alt Hacker NewsWatsi seems to be doing great work, but the title—"you helped save 33k lives"—reads as misleading to me. I guess "helped" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I would be incredibly surprised if the counterfactual number of lives saved was more than 3000. (But don't let this dissuade you from donating; concretely improving someone's life is totally a worthwhile goal, and Watsi seems very good at effecting this)
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wetpaws • today at 12:17 AM
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"Counterfactual number of lives saved" is not the normal sense of the phrase "save a life". By that logic, each person's life can only be saved once, which is not how people normally use the phrase.
Your definition may be useful for cold hard utilitarian calculus, of the sort that hospital directors need to do if they've run out of fundraising opportunities. However, "effective altruism" – which I suspect you're alluding to here – isn't actually an efficient way to save lives, the way it's usually practised (ignoring second-order effects, and everything that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet).