Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

by William MacAskill

Is this because the general public doesn’t really understand what life with the medical condition is like and overestimates how bad it is? Or is it because patients have subconsciously lowered the standard for what they regard as 100 percent health? It’s difficult to know, and academics continue to debate the topic.

What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered and died before their time, not that they died from a specific cause.

Distributions that look like this are called fat-tailed distributions. (You might have heard of the 80/20 rule: that 80 percent of the value of a set of activities comes from the best 20 percent of activities.

That’s why the world’s average income, which is $10,000 per year, is so much higher than the typical income, which is only $1,400 per year: the richest people bring up the average.