But I just don't think it's as effective, and I don't think most people agree.
If the only available labor was teenagers, rebuilding the community theater meant hiring them, and you knew that statistically there was a risk some might die from heat stroke. What risk of death would you deem acceptable to build a community theater?
Mine was specifically to be an intuition pump to see how valuable the OP thinks a theater is when weighed against actual lives.
It's easy to say x is important where x is saving sea turtles, teaching kids to read, or repairing a community theaters.
It's harder to say x is more important than y charity when y charity saves lives effectively.
Building a community theater with good working conditions might have a big impact on the community around it and could go end up saving lives down the road, or dramatically improving the quality of life of many.
It's very hard to quantity the impact of the community theater against say feeding 100 people for one week. All these people could die the week after, was it really sustainable improvements or just temporary relief?
Anyways, I never said any specifics about where this community theater is being built. I don't know where heat stroke came from. Sure, yeah, in the straw man situation of building a community theater in an extremely hot area, where the only labor is teenagers, I would...not enlist teenagers to build a community theater in an extremely hot area? I don't want to be dismissive of your comment but I genuinely don't know what's the point here.
But repairing a community theater could easily cost $100,000 which would save the lives of ~22 people in Guinea if donated to certain bed net charities. And even the most die hard theater fans probably wouldn't save a theater if to do so it would require risking 22 lives for.
So in this case quantification isn't failing, it's succeeding. It's correctly telling us which donations are more effective. And all our intuition agrees that the $100,000 theater is worth less than the 22 lives.
Thus by chosing to repair the community theatre you are directly causing the death of 9,978 people.
“Ah bit they are luxuries, distinct from charity…”
Ok then give me the luxury of donating to the local theatre!
Schindler's List | "I Didn't Do Enough"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9vj2Wf57rQ
In the end, nearly everyone values their life higher than the life of others. The more distant that the "others" are the less we value them.
Too bad these empathetic values privilege building an entertainment venue over saving lives or preventing suffering. /s
Every dollar you spend on a theater donation is a dollar less that you value human lives.
Of course, the same logic applies to candy bars, internet, television, and all the things that being you joy in life.
But that’s what leads to “earn to give”, which is what leads to deciding to become a billionaire and/or give away other people’s money instead.
I don't have unlimited resources. I have the privilege of having a surplus that I can redirect to making the world better. EA is a framework for trying to do the most amount of good from the limited resources that I have.
> We can do both.
So, save fewer lives for more theatre seats?
> diversification of one's "ethics portfolio"
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean.
Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation[2].
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
1. Your model of the world is incomplete or inconsistent (eg, forgetting to include negotiation as a strategy, forgetting long term consequences).
2. You've hit on a cognitive bias and can probably do a huge amount of good that other people will miss (eg, lending with interest -> modern industrial society, rule of law rather than letting high status people do whatever -> mass prosperity). The cognitive bias is probably well known and understood and the evidence that the emotional response leads to poor outcomes should be obvious.
I'm completely befuddled by this. My experience is that people make most decisions emotionally and then harness their brain to rationalize those irrational decisions after the fact. It's the reason that science (the process) has to exist. Because people will fool themselves to reach a conclusion they want if there are no procedural guardrails.
Surely 800,000 mosquito nets is "more effective" than 800,000 robo calls and shitty campaign ads with a moron at the end saying "I'm Joe Blow, and I endorse this bullshit"
Sorry for the cringe, but really - you're actually saying that encouraging people to do what they think is right is a problem? Especially when they've actually read the books, done the numbers, and all you have is a feeling that they may be wrong in some cases? I can't really argue with that except with caps lock and sarcasm.
Are eggplants fruits? Yes. Do you feel you should put them in a fruit cup? No.
This is called “the map is not the territory”.
It's fine to spend money on the theater, everyone spends money and time on themselves and their interests. If you consider community theater altruism though, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it is ineffective altruism - that is, you're doing a little bit of good with your money, but not nearly as much as you might be doing.
Art in particular has a multiplicative effect that is essentially impossible to quantify. Once a work of art is out there, it can live forever and influence multiple generations. That seems like a pretty effective use of my money.
Obviously the local theatre benefits your own community, but if you live there then you are also benefiting yourself (via status and seeing plays), which seems less than altruistically pure, even if you could only build 1 theatre in Africa.
You know a lot better what a theater could bring to a neighborhood you know well.
And then, there's the question of if altruism itself is most efficient at helping others. Some would argue that helping oneself but where it benefits others as well, win/win situations, in practice produces better outcomes. The idea of self-sacrifice, or having to lose or risk something personal to help others sounds noble, but might not be most effective.
You need to contextualize the life saved, do we mean they went to live one more day, or a full long life of prosperity and comfort with a happy painless death from old age.
And did they themselves gain the means to save more lives in turn?
For example, I feel giving people the means of saving their own life, or other people's lives a much more efficient way to save lives than actually saving a life.
And finally you have to address the sacrifices you've made and the people you've hurt in pursuit of saving that life.
To me, it looks like a charade, because the claim that you can actually measure and quantify all of these complex systems to truly arrive at the real impact of all these things, I just don't believe it. It seems you've picked a simple metric to measure, because it's easy, but is it lasting impact, is really more meaningful impact, that's all all still up in the air.
One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.
If there was a crypto trade available to make a billion dollars available for the next 15 minutes only - but you have to chose between the community theater, the bus of X people on fire or giving 10% of your gainz to a charity to save X*2 ...
In practice, I think people coming from a starting point of "I'm going to focus on solving friendly AI because it fits with my interests and computer science background and I think I'll be able to help the process along a bit" are being more honest with themselves than people dressing up their preferences in magical utilitarian numbers which conclude they're more efficient than merely feeding people or giving them goats...