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Comment by malydok | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting fact that one could save many lives by donating to charities and yet wouldn't feel quite the same way about it. Clicking "donate" on a screen and filling in credit card details isn't as thrilling an experience as yours even if it achieves no less.

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Charities aren't appealing not just because you don't feel as connected to outcomes, but because we know many of them pay out big paycheques to execs and other overhead to the point where barely any of our donations are put to good use.

Maybe just being cynical about it, but if I help out at a soup kitchen I know I'm helping people, when I donate I am just getting a tax credit and boosting a charity's executive bonuses.

I don't think it's about being cynical and more about proximity. I'm not as pessimistic about charities. We don't get the same good feelings helping people we don't know for the same reason we don't care about all the people that is suffering right now.

On this note, my parents have been in contact with a African woman for years who they helped via one of those child sponsorship programs. Shes an adult now and literally yesterday she called and texted my Mom via her own funds and everything. It doesn't seem like a petty thing after all.

There's actually an entire field called Effective Altruism [1] that's dedicated to researching which charities put donations to good use - and there are quite a few of them [2]

Also, overheads like executive bonuses don't _necessarily_ mean that the charity is ineffective [3]

[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

[2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

[3] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/choosing-a-charity/#a-note-a...

This nicely encapsulates why our society sucks. Helping people you can't see doesn't provide the self-congratulation dopamine hit, thus people don't do it.

That's why charities ought to be small, local operations helped chiefly by local volunteers and only secondarily by donations.

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