Thank you for posting this. An excellent writeup all around, and it gives me lots of hope that CFAR will continue improving.
Is your definition of “do good in the world” approximately equivalent to “donating to effective charity”? It sounds from this post like it is, and I find that odd. Your startup list is impressive, and personally I would credit the founders of several of those startups (specifically, all the ones I know anything about) with doing good in the world, regardless of their charitable activities or lack thereof.
Is your definition of “do good in the world” approximately equivalent to “donating to effective charity”?
No, not at all. Donating to effective charity can be highly important; but I’ll be sad, and think something has gone badly wrong, if e.g. CFAR’s altruistic impact occurs exclusively or even mainly through causing such donation; it is important to increase generators of knowledge of what is actually worth doing (rather than e.g. creating copies of CFAR’s founders’ initial beliefs on that subject), to increase people capable of finding important gaps in the world and then filling them, etc.
At the same time, donating to effective charity is both high-impact enough, and simple enough, that I suspect something will have gone badly wrong if we don’t also see a lot of giving of that sort—it’ll suggest an unwillingness to take risks, or to trust others, or to pool together into common efforts, or something similar. I have actually a lot of thoughts on how the above point and this one can both be true, but the subject is a bit unwieldly; I may write a post; in any case, I agree with your nonequivalence.
Thank you for posting this. An excellent writeup all around, and it gives me lots of hope that CFAR will continue improving.
Is your definition of “do good in the world” approximately equivalent to “donating to effective charity”? It sounds from this post like it is, and I find that odd. Your startup list is impressive, and personally I would credit the founders of several of those startups (specifically, all the ones I know anything about) with doing good in the world, regardless of their charitable activities or lack thereof.
No, not at all. Donating to effective charity can be highly important; but I’ll be sad, and think something has gone badly wrong, if e.g. CFAR’s altruistic impact occurs exclusively or even mainly through causing such donation; it is important to increase generators of knowledge of what is actually worth doing (rather than e.g. creating copies of CFAR’s founders’ initial beliefs on that subject), to increase people capable of finding important gaps in the world and then filling them, etc.
At the same time, donating to effective charity is both high-impact enough, and simple enough, that I suspect something will have gone badly wrong if we don’t also see a lot of giving of that sort—it’ll suggest an unwillingness to take risks, or to trust others, or to pool together into common efforts, or something similar. I have actually a lot of thoughts on how the above point and this one can both be true, but the subject is a bit unwieldly; I may write a post; in any case, I agree with your nonequivalence.