I think 80K writes a lot of articles to get page views, not because they’re particularly valuable. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
If a tobacco CEO is one of the most harmful careers and it’s still not enough to counteract good done by donating to AMF, that’s a good response to the common argument that earning to give is harmful if you work in a harmful career. Although it would probably be more useful to talk about careers that more people are actually pursuing, like finance.
The people who think finance is harmful won’t be persuaded by adding up tobacco deaths and doing this kind of math. They believe that donating to charity is not nearly as good as the numbers suggest, or they believe that finance is worse than being a tobacco CEO, or they believe that charity doesn’t morally offset direct harm, or they believe that the entire paradigm of calculating how many people die or live and adding those numbers up is totally misguided from a methodological standpoint. Moreover, this wouldn’t even counter the steelmanned argument which is that even if earning to give is not harmful, it’s still not nearly as good as direct work, and that is what the most authoritative critics (e.g. Deaton, Acemoglu) have been saying. Seriously, how many people are there who would seriously think “Wall Street financiers are exploiting the poor more than their charity will help—but, wait, if you add up tobacco deaths and subtract it from AMF lives saved, you get a positive number, so working in finance must be okay after all” and then make a decision accordingly?
If it gets people interested in relevant content, then I suppose that’s fine, as long as everyone keeps in mind how fine the line is between pretending to be clickbait and being clickbait.
Although it would probably be more useful to talk about careers that more people are actually pursuing, like finance.
If there was a good article concluding that financial work did so much counterfactual harm you couldn’t more than cancel it out through donations I’d be happy to write a response to their methodology. But at least I have yet to come across any articles that even attempt to do the calculation. The ones I’ve seen basically just assume that the reader has a very strong anti-finance prior.
I think 80K writes a lot of articles to get page views, not because they’re particularly valuable. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
If a tobacco CEO is one of the most harmful careers and it’s still not enough to counteract good done by donating to AMF, that’s a good response to the common argument that earning to give is harmful if you work in a harmful career. Although it would probably be more useful to talk about careers that more people are actually pursuing, like finance.
The people who think finance is harmful won’t be persuaded by adding up tobacco deaths and doing this kind of math. They believe that donating to charity is not nearly as good as the numbers suggest, or they believe that finance is worse than being a tobacco CEO, or they believe that charity doesn’t morally offset direct harm, or they believe that the entire paradigm of calculating how many people die or live and adding those numbers up is totally misguided from a methodological standpoint. Moreover, this wouldn’t even counter the steelmanned argument which is that even if earning to give is not harmful, it’s still not nearly as good as direct work, and that is what the most authoritative critics (e.g. Deaton, Acemoglu) have been saying. Seriously, how many people are there who would seriously think “Wall Street financiers are exploiting the poor more than their charity will help—but, wait, if you add up tobacco deaths and subtract it from AMF lives saved, you get a positive number, so working in finance must be okay after all” and then make a decision accordingly?
If it gets people interested in relevant content, then I suppose that’s fine, as long as everyone keeps in mind how fine the line is between pretending to be clickbait and being clickbait.
If there was a good article concluding that financial work did so much counterfactual harm you couldn’t more than cancel it out through donations I’d be happy to write a response to their methodology. But at least I have yet to come across any articles that even attempt to do the calculation. The ones I’ve seen basically just assume that the reader has a very strong anti-finance prior.