Aaron Gertler(Aaron L. Gertler)

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: Septem­ber 2020

• Aaron Gertler 21 Oct 2020 13:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: So-Low Growth’s comment on: So-Low Growth’s Shortform

  Peo­ple have tried to es­ti­mate similar figures be­fore. See Jeff Kauf­man on dairy offsets or Gre­gory Lewis on meat-eat­ing (search­ing the term “moral offset” will help you find other ex­am­ples I haven’t linked).

  Some peo­ple also think this idea is con­cep­tu­ally bad or an­ti­thet­i­cal to EA.

• Aaron Gertler 21 Oct 2020 13:19 UTC

  33 points

  on: Progress Open Thread: Oc­to­ber //​ Stu­dent Sum­mit 2020

  I’ll kick things off!

  This month, I finished in sec­ond place at the Magic: the Gather­ing Grand Fi­nals (sort of like the world cham­pi­onship). I earned $20,000 in prize money and de­clared that I would donate half of it to GiveWell, which gave me an ex­cuse to talk up EA on cam­era for thou­sands of live view­ers and post about it on Twit­ter.

  This has been a whirlwind jour­ney for me; I did un­ex­pect­edly well in a se­ries of qual­ify­ing tour­na­ments. Lots of luck was in­volved. But I think I played well, and I’ve been thrilled to see how in­ter­ested my non-EA fol­low­ers are in hear­ing about char­ity stuff (es­pe­cially when I use Magic-re­lated metaphors to ex­plain cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion).

Progress Open Thread: Oc­to­ber //​ Stu­dent Sum­mit 2020

Fo­rum up­date: New fea­tures (Oc­to­ber 2020)

• Aaron Gertler 21 Oct 2020 8:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: xccf’s comment on: When does it make sense to sup­port/​op­pose poli­ti­cal can­di­dates on EA grounds?

  Sure—that’s a good thing to clar­ify. When I say “op­posed to,” I mean that it seems like the things he presently cares about don’t seem con­nected to a cause-neu­tral welfare-max­i­miz­ing per­spec­tive (though I can’t say I know what his mo­ti­va­tions are, so per­haps that is what he’s aiming for).

  Most no­tably, his PAC ex­plic­itly sup­ports an “Amer­ica First im­mi­gra­tion policy,” which seems difficult to square with his es­poused liber­tar­i­anism and his com­plaints about tech­nolog­i­cal slow­down in ad­di­tion to be­ing di­rectly op­posed to work from Open Phil and oth­ers. I don’t un­der­stand ex­actly what his aims are at this point, but it feels like he’s far away enough from the EA baseline that I wouldn’t want to as­sume a mo­ti­va­tion of “do the most good in a cause-neu­tral way” any­more.

• Aaron Gertler 20 Oct 2020 19:45 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Fore­cast­ing Newslet­ter: Septem­ber 2020.

  The newslet­ter it­self; alas, the re­al­ity of time forces me to be se­lec­tive about what I choose to read more closely. But I’m glad to have the op­por­tu­nity to se­lect things at all!

• Aaron Gertler 19 Oct 2020 9:27 UTC

  4 points

  on: Some his­tory top­ics it might be very valuable to investigate

  Com­ment that came in from the EA Newslet­ter:

  “I’m writ­ing a PhD on alumni en­gage­ment with effec­tive al­tru­ism as the philo­soph­i­cal back­ground. I’m com­par­ing six top 100 ranked uni­ver­si­ties in the world and their alumni en­gage­ment. The uni­ver­si­ties are Har­vard, Penn State, Cam­bridge, Vienna, Upp­sala, Helsinki. I am in­ter­ested in any sem­i­nar or dis­cus­sions about im­ple­ment­ing effec­tive al­tru­ism and his­tor­i­cal re­search as I have been do­ing that my­self for the past four years. I’m writ­ing the PhD for the Univer­sity of Helsinki for pro­fes­sor Laura Kolbe, I my­self live on the Åland Is­lands.”

  Pia Widén (pia.widen at aland.net)

• Aaron Gertler 19 Oct 2020 9:16 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: xccf’s comment on: When does it make sense to sup­port/​op­pose poli­ti­cal can­di­dates on EA grounds?

