At EA Global SF 2019, Steven Zhang lead a People of Faith meetup where those of us with religious practices met to discuss the intersection of EA and our spiritual beliefs. During this meetup I learned about the EA for Christians group, and it dawned on me that we could do something similar for Buddhists in EA.
Thus, I present to you, the Buddhists in EA Facebook group.
We're not nearly as organized as EA for Christians at this point, but we have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is a Facebook group that gives us the opportunity to discuss EA topics in an environment with Buddhism as part of the context. I encourage you to join if you either consider yourself a practicing Buddhist or think "Buddhist" is a reasonable label that could be applied to you (and you're interested in EA, of course!).
And if you are in Berkeley on a Tuesday, you might like dropping by the pre-existing Effective Meditation Meetup held at REACH (the calendar also calls it "Rationalist Meditation"). We meet at 8:30 pm to meditate for about 30 minutes and then discuss meditation-related topics until 9:30 or everyone decides to go home, whichever is later.
Thanks for creating this. This is awesome!
Also, to those who create and organize EA for Christians: count me as impressed. I had no idea there was such work going on in that space.
I'm curious. Do you see Buddhism as a value system, a world model, a beneficial practice (ex. meditating), a community, a Schelling Point, a strategy (ex. a beneficial superorganism), or a combination of those or something else?
It's a lot of things. I'd say that at its heart it's a way of life, or a way to live life. That way manifests itself in many ways such that we can talk about common Buddhist values, world models, practices, community forms, etc. but all of those are implementation details of how you bring about something deeper, more subtle, and more fundamental than any of them. It's a little hard to point at what that way is, though, so that I can say some words about it, because whatever words I say it will not be the thing itself, like the way a finger pointing at the moon is not itself the moon. If I had to pick some very few words to capture the essential nature of the Buddha way, I would say that it asks us to be here, now, in our totality, fully engaged in the act of living as compassionate agents embedded in the world.
thanks for your answer
Dead link. It says "Sorry, this content isn't available right now
The link you followed may have expired, or the page may only be visible to an audience you're not in."
Hmm, I'm not sure. The group is set to be publicly visible so anyone should be able to find it and ask to join, although it's a "private" group meaning only members can see who else are members and can see posts. The link is live and works for me, so I'm not sure. As an alternative you can search "Buddhists in Effective Altruism" on Facebook and that should find the group.
Weird, the link works for me now.