Julia_Wise
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You have more than one goal, and that’s fine
This is not a question that anyone has an objective answer to.
I’m surprised and impressed by that BBC vertical! I wonder how much their sense of “long term” will overlap with the sense used in EA. It seems the Vox vertical on EA has needed to churn out so much content that they tend to include material that I don’t see as a great fit for the theme. I hope BBC will be more relaxed about the quantity of material they need to produce, so that the material can be more on-topic.
Rafa_fanboy, I’ve written to you but I’m not sure if you saw the message. You consistently make comments that aren’t helpful, and people regularly report them. Please try to keep your comments in the realm of “friendly and productive.”
“Whichever will have the best life” seems very compatible with “welfare.” I agree there are a lot of considerations that aren’t obviously indicated by any of these definitions, though, even if they’re compatible.
I think the question being asked is not quite what it seems. If you work at a company that offers corporate matching, that’s great and I’d encourage you to take advantage of it.
If you are funneling money to your friend for them to give because they work for a company that offers corporate matching, that seems borderline fraudulent. Presumably what the company intends is to offer a benefit to their employees, not to their employees’ friends. For more discussion: https://doublethedonation.com/tips/blog/2013/08/reader-question-submitting-match-requests-for-non-personal-donations/
There’s a problem with the way posts are imported from some blogs, which we’re working to fix.
I think it’s that none of the existing EA organizations would want to hire government and policy experts to their own orgs, but would very much like to see people with an EA approach working in government.
Submit questions about Giving What We Can for Q&A session December 30
>The Trustees do the selecting for stays over a month. Managers for stays under a month.
I see where the Trustees are listed, but who are the Managers?
He wrote one of the early articles about earning to give, as far as I know “became associated with EA” in the same way that other EAs do—by getting interested in the ideas and starting to act on them. For example, he donated a kidney.
Giving What We Can has always emphasized that the evidence points to some interventions being much more effective than others, although it’s increased the scope of interventions it now encourages members to consider.
In keeping with the “evidence and reason” basis of effective altruism, we encourage people towards cause areas that hold up well under at least reason even if there is not yet evidence. For example, there’s plenty of scientific evidence on how animals respond behaviorally and neurologically to stimuli that would be painful to humans, so it seems reasonable to conclude they do experience pain, and to consider whether interventions aimed at reducing that pain might be more effective than interventions aimed at other morally relevant populations. While the evidence on something like policy change or preventing GCRs isn’t nearly as established, because they’re about trying to cause or prevent something that hasn’t happened yet, we think there is often good reasoning behind efforts in these areas. We see evangelism as different because believing that people who are currently alive will continue to be moral patients after we can no longer observe any evidence of them having continued consciousness, and that their holding specific religious beliefs is essential to their wellbeing in the afterlife, is called “faith” because it doesn’t fully rest on either evidence or reason.
I agree there’s not a terribly bright line here, and we could find more cases that could plausibly go either way. There are also more causes that some people consider best but that Giving What We Can would not accept towards the pledge, like white supremacy or destruction of the world to prevent future suffering.
Religious evangelism is not counted toward the Giving What We Can pledge. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/11/giving-what-we-can-people-faith/
We realize that some people do genuinely believe it’s the best way to help others, but it’s far enough from the goals of our project that we think people who want support in sticking to their goals of donation for that cause should instead connect with the many existing communities that favor funding evangelism.
I assume the post was primarily about agricultural pesticides rather than home pesticides.
Yeah, I think there’s a bad dynamic where people who have read Tomasik either seriously or jokingly propose “pave everything” and other people find that alarming and want nothing to do with any ideas that could lead in that direction. I spent years intentionally not reading Tomasik because I was afraid it would make me into some kind of fanatic.
I don’t think it’s an absurd example. It’s come up seriously as a question about how Giving What We Can members can donate as part of their pledge.
I find that discussion about wild animal suffering very quickly gets to “but it would be ludicrous to believe X because then we’d have to do Y.” I think it’s better to focus on “How might we find out if X is true” rather than the drastic consequences that would have.
As a parallel, people in power have often found it convenient to believe that slaves, immigrants, poor people, etc have naturally higher pain tolerance than themselves and thus it’s not a problem for them to do hard labor, have inadequate medical care, etc. The fact that changing this belief would have disruptive consequences doesn’t have anything to do with its accuracy.
Yeah I noticed with “cleaning equipment”there’s a very clear distinction between 1. homemade brushes, 2. storebought brooms, and 3. vacuum cleaners.
Thanks, I wouldn’t have read this full book but these seem like really useful things for group and event organizers to think about! I’m cross-posting to the group organizers FB group.
I’d also expect people to do a thing of taking high-paying jobs with the expectation that it benefits their children more than their own happiness. I don’t know if there’s evidence on that.