1.2 Our care-o-meters are broken

Start with a question. There is no right answer.

The study is old and the method is crude: asking people what they would pay is not the same as watching what they do. But the pattern has been found many times: with birds, with polluted lakes, and with human lives. Psychologists call it scope insensitivity. How much we care tracks the vividness of a problem, not its size. One identifiable person in trouble moves us. A statistic about thousands mostly doesn't move us more.

Nate Soares put it more bluntly in an essay that is now part of the EA Handbook.

His argument goes roughly like this. Imagine you could clean an oil-covered bird in a few minutes. Most people would happily do it. Now imagine there are thousands of birds, and cleaning them all would take months of full-time work. Most of us would not give up those months. That doesn't mean we don't care about each bird. It means our feelings don't scale the way the problem does.

Soares's conclusion is not that you should try to feel a thousand times worse about a thousand times more suffering. Nobody can. It is that you should notice the instrument is broken, and stop using it to measure size. Feelings are good at telling you that something matters. They are bad at telling you how much. That part is the job of numbers.

Numbers can mislead too. A figure can be wrong, out of date or beside the point. This course gives the source and date for every number, and each unit ends with the strongest objection to its own case.