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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?

#131

Post by cdcarter »

reasonattlm wrote: post #40
kijin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very important. The chance of being able to eliminate nearly all age-related diseases in the foreseeable future is very small. The chance of any single donation making a difference there is also fairly small, whereas other donations go more directly toward saving lives. If I had to choose between contributing 0.1% of the cost of a project that has a 1% chance of saving 100,000 lives a day (effectively saving…

The trouble is you'll never know what the actually numbers were until after the fact - the best you can do is make some educated investments at an 80/20 point. So either you learn yourself or you rely on consensus and authority, etc. You give to a middleman charity that has people who spend the time or do the work based on a theory of what should be done. You're relying on their expertise, and the expertise of those…

Thiel investing in an aging-related organization is no shock.

What is telling and makes it clear that this organization (not going to discuss the cause, but this specific organization) is that there are NO people of color on the advisory board and only one person of color on the board of directors. The board of directors also is entirely startup founders, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs.

Without diversity at the leadership level, it is fairly easy to assume (externally) that this organization is working to solve aging related illnesses for the 1%.

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

#132

Post by jeffreyrogers »

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…

There are a few problems with this:

First, not everyone who goes to an elite university can get a job on Wall Street. Though these jobs are largely populated by graduates of elite universities, they are still very hard to get.

Second, people are more efficacious at things they want to be doing. Many people don't want to be in a high pressure job with long work hours and are more satisfied doing work that they find personally meaningful, rather than meaningful because of all the nice ways they can spend money on others.

Third, implicit in your response is the idea that there is some moral imperative to act as selflessly as possible. Why? No one chose to be born, so why does the accident of their birth impel them to act a certain way? Further, it is not even clear to me that improving human life is that important. Humans are petty. We are mean to each other, we harm the environment, etc. Different people value different things. You seem to value improving others lives materially. Others have different values and priorities, and that is fine as well.

Fourth, peoples lives have higher order consequences than just their immediate actions. Someone can touch a lot of lives through the money they spend but they may not have as much impact as a nurse who sits down with her patients and their families and comforts them when they're scared. Or the barber that I go to who always makes my entire day better (and thus my interactions with others better) by how cheerful he is.

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

#133

Post by jsalvatier »

Spooky23 wrote: post #65

Charity is about the donor as much as the recipient. Skip the pseudo-scientific horseshit and do something that matters to you. Personally, I tutor a couple of kids in math every once in awhile, donate to a couple of religious organizations, a zoo, a local social services org, and a few museums. I find it fulfilling. One of my best friends is devoted to a particular state park -- he does trail cleanup something like…

Its fine to do those things (and I tutor kids too), but you should hardly get to claim that you're doing charity if you're knowingly and willingly doing far less good than you could be doing.

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

#134

Post by schoen »

alphapapa wrote: post #113
fizixer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the way we should've estimated the likelihood of curing cancer before we started pouring money in it. Probably we did, and then based on the importance of the matter, poured in billions of dollars anyway. SENS approach is essentially suggesting something better than that. According to them, pouring billions of dollars into individual age-related diseases (e.g., age-related onset of cancer) is the wrong way to go…

It's amazing how some people are trying to reduce the population and others are trying to help people live longer. Wouldn't it be interesting to get them all in a room together...

But people are working to reduce the population by reducing fertility rates. I haven't met anyone who was openly working to reduce the population by increasing mortality rates or even by campaigning against efforts to decrease mortality rates.

It's possible that if mortality rates were reduced really dramatically, some population activists would get upset (and I've seen indications of that in other threads here).

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

#135

Post by jsalvatier »

notahacker wrote: post #96
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…

I wonder how many of the critics of ineffective altruists actually give more to society than the overqualified soup kitchen volunteers...

A lot of them. A large fraction give 10%+ of their income per year.

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

#136

Post by Retra »

alphapapa wrote: post #116
Retra wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, that's the whole point of caring about the greater good: to help people live longer. If you're having some sort of existential crisis wherein you honestly can't see any reason people should live, then take some time to reassess your priorities in depth. Because you're questioning the only real moral principle humanity has.

It depends on what you believe. If you believe that there is life after death, and it's a better one, then living longer on earth isn't necessarily better. I think if you talked to a lot of people who are actually elderly and actually nearing natural death, some of them would wish for another lifetime's worth of years (if it came with renewed health), but some of them would be ready to move on.

No, it doesn't depend on what you believe, it depends on what is actually true. There is no rational justification for believing things that are not true, so there's no way to effectively argue for them.

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

#137

Post by Retric »

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…

There is a long history of people suggesting various solutions to aging. The SENS Research Foundation has little to suggest it's better than any of the other wastes of cash.

Step 1: Drugs, invasive procedures, and diet are completely off the table as viable solutions.

Step 2: ? (Nanite/Magic)

Because we really don't have many other options right now.

PS: A lesser goal involving tradeoffs may be possible with drugs, but flow out slow aging so you keep a 25 year old body for longer that's not going to happen from drugs.

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

#138

Post by rayiner »

homunculus wrote: post #126
rayiner wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 31, with a toddler. I can't compare anything I do with the joy she gets out of the most mundane things. The first time she tasted chocolate? Blows me going to Alinea out of the water.

I'm not trying to disagree with you, I have a 7 month old son, but what about the joy you felt seeing her being born? I know that isn't a mundane thing and that you likely won't have it but a few more times but there are experiences that children can't have, that are, at least, as transcendent as a child's first taste of chocolate.

But that's precisely the thing. In a stable population, births per year are inversely proportional to life expectancy. So whatever joy seeing a child born brings to people, there will necessarily be less of that per year aggregated over the whole society. A society where everyone lives longer is necessarily one with a smaller proportion of joyful idealistic children and a higher percentage of cynical jaded older people.
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