I feel like a lot of EA charities are “reactionary” in that they try to mitigate an issue while not attempting to overcome an issue.
Take animal welfare for example: the main charities that are funded are mostly advocacy based and activism. While I am supportive of this approach, I don’t think it will ultimately help animal welfare much by any order of magnitude in the long term. Instead, something will probably displace the need for animals IMO– like lab grown meat. Why don’t EAs support basic research such as lab grown meat* as a means to displace the current state of factory farming? Sure, over a lifetime lab grown meat has a really low % chance of coming to fruition, but if it did (and with greater funding you can increase its chance of happening!), it would have orders of magnitude more impact for animal welfare than the current advocacy model.
*The same situation applies to climate change too. There’s a trend in EA and now more general circles to “offset your carbon footprint” but again this feels like a mitigation/reactionary way of spending your money. I would much rather my money go to nuclear fusion research b/c if it worked out, it would have orders of magnitude more impact than simply mitigating my own carbon footprint
I feel like a lot of EA charities are “reactionary” in that they try to mitigate an issue while not attempting to overcome an issue.
Take animal welfare for example: the main charities that are funded are mostly advocacy based and activism. While I am supportive of this approach, I don’t think it will ultimately help animal welfare much by any order of magnitude in the long term. Instead, something will probably displace the need for animals IMO– like lab grown meat. Why don’t EAs support basic research such as lab grown meat* as a means to displace the current state of factory farming? Sure, over a lifetime lab grown meat has a really low % chance of coming to fruition, but if it did (and with greater funding you can increase its chance of happening!), it would have orders of magnitude more impact for animal welfare than the current advocacy model.
*The same situation applies to climate change too. There’s a trend in EA and now more general circles to “offset your carbon footprint” but again this feels like a mitigation/reactionary way of spending your money. I would much rather my money go to nuclear fusion research b/c if it worked out, it would have orders of magnitude more impact than simply mitigating my own carbon footprint
hope that makes some sense!