Jeff Kaufman 🔸 comments on The history of the term ‘effective altruism’

[Jeff Kaufman 🔸]

Copying the text here in case the archive.is copy is lost:

Whether you have $100 or $100 million that you can apply to improving humanity’s condition, there are more effective and less effective ways to use that money. For example, say you want to donate $1,000 to an AIDS foundation, possibly one that attempts to slow the spread of HIV/​AIDS in Africa, or one that works on figuring out how to control HIV itself, so that people can live with the virus. Giving to such a foundation is an altruistic act, a good deed, and thus by itself wonderful and commendable. It’s certainly more altruistic to give $1000 to an AIDS foundation than to buy someone you care for $1000 in material possessions; possessions they don’t need in any important sense. However, if the person with $1000 was aware, or became aware, of a way that they could use their money to help achieve a much greater and longer lasting altruistic impact on humanity, even though that way was less emotionally satisfying than helping AIDS victims, then it would be more helpful, more altruistic, and achieve greater lasting good if they used their money in the second way.

Everything that I know about trying to do what’s good, which includes trying to figure out how to do what’s good, tells me that supporting the second way is preferable to supporting the AIDS foundation (that’s not to say that supporting such a foundation isn’t worthwhile or important!), and certainly more preferable than using the money on jewelry. To my knowledge, the best known examples of the second way are SingularityExplicitAndImplicitWork; the most effectively altruistic forms of work that one can presently do. —Anand

---

It is also worth noting that “IntuitiveSelfishness” is not the same thing as “RationalSelfishness” or “EffectiveSelfishness”. —observer

---

Last edited October 4, 2003 1:19 am by Observer