As the Creative Writing Contest noted, Singer’s drowing-child thought experiment “probably did more to launch the EA movement than any other piece of writing”. The key elements of the story have spread far and wide—when I was in high school in 2009, an English teacher of mine related the story to my class as part of a group discussion, years before I had ever heard of Effective Altruism or anything related to it.
Should this post be included in the decadal review? Certainly, its importance is undisputed. If anything, Singer’s essay might be too well-known to merit inclusion in a decadal review, since its basic logic (that suffering far away still matters, and that suffering far away can sometimes be averted very cheaply) is essentially the starting-point through which almost all new EAs are introduced to the movement. It also might fail due to the technicality that the story was originally written in 1997, despite being reposted on our dear Forum in 2014.
Certainly there have been criticisms of the story, such as Yudkowsky’s here. It seems a bit of a bait and switch to have the story be about diving into a pool (which only takes a few minutes and at most ruins a nice set of clothes), and then Singer says that we are all in the situation described due to the existence of charities like Against Malaria Foundation who can save a life for several thousand dollars (which even for most rich-world citizens is more like the hard-earned savings from several months’ labor). But that is just nitpicking plot details—the fundamentals of the story are sound.
As the Creative Writing Contest noted, Singer’s drowing-child thought experiment “probably did more to launch the EA movement than any other piece of writing”. The key elements of the story have spread far and wide—when I was in high school in 2009, an English teacher of mine related the story to my class as part of a group discussion, years before I had ever heard of Effective Altruism or anything related to it.
Should this post be included in the decadal review? Certainly, its importance is undisputed. If anything, Singer’s essay might be too well-known to merit inclusion in a decadal review, since its basic logic (that suffering far away still matters, and that suffering far away can sometimes be averted very cheaply) is essentially the starting-point through which almost all new EAs are introduced to the movement. It also might fail due to the technicality that the story was originally written in 1997, despite being reposted on our dear Forum in 2014.
Certainly there have been criticisms of the story, such as Yudkowsky’s here. It seems a bit of a bait and switch to have the story be about diving into a pool (which only takes a few minutes and at most ruins a nice set of clothes), and then Singer says that we are all in the situation described due to the existence of charities like Against Malaria Foundation who can save a life for several thousand dollars (which even for most rich-world citizens is more like the hard-earned savings from several months’ labor). But that is just nitpicking plot details—the fundamentals of the story are sound.