  Was the “at least one EA” some­one in a po­si­tion of in­fluence?

  My un­der­stand­ing is that Thiel stopped be­ing es­pe­cially in­ter­ested in EA around the time he got into poli­tics, but he might still be mak­ing AI-re­lated dona­tions here and there. I’d be sur­prised if he had wanted to speak at any re­cent EA Global con­fer­ence, as most of his cur­rent work seems ei­ther op­posed to or or­thog­o­nal to com­mon EA po­si­tions. But I don’t have any spe­cial knowl­edge here. (Cer­tainly he was never Glebbed.)

• Aaron Gertler 19 Oct 2020 8:43 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai’s comment on: When does it make sense to sup­port/​op­pose poli­ti­cal can­di­dates on EA grounds?

  If you’re still skep­ti­cal that peo­ple are re­luc­tant or afraid to speak pos­i­tively about Trump or Repub­li­cans in gen­eral...

  I never said I was skep­ti­cal that peo­ple felt this way. I’m quite cer­tain peo­ple do feel this way, be­cause you’ve said you feel it and so have oth­ers. I just wanted to hear more de­tails about that feel­ing of re­luc­tance/​fear, and to ex­press doubt that no Trump sup­porter would ever be will­ing to ex­press that sup­port in a pub­lic EA dis­cus­sion.

  It’s cer­tainly pos­si­ble, even likely, that “some peo­ple” in the com­mu­nity would re­act nega­tively to hear­ing that some­one was a Trump sup­porter, in a way that made fu­ture in­ter­ac­tions a bit less col­lab­o­ra­tive or more fraught. But I think that’s the na­ture of ex­press­ing strong opinions gen­er­ally, in al­most any com­mu­nity. Some­one who came out as a com­mu­nist would likely face similar challenges. Same for some­one who was very re­li­gious, or a sup­porter of PETA, or a fan of An­tifa. Prob­a­bly not for a mod­er­ate liberal, even an out­spo­ken one, but that’s be­cause EAs are over­whelm­ingly mod­er­ately liberal.

  This phe­nomenon makes it hard to have to­tally open dis­cus­sions on many top­ics, poli­tics among them. And I agree with you that any pub­lic dis­cus­sion about poli­tics within EA could be skewed* -- but I just don’t think it would be skewed to the point that an idea many peo­ple held wouldn’t show up at all.

  Peo­ple write con­tro­ver­sial Fo­rum com­ments all the time. Peo­ple have bit­ter on­line ar­gu­ments in var­i­ous EA spaces. There are plenty of loud and opinionated peo­ple in the com­mu­nity who aren’t con­cerned about how oth­ers will re­act to them (heck, any­one who wants to can make an anony­mous ac­count on the Fo­rum—where are the anony­mous Trump sup­port­ers?).

  *This is one rea­son I’d pre­fer we not have much par­ti­san poli­ti­cal dis­cus­sion here. And if a group of peo­ple were to look for “poli­ti­cal dona­tion op­por­tu­ni­ties,” I’d hope that they would start by look­ing care­fully at the ob­ject-level virtues of each im­por­tant can­di­date in a given elec­tion, with­out par­ti­san­ship.

  *****

  Can it re­ally be that out of thou­sands of fo­rum users and FB friends/​fol­low­ers, there is not one Trump or Repub­li­can sup­porter who might ob­ject to vot­ing for Democrats on ob­ject-level grounds,

  I’ve seen poli­ti­cal posts from EAs I know that drew in Trump sup­port­ers who hap­pened to be in their so­cial net­works (though I’m not sure how many of said sup­port­ers would con­sider them­selves in­ter­ested in EA). But I don’t spend much time on Face­book in gen­eral, and EA Twit­ter doesn’t have es­pe­cially ac­tive poli­ti­cal con­ver­sa­tion in my ex­pe­rience (most of Rob Wiblin’s re­cent posts have ~1 com­ment, and he’s one of the most pop­u­lar EA Twit­ter users). So I’m in­ter­ested in your ex­pe­riences (and those of other peo­ple who spend more time than I do in the rele­vant spaces). Are these FB/​Twit­ter posts get­ting 5 com­ments? 10? 50?

