events much more directly than the low-probability guesswork they think my have an impact in the distant future.