I hope we don’t get carried away with the art thing-I was just trying to steelman that guy’s response.
My main point was just to solicit ideas about how to help first-world folks. That’s not because I think you can save more first-world folks than developing-world folks: it’s because I accept greater concern with socially nearby people in my definition of altruism. On this site you guys don’t-and I accept that too. But I now wonder if your definition of effectiveness is so different from mine that we can’t even talk.
I would definitely be interested in seeing more of a conversation about how to effectively help people in the first world. I think your position is not abnormal, and while I don’t hold it, I do think that it’s valuable for people with many different positions to pay attention to effectiveness in their altruism. At the Global Priorities Project we are working on some notes on how different ethical or factual assumptions would lead you to preferring different causes.
I guess that the link without framing may have made people think you were saying we should as a whole focus more on the first world, which could have earned the downvote.
Are you concerned with first world people alive today, or also with future first-world people? The answer may well depend on this (it affects how good economic growth is, as well as climate change mitigation and catastrophe reduction, particularly catastrophes that might destroy civilisation).
I hope we don’t get carried away with the art thing-I was just trying to steelman that guy’s response.
My main point was just to solicit ideas about how to help first-world folks. That’s not because I think you can save more first-world folks than developing-world folks: it’s because I accept greater concern with socially nearby people in my definition of altruism. On this site you guys don’t-and I accept that too. But I now wonder if your definition of effectiveness is so different from mine that we can’t even talk.
I would definitely be interested in seeing more of a conversation about how to effectively help people in the first world. I think your position is not abnormal, and while I don’t hold it, I do think that it’s valuable for people with many different positions to pay attention to effectiveness in their altruism. At the Global Priorities Project we are working on some notes on how different ethical or factual assumptions would lead you to preferring different causes.
I guess that the link without framing may have made people think you were saying we should as a whole focus more on the first world, which could have earned the downvote.
Are you concerned with first world people alive today, or also with future first-world people? The answer may well depend on this (it affects how good economic growth is, as well as climate change mitigation and catastrophe reduction, particularly catastrophes that might destroy civilisation).
I am concerned with future people; I would like us to have an interesting or “awesome” future.