Joshua Greene

Okay, like in a developed country like the US, paying to train a guide dog for someone who's blind or visually impaired and calls like $50,000.

A surgery in other parts of the world that can prevent people from going blind due to a disease called trachoma can cost less than $100.

That can be something like 500 to 1,000 times difference in what you get from your money.

Now, this is not to say that we shouldn't support and care about blind people here, but

Surely we should take advantage of that opportunity if, you know, for the cost of training one guide dog, we can prevent 500 people or 1,000 people from going blind in the first place.

So huge differences.

Yeah.

It hurts to think about.

We have the solution because this is what I do.

My wife and I, we give to local charities and things like that that just we feel a personal connection to.

And then we do things like deworming treatments and vaccinating newborns in Nigeria and things like that.

And so I said, well, why don't we just ask people, instead of saying you should be giving to more effective charities instead of what you do, why don't you do both, right?

So we started running these experiments.

And sort of the basic setup for our first experiment is in one condition, it's the typical choice.

That is, you can pick your favorite charity or this charity that's recommended by experts.

So let's say it's a

deworm the world initiative where, you know, for a dollar, you can give a kid a deworming treatment, right?

And what we found is that, you know, most people like 80% of people or more would choose their personal favorite over the expert effectiveness recommendation.

That's the control condition.

And then in the experimental condition, we give people three choices.