Yes! Europe and non-americans coming soon, plenty to do on the site. Glad you’re enjoying it so far and I hope to make it better for you very soon.
Myles Stremick
Karma: 125
This reminds me of when I pitched this idea to my brother and he said “I don’t like the framing that a human life is negative and needs to be made up for.” and I clarified “I think on the whole our lives are good and nothing to be ashamed about, but there are particular areas of our life that cause harm that we can make up for. Not that the whole life needs to be made up for.”
I do think having some but not an overwhelming amount of guilt-based messaging is useful here, but I’ll reconsider this line and see if it’s too much.
The word “offsetting” seems to have bad PR.
Yeah not great, but personally I think of it as a good thing so part of the hope with this is to turn the corner on the feeling of “offsetting”.
Maybe guilt is a good framing, especially since it is more generalizable here than most charities are capable of eliciting.
My goal is to make this site stick with people who are not familiar with EA in any way and possibly be a stepping stone from impact due to personal responsibility into impact for the sake of doing more good, regardless of how the opportunity got there. In order to do this I think I need to tap into the “do you have a vague, persistent sense of guilt” feeling and give the solution very quickly after. It’s definitely a balance between “think about the guilt of not doing this” vs “think about the pride you’ll feel after doing this” and going too hard in either direction here I think will be a huge turn off for most people.
I’m certainly not an expert on this, but I wonder if this could have particular appeal to religious groups? The concept of “Ahimsa” in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism seems relevant.
I don’t think I’d like to put religious framing on the site but connecting to communities who resonate with this kind of thing seems very useful.
Air pollution may be a good additional category of harms
I’ll do some research on this but I think this is covered by Climate? What are you imagining is air pollution harm but not climate harm?
I can imagine donating to these causes has hidden second-order effects with a chance to make the whole donation negative impact. My goal is definitely NOT to be on the cutting edge of moral philosophy with this site, just to make the kinds of information I feel will click easily with people more accessible.
Love that you’re exploring microorganism welfare that seems interesting and like not many people have thought it through.
I think this makes a lot of sense! It can be tricky to get the balance right and at the moment I think some formulations that try to emphasize clarity err in the direction of being too confident—but I fully understand that it is a lot of effort to do these things well.
Agreed here. I think my website errs on the side of overconfident right now but I feel like that will help engagement for now. Maybe later I can try to surface more of the uncertainty.“Inspired by effective altruism principles, for each of the major areas where our lifestyle comes along with negative impact, we’ve identified where your money can do the most good—and calculated how much it takes to balance your share.”
This is a really good callout, especially because I’m not actually sure (and think it’s slightly unlikely) that these are actually the areas where you can do the most good. They’re just the areas that I think people hold a disproportionate amount of guilt towards.
I feel the formulation “undo/offset my impact” is a little unfortunate as, in my mind, impact mainly is related to intended and thus positive consequences. It takes a little extra concentration to realize that in this case I do want to get rid of the impact. On the other hand, I cannot find a similarly short alternative formulation. Maybe “rectify your impact” could work?
Agreed with the sentiment and I also haven’t landed on wording I feel super confident about. I’m thinking about toying around with “harmful impact” to keep the branding around harm consistent. Not sure I agree that impact is just intended, in my mind it’s the result of what you do regardless of intention, but I’m not sure how many people share my view. I’ll keep workshopping this wording.
This is a bug, I’ll make sure it’s fixed by the end of the day and your recommendation for animal welfare goes down to 0. Thanks for giving it a shot!
I assume there are some vegans out there who have a very small but non-zero impact on animal suffering due to other parts of their lifestyle, probably something around high climate impact causing suffering to non factory farmed animals, but it’s not directly causal enough for my site. I want the chain from “I do this thing” to “It has this impact” to be pretty straightforward.
I appreciate this! There’s a bunch more I want to do with this but I figured it’s in a good enough place to start getting feedback from other people.
I imagine finding unusually effective charities that focus on local air pollution will be very difficult, but I’ll give it some research! I think it’s a good idea and if I can find something like this I’ll try to add it to the site.