  When peo­ple re­spond to par­ti­san poli­ti­cal posts from friends they know per­son­ally, I’d ex­pect agree­able re­sponses to dom­i­nate. When my so­cial­ist Face­book friends post about so­cial­ism, they get a lot of re­sponses from other so­cial­ists and very few from cap­i­tal­ists, even though I ex­pect they have lots of cap­i­tal­ists in their so­cial net­works, and I wouldn’t ex­pect cap­i­tal­ists who re­spond to them to be wor­ried about shun­ning given that cap­i­tal­ism is a nor­mal po­si­tion in elite spaces. I think peo­ple just don’t like start­ing ar­gu­ments with their friends over touchy sub­jects.

  Of course, this as­sumes that the dy­namic in play is “re­spond­ing to a friend.” If these are posts in dis­cus­sion-ori­ented spaces and there are lots of re­sponses, and the re­sponses are all one-sided, that’s stronger ev­i­dence that peo­ple don’t want to speak out in sup­port of Trump. (How­ever, it also seems plau­si­ble that EA is so anti-Trump gen­er­ally that there just aren’t peo­ple around who dis­agree and care enough to com­ment, es­pe­cially given how much of the com­mu­nity is non-Amer­i­can.)

  *****

  As for this Fo­rum: On the post we’re now dis­cussing, the opinionated com­ments are (as I type this) as fol­lows:

  • Our back-and-forth (with Ian’s con­tri­bu­tion)

  • Your com­ment which links to other com­ments where you push back on the post

  • xccf’s com­ment push­ing back on the post and mak­ing what I see as a good-faith at­tempt to steel­man Trump supporters

  • Ryan Carey’s com­ment push­ing back on the post

  • Linch’s com­ment push­ing back on the post (and re­lated dis­cus­sion)

  • Abra­ham Rowe’s gen­er­ally sup­port­ive comment

  • My com­ment push­ing back on the post (though my tone was sup­port­ive)

  • Ben’s com­ment push­ing back on the post (but sup­port­ing Ian for tak­ing the time to dis­cuss things)

  • Mar­cSerna’s com­ment push­ing back on the post

  • MichaelStJules pre­sent­ing some neu­tral thoughts/​feedback

  • JTM en­dors­ing the con­cept of the post and push­ing for more discussion

  • Jor­dan Warner’s com­ment push­ing back on the post

  Al­most unan­i­mously, peo­ple seem to want EA to stay out of par­ti­san poli­ti­cal stuff. No one aside from Ian and maybe JTM ac­tu­ally ar­gued against Trump on the ob­ject level. I’m not sur­prised that there were no pro-Trump ar­gu­ments on the ob­ject level.

  Com­ments on the “recom­men­da­tions for donat­ing to beat Trump post” are:

  • Me not­ing that we won’t front­page it (and ex­press­ing sup­port for the cause)

  • A dis­cus­sion be­tween Peter and Ian about the gen­eral case for donat­ing vs. volunteering

  • Other com­ments by Peter where he men­tions he’d con­sider donating

  And… that’s it. Only three unique re­spon­dents, hardly a land­slide even if they all ex­press a de­sire for Trump to lose the elec­tion.

  On which other Fo­rum posts would it make sense for a pro-Trump EA to dis­cuss their sup­port for Trump? The sub­ject is only now com­ing up with the elec­tion sea­son al­most over (kbog had his “Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem” posts a while back, but those didn’t lead to much or any par­ti­san dis­cus­sion IIRC). If it took un­til now for some­one to write the post “sup­port­ing Democrats might be a good EA cause” and 90% of EA leans left, I’m not sur­prised that the post “sup­port­ing Repub­li­cans might be a good EA cause” hasn’t come up.

  In some posts made around the time of the 2016 elec­tion, there were a few com­ments point­ing out po­ten­tial benefits of a Pres­i­dent Trump (see Hen­ryMaine and Larks here). There were more anti-Trump com­ments, but noth­ing sur­pris­ing given the un­der­ly­ing de­mo­graph­ics of EA. I just don’t think there’s enough over­all ac­tivity on the Fo­rum for “no re­cent ob­ject-level pro-Trump com­ments” to mean much.

