Thanks for pointing that out, I didn’t realise how effective blood donation was. I think my original point still stands, if “donating blood” is substituted with a different proxy for something that is sub-maximally effective but feels good though.
Also, almost everything anyone does is sub-maximally effective. We simply do not know what maximally effective is. We do think it’s worth trying to figure out our best guesses using the best tools available but we can never know with 100% certainty.
Yeah, I actually called this point out in general in my #8 footnote (“Plus some of these things could (low confidence) make a decent case for considering how low cost they might be.”). I’ve been at EA events or in social contexts with EAs when someone has asserted with great confidence that things like voting and giving blood are pointless. This hasn’t been well received by onlookers (for good reason IMHO) and I think it does more harm than good.
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn’t realise how effective blood donation was. I think my original point still stands, if “donating blood” is substituted with a different proxy for something that is sub-maximally effective but feels good though.
Also, almost everything anyone does is sub-maximally effective. We simply do not know what maximally effective is. We do think it’s worth trying to figure out our best guesses using the best tools available but we can never know with 100% certainty.
Yeah, I actually called this point out in general in my #8 footnote (“Plus some of these things could (low confidence) make a decent case for considering how low cost they might be.”). I’ve been at EA events or in social contexts with EAs when someone has asserted with great confidence that things like voting and giving blood are pointless. This hasn’t been well received by onlookers (for good reason IMHO) and I think it does more harm than good.