I certainly think we should be wary when discussing immigration: we should be aware that discussing it in detail could be destructive (eg alienate people with particular political affiliations entirely), and that it seems intractable. We might want to, for example, wait for the Copenhagen Consensus Centre to do more work on it, and see whether they come up with tractable ways to help the world based on it. On the other hand, the harm I was trying to describe in the case of abortion is far greater than immigration. While I would expect there to be somewhat few readers of the blog sufficiently emotionally attached to one view on immigration that they would experience a somewhat careless discussion of it as distressing, I would expect there to be decidedly more so on abortion. If abortion seemed a more tractable issue, it would likely still be worth having the discussion, but trying to be careful in the language used (just as when comparing the effectiveness of charities, it’s important to be sensitive to the suffering relieved by charities which are comparatively ineffective). But given the current state of things, it doesn’t seem worth it. This is compounded by the fact that effective altruism in general is sometimes seen as somewhat male dominated, and the people likely to be put off by insensitive-seeming discussion of abortion are likely to be disproportionately women. Given that, and the huge space of effective research to be done, and topics which need further analysis, it seems sensible to focus on those others rather than this one.
I certainly think we should be wary when discussing immigration: we should be aware that discussing it in detail could be destructive (eg alienate people with particular political affiliations entirely), and that it seems intractable. We might want to, for example, wait for the Copenhagen Consensus Centre to do more work on it, and see whether they come up with tractable ways to help the world based on it. On the other hand, the harm I was trying to describe in the case of abortion is far greater than immigration. While I would expect there to be somewhat few readers of the blog sufficiently emotionally attached to one view on immigration that they would experience a somewhat careless discussion of it as distressing, I would expect there to be decidedly more so on abortion. If abortion seemed a more tractable issue, it would likely still be worth having the discussion, but trying to be careful in the language used (just as when comparing the effectiveness of charities, it’s important to be sensitive to the suffering relieved by charities which are comparatively ineffective). But given the current state of things, it doesn’t seem worth it. This is compounded by the fact that effective altruism in general is sometimes seen as somewhat male dominated, and the people likely to be put off by insensitive-seeming discussion of abortion are likely to be disproportionately women. Given that, and the huge space of effective research to be done, and topics which need further analysis, it seems sensible to focus on those others rather than this one.