In this question, youâre asking about how best to help a very specific group of people, which isnât the traditional âEAâ approach.
Generally, effective altruism is focused on finding the best ways to help people without choosing which specific people to help ahead of time. Instead, we try to reach whichever people will get the most benefit from what we can give.
The people we can help the most usually arenât those whose problems we hear about on the news. As GiveWell notes in their advice on disaster relief giving:
Think about less-publicized suffering. Every day, people die from preventable and curable diseases, in many cases because they lack access to proven life-savers such as insecticide-treated nets. Their day-to-day suffering isnât well-suited to making headlines, and they generally donât attract the attention and dollars that disaster relief victims do â yet we believe that donations targeting these populations do more good than disaster relief donations.
If a recent disaster has given you a strengthened desire to reduce suffering and help others, consider asking whether you might be able to broaden this desire and make it part of your everyday life.
That said, if you are determined to specifically help people who were affected by this fire, GiveWellâs other advice in that article is worth taking:
Give cash rather than goods
Make unrestricted donations
Proactively seek out accountable and transparent organizations (rather than supporting one that happens to advertise to you)
I wonder if the forum shouldnât encourage a class of post (basically like this one) thatâs something like âare there effective giving opportunities in X context?â Although EA is cause-neutral, thereâs no reason why members shouldnât take the opportunity provided by serendipity to investigate highly specific scenarios and model âvirtuous EA behavior.â This could be a way of making the forum friendlier to visitors like the OP, and a way for comments to introduce visitors to EA concepts in a way thatâs emotionally relevant.
If I understand you correctly, I agree. I understand the reason for quoting GiveWellâs framework, however, I think that it is potentially discouraging to someone who is trying to do the most good in a context that they care about. Thatâs not to say that nobody should ever say âmaybe there are more neglected causes that you may not have thought aboutâ, but the EA community certainly shouldnât be giving the impression that we follow some strict ideology that no-one can challenge.
Iâm not sure that I would group refugee camps on the Aegean Islands in with âdisaster reliefâ (although I understand that this post was specifically about the fire).
I guess that taking this specific event out of the consideration, the two main causes of suffering here are 1. The actual wars/âregimes that people are fleeing in their home countries and 2. The asylum system in Europe (and elsewhere, but I am more familiar with Europe). It doesnât really seem like donating money can help much with either of these (Iâm happy to be corrected if wrong, and I havenât looked into this in enormous depth). Milbig, maybe you could get involved in a group that focusses on political lobbying? I donât know how effective this is likely to be, and I doubt that EA would say that this is very tractable as a cause. However, I donât think that the scale, neglectedness, tractability framework is completely foolproof, and itâs obviously very hard to know what is âeffectiveâ when it comes to political issues.
In this question, youâre asking about how best to help a very specific group of people, which isnât the traditional âEAâ approach.
Generally, effective altruism is focused on finding the best ways to help people without choosing which specific people to help ahead of time. Instead, we try to reach whichever people will get the most benefit from what we can give.
The people we can help the most usually arenât those whose problems we hear about on the news. As GiveWell notes in their advice on disaster relief giving:
That said, if you are determined to specifically help people who were affected by this fire, GiveWellâs other advice in that article is worth taking:
Give cash rather than goods
Make unrestricted donations
Proactively seek out accountable and transparent organizations (rather than supporting one that happens to advertise to you)
I wonder if the forum shouldnât encourage a class of post (basically like this one) thatâs something like âare there effective giving opportunities in X context?â Although EA is cause-neutral, thereâs no reason why members shouldnât take the opportunity provided by serendipity to investigate highly specific scenarios and model âvirtuous EA behavior.â This could be a way of making the forum friendlier to visitors like the OP, and a way for comments to introduce visitors to EA concepts in a way thatâs emotionally relevant.
If I understand you correctly, I agree. I understand the reason for quoting GiveWellâs framework, however, I think that it is potentially discouraging to someone who is trying to do the most good in a context that they care about. Thatâs not to say that nobody should ever say âmaybe there are more neglected causes that you may not have thought aboutâ, but the EA community certainly shouldnât be giving the impression that we follow some strict ideology that no-one can challenge.
Iâm not sure that I would group refugee camps on the Aegean Islands in with âdisaster reliefâ (although I understand that this post was specifically about the fire).
I guess that taking this specific event out of the consideration, the two main causes of suffering here are 1. The actual wars/âregimes that people are fleeing in their home countries and 2. The asylum system in Europe (and elsewhere, but I am more familiar with Europe). It doesnât really seem like donating money can help much with either of these (Iâm happy to be corrected if wrong, and I havenât looked into this in enormous depth). Milbig, maybe you could get involved in a group that focusses on political lobbying? I donât know how effective this is likely to be, and I doubt that EA would say that this is very tractable as a cause. However, I donât think that the scale, neglectedness, tractability framework is completely foolproof, and itâs obviously very hard to know what is âeffectiveâ when it comes to political issues.
A short but relevant article: https://ââwww.theguardian.com/ââcommentisfree/ââ2015/ââsep/ââ04/ââhelp-refugees-donations-government-political-action