TLDR: Everyone’s talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team...
I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.
The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least...
I have found it useful and interesting to build a habit of noticing an intuition and then thinking of arguments for why that intuition is worth listening to. It has caused me to find some pretty interesting dynamics that it seems like naive consequentialists/utilitarians aren't aware of.
One concern about this is that you might be able to find arguments for any conclusion that you seek out arguments for; the counter to this is that your intuition doesn't give random answers, and is actually fairly reliably correct, hence explicit arguments that explain your intuition are some amount more likely than random to correspond reality, making these arguments useful to discover.
This definitely goes better if you are aware of the systematic errors your intuition can make (i.e. cognitive biases).
Is there a context for the type of things you are using your intuition for?