Episode Details
Back to Episodes“What 100 Lives Is” by Bentham’s Bulldog
Description
Crosspost.
The best charities save lives for a few thousand dollars. If you earn $100,000 per year and give away 10%, you can save about 100 people over the course of your life. I think we generally aren’t good at visualizing what's really at stake. So here is me attempting vaguely to grok 100 lives.
Ted Bundy killed around 30 people. So by saving 100 lives, you’ll save more lives than Ted Bundy killed. You’ll save more lives than if you prevented all of his killings.
100 lives is twenty-five families of four. It's four families of ten.
It's about 1% of annual U.S. gun homicides.
It's a hundred extra children who get to live to adulthood, rather than being snuffed out in childhood by a horrible disease, in agony and terror. That's several kindergarten classes. An amount of child death prevented equivalent to stopping many school shootings. Pick some kindergartener you know—imagine that you could prevent them and everyone in the two neighboring classes from dying. That is how much death you personally can prevent.
Imagine your mother, father, and brother dying. Multiply that by 33. Add one. That's 100 deaths.
100 lives is about the number [...]
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First published:
June 6th, 2026
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YXBGC73TJLrTirxoL/what-100-lives-is
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.