...the fact that the average life in New Zealand is much, much better than the average life in the Democratic Republic of Congo...
I think you may be in danger of overloading “better” in statements like this, and more implicitly throughout your argument. (Similarly “good” in statements like “It’s absurd to… believe[] a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income”.)
Consider if I said something like this: “We are constantly told that it would be better for us if we ate fewer calories. But this ignores the quality of those calories. Everybody who has tasted both knows that calorie for calorie, chocolate eclairs are better than lima beans. So it only makes sense that it would be better to reduce the better calories last.”
It might help if you explicitly stated better how (and maybe for whom) throughout, or use more precise adjectives than the generic good or better.
You also seem to me to be making an implicit “the goal of EA ought not to be to relieve existing suffering but to maximize future hedons” argument that maybe should be made explicit instead.
Thanks for the feedback. Thinking about it for a minute, it seems like your first point is more than just stylistic criticism. By “better” i meant we have strong intuitions about first person subjective experience, but i now realize the way I phrased it might be begging the question.
Why do you think I’m making that assumption? I assume EAs care about all of these things with some reasonable exchange rate between all the three. Assuming you only care about doesn’t this bias you towards enhaving subjective experience, pain relief etc (eg. Give Directly, Strong Minds etc) versus life saving interventions that might be barely net positive anyway, especially because things like malarial bed nets don’t have other positive externalities (unlike something like deworming) I agree it’s also an update towards any other things EAs could plausibly do, such as institutional imrprovements/human capital development etc.
I think you may be in danger of overloading “better” in statements like this, and more implicitly throughout your argument. (Similarly “good” in statements like “It’s absurd to… believe[] a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income”.)
Consider if I said something like this: “We are constantly told that it would be better for us if we ate fewer calories. But this ignores the quality of those calories. Everybody who has tasted both knows that calorie for calorie, chocolate eclairs are better than lima beans. So it only makes sense that it would be better to reduce the better calories last.”
It might help if you explicitly stated better how (and maybe for whom) throughout, or use more precise adjectives than the generic good or better.
You also seem to me to be making an implicit “the goal of EA ought not to be to relieve existing suffering but to maximize future hedons” argument that maybe should be made explicit instead.
Thanks for the feedback. Thinking about it for a minute, it seems like your first point is more than just stylistic criticism. By “better” i meant we have strong intuitions about first person subjective experience, but i now realize the way I phrased it might be begging the question.
Why do you think I’m making that assumption? I assume EAs care about all of these things with some reasonable exchange rate between all the three. Assuming you only care about doesn’t this bias you towards enhaving subjective experience, pain relief etc (eg. Give Directly, Strong Minds etc) versus life saving interventions that might be barely net positive anyway, especially because things like malarial bed nets don’t have other positive externalities (unlike something like deworming) I agree it’s also an update towards any other things EAs could plausibly do, such as institutional imrprovements/human capital development etc.