Though I wouldn’t be surprised if I found a better organization with more searching.. I’m definitely in the market for that if you have ideas.
I don’t have direct ideas for the stated goal, but some brainstorming on the purpose of why you are interested in Asian advocacy might be fruitful? If you are interested in things that help Asian diaspora have better lives, have a wildly flourishing future, etc, I’d bet that the same general (human-focused) cause areas that EAs are interested in (scientific advancement, reducing existential synthetic biology and AI risk, etc) are in expectation better for Asian people than Laaunch or the other orgs above.
If you want things that disproportionately benefit Asians (eg, because “I want to show support for Asians so I want to do basically the same thing I was planning to do anyway” is a bad look/ serve poorly as an honest loyalty signal), I’d probably look into ways to improve health and other outcomes in countries with a lot of Asians, or affect a lot of Asians. Plausible targets include outdoor pollution, smoking cessation, deworming, and lead poisoning. I’d also more speculatively suggest donating to reduce nuclear risk, since I think the majority of potential flashpoints for nuclear risk is in Asia.
If you want to donate to organizations that disproportionately benefit upper-middle class Asians in Western countries (because this is the relevant group of friends/collaborators/students/etc that you wish to express solidarity to), I’m pretty stuck on ideas, yeah. I think there’s a fairly high difficulty in finding charities in this space with any nontrivial and positive tangible outcome (even more so than normal for charity selection).
Speaking personally, I do think the impact of racism on me is nonzero and negative. But almost all of the experiences of racism in my adult life looks less like explicit and obvious racial prejudice and more like statistical disparate impact, in both my corporate and social life. In no individual case would there be obvious racism, but collectively a (murky) picture is painted. Eg, I have to apply to X jobs to get offers I’m happy with, whereas I suspect my demographic twin of a different race only have to apply to ~Y jobs to get the same number of offers, visa approvals to the US are harder for Asians than for Europeans*, stuff like that. This is only my own anecdotal experience, but I suspect it generalizes well to East Asian people** who are likely to be your friends/coworkers/etc.
It seems pretty hard to meaningfully improve on the disparate impact stuff without a clear theory of change, and I don’t think there are obvious quick fixes (eg, I sure don’t want to work in any job that I have to sue to get!). I’d maybe weakly endorse a variation of Dale’s comment here and suggest organizations that lobby for greater standardization/legibility in admittance to universities and prestige jobs (under the assumption that illegibility and informal systems almost always disproportionately benefit people with power, and harms minorities). But I’m hesitant to recommend donating to any specific group that works on this without at least doing some due diligence on their theory of change.
Thinking farther afield, I’d also be interested in great power stuff and other things that mitigate potential future ethnic tensions.
* And people who are ethnically Asian are more likely to be from Asian countries than from European countries.
** I’m less sure about generalization to eg, West Asians because I can imagine a lot of anti-Arab and Anti-Israeli sentiment that’s more direct.
I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this comment. In particular, I think the first part is an excellent and well-phrased example of the “universal solvent” property of EA thinking that I think is both hugely valuable and quite emotionally challenging to many people in cases like this.
Thanks, and sorry for not responding to this earlier (was on vacation at the time). I really appreciated this and agree with willbradshaw’s comment below :).
I don’t have direct ideas for the stated goal, but some brainstorming on the purpose of why you are interested in Asian advocacy might be fruitful? If you are interested in things that help Asian diaspora have better lives, have a wildly flourishing future, etc, I’d bet that the same general (human-focused) cause areas that EAs are interested in (scientific advancement, reducing existential synthetic biology and AI risk, etc) are in expectation better for Asian people than Laaunch or the other orgs above.
If you want things that disproportionately benefit Asians (eg, because “I want to show support for Asians so I want to do basically the same thing I was planning to do anyway” is a bad look/ serve poorly as an honest loyalty signal), I’d probably look into ways to improve health and other outcomes in countries with a lot of Asians, or affect a lot of Asians. Plausible targets include outdoor pollution, smoking cessation, deworming, and lead poisoning. I’d also more speculatively suggest donating to reduce nuclear risk, since I think the majority of potential flashpoints for nuclear risk is in Asia.
If you want to donate to organizations that disproportionately benefit upper-middle class Asians in Western countries (because this is the relevant group of friends/collaborators/students/etc that you wish to express solidarity to), I’m pretty stuck on ideas, yeah. I think there’s a fairly high difficulty in finding charities in this space with any nontrivial and positive tangible outcome (even more so than normal for charity selection).
Speaking personally, I do think the impact of racism on me is nonzero and negative. But almost all of the experiences of racism in my adult life looks less like explicit and obvious racial prejudice and more like statistical disparate impact, in both my corporate and social life. In no individual case would there be obvious racism, but collectively a (murky) picture is painted. Eg, I have to apply to X jobs to get offers I’m happy with, whereas I suspect my demographic twin of a different race only have to apply to ~Y jobs to get the same number of offers, visa approvals to the US are harder for Asians than for Europeans*, stuff like that. This is only my own anecdotal experience, but I suspect it generalizes well to East Asian people** who are likely to be your friends/coworkers/etc.
It seems pretty hard to meaningfully improve on the disparate impact stuff without a clear theory of change, and I don’t think there are obvious quick fixes (eg, I sure don’t want to work in any job that I have to sue to get!). I’d maybe weakly endorse a variation of Dale’s comment here and suggest organizations that lobby for greater standardization/legibility in admittance to universities and prestige jobs (under the assumption that illegibility and informal systems almost always disproportionately benefit people with power, and harms minorities). But I’m hesitant to recommend donating to any specific group that works on this without at least doing some due diligence on their theory of change.
Thinking farther afield, I’d also be interested in great power stuff and other things that mitigate potential future ethnic tensions.
* And people who are ethnically Asian are more likely to be from Asian countries than from European countries.
** I’m less sure about generalization to eg, West Asians because I can imagine a lot of anti-Arab and Anti-Israeli sentiment that’s more direct.
I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this comment. In particular, I think the first part is an excellent and well-phrased example of the “universal solvent” property of EA thinking that I think is both hugely valuable and quite emotionally challenging to many people in cases like this.
Thanks, and sorry for not responding to this earlier (was on vacation at the time). I really appreciated this and agree with willbradshaw’s comment below :).