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The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

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Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#41

Post by JoeAltmaier »

duopixel wrote: post #11
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

Charity grunt work brings forward compassion, acceptance, frugality and other qualities that wouldn't arise from working in finance. If you don't see the problem up close you won't want to donate 90% of your income. Furthermore, smart people with the conviction to solve the problem and the guts to get their hands dirty eventually accomplish great things. Norman Borlaug comes to mind.

Its pretty clear that a person who would dedicate their young years to charity work, already have those qualities. I'm thinking she might have retains some fragments of that, as she worked at her real skills and donated significantly.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#42

Post by reasonattlm »

bhouston wrote: post #33
reasonattlm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who suffers the most from age-related disease? The rich or the poor? Are novel medical treatments forever only available to the rich, or do they become ever cheaper, more widespread, and more effective over time? How much of your own personal future are you willing to sacrifice to spite rich people who might get access to early, inefficient technologies before you do? How much of everyone else's future are you willin…

What products has this SENS group ever produced besides a bunch of talk? Have they even produced one research result paper in a top journal? Or is it just a bunch of talk. I guess maybe you can argue that funding people to advocate for anti-aging research can encourage more people to engage in it? Is that your argument on why this is a useful charity to fund?

There's a website out there you can go look at, you know. With annual reports, links to published research papers, explanations of the research programs they conduct in collaboration with noted laboratories around the world, records from the scientific conferences held, news and press, and so on. It's no big secret - you don't have to ask me.

http://sens.org

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#43

Post by JoshTriplett »

rayiner wrote: post #34
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marri…

> People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population

That's a big assumption, and one that seems rather unlikely to hold or to suddenly change.

> You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage.

If you're going to blatantly invoke imagery like that, then how about preserving the wisdom of experience? How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around, healthy, and making new discoveries?

And there are plenty of 80-year-olds still enjoying their first marriage.

Youth is a wonder largely because of aging; eliminate aging and you get the pleasures of youth when you're a hundred.

Personally, I'm satisfied with "death is bad; stopping death would be good". Simplistic yet still incredibly true.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#44

Post by JoeAltmaier »

codingdave wrote: post #6
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

While you are correct, speaking negatively towards direct service probably isn't the best choice either. If everybody just donated cash instead of doing the work directly, there would be nobody to do the work. And if we start categorizing people by who is should make money vs. who should do the work, we are heading down a path of strengthening an unfair class system. There are enough people who do nothing at all that…

There are plenty of unskilled volunteers. The waste was a Stanford education, an enormous investment by our culture and by her family, to get her to the point where she ... drove a truck and handed out meals. That was arguably wasteful, self-indulgent and small-minded.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#45

Post by JoeAltmaier »

vacri wrote: post #13
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

> Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? Hrm... I seem to recall large numbers of protestors recently whose general point was that working on Wall St was in itself, not a morally positive or neutral proposition. Is it morally defensible to screw people over to help different people? The other problems with positions like yours is that you get a lot of juice out of conflating a particular ac…

Still, the point is clear. This was a terrible waste of a Stanford education. Hundreds of thousands in public, private and family funds and now she's in a low-paying feel-good job that anybody could do.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#46

Post by JoshTriplett »

reagency wrote: post #21
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering. The problems facing the wealthy elites are not the problems most people face.

> Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering.

Cancer is closely related to the processes of aging, and aging research is highly likely to overlap with cancer prevention and treatment. (If only because the processes that cause cell aging and death are also the ones that prune potential cancer cells from the body.) So, aging research is also quite likely to help prevent childhood cancer or other early-onset cancers.

(That said, people always act shocked and appalled when cancer strikes those in their teens, 20s, and 30s, as though that's somehow worse than it hitting someone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or older. I can't stand the phrase "before their time"; all deaths are too soon.)

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#47

Post by theycallhimtom »

noname123 wrote: post #30

Can't believe, no one has posted this yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell "GiveWell is an American non-profit charity evaluator and effective altruism-focused organization.[5][6] Unlike any other charity evaluators, GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on ov…

I'm guessing no one posted it because there was a whole section in the original article on GiveWell.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#48

Post by mikekchar »

rayiner wrote: post #34
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish…

What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marri…

I'm just going to have to guess that you aren't very old. I'm only 47, but I have to tell you that at least for me life just keeps getting better every year. I wouldn't trade this year for another year of my teens. I wouldn't trade this year for 10 more years in my teens.

Gradually losing health is unfortunate. I have to watch what I eat and be careful with my lifestyle due to chronic illness. My vision has degraded pretty badly and I'm forced to use a really gigantic font when I'm programming (you don't want to know how much time I spend fiddling with my colours!). These things pale in comparison to simply knowing what makes me happy.

I've worked hard to learn to be happy. Again, at least for me, I don't think happiness is something that is given to you. It's something that you make yourself. I suppose some people have a talent for it, like everything else, but it's something that you can work on and get better at. Without trying to sound arrogant there is no way that a child can have the kind of happiness that I have every day, because they simply do not have the experience to do it. They have a tumble of conflicting emotions which they have no control over. You couldn't pay me to do that again.

Re: The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

#49

Post by JoshTriplett »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the…

> This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead?

I wouldn't go as far as "selfish"; it's suboptimal, but sometimes there's value in the experience for the person doing it. It depends on what you're seeking to get. I've seen it suggested to do some small fraction of direct charitable work for the experience, but then to do the most good, work and donate.

For my part, for instance, I donate a moderate amount to causes I find personally interesting (amateur space travel, Free Software projects, etc), but a much larger amount to projects with much larger potential impact to people's lives, such as SENS or (in the future) MIRI. The former I do because I find it fun and motivating; the latter I do because it's efficient and does more good.

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