Dave Cortright 🔸
Bio
Participation4
I have been a serious philanthropist since 2004 and part of the EA community since 2017. I am audaciously optimistic we can ameliorating the global mental health crisis. I used my coaching and facilitatation skills to help grow EA capacity. I support environmental and animal welfare organizations. I am on the advisory council of Vegan Outreach and the Santa Clara County Behavioral Health Board.
I am a certified professional coach, with additional experience in crisis counseling and peer mentoring. I shifted to mental health and well-being after 25 years as a designer, manager, and director at Silicon Valley tech companies. I am passionate about helping others, and by guiding them to find their true calling, I amplify my impact on improving the world.
How others can help me
I'm looking for partners to work on a peer support group (PSG) program that will help alleviate the global mental health crisis. I'm especially interested in working with students at colleges and universities, or young adults in general.
How I can help others
Figuring out what to do next in your life for maximal impact.
Don’t ask what the world needs, but ask what makes you come alive, because that is what the world needs: people who have come alive.
—Howard Thurman
Posts 24
Comments145
Topic contributions1
The other major problems with trying to calculate your way to a neat and orderly table of "the best" interventions:
- There is no single absolute objective perspective on value weights. Just listen to conversations at EAG or in the forum. There will never be full consensus on the value of a quadrillion crustaceans vs. billions of mammals, or on the value of future sentient beings vs. current ones.
- Preferences matter. And in fact, a diversity of preferences is essential. If we only used the final ranking, in the extreme case we devote 100% of our resources to Program A. But not everyone is passionate about A, and the world probably can not handle the capacity for everyone to productively contribute to A. So we need people to have a preference for all projects, even and especially those further down the list so we have reasonable coverage of interventions across the entire problem space.
For some, spending can be a soothing activity, but being a shopaholic is harmful, like many other addictions. The hole most people are trying to fill with any addiction: a lack of strong, close, healthy relationships. You must have at least one relationship (and ideally 3–5 according to Dunbar) where you can regularly be vulnerable and talk about all your feelings. If you don’t, work on that 😇 You can start with therapy or a support group to help you build up your skills. That's what I did, since I didn't learn this in my family of origin.
Good.store showed the Profit for Good model works (100% of profits go to charity). They continued to grow, expanding from coffee, socks, and soap into tea, undies, and cleaning products. The big milestone in 2025: they opened the maternal health center in Sierra Leone.
I bring it up because I think anyone who cares about being compassionate and effective (you 😇) should consider voting for maternal health in Africa over contributing to the profits of large international conglomerates.
Is Barack Obama black? Technically, no; he is bi-racial. But he identifies as black, and most people—when asked—would say he is black (Wikipedia concurs).
I think veganism should be treated the same way. You don't have to be 100% perfect for you or others to consider you vegan.
Being pedantic about definitions does not help reduce suffering, IMO.
Maybe your belief is that if enough people "at the top" of EA agree to this, they can influence a majority of the EA community to follow. My sense is that EAs are more independent freethinkers than most other groups, so I don't think this scenario is likely.
Given that, what you're proposing is essentially relabeling the current set of "EAs who care about animal welfare" to "EA". A few EAs who aren't already in this camp might follow you over, but on the whole I strongly suspect this would alienate everyone else who doesn't sign up for this worldview, and it would just fracture the community.
I’m a fan of “wisdom of crowds”. But I suspect—at least for the top-rated ones—there has been coordinated ballot box stuffing by staff and supporters. And like many user reviews online, it tends toward bimodal of "great" or "awful". Most people don't make the effort to write "it was ok" reviews.
I feel there's too much noise and not enough signal to make it a worthwhile source.
EoL Competition, EOL in the software world means "End of Life". I'd recommend choosing a different acronym. LongTermism could be abbreviated LT, so EoLT or Thoughts on Longtermism, TLT. (LTE is already taken 😇)
This dropdown is clipped for me in Chrome on my laptop. I can't read the full text of the options