I agree that persuasion frames are often a bad way to think about community building.
I also agree that community members should feel valuable, much in the way that I want everybody in the world to feel valued/loved.
I probably disagree about the implications, as they are affected by some other factors. One intuition that helps me is to think about the donors who donate toward community building efforts. I expect that these donors are mostly people who care about preventing kids from dying of malaria, and many donors also donate lots of money towards charities that can save a kid’s like for $5000. They are, I assume, donating toward community building efforts because they think these efforts are on average a better deal, costing less than $5000 for a live saved in expectation.
For mental health reasons, I don’t think people should generally hold themselves to this bar and be like “is my expected impact higher than where money spent on me would go otherwise?” But I think when you’re using other peoples altruistic money to community build, you should definitely be making trade offs, crunching numbers, and otherwise be aiming to maximize the impact from those dollars.
Furthermore, I would be extremely worried if I learned that community builders aren’t attempting to quantify their impact or think about these things carefully (noting that I have found it very difficult to quantify impact here). Community building is often indistinguishable (at least from the outside) from “spending money on ourselves” and I think it’s reasonable to have a super high bar for doing this in the name of altruism.
Noting again that I think it’s hard to balance mental health with the whacky terrible state of the world where a few thousand dollars can save a life. Making a distinction between personal dollars and altruistic dollars can perhaps help folks preserve their mental health while thinking rigorously about how to help others the most. Interesting related ideas:
I agree that persuasion frames are often a bad way to think about community building.
I also agree that community members should feel valuable, much in the way that I want everybody in the world to feel valued/loved.
I probably disagree about the implications, as they are affected by some other factors. One intuition that helps me is to think about the donors who donate toward community building efforts. I expect that these donors are mostly people who care about preventing kids from dying of malaria, and many donors also donate lots of money towards charities that can save a kid’s like for $5000. They are, I assume, donating toward community building efforts because they think these efforts are on average a better deal, costing less than $5000 for a live saved in expectation.
For mental health reasons, I don’t think people should generally hold themselves to this bar and be like “is my expected impact higher than where money spent on me would go otherwise?” But I think when you’re using other peoples altruistic money to community build, you should definitely be making trade offs, crunching numbers, and otherwise be aiming to maximize the impact from those dollars.
Furthermore, I would be extremely worried if I learned that community builders aren’t attempting to quantify their impact or think about these things carefully (noting that I have found it very difficult to quantify impact here). Community building is often indistinguishable (at least from the outside) from “spending money on ourselves” and I think it’s reasonable to have a super high bar for doing this in the name of altruism.
Noting again that I think it’s hard to balance mental health with the whacky terrible state of the world where a few thousand dollars can save a life. Making a distinction between personal dollars and altruistic dollars can perhaps help folks preserve their mental health while thinking rigorously about how to help others the most. Interesting related ideas:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-fuzzies-and-utilons-separately https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zu28unKfTHoxRWpGn/you-have-more-than-one-goal-and-that-s-fine