Same here, how exactly can we help?
ld25
Karma: 16
If I understand you correctly, I agree. I understand the reason for quoting GiveWell’s framework, however, I think that it is potentially discouraging to someone who is trying to do the most good in a context that they care about. That’s not to say that nobody should ever say ‘maybe there are more neglected causes that you may not have thought about’, but the EA community certainly shouldn’t be giving the impression that we follow some strict ideology that no-one can challenge.
I’m not sure that I would group refugee camps on the Aegean Islands in with ‘disaster relief’ (although I understand that this post was specifically about the fire).
I guess that taking this specific event out of the consideration, the two main causes of suffering here are 1. The actual wars/regimes that people are fleeing in their home countries and 2. The asylum system in Europe (and elsewhere, but I am more familiar with Europe). It doesn’t really seem like donating money can help much with either of these (I’m happy to be corrected if wrong, and I haven’t looked into this in enormous depth). Milbig, maybe you could get involved in a group that focusses on political lobbying? I don’t know how effective this is likely to be, and I doubt that EA would say that this is very tractable as a cause. However, I don’t think that the scale, neglectedness, tractability framework is completely foolproof, and it’s obviously very hard to know what is ‘effective’ when it comes to political issues.
A short but relevant article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/04/help-refugees-donations-government-political-action
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