Dear Andy,

Thank you very much for your comment. That sounds like a pretty cool project! I will definitely be in touch (when I get a look at the above suggestions and get my own head sorted out).

Cheers!

Awesome Jonas! I will check out your work and get back to you asap! Please do shoot me a private msg -- would love to get in touch!

Thanks, Ben! I didn't know about this project. Will check it out!

Dear Sanjay,

Thank you for your post. Much appreciated!

I did not know of your project. Sounds awesome and I will definitely look into it. As to your comments:

RE: Social media I am personally more bullish about this than my original post might suggest. In fact, I think the things you mention could be powerful motivators for increased giving. The reason why I sound bearish is that friends I have talked to were somewhat on the fence about the idea. And I can follow their reasoning: They/I fear that the social media integration might become "unhealthy" (I am imaging people "bragging" about their donations in the same way that some people feel the need to constantly tell all of Facebook how happy they are...I don't like this side of social media). HOWEVER, either my fears (and those of my friends') are exaggerated OR this might simply be a situation where the ends justify the means (it seems that, on a large scale, more donations to people in need would outweigh the negatives of social media).

RE: EA This was definitely not meant as catering to EA people only. However, I feel like having an EA backbone -- or at least having people from the EA community contribute with ideas -- would possibly make the project better AND be a nice outlet for EA to a more mainstream audience. I might be wrong, though. In any case, I agree with you that there should be as many charities as possible. This would appeal the more people, hopefully.

I am definitely also happy to discuss further! I added you on Facebook, but would prefer the discussion to stay here for a while -- at least while the discussion is somewhat general, so that other people can follow it and comment if they want. I would love to hear about your experiences with this. In particular, I'd also love to hear if you think there are room for more than one app (i.e. for more than SoGive). I.e. if you feel like this is something I should continue with or whether some form of collaboration would be better.

I have no idea, actually. My intuition is that there is one...or that there will become one. Or at least that there ought to be one.

Maybe the market can be created through social media? (see Sanjay's post below).

Thanks David! Much appreciated!

Maybe I am missing something here, but -- given your post and your arguments -- how does it follow that the EA movement should not endorse case-specific effective altruism?

If I understand the "EA mission" correctly, it is about doing the most good in total. The original poster seems to believe that EA endorsing case-specific effective altruism will do more good than if they don't (overall). Hence, if you disagree, you should argue why it would be better for EA to not endorse this. Where am I making a mistake in this logic?

My own intuition (which I tried to hint at in my first post) is that any official endorsement of case-specific effective altruism on behalf of EA would take away too much from the core of EA to be worth it. YES, the world would be better, if everyone applied the EA core values to their own field, BUT ressources are too tight -- or it might be too distracting -- to devote any attention to such "secondary" causes. (That being said, I am very much aware that my intuition might be wrong!)

Great, thanks for sharing! I don't use reddit enough, but will try to swing by regularly.

Hi Ian,

Great and thought-provoking post. Thank you very much for taking the time to write it!

I will think about it and might respond at length later, but for now, let me ask you this: How do you propose the EA movement go about introducing "case-specific effective altruism"? Do you imagine several official sub-groups, each dedicated to a specific cause?* Or do you simply want EA to acknowledge that case-specific effective altruism is a good thing, so that people can set up their own domain-specific EA groups if they like?

In sum, a few words on your thoughts for actual implementation going forward, would be nice! :)

*It seems, that if you are advocating that the EA movement actively pursues domain-specific effective altruism in a number of different domains, this would require a large amount of work from the group/community -- work that will therefore not go into the (cause-neutral) traditional EA domain. For this reason alone, one could argue against this implementation (i.e. one could acknowledge that case-specific effective altruism would be a good thing, but still reject to actively do something about it, since the work load would be too high as compared to what you get out of it).

This was a good write-up. Thank you very much for doing it, Sean -- and good luck with the future developments. I'm very much looking forward to following the research coming out of CSER!