• Aaron Gertler 16 Oct 2020 9:56 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Char­ity Nav­i­ga­tor ac­quired Im­pactMat­ters and is start­ing to men­tion “cost-effec­tive­ness” as important

  This was an ex­cel­lent com­ment and saved me a lot of time I’d oth­er­wise have spent read­ing the method­ol­ogy in full. Thank you for post­ing it!

• Aaron Gertler 16 Oct 2020 9:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai’s comment on: When does it make sense to sup­port/​op­pose poli­ti­cal can­di­dates on EA grounds?

  Strongly up­voted. You ex­pressed what I dis­liked about that para­graph much more suc­cinctly than I was able to in my com­ment. (Also, I wanted to up­vote some of your com­ments in the deleted thread, so this strong up­vote is partly meant to de­liver that ex­tra karma.)

• Aaron Gertler 16 Oct 2020 9:53 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai’s comment on: When does it make sense to sup­port/​op­pose poli­ti­cal can­di­dates on EA grounds?

  Is your fear of say­ing pos­i­tive things about Trump based on how you would ex­pect peo­ple in the EA com­mu­nity to re­act? Is it more about peo­ple el­se­where on the in­ter­net who might hap­pen to see your views or track them down be­cause of an un­re­lated grudge they hold against you?

  I can eas­ily imag­ine some­one in the EA com­mu­nity tak­ing a pro-Trump po­si­tion for EA-re­lated rea­sons (e.g. a be­lief that abor­tion is a hugely ne­glected cause area, or that gains from Trump’s eco­nomic/​war-avoid­ing poli­cies over­whelm losses from his other poli­cies). What do you pre­dict would hap­pen to some­one like that? Would you ex­pect them to be fired if they held a po­si­tion at an EA org? Barred from at­tend­ing EA Global? Shunned by peo­ple in their lo­cal group?

  I’ll also note that the po­si­tions in a dis­cus­sion like the one Ian pro­poses aren’t re­ally “pro-Trump” and “anti-Trump”: they are “Trump is so bad that pre­vent­ing his elec­tion is a com­pet­i­tive EA cause area” and “no, this doesn’t re­ally mea­sure up to other cause ar­eas, or is oth­er­wise a bad idea.” Some­one could eas­ily ar­gue for the lat­ter point even if they would never vote for Trump.

  (That said, if this dis­cus­sion re­ally would ex­clude ev­ery­one who could pos­si­bly be taken as a Trump sup­porter, that seems very un­healthy to me. I just don’t think that’s what would hap­pen.)

• Aaron Gertler 15 Oct 2020 6:26 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Avoid­ing Mu­nich’s Mis­takes: Ad­vice for CEA and Lo­cal Groups

  Any dis­cus­sion of the Mu­nich can­cel­la­tion as a po­ten­tial in­di­ca­tor of “norms” should prob­a­bly note that there are hun­dreds of talks by in­ter­est­ing thinkers each year at EA con­fer­ences/​mee­tups around the world. At least, peo­ple I’d con­sider in­ter­est­ing, even if they don’t come into con­flict with so­cial norms as reg­u­larly as Robin.

  On a graph of “con­tro­ver­sial x con­nec­tion to EA,” Robin is in the top cor­ner (that is, I can’t think of any­one who is both at least as con­tro­ver­sial and at least as con­nected to EA, other than maybe Peter Singer). So all these other talks may not say much about our “norm” for han­dling con­tro­ver­sial speak­ers. But based on the or­ga­niz­ers I know, I’d be sur­prised if most other EA groups (es­pe­cially the big­ger/​more ex­pe­rienced ones) would have dis­in­vited Robin.

  In terms of your own feel­ings about con­tribut­ing/​col­lab­o­rat­ing in EA, do you think sen­ti­ments like those of the Mu­nich group are com­mon? It seems like their de­ci­sion was widely crit­i­cized by lots of peo­ple in EA (even those who, like me, defended their right to make the de­ci­sion/​em­pathized with their plight while say­ing it was the wrong move), and sup­ported by very few. If any­thing, I up­dated from this in­ci­dent in the di­rec­tion of “wow, EA peo­ple are even more op­posed to ‘can­cel cul­ture’ than I ex­pected.”

