Re:Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each chari...
by Gnuffles on Monday June 04, 2018 @10:55AM
(#17228303)
Our intuition regarding communities stems from a history where we only ever communicated with those near us. Right now, we are able to go anywhere in the world within a day. We are able to communicate worldwide within seconds. Clearly our intuition has not caught up, but maybe given these changes in our community (which is now far less defined just by some kind of radius around our location), we should update our actions to reflect this?
It makes sense not to feel morally responsible for things that happen out of view when you cannot know what is going on and have no way to impact it. Thing is, we do know a lot about what is going on and we do have tools to impact it. It just doesn't feel intuitively satisfying. It is possible to internalize this satisfaction regardless, though.
Re:Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each chari...
by akvadrako on Friday June 01, 2018 @11:13AM
(#17206037)
That’s true but also what makes EA interesting. Ineffective charity is as good as nothing and sometimes worse. All the money poured into former colonies is a good example where it may be doing more harm than good.
The reason EA is not interesting is finding out what’s effective is so hard. Maybe local is much better.
Also, making charity too much about distant problems and far off research outcomes factors out the civic and community-level thinking that actually drives and sustains a lot of charity.
It also makes charity solely the domain of experts. Instead of seeing a problem firsthand in your first-world community and reacting to fix it, you have to delegate to someone who you hope knows the highest needs in far off lands.