I got into EA because of GiveDirectly and it has been the lion’s share of my donations since I first got into contact with it in December ’21, and the core argument regarding how much a $1 can make a difference if you donate to the world’s poorest was a big part of it.
Relatedly, I once learned about GD doing campaigns within the USA and that made me feel angry that this core value proposition of GD was, apparently, being ignored. I did as one should and let the emotion pass and later thought that maybe the reason for that was that GD was trying to not push away people who are morally parochial and thus would only donate to GD if it was giving money to the American poor, which of course makes a lot of sense. I suppose this goes to show how it might be difficult to communicate to target audiences that have significantly different morals.
Regarding the basic vs. applied science discussion, good points, I would also point out that goes both ways: sometimes you’re doing only really basic research and then also end up stumbling upon knowledge that is important for applied contexts, e.g., because you wanted to control for the influence of some aspect of the stimuli or the participants.
Just three points:
I got into EA because of GiveDirectly and it has been the lion’s share of my donations since I first got into contact with it in December ’21, and the core argument regarding how much a $1 can make a difference if you donate to the world’s poorest was a big part of it.
Relatedly, I once learned about GD doing campaigns within the USA and that made me feel angry that this core value proposition of GD was, apparently, being ignored. I did as one should and let the emotion pass and later thought that maybe the reason for that was that GD was trying to not push away people who are morally parochial and thus would only donate to GD if it was giving money to the American poor, which of course makes a lot of sense. I suppose this goes to show how it might be difficult to communicate to target audiences that have significantly different morals.
Regarding the basic vs. applied science discussion, good points, I would also point out that goes both ways: sometimes you’re doing only really basic research and then also end up stumbling upon knowledge that is important for applied contexts, e.g., because you wanted to control for the influence of some aspect of the stimuli or the participants.