Oliver: … Thus we see that donating to the opera is the best way of promoting the arts.
Eleanor: Okay, but I’m principally interested in improving human welfare.
Oliver: Oh! Well I think it is also the case that donating to the opera is best for improving human welfare too.
Generally, what is best for one thing is usually not the best for something else, and thus Oliver’s claim that donations to opera are best for the arts and human welfare is surprising. We may suspect bias: that Oliver’s claim that the Opera is best for the human welfare is primarily motivated by his enthusiasm for opera and desire to find reasons in favour, rather than a cooler, more objective search for what is really best for human welfare.
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The claim that, even granting the overwhelming importance of the far future, it turns out that global poverty charities are still the best to give to, given their robust benefits, positive flow through effects, and the speculativeness of far future causes.
Yes that is a major risk with this kind of thing and I cited that article in the disclaimer. I think there is almost certainly a real convergence but the strength of that convergence is what is debatable. Finding the bits where these cause areas intersect may really be a great opportunity though which EA is uniquely capable of researching and making a positive impact. So it is good to be skeptical of the convenient convergence phenomenon but that shouldn’t make us blind to ways where real convergence may be a convenient opportunity to have an outsized impact.
Greg Lewis writes about this in his excellent post: “Beware of surprising and suspicious convergence”:
I think this post already has a link to that excellent post in the disclaimer in the third section.
Yes that is a major risk with this kind of thing and I cited that article in the disclaimer. I think there is almost certainly a real convergence but the strength of that convergence is what is debatable. Finding the bits where these cause areas intersect may really be a great opportunity though which EA is uniquely capable of researching and making a positive impact. So it is good to be skeptical of the convenient convergence phenomenon but that shouldn’t make us blind to ways where real convergence may be a convenient opportunity to have an outsized impact.