It’s hard to stop this argument from heading down the Dead Children Currency route. I think your heuristic that we should try to balance convenience with not being wasteful is right, and the optimizing heuristic that we should only spend on things that are more effective than giving that money away is wrong. It feels wrong in the same way that it would feel wrong to say “we should only spend time doing (activity if that activity is highly effective/it would increase our productivity in EA work”. EA is a community, for better or worse, and I think it’s bad for communities to create norms that are bad for community members well-being. I think a counterfactual norm of comparing all spending decisions to the potential impact of donating that money would be terrible for the well-being of EAs, especially very scrupulous EAs. Effective altruism in the garden of ends talks beautifully about the dark side of bringing such a demanding framework into everyday decisions.
That obviously does not mean all forms of EA spending are good, or even that most of them are. It’s a false dichotomy to say the only options are to spend on useless luxuries or to obsess over dead children currency. But it does suggest that we should have a more heuristic approach to feeling out when spending is too much spending. Yes, we shouldn’t spend on Ubers just because EA is footing the bill. Take the BART in most cases. But if it’s late at night and you don’t want to be on the BART then don’t force yourself into a scary situation because you were scared of wasting money that could save lives.
Yes, I think it is a very difficult and perhaps neccesarily uneasy balancing act, at least for those whose main or sole priority is to maximize impact. Minimum viable self-care is quite problematic, but it is not plausible we can maximize impact without any sacrifice whatsoever either
It’s hard to stop this argument from heading down the Dead Children Currency route. I think your heuristic that we should try to balance convenience with not being wasteful is right, and the optimizing heuristic that we should only spend on things that are more effective than giving that money away is wrong. It feels wrong in the same way that it would feel wrong to say “we should only spend time doing (activity if that activity is highly effective/it would increase our productivity in EA work”. EA is a community, for better or worse, and I think it’s bad for communities to create norms that are bad for community members well-being. I think a counterfactual norm of comparing all spending decisions to the potential impact of donating that money would be terrible for the well-being of EAs, especially very scrupulous EAs. Effective altruism in the garden of ends talks beautifully about the dark side of bringing such a demanding framework into everyday decisions.
That obviously does not mean all forms of EA spending are good, or even that most of them are. It’s a false dichotomy to say the only options are to spend on useless luxuries or to obsess over dead children currency. But it does suggest that we should have a more heuristic approach to feeling out when spending is too much spending. Yes, we shouldn’t spend on Ubers just because EA is footing the bill. Take the BART in most cases. But if it’s late at night and you don’t want to be on the BART then don’t force yourself into a scary situation because you were scared of wasting money that could save lives.
Yes, I think it is a very difficult and perhaps neccesarily uneasy balancing act, at least for those whose main or sole priority is to maximize impact. Minimum viable self-care is quite problematic, but it is not plausible we can maximize impact without any sacrifice whatsoever either