Food for Thought: Offsetting Our Actions: Can Giving Make Up for Doing?
Food for Thought is a series of events, where we discuss philosophical and practical questions of EA in small groups over food and drinks: We are exploring effective altruism one bite at a time. EA newcomers are welcome; studying the suggested material is encouraged but not required, please RSVP.
Topic
This time we will discuss two common ways of doing good: donating and making personal changes. In Effective Altruism, there’s a strong emphasis on supporting high-impact charities and effective giving, while veganism and other lifestyle shifts are also widespread. Some argue that donating to reduce harm is just as effective, and often easier, than reducing harm through personal actions. But are these approaches truly equivalent? And how can we do the most good?
Suggested reading
A very short post about possible moral problems of offsetting
For those with a bit more time on their hands an account of an (unsuccessful) kidney donation
Where/How/What
As the days are getting shorter again, we are moving back to our indoor location at Atopia. It is easy to reach via Ringbahn (Prenzlauer Allee), M10 (Prenzlauer Allee/Danziger Staße) or M2 (Fröbelstraße).
We start with introductions at 19:15. If you can’t make it for this time, feel free to join later, but ideally at 20:00, when we’ll do a second introduction round for those joining at that time.
What to bring
Some cash to buy a drink at Atopia (they don’t take card)
Sorry for the short notice, but we have to skip the August date. That’s why I’ve changed it to September 24th. Hope to see you there!
(We might need to move it indoors—but let’s see, sometimes it can still be quite warm in September.)
FYI I did not receive any notification about it moving, probably because I just added the event to my calendar using “Add to calendar” and did not RSVP. I expect more people to not know it has been moved.
Hey Lucie, thanks for letting us know! I know it’s not ideal to move the event on such short notice. However, sometimes it can happen that something comes up so that both of the organisers can’t make it, in that case we need to cancel/move the event. Luckily that does not happen too often.
I’ve changed the date here, on Meet-up and in the EA Google calendar. Is there any other place where you’d recommend posting a cancellation next time to reach more people (i.e. in the EA Telegram channel)?
Case in point, a friend was still planning to go a few hours before the event.
I think the main issue here is technological, where adding fixed events to a calendar does not allow updating it. If the calendar event could be updated to say “CANCELLED”, then it’d be very clear.
I did not know there was a shared Google Calendar. I guess this one is live updating.
Personally, I’d have seen it if it was posted in the EA Berlin Community Telegram
EDIT: my bad I had access to the calendar but had not activated it. Now I’ll see the updates!