Thank you Ramiro. If I understand correctly your point around attention being a scarce resource, you are challenging whether we should pay too much attention to topics like racism at a time when lots of people are thinking about it, while other more neglected issues (like the Ebola outbreak and other issues you mentioned) may be higher impact things to pay attention to.
I think this makes a lot of sense.
But I don’t think everyone will be so cause neutral, and I think EA ways of thinking still have something to for people who want to focus on a specific cause.
Actually, I think that, before BLM, I underestimated the impact of racism (probably because it’s hard to evaluate and compare current interventions to GW’s charity recommendations); also, given BLM and the possibility of systemic change, I now think it might be more tractable - this might even be a social urgency.
But what most bothered me in your text was:
a) EA does not reduce everything to mosquito nets and AI—the problem is that almost no one else was paying attention to these issues before, and they’re really important;
b) the reason why most people don’t think about it is that the concerned populations are neglected—they’re seen as having less value than the average life in the developed world. Moreover, in the case of global health and poverty interventions in poor countries (mostly African countries), I think it’s quite plausible that racism (i.e., ethnic conflicts, brutal colonial past, indifference from developed countries) is partially responsible for those problems (neglected diseases and extreme poverty). For instance, racism was a key issue in previous humanitarian tragedies, such as the Great Famines in Ireland and Bengal.
Thank you Ramiro. If I understand correctly your point around attention being a scarce resource, you are challenging whether we should pay too much attention to topics like racism at a time when lots of people are thinking about it, while other more neglected issues (like the Ebola outbreak and other issues you mentioned) may be higher impact things to pay attention to.
I think this makes a lot of sense.
But I don’t think everyone will be so cause neutral, and I think EA ways of thinking still have something to for people who want to focus on a specific cause.
Actually, I think that, before BLM, I underestimated the impact of racism (probably because it’s hard to evaluate and compare current interventions to GW’s charity recommendations); also, given BLM and the possibility of systemic change, I now think it might be more tractable - this might even be a social urgency.
But what most bothered me in your text was:
a) EA does not reduce everything to mosquito nets and AI—the problem is that almost no one else was paying attention to these issues before, and they’re really important;
b) the reason why most people don’t think about it is that the concerned populations are neglected—they’re seen as having less value than the average life in the developed world. Moreover, in the case of global health and poverty interventions in poor countries (mostly African countries), I think it’s quite plausible that racism (i.e., ethnic conflicts, brutal colonial past, indifference from developed countries) is partially responsible for those problems (neglected diseases and extreme poverty). For instance, racism was a key issue in previous humanitarian tragedies, such as the Great Famines in Ireland and Bengal.