• Aaron Gertler 14 Oct 2020 23:35 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: jackmalde’s Shortform

  There­fore I think we need to give peo­ple a more re­al­is­tic con­cep­tion of a life that is barely worth liv­ing to wrap their heads around.

  My per­sonal men­tal image of the Repug­nant Con­clu­sion always in­volved peo­ple liv­ing more re­al­is­tic/​full lives, with rea­son­able amounts of bore­dom be­ing com­pen­sated for with just enough good feel­ings to make the whole thing worth­while. When I read “muzak and pota­toes”, my mind con­jured a so­ciety of peo­ple liv­ing to­gether as they con­sumed those things, rather than peo­ple in iso­la­tion cham­bers. But I could be un­usual, and I think some­one could write up a bet­ter ex­am­ple than Parfit’s if they tried.

• Aaron Gertler 14 Oct 2020 23:22 UTC

  15 points

  on: When does it make sense to sup­port/​op­pose poli­ti­cal can­di­dates on EA grounds?

  Per­sonal con­text: I’m writ­ing this as an in­di­vi­d­ual rather than a mod­er­a­tor. I was happy to see your recom­men­da­tions for poli­ti­cal dona­tions in the other threads, and I agree with you that the cur­rent pres­i­dent is much more dan­ger­ous than a more generic leader might be (though I’m not sure about “or­ders of mag­ni­tude”; the Iraq War was also very bad, and we missed a lot of po­ten­tial cli­mate change benefits when Al Gore didn’t be­come pres­i­dent).

  I gen­er­ally agree with you that EA should treat poli­tics mostly as it does other is­sues, though I think it’s benefi­cial to take steps to avoid what fre­quently hap­pens to other move­ments that be­come poli­ti­cal (that is, poli­tics sucks up more and more of their time and they lose fo­cus on other things). This was the im­pe­tus be­hind the Fo­rum’s policy on poli­ti­cal posts.

  How­ever, with the back­ground of that gen­eral agree­ment, I have some ques­tions/​con­cerns about as­pects of this post.

  Many of those who push back against poli­ti­cal en­gage­ment in EA see the left, and par­tic­u­larly the so­cial jus­tice move­ment, as some kind of scary jug­ger­naut seek­ing world dom­i­na­tion by mind con­trol.

  This seems like an un­char­i­ta­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how the me­dian con­cerned Fo­rum user ex­presses those con­cerns. I’ve in­ter­acted with a few peo­ple who seem to view the left as more cul­turally pow­er­ful than they are, but I’ve also had bet­ter dis­cus­sions with peo­ple who had more rea­son­able con­cerns.* Us­ing a phrase like “mind con­trol” to de­scribe the be­liefs of one’s op­po­nents (even those on the fringes of com­mu­nity opinion) isn’t great.

  I thought the sec­tion other than this para­graph was very good, es­pe­cially the point that sup­port­ing the Demo­cratic Party doesn’t equate to sup­port­ing the far left. But read­ing this nearly soured me on your ar­gu­ment in gen­eral (even though I don’t think of my­self as some­one who “pushes back”).

  * For ex­am­ple, that while the far left isn’t very nu­mer­ous or pop­u­lar, their sup­port over­laps a lot with EA’s core growth de­mo­graph­ics, such that we might end up ab­sorb­ing many of their norms or ideas with­out mean­ing to.

  It will re­duce EA’s long-term impact

  I have to con­fess I’ve never re­ally un­der­stood this ar­gu­ment.

  Can you provide an ex­am­ple of some­one say­ing this? I strug­gle to think of any ar­gu­ments I’ve seen that re­sem­ble this. Maybe the idea that EA doesn’t want to cut off con­ser­va­tive peo­ple from feel­ing like they can be­long in the move­ment, be­cause that makes it harder to grow the move­ment?

  A bet­ter way, in my opinion, would be to have some kind of for­mal sys­tem to weigh the risks against the op­por­tu­ni­ties on a case-by-case ba­sis, as well as the risks of not en­gag­ing.

