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Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Recent opportunities to take action
The very well written Notes on Effective Altruism coheres some thoughts I've had over the years, and makes me think we should potentially drop the "how to do good in the best way possible framing" when introducing EA for the "be more effective when trying to help others" framing. This honestly seems straightforwardly good to me from a number of different angles, and I think we should seriously be thinking about changing our overall branding to this as a tagline instead.
But am I missing something here? Is there a reason the latter is worse than I think? Or some hidden benefits to the former that I'm not weighing?
I think there's a big difference between "more effective" and "most effective", and one of the most important and counterintuitive principles of EA is that trying to find the best option rather than just a good option can make a huge difference to how much good you do -- we have to prioritise between different goods, and this is painful to do (hence easy to avoid) but really important.
Yeah, I think the tension here is between finding a way to put the motivation that can appeal to all people, and watering it down a bit, or putting it fully in such a manner and accepting that you're only ever going to be speaking to a small portion of people.
Taking only the "most effective" path towards doing good, when that looks like working on top causes or donating a significant amount, just isn't open to 90% or more of the population. Is it really wise to focus a movement so narrowly that you rule out most people in the world being able to find a place in it?
Perhaps a compromise is something like the below, where "do more good" is the motto, but with an emphasis on how big that difference can be.
The context might vary and make me reconsider in certain instances, but I generally think it's important to say that there are ways to act that are orders of magnitude more effective than others. So yes, insist on "more" rather than on "the most possible"... But with an emphasis on the fact that there are resources to help you and guide you towards options that are likely to be immensely more impactful than most actions.