Dave Cortright 🔸

Karma: 819

I have been a serious philanthropist since 2004 and part of the EA community since 2017. I am audaciously optimistic we can ameliorating the global mental health crisis. I used my coaching and facilitatation skills to help grow EA capacity. I support environmental and animal welfare organizations. I am on the advisory council of Vegan Outreach and the Santa Clara County Behavioral Health Board.

I am a certified professional coach, with additional experience in crisis counseling and peer mentoring. I shifted to mental health and well-being after 25 years as a designer, manager, and director at Silicon Valley tech companies. I am passionate about helping others, and by guiding them to find their true calling, I amplify my impact on improving the world.

Dave Cortright 🔸 4 Mar 2026 19:53 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: How Are EAs Really Doing? Help Us Find Out (~15 min survey)
This dropdown is clipped for me in Chrome on my laptop. I can’t read the full text of the options

Dave Cortright 🔸 2 Mar 2026 20:52 UTC
1 point
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on: The best cause will disappoint you: An intro to the optimisers curse
The other major problems with trying to calculate your way to a neat and orderly table of “the best” interventions:
1. There is no single absolute objective perspective on value weights. Just listen to conversations at EAG or in the forum. There will never be full consensus on the value of a quadrillion crustaceans vs. billions of mammals, or on the value of future sentient beings vs. current ones.
2. Preferences matter. And in fact, a diversity of preferences is essential. If we only used the final ranking, in the extreme case we devote 100% of our resources to Program A. But not everyone is passionate about A, and the world probably can not handle the capacity for everyone to productively contribute to A. So we need people to have a preference for all projects, even and especially those further down the list so we have reasonable coverage of interventions across the entire problem space.

Dave Cortright 🔸 2 Mar 2026 16:41 UTC
3 points
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on: Don’t scale up your lifestyle
For some, spending can be a soothing activity, but being a shopaholic is harmful, like many other addictions. The hole most people are trying to fill with any addiction: a lack of strong, close, healthy relationships. You must have at least one relationship (and ideally 3–5 according to Dunbar) where you can regularly be vulnerable and talk about all your feelings. If you don’t, work on that 😇 You can start with therapy or a support group to help you build up your skills. That’s what I did, since I didn’t learn this in my family of origin.

Don’t scale up your lifestyle

Dave Cortright 🔸1 Mar 2026 18:37 UTC

103 points

6 comments2 min readEA link

Dave Cortright 🔸 23 Jan 2026 3:19 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Celebrating wins — discussion thread
Good.store showed the Profit for Good model works (100% of profits go to charity). They continued to grow, expanding from coffee, socks, and soap into tea, undies, and cleaning products. The big milestone in 2025: they opened the maternal health center in Sierra Leone.

I bring it up because I think anyone who cares about being compassionate and effective (you 😇) should consider voting for maternal health in Africa over contributing to the profits of large international conglomerates.

Dave Cortright 🔸 26 Dec 2025 20:11 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Anton’s comment on: 3 doubts about veganism
I was responding to the No space for sinners section above, where the author claims the opposite.

Dave Cortright 🔸 28 Nov 2025 21:31 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 2
on: 3 doubts about veganism
Is Barack Obama black? Technically, no; he is bi-racial. But he identifies as black, and most people—when asked—would say he is black (Wikipedia concurs).
I think veganism should be treated the same way. You don’t have to be 100% perfect for you or others to consider you vegan.
Being pedantic about definitions does not help reduce suffering, IMO.

Dave Cortright 🔸 25 Nov 2025 16:21 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
They all touch on mental health interventions in some way.

Dave Cortright 🔸 18 Oct 2025 19:05 UTC
5 points
5 ∶ 0
on: What If EA Actually Picked One Goal?
Maybe your belief is that if enough people “at the top” of EA agree to this, they can influence a majority of the EA community to follow. My sense is that EAs are more independent freethinkers than most other groups, so I don’t think this scenario is likely.
Given that, what you’re proposing is essentially relabeling the current set of “EAs who care about animal welfare” to “EA”. A few EAs who aren’t already in this camp might follow you over, but on the whole I strongly suspect this would alienate everyone else who doesn’t sign up for this worldview, and it would just fracture the community.

