What are all these children doing in my ponds?

He suggests that he subscribes to such a maximum, but also proposes a weaker maxim - that we should give unless the bad that would happen to us is comparable in moral significance to the harm we would prevent (note: this says comparable in moral significance, not equal in morally significance).

In retrospect, my reading of the post (and my reply) were more uncharitable than I would've liked. To clarify where I'm coming from, it pattern-matched to two things I've grown frustrated with over time: Firstly, it gave me the impression of an outside critique of a field without engaging with its strongest arguments, as happens a lot to the rationality community as well (e.g. here's an old SSC post on the general problem).

And secondly, the final sentence pattern-matched to the ubiquitous "we need systemic change" criticism of effective altruism (subjectively, it appears in every single news article on EA), which doesn't seem particularly fair when everyone in the field is aware that of course systemic change would be better in principle, but it's incredibly unclear how to handle such problems in a tractable manner. (Not to mention that tons of interventions intended to effect systemic change actually perform significantly worse than e.g. cash transfers.)

Finally, when I mentioned you hadn't added an arbitrary number of students to the analogy, I meant that in your modified analogy a single individual seemingly has to save the entire world, whereas once you allow for many students, one way to resolve such a world would be to promote altruism more widely or even help build a community of effective altruism, as Peter Singer has done. Isn't that the kind of systematic approach you were calling for?

#1. It's not the money, it's the time which goes by and leaves the "you" forever alone on the roadside. #2. Having children is not aimed to support any ideology besides having children.

#1, 2, 3 : you are correct in absolute terms in that probably the world has changed and you are probably correct.  

Still, #1 : you can use that over $100k funds to shift the probability more for your kids, even if the gains are very marginal, our firmware says to do it.

#2: You're right, but our firmware is programmed to ignore this possibility.

#3: You're right, but our firmware says that our own child is worth a lot more than other people's.  As long as ours doesn't drown in pools, screw everyone else.  

One thing your thought experiment points out is the difference between what humans claim to care about "I don't want any children to starve or drown in pools" to what they actually care about.  Because obviously everyone walking with headphones on is doing it because they really don't give a shit, they just said they did to fit in.

Another thing I might note: you gave children drowning in pools as the analogy but the real boogeyman, aging, is going to affect everyone walking by oblivious.  They all would personally benefit if they collectively worked together sufficiently on methods to slow and reverse it.

Maybe ignore the below ramble

Part of the issue here is that the current roadblocks in biomedical progress - the recent mRNA vaccines are an example of what is possible when the funds and roadblocks are temporarily removed - have made my prior for "any further progress at all" to be assumed to be none.

I am still kind of imagining a world where I am 95 and there is still no treatment for Parkinson's, an ineffective treatment for dementias (so if I see the world at 95 it's due to luck), and barely any better cancer treatments as well.  If we subtract 60 years from the present day, 1961, this is basically true.  It's an observation of historical fact.  

This is why AI (and exponentially more intelligence) is our best personal hope.  To get through these red tapes and roadblocks you would basically need to be superhuman. (because AI can fill out forms for free, design experiments for the maximum knowledge gain within ethical constraints, perform and analyze the results of thousands of experiments in parallel, read every science journal article published to set up priors, and so on).

To control biology it's what we need.  

I will try to move from the specific, to the general:

Specific: 

Shoes: The problem is, as my friend explained to three things:

1.  That shoes/bicylces/engines/etc. is not a consistently donated good across time. Interest waxes and wanes. That means an unsteady supply of "free goods". 
2. It also doesn't allow the country to progress in up-skilling manufacturing, as many Asian countries have done. I forget the model name, but the one where they move from raw materials, to manufacturing, to low-level electronics, etc. - its hard to simply move from rural farmer to semiconductor engineering - for various reasons ranging from income to sustain education, etc. 
3. It destroys what capacity already existed. If people and businesses invest in capacity for building bicycles, then get hit with a 3-year surge of bicycles (than then disappear) - you have to rebuild and reacquire the expertise. 

Brain-drain: From an ethical standpoint, I think the paradigm you are approaching from is wrong. This is not about normative duties, but about pragmatism. 

1. It is easier for a native to enter local government. 
2. It is difficult and time consuming to integrate new peoples into countries - for both host and immigrant. 
3. It is GREAT for me that engineers, doctors and judges are coming to my country. It is not so great for the originator country. It is not about "sending somebody back to deal with it" - but about investigating the second-order effects on millions of people, when deciding to help thousands of people. Put in another way: If we presume that only the educated elite gets to leave, is it a good idea "to let them  in" from a pure utilitarian perspective, cosnidering their country-men? Its not about individual rights, because then we would have to discuss a very deep topic of, to what degree people have a right to the land that their forefathers lived on, which I think is not the purpose of my argument here. 

Climate: 

1. Many wars have been worsened, started or instigated by access to freshwater resources. The united nations keeps a list of "water conflicts" - if i'm not mistaken - but googling the term will lead to plenty of examples. 

Status:

1. There is no such thing as global status for, say, donating $5000 to a community shelter. Nobody will care, if you decide to donate to another country, county or even city. You do have a point on "letting locals freeload" - but at least you will have proportionally larger personal benefits, despite the freeloaders, than from donating to a community shelter the town over. 

General:

Still, I get that each point is not complete or has individual shortcomings - I am only trying to demonstrate a general point. The general point is this: 

• "What if supporting some altruistic purpose simply lets other people ignore the issue and pocket the change, leaving net gain at 0?" (i.e. ambitious climate plans letting others relax). 
• "What if supporting some altruistic purpose inadvertently worsened everything"

And my general solution is:

• "Keep things simple and local, as to avoid interacting with things you have no insight into, and to minimize unruly second-order global effects".