We’re not likely to get any leverage on it one way or the other, because of the resources already invested pushing both ways.
Do you think we should give up on immigration as well? That’s a pretty ‘hot button topic’ as well. At least in the UK it seems much more political than abortion.
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.
One relevant difference between abortion and immigration is that rival views about abortion, but not about immigration, correlate well with positions on the left-right continuum. Pulling the rope sideways thus seems easier in the case of immigration, because you can appeal to both the left and the right, and cannot be accused of being partisan to either.
Do you think we should give up on immigration as well? That’s a pretty ‘hot button topic’ as well. At least in the UK it seems much more political than abortion.
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.
One relevant difference between abortion and immigration is that rival views about abortion, but not about immigration, correlate well with positions on the left-right continuum. Pulling the rope sideways thus seems easier in the case of immigration, because you can appeal to both the left and the right, and cannot be accused of being partisan to either.
My impression was that the left is pro-immigrant (at least more so than the right) and the far right is very xenophobic.
Indeed, you’re right.