Nic Kruus🔸
Participation2
- Attended an EAGx conference
- Received career coaching from 80,000 Hours
Posts 18
Comments16
I apologize for this confusion. I've updated the section with the inaccurate statement @Richard Y Chappell quoted.
Thank you for bringing up other important considerations and limitations of these studies. You are right that, with this post, I don't intend to make any claims about the extent to which anyone should let productivity effects determine their decision whether or not to have children. I'm just hoping to help better inform those who factor it into their choice (although, again, you make a good point about these studies' failure to account for the counterfactual of people who want children deciding against it).
Unfortunately, I'm learning the article may be a bit misleading. I'd see some of the other comments for more details.
I’m glad you mustered the courage to post this! I think it’s a great post.
I agree that, in practice, people advocating for effective altruism can implicitly argue for the set of popular EA causes (and they do this quite often?), which could repel people with useful insight. Additionally, it seems to be the case that people in the EA community can be dismissive of newcomers’ cause prioritization (or their arguments for causes that are less popular in EA). Again, this could repel people from EA.
I have a couple of hypotheses for these observations. (I don’t think either is a sufficient explanation, but they’re both plausibly contributing factors.)
First, people might feel compelled to make EA less “abstract” by trying to provide concrete examples of how people in the EA community are “trying to do the most good they can,” possibly giving the impression that the causes, instead of the principles, are most characteristic of EA.
Second, people may be more subconsciously dismissive of new cause proposals because they’ve invested time/money into causes that are currently popular in the EA community. It’s psychologically easier to reject a new cause prioritization proposal than it is to accept it and thereby feel as though your resources have not been used with optimal effectiveness.