  In prin­ci­ple, a sys­tem like this could be use­ful, but EA doesn’t have a sys­tem like this for any­thing right now. Even an or­ga­ni­za­tion like EA Funds, which eval­u­ates op­por­tu­ni­ties to do good and recom­mends that some of them get sup­port, is just a few ex­pe­rienced peo­ple try­ing to con­vince other peo­ple to trust their judg­ment. If some­one wanted to, they could start do­ing this for poli­ti­cal op­por­tu­ni­ties right now (and in­deed, we’ve had peo­ple try to com­pare can­di­dates be­fore).

  Within EA, in­di­vi­d­u­als typ­i­cally vote with their wallets, job ap­pli­ca­tions, and Fo­rum posts. There’s not much in the way of co­or­di­na­tion around “offi­cial” EA recom­men­da­tions, even if some orgs are trusted by much of the com­mu­nity to recom­mend things. The equiv­a­lent of vot­ing against com­mu­nity ap­proval for can­di­date X (as a cause worth sup­port­ing over var­i­ous other causes) is to not donate to can­di­date X.

  So while I like the idea of an or­ga­ni­za­tion that re­views poli­ti­cal cam­paigns to seek out op­por­tu­ni­ties for im­pact — as I would al­most any org that re­views op­por­tu­ni­ties for im­pact — I don’t think we’d need that or­ga­ni­za­tion to be uniquely “offi­cial” within EA. They’d just have to pre­sent their ar­gu­ments clearly and con­vinc­ingly.

  (And, I sup­pose, not be ac­tively op­posed by other orgs in the move­ment, though I don’t think that would be likely to hap­pen as long as the org in ques­tion avoided rep­re­sent­ing it­self as “the offi­cial EA poli­ti­cal char­ity” or some­thing.)

  Were this or­ga­ni­za­tion to ex­ist, one fac­tor that would help me per­son­ally trust it would be if their most com­mon recom­men­da­tion were “no ac­tion, this cam­paign doesn’t seem im­por­tant/​tractable enough to sup­port ei­ther can­di­date rather than giv­ing to (in­sert non­par­ti­san char­ity).”

• Aaron Gertler 14 Oct 2020 22:35 UTC

  5 points

  on: Recom­men­da­tions for pri­ori­tiz­ing poli­ti­cal en­gage­ment in the 2020 US elections

  In ac­cor­dance with the Fo­rum’s policy on poli­ti­cal posts, I’m keep­ing this one in “Per­sonal Blog.”

  How­ever, as a cit­i­zen of the U.S. and the world, I deeply ap­pre­ci­ate the Coal­i­tion’s work, and I hope you can draw a lot of read­ers to this post by link­ing to it el­se­where.

• Aaron Gertler 14 Oct 2020 22:32 UTC

  7 points

  on: Effec­tive dona­tion for Mo­ria /​ Les­bos

  In this ques­tion, you’re ask­ing about how best to help a very spe­cific group of peo­ple, which isn’t the tra­di­tional “EA” 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 aren’t 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 isn’t well-suited to mak­ing head­lines, and they gen­er­ally don’t at­tract the at­ten­tion and dol­lars that dis­aster re­lief vic­tims do – 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, GiveWell’s 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)

• Aaron Gertler 13 Oct 2020 7:59 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: jackmalde’s Shortform

  I take this to be a short­cut Parfit took to con­jure an image of a drab ex­is­tence, rather than what he ac­tu­ally con­ceived of as the min­i­mum vi­able pos­i­tive life.

  If you pressed him on this point, I’d guess he would ar­gue that there are ac­tual hu­mans who have lives that are barely worth liv­ing. And even if those hu­mans don’t sub­side only on “muzak and pota­toes,” the idea of bland food + a lot of bore­dom + repet­i­tive days prob­a­bly hits on some real fea­tures of the kind of life Parfit and many oth­ers would clas­sify as “just barely worth­while.”

  Caveat: I haven’t read Parfit in a while, and I could eas­ily be for­get­ting the con­text of this re­mark. Maybe he uses the ex­am­ple in such a way that it’s clear he meant it liter­ally?

• Aaron Gertler 12 Oct 2020 18:02 UTC

  7 points

  on: Fore­cast­ing Newslet­ter: Septem­ber 2020.

  I read these cover-to-cover when­ever they come out! Thanks for tak­ing the time to com­pile all these links.