Dave Cortright 🔸 16 Oct 2025 18:00 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Thoughts on greatnonprofits.org?
I’m a fan of “wisdom of crowds”. But I suspect—at least for the top-rated ones—there has been coordinated ballot box stuffing by staff and supporters. And like many user reviews online, it tends toward bimodal of “great” or “awful”. Most people don’t make the effort to write “it was ok” reviews.
I feel there’s too much noise and not enough signal to make it a worthwhile source.

Community-based wildlife conservation deserves more attention in EA

Dave Cortright 🔸15 Oct 2025 4:25 UTC

6 points

1 comment2 min readEA link

Dave Cortright 🔸 16 Sep 2025 15:41 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 1
on: DaveC’s Shortform
EoL Competition, EOL in the software world means “End of Life”. I’d recommend choosing a different acronym. LongTermism could be abbreviated LT, so EoLT or Thoughts on Longtermism, TLT. (LTE is already taken 😇)

Dave Cortright 🔸 8 Sep 2025 19:32 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: How big a deal is donating 10% of your income really? A perspective
For me, the foundational question is “How much is enough?” How much do I need to live a reasonably healthy, happy life? Kahneman & Deaton (2010) found this to be $75,000, which would be about $100k in 2025. I use this as my baseline (adjusted for the cost of living in my area). Maybe this will help others contextualize.

Dave Cortright 🔸 26 Aug 2025 15:38 UTC
3 points
3 ∶ 11
on: You’re Enough
I encourage everyone to lower their achievement bar all the way down to “minimize harm”. There is no rational reason to beat yourself up for not reaching some arbitrary goalpost, even if it is one that you set for yourself and was arguably achievable. Life happens, and new circumstances and data can easily shift things.
For example, if you were hit by a bus and in the ICU recovering, no one would expect you to be productive. Why is it any different for milder versions? Have the flu or a cold? Didn’t sleep well last night? Completely exhausted and burnt out?
“Should” is the most insidious word we use. “I should be able to achieve more or give more or be better”. Love and accept yourself where you are. Then, if you want to make step towards improvement, do so. But keep them small and don’t compare against others or hypotheticals. The only comparison that matters is against yourself.

A practical guide to suicidal ideation

Dave Cortright 🔸25 Aug 2025 19:15 UTC

9 points

1 comment1 min readEA link

Dave Cortright 🔸 11 Aug 2025 15:17 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Indrek Kivirik’s comment on: Alcohol is so bad for society that you should probably stop drinking
I agree it is a factor, but it is naïve to think that is the only explanation.

Dave Cortright 🔸 7 Aug 2025 9:36 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 3
on: Alcohol is so bad for society that you should probably stop drinking
Alcohol is indeed a Class 1 carcinogen. As the WHO says bluntly, “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”
But it is also one of the nine factors in Blue Zones—longevity outlier populations.
So, how to explain the contraction? The power of community and relationships:
The positive effects of consistent, strong, and healthy relationships are so much more powerful than other factors, they become essentially rounding errors in the equation.
I overall agree that alcohol is a net negative to society. But if it is ingested in moderation as part of social bonding rituals like evening meals together or spiritual services, the positive effects of these rituals on our health—especially bolstering our amazing immune systems that constantly repair mild to moderate damage in our bodies—more than make up for the negatives of the alcohol.

Dave Cortright 🔸 1 Aug 2025 16:00 UTC
1 point
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on: On the Moral Patiency of Non-Sentient Beings (Part 2)
In the infinite game there is no win condition
The winning condition is that the game is still ongoing. As long as the infinite game is in progress, it is in the winning state.

Dave Cortright 🔸 25 Jul 2025 16:34 UTC
3 points
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on: From Google to co-founding a global health charity: Mid-career transitions with Martyn James
I recommend updating the title to something like “From Google to global health NGO”.
At first glance, I thought this said “Google is founding a new global health charity.”

Dave Cortright 🔸 25 Jul 2025 16:31 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Debate: Are enough EAs earning to give?
To scale solutions, we need more money than people, since money can not only deploy solutions but also hire more people

Dave Cortright 🔸

Don’t scale up your lifestyle

Com­mu­nity-based wildlife con­ser­va­tion de­serves more at­ten­tion in EA

A prac­ti­cal guide to suici­dal ideation

Community-based wildlife conservation deserves more attention in EA

A practical guide to suicidal ideation