Russell White🔹

[Question] Has EA tried af­fect­ing where church tithing goes?

• Russell White🔹 16 Jan 2025 2:36 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Dacyn’s comment on: How big of a prob­lem is abor­tion?

  I was thinking more in terms of political difficulty. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned and several states have instituted abortion, it seems like there could be a lot more momentum and support for further abortion bans.

  Comparatively, it seems politically hard to coordinate on ending the suffering of those in different countries in a way that as many people as support abortion bans would get behind.

  That’s why my hunch would be that abortion is more tractable in terms of pure legal bans, but you might be right that going beyond that into actually stopping people from getting abortions might be far less tractable than malaria.

• Russell White🔹 15 Jan 2025 16:18 UTC

  13 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: huw’s comment on: How big of a prob­lem is abor­tion?

  You make a good point, and I’m not advocating for restricted abortion access in any way.
  
  I was more trying to take the POV of those protestors; under their model of the world, each abortion is a murder(potentially with great suffering associated). I wanted to find out whether abortion would be an important issue to work on given that starting assumption that gave no weight to the future of the parents or children.
  
  What I found was that, even when using the strongest case of abortion(albeit, that didn’t incorporate the potential value of a future human life), it still paled in comparison to other issues such as animal welfare.
  
  Thank you for your constructive criticism! I recognize that this is a contentious issue, and I’ll try to soften the language a bit and clarify my very overly-simplifying assumptions.

• Russell White🔹 15 Jan 2025 16:10 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: How big of a prob­lem is abor­tion?

  That’s a very good point! Thank you for your criticism!
  
  I chose to compare fetus suffering to chicken suffering directly because I’m very uncertain about how much an extra life lived compares to prevention of suffering in existing lives; I had a hunch that any value I assigned to additional lives lived would be pretty arbitrary, so I instead focused on the (comparatively) easy part of suffering to suffering.
  
  I’ll make sure to add a disclaimer that this is a rough fermi estimate that makes massive simplifying assumptions.

How big of a prob­lem is abor­tion?