One obvious answer here that hasn’t come up yet—they can take the 10% pledge! And, of course, hustle at their current job, work their way up, and earn-to-give or build management skills that can later be useful for jobs at direct work organizations
JDBauman
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I’m not sure how many 1-1s EA UK does with people who are new to EA, but first timer 1-1s seem especially valuable at helping people who are very new to the movement who maybe didn’t get into it through a typical university pipeline or randomly read about it online.
If EA UK existed solely as a lone, gifted community organizer who took a few hundred 1-1s with new members and sought value-adding connections and resources for the EA UK ecosystem, I think might well be worth a 100k yearly budget.
Seems like the commenter is hung up on this “Because afterlife, evangelism dominates” view.
Saving children’s lives from malaria might have much greater eternal value than preaching a sermon. That’s because preaching and evangelism plausibly aren’t the only thing that influence the afterlife. It’s commonly held that good deeds will be rewarded in the afterlife, even if only as memories (Matt 5:12). Any positive good experienced over an infinite timeframe is, of course, infinite.Recently, philosophers like Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson have written about this in their Connection-building theodicy. Bentham’s Bulldog wrote about that here.
So consequentialist-leaning Christians might not prioritize evangelism at all costs.Most people (Christians included) don’t lean heavily towards consequentialism, anyways, and take at face value the (hundreds) of biblical commands to care for the poor, sick and marginalized.
What is the breakdown by religion?
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This looks really cool!
Thank you for posting this! There’s a lot of wisdom here and surely plenty more Christians can (and should!) be doing to share about effective altruism with other Christians.
Super useful, tyvm for sharing.
Thanks for this. I wonder roughly how many hours of “disabling pain” or “hurtful pain” we estimate are diverted by saving 1 DALY. That would help me get a better sense of the tradeoff.
Anyone have a better sense? @NickLaing ?
Laura Duffy’s analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like “Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.
I’m pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don’t think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.
Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP’s human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!
Thank you for the feedback on the EA Christian / Christians for Impact page!
I wasn’t expecting folks to comb through the projects like you did. The fact that you did so encourages me and updates me towards being more public and forthcoming about project and funding proposals.
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Hi Aaron,
I direct EACH. Thanks for your interest—I’d be happy to have a chat anytime.
For a bit about us and our impact, you can read here, or see here for a directory of our linktree.For Christians who have no interaction with EA, the careers website is a much better entry point, as is this excellent blog article related to effective giving.
Thanks for this. My view is the same as yours. The first two strike me as “net positive.” I’m also unsure about what pigs and dairy cows need. I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if they have either “net positive” or “net negative” lives, but I think it’s most likely (80%+ chance) they are “net positive.”
(Qualifying discussion of net value of existence with ” ” because I find such valuations always so fraught with uncertainty and I feel I owe other beings tremendous humility in this!)
I expect we’ll update this on an (approximately) yearly basis