I'm living in France. Learned about EA in 2018, found that great, digged a lot into the topic. The idea of "what in the world improves well-being or causes suffering the most, and what can we do" really influenced me a whole lot - especially when mixed with meditation that allowed me to be more active in my life.
One of the most reliable thing I have found so far is helping animal charities : farmed animals are much more numerous than humans (and have much worse living conditions), and there absolutely is evidence that animal charities are getting some improvements (especially from The Humane League). I tried to donate a lot there.
Long-termism could also be important, but I think that we'll hit energy limits before getting to an extinction event - I wrote an EA forum post for that here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wXzc75txE5hbHqYug/the-great-energy-descent-short-version-an-important-thing-ea
Great post, very inspiring, thanks for making it!
The list is an interesting concept, and maybe it can inspire billionaires to donate more. The visuals are good and it is clear.
However, I fear that as a tool it will have limited spread by design. There are the assumptions, of course (though I personally think including animals is great).
But it's mostly the fact that many people have in mind the terrible harms caused by several of the people on the list (shutting down USAid, developing social networks that favour addictions, making money from tobacco, investing in factory farms).
I don't know what criteria to use to deal with that, but I think entire segments of the population will be very skeptical of the project because they know that billionaire X did bad stuff and still appears the list as a life saver.
For me, your best shot at using this website is not at getting widespread adoption (which is always super hard), but by getting rich people to see that they are ranked lower than the other ones and wanting to improve their ranking.
Congrats on all the work you did for Hive!
I am sure you thought deeply about this choice, and it seems David Coman-Hidy and Joey Savoie have made a similar shift.
Good luck on your new project!
Yes, makes sense, shorter or longer AI timelines do change the game a lot, for instance.
Great, good to know !
Well written and pragmatic, thanks. Although forecasting does sounds great, I have no idea how animal nonprofits (to take one example) could use it to make better work.
That sounds like a good strategy, and you explain it very well.
It's impressive that you managed to get that many trial pledges!
Congrats!
Completely agree! We get used to changes in our lifestyle so fast. Our brain tends to take a ton of stuff for granted.
I know that if I buy a large apartment or a fancy car, I'll get used to it in a few weeks. So why bother ? Donating it seems the right choice.
I love this, what a fun read ❤️
And the opinion of the bot on Vasco is quite wholesome as well
Agreed, I'm always surprised by these low donations numbers.
I keep in mind that EA is one of the movements that helps animals the most in the world, especially farmed and wild animals, which are so important. This is great and much, much more better than the average.
But given that animals are so numerous and often live in terrible conditions, there still is be an important imbalance.
I see no rational reason to spend only 7% of donations on the vast majority of individuals in the world.