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

theatlantic.com

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

#81

Post by ThrustVectoring »

reddog wrote: post #75

Wow. This is a tough crowd. Its not enough to generously give your time and money to charity, you have to have an effective data driven approach to your giving or you suck. And if you can bill at $500 an hour, no helping out at the soup kitchen for you -- that an inefficient use of societies resources. Back to your cubicle, work some extra hours and give it to whatever causes our models say are best. Kind of a cold a…

There's generally two things people want to accomplish out of charitable giving - making the world a better place, and the "warm fuzzies" of helping out.

The fact that getting the warm fuzzies isn't a particularly good way of making the world better doesn't mean that you can't get the fuzzies, too. It just means that there's a tradeoff involved, which means you want to make the best tradeoff you can between the two.

Go ahead and volunteer at the soup kitchen while you make $500, or even $5000 per hour. I particularly encourage it if you find it emotionally rewarding or motivating for the nitty-gritty work of making the world better.

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

#82

Post by RetardedBob »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #81
reddog wrote: post #75

Wow. This is a tough crowd. Its not enough to generously give your time and money to charity, you have to have an effective data driven approach to your giving or you suck. And if you can bill at $500 an hour, no helping out at the soup kitchen for you -- that an inefficient use of societies resources. Back to your cubicle, work some extra hours and give it to whatever causes our models say are best. Kind of a cold a…

There's generally two things people want to accomplish out of charitable giving - making the world a better place, and the "warm fuzzies" of helping out. The fact that getting the warm fuzzies isn't a particularly good way of making the world better doesn't mean that you can't get the fuzzies, too. It just means that there's a tradeoff involved, which means you want to make the best tradeoff you can between the two.…

thanks for the F shack - Dirty mike and the boys

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

#83

Post by vacri »

vacri wrote: post #17
waxymonkeyfrog wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joe, this is Derek, the author of the piece linked above. I think you make a good point. When I first heard Will explain "earning to give," a part of me considered it off-putting and radical, but I've come to see it as an expansive view of doing good, because I think there are a lot of people who (a) wouldn't be good at charitable work or (b) would be good at charitable work but are better at - and enjoy! - other wor…

As a counterpoint, a friend of mine was knocked by when she volunteered for a local charity. "What qualifications do you have?" The question sounds elitist, but the point was that charities often have metric shitloads of untrained helping hands. What they need, right now, is people that know how to manage, run finances, computer networking. Advanced skillsets. I actually think the 'earning to give' mindset would real…

ugh, what is it with me and typos? "knocked by" => "knocked back" (too late to edit)

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

#84

Post by vacri »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #45
vacri wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A Stanford education is an asset to a human. A human is not a vessel with which to apply a Stanford eduction to the world.

It's also not like Wall St jobs have trouble filling positions. Charities do have trouble filling skilled positions.

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

#85

Post by hueving »

reasonattlm wrote: post #42
bhouston wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reading and research is something wealthy people try to guilt you into doing! We want you to spell it out here so we don't have to spend any of our own effort discrediting our preconceived notions.

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

#86

Post by imakesnowflakes »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #43
rayiner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around..

That will also keep bad guys around indefinitely. I think we can agree that things can be better. (I mean things like, environmental issues, corruption and foreign policies). But one cannot really hope to change the viewpoints/values/priorities of people already in power. Our only hope is the new generations, which we can hope to bring up with better values, which will eventually replace them.

Imagine if Hitler could live indefinitely or created an army of clones. Imagine every corrupt/powerful person in the world right, has the capability for doing this.

The point I am trying to make, is good cannot do good, when evil forces are in power. And the only thing that prevents evil forces in power indefinitely, is natural death. (We can all agree that things like democracy are not really doing a good job at that, right?)

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

#88

Post by SixSigma »

guelo wrote: post #87

It seems like simple education would be more effective than directly buying bed nets. How about subsidizing the cost for whole nations and educating with billboards?

A common fallacy is that the donors know best.

It would be wise to consult the works of William Easterly [1] e.g. The White Man's Burden [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly

[2] http://www.davidmays.org/BN/EasWhit.html

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

#89

Post by SixSigma »

maxerickson wrote: post #20
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…

Is cancer rolled into those age related disease numbers? Heart disease? If so, do you happen to know how it breaks out? Cancer and heart disease get quite a lot of medical and funding attention (which doesn't necessarily mean they get enough).

You could reduce cancer and heart disease more effectively by stopping people get fat.

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

#90

Post by technomancy »

danieltillett wrote: post #68

The greatest good will be accomplished by developing synthetic labour (AI). This will generate so much profit that even a tiny taxation rate (0.001%) will allow everyone to live as billionaires do now and allow us to solve all other problems caused by (relative) poverty.

Right, because the human race has a really good track record of allowing the benefits of technological productivity increases to impact the poor in a positive way.
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