

There is only one best charity - agalmicvinegar
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others/

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ScottBurson
_...and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in
the Third World a thousand people are dead._

This kind of moralizing about other people's choices leaves me very cold. It's
their money; they can spend it as they see fit.

The point about the insecticide nets being more effective per dollar than
antimalarial drugs is better taken; in that case the goal is the same, and
only the means are in question. But if people want to give their money for an
entirely different purpose, such as keeping a painting in a museum, that is
their choice.

So no, there is not only one best charity.

~~~
agalmicvinegar
Moralizing isn't the point. The point is that, for a given value system, there
is one charity that best optimizes for those values. The vast majority of the
people who donated to that museum would agree that the thousand lives are more
important than the painting, yet they donated to the museum instead of the
third world anyway. This isn't because they're immoral, it's because they're
irrational: they're not optimizing with respect to their own value systems.

