1. Some people live in relative material abundance, and face significant diminishing returns to having more material wealth.
2. However, many problems remain, including poverty and catastrophic risk.
3. It would be valuable for funds to go towards reducing these problems, and thus quite valuable to successfully spread values that promote donating towards them.
You also make a couple of interesting claims:
4. We can feasibly cause a ‘paradigm shift’ in values by convincing people to tithe.
5. The benefits of changing society’s values in this way don’t depend on us spreading norms around effectiveness, or encouraging donations to effective charities in particular.
which I’m tentatively interpreting as
5A. We should focus on a moonshot-like attempt to paradigm-shift society via promoting tithing to any cause, rather than incrementally spreading effective altruist ideas, because the expected value of effort spent on the former is higher.
Could you explain why you think these are true?
On 4, I think the fact that the donation rate has remained steady, despite the existence of many large charities with competent fundraisers who’d love to increase it, provides some evidence against this being easy. As does, you know, human nature.
On 5, I’m not sure what mechanism will channel within-US donations to benefits in the developing world, or to animals or x-risk. I assume the idea is that people will get less selfish and more altruistic? If you mean 5A, I agree that this mechanism will probably kick in eventually, but then I’m back to asking about feasibility.
I think most EAs share these premises with you:
1. Some people live in relative material abundance, and face significant diminishing returns to having more material wealth.
2. However, many problems remain, including poverty and catastrophic risk.
3. It would be valuable for funds to go towards reducing these problems, and thus quite valuable to successfully spread values that promote donating towards them.
You also make a couple of interesting claims:
4. We can feasibly cause a ‘paradigm shift’ in values by convincing people to tithe.
5. The benefits of changing society’s values in this way don’t depend on us spreading norms around effectiveness, or encouraging donations to effective charities in particular.
which I’m tentatively interpreting as
5A. We should focus on a moonshot-like attempt to paradigm-shift society via promoting tithing to any cause, rather than incrementally spreading effective altruist ideas, because the expected value of effort spent on the former is higher.
Could you explain why you think these are true?
On 4, I think the fact that the donation rate has remained steady, despite the existence of many large charities with competent fundraisers who’d love to increase it, provides some evidence against this being easy. As does, you know, human nature.
On 5, I’m not sure what mechanism will channel within-US donations to benefits in the developing world, or to animals or x-risk. I assume the idea is that people will get less selfish and more altruistic? If you mean 5A, I agree that this mechanism will probably kick in eventually, but then I’m back to asking about feasibility.