Hi! My name's Adin (pronounced "ahdeen", yes it should be spelled differently haha). I first came across EA stuff maybe like 7 years ago through GiveWell. More recently I've been perusing 80k site & pod to try to figure out my career. Heard an interview with Lucia from LEEP and starting checking out some of what Charity Entrepreneurship (or I guess AIM now) gets up to. Overall I find their work, and much of the work done by the EA community, pretty impressive.
I recently came off a relatively brief stint working at a homeless services organization where I live in Denver, CO with a lot of questions about "doing good". On the one hand I felt that the hands on case management I was doing with clients wasn't accomplishing much, partly due to the rigourlessness and ineffectiveness of the organization I worked for. But shifting focus overseas because that's where it appears to be cheapest to achieve measurable outcomes doesn't seem quite right to me either.
I'm not yet convinced that my inclination to give some level of priority to people living in my physical community is a psychological bias to be overcome with logical thought. In the terminology of the Giving Multiplier folks, but not fully accepting their premise or approach, I don't think the "head" and "heart" are necessarily so at odds as they might appear. So I'm trying to read and listen to more on this topic and engage in conversation with people who might be interested in the same set of questions, which is why I'm excited to be here!
I think the moral questions that arise when assessing effectiveness are particularly concerning. DALYs and QALYs are likely unreliable for the reasons you mention, though how unreliable exactly is hard to say. It's possible they're close to the best approximations we'll ever have and there is no viable alternative to using them. But the fundamental and inescapable limitations of cost effectiveness analysis remain.
What can we say with confidence about the distribution of suffering in the world? Misery is a subjective experience for which macro measures of poverty are a weak proxy at best. I'm left with the sense that the case for directing EA resources only to the poorest geographies is hardly airtight. From a fairness perspective, the comparison shopping approach to choosing who to help is hard to swallow. Should a person suffering profoundly not receive assistance simply because they were, in a perverse reversal, unlucky enough to be born in the US or UK? This seems like less a widening moral circle than a sort of hollowed out bagel shaped one. I don't think we're wise to so doggedly resist intuitions here.
Even in a fully utilitarian calculus it's unclear how high the total cost of meaningfully benefiting the needy in wealthier parts of the world would actually be if EAs gave it a shot. And the size of the potential benefit is also conceivably very high. Overall it strikes me as an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity and ambition that EAs bring to the question of how we might be able through philanthropy to strengthen the small, medium and large groups we belong to in order to act even more impactfully on a global scale. Shouldn't we explore the area between hyperlocal EA meta and anti-local EA causes a little more? And by "we" I maybe mean "I" haha. I maybe just haven't looked deeply enough at the arguments yet.
I'm not as well-read on this topic as I'd like to be so would welcome any paper or book recommendations. Thanks for the detailed & high quality post.
Hi! My name's Adin (pronounced "ahdeen", yes it should be spelled differently haha). I first came across EA stuff maybe like 7 years ago through GiveWell. More recently I've been perusing 80k site & pod to try to figure out my career. Heard an interview with Lucia from LEEP and starting checking out some of what Charity Entrepreneurship (or I guess AIM now) gets up to. Overall I find their work, and much of the work done by the EA community, pretty impressive.
I recently came off a relatively brief stint working at a homeless services organization where I live in Denver, CO with a lot of questions about "doing good". On the one hand I felt that the hands on case management I was doing with clients wasn't accomplishing much, partly due to the rigourlessness and ineffectiveness of the organization I worked for. But shifting focus overseas because that's where it appears to be cheapest to achieve measurable outcomes doesn't seem quite right to me either.
I'm not yet convinced that my inclination to give some level of priority to people living in my physical community is a psychological bias to be overcome with logical thought. In the terminology of the Giving Multiplier folks, but not fully accepting their premise or approach, I don't think the "head" and "heart" are necessarily so at odds as they might appear. So I'm trying to read and listen to more on this topic and engage in conversation with people who might be interested in the same set of questions, which is why I'm excited to be here!
I think the moral questions that arise when assessing effectiveness are particularly concerning. DALYs and QALYs are likely unreliable for the reasons you mention, though how unreliable exactly is hard to say. It's possible they're close to the best approximations we'll ever have and there is no viable alternative to using them. But the fundamental and inescapable limitations of cost effectiveness analysis remain.
What can we say with confidence about the distribution of suffering in the world? Misery is a subjective experience for which macro measures of poverty are a weak proxy at best. I'm left with the sense that the case for directing EA resources only to the poorest geographies is hardly airtight. From a fairness perspective, the comparison shopping approach to choosing who to help is hard to swallow. Should a person suffering profoundly not receive assistance simply because they were, in a perverse reversal, unlucky enough to be born in the US or UK? This seems like less a widening moral circle than a sort of hollowed out bagel shaped one. I don't think we're wise to so doggedly resist intuitions here.
Even in a fully utilitarian calculus it's unclear how high the total cost of meaningfully benefiting the needy in wealthier parts of the world would actually be if EAs gave it a shot. And the size of the potential benefit is also conceivably very high. Overall it strikes me as an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity and ambition that EAs bring to the question of how we might be able through philanthropy to strengthen the small, medium and large groups we belong to in order to act even more impactfully on a global scale. Shouldn't we explore the area between hyperlocal EA meta and anti-local EA causes a little more? And by "we" I maybe mean "I" haha. I maybe just haven't looked deeply enough at the arguments yet.
I'm not as well-read on this topic as I'd like to be so would welcome any paper or book recommendations. Thanks for the detailed & high quality post.