301–310 of 417 posts
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I distinctly remember signing up to give £5 a month to a charity on the condition that if they ever contacted me again asking me for more money I'd immediately cancel my Direct Debit. They didn't even get their second payment.
Honestly, the £5 a month you were giving them is probably less than the cost of special casing you in their largely automated donor marketing systems so this is a net win to both of you.
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>Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly . We need to be concerned with the future. That is the only reason to maintain roads and bridges, to prevent pollution, or to conserve resources like water in aquifers and helium.…
>It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. [...] But effective altruists are as likely to talk about colonizing Mars as they are to talk about global warming. Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? AFAIK effective altruists want to colonize mars on x-risk grounds, which would explain why they want to prioritize that over global warm…
A Mars colony that puts a whole parallel self sufficient society on Mars with their own semiconductor manufacturing and so on is millenia away.
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> Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars. thank you how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here Earth is easy mode compared to Mars
>how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here because its unique challenges and constraints may make us develop technology that we wouldn't otherwise that may in turn out to be useful back on earth. Much of our technological advancements come from military resea…
We already have no till agriculture. The plants terraform the soil for us. The problem with this terraformation is that you need to rotate the plants because every plant terraforms the soil in a different way. Plants don't deplete the soil unless you replant the same plant over and over again and destroy terraforming progress through tillage and harvest it and then never bring the poop back.
Some people will now say that avoiding soil depletion in the short term is a bad idea because it means using a little bit more land (or bring up incorrect numbers).
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our earth has had impact events that no bunker would save us from. like the one that created the moon or the much smaller impact that created the Borealis Basin on mars would boil the oceans and melt the surface.
It would be massively cheaper and faster to robotically colonize near-Earth space and get really, really good at killer asteroid detection and redirection.
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> Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. Which you think is what, exactly? I'm under the impression that thing is warmed-over utilitarianism. > The fundamental idea is sound. I do not believe utilitarianism is sound, because its logic can be easily used to justify some obviously horrible things. However the framework appeals very strongly to "rationalist" typ…
> I do not believe utilitarianism is sound, because its logic can be easily used to justify some obviously horrible things. I think most moral philosophers agree with you on that. IMO, the way people talk about Utilitarianism feels to me exactly the same as my own feelings when at school, having only been taught 2D vectors and basic trig functions, I spent 6 months trying to figure out what it even meant to render in…
In other words, we would have to treat most situations as unique and then try to find patterns and then the whole rationalism thing goes out of the window.
The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…
Let us take a moment and separate the idea from the community - most (I might potentially say all) communities fail to embody their own ideas. A fun one is giving any religious community 100 years and then checking in to see how they are going at avoiding scandals. Effective altruism the ideal is very easy to defend - it is blindingly obvious that economic advancement has outperformed all attempts at charity by order…
In some sense, I think this idea is even valid. "You're trying to be better so why are you not better at this particular thing?" seems like a reasonable question. It's just sad when this is used as a general argument against trying to improve things.
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Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…
On the subject of charities being annoying with you, there's a simple answer: Start a donor-advised fund (DAF) with your financial institution. Most have one, and some large charities (e.g. Silicon Valley Charitable Foundation) have their own. You fund it with cash or appreciated stock. For the latter, you can take a tax deduction that year for the entire market value. You can't get the money back (that's why it was…
I find that the following is true: those who are very vocal about their own virtue/altruism are usually rotten. Those who aren't, often surprise you with their goodness when it matters. I've found the "I am so good/empathetic/etc" crowd to be either self deluded and useless, or manipulative, specifically for the purpose of trying to work your way in sexually (as in this story)
Back in my day effective altruism was mainly about finding charities that aren't essentially scams (way harder than it looks). Scene has apparently moved on to other things since I followed it a decade or so ago.
This is a super-simplified summary, but I think it's generally accurate. The basic thesis of EA is "it is your duty to improve/save as many human lives as you can." At some point, a lot of EAs realized that there were many more future humans than present humans. Once you widen your scope in that way, you start realizing that long-term, catastrophic risks (climate change, nuclear disaster, misaligned AI) would affect…