a) Important. The world’s great challenges are undoubtedly severe; this is exacerbated by the fact that not nearly enough people are involved in solving them. It is obvious that global problems will require global cooperation and contribution.
The actual intervention you seem to be arguing for is “spreading mindfulness practice and compassion exercises”. I do not know of any evidence that suggests that those practices actually cause people to do more good with their lives, and the fact that they do not seems supported by the large national differences in practicing various forms of compassion meditation (e.g. India, Tibet, etc.), but a corresponding lack in correlation between those practices and people working on key global problems.
b) Highly neglected. Where are the institutions or organisations attempting to spread the ethics of altruism and compassion?
As you mentioned, spreading mindfulness practices is attempted by large parts of the buddhist religion, hundreds of not thousands of monasteries around the world, as well as a good number of institutions in the U.S. Spreading altruism has also been a major goal of most organized religions including Christianity.
Spreading altruism broadly seems to me like one of the least neglected cause areas in the charitable sector.
c) Highly solvable—in light of altruism cultivation practices and the scientific results showing how they lead to increased altruistic action. They are simple, accessible, and free to teach.
Free to teach does not mean easy to teach. I do not know of any intervention that actually successfully teaches those principles in a scalable way, and individual instruction is going to be very slow and costly. You also do not actually propose any concrete interventions besides teaching CCT, which I do not expect will cause major shifts in the behavior of people who do so (you might be able to squeeze a p<0.05 study out of it, but I would be surprised by much more).
Overall I find the arguments in this post relatively weak. I think interventions in this space could be promising, but I don’t think this post gave much evidence either way. I would however be interested for other people, or the author of this post, to look into this topic with more rigorous standards of evidence, more rough quantitative estimates, and generally a more neutral perspective.
I was at a talk at the EA hotel that claimed there’s evidence that a specific type of compassion meditation for 30 minutes a day for a few weeks has large effects sizes on compassion. I would be surprised however if this caused people to work on large global problems. I woudn’t be surprised if the combination of interventions that improve compassion and interventions that improve rationality caused more people to work on large global problems.
Thanks very much for reading and taking the time to give this feedback. It’s much appreciated. I’m taking it all into account and plan to do a more rigorous investigation with a deeper, more neutral look into the evidence (one problem is that when it comes to CCT, metta meditation etc., there aren’t too many studies assessing their direct impact on altruistic action). But it seems obvious to me that they can do this, after I have experienced it very strongly in my own life, and have seen it happen in others, too—but all this has definitely given me some personal bias/motivation to argue for their dissemination!
This post was, I guess, a pretty rough initial outline of how these practices might help a lot of different causes.
You’ve certainly helped me be aware that my enthusiasm for these practices has overshadowed my commitment to solid evidence, and for that I’m grateful.
A compassion-competent mind (an acquired trait) is not necessarily one focused on “key global problems.” Look at this: a compassionate mother and father raise three well-functioning children. A non-compassionate single parent has three children who are dysfunctional, harm many others and are a great financial burden on society (policing, courts, incarceration, medical, material damage). Neither, however, have extra resources to donate to “key global problems.”
The actual intervention you seem to be arguing for is “spreading mindfulness practice and compassion exercises”. I do not know of any evidence that suggests that those practices actually cause people to do more good with their lives, and the fact that they do not seems supported by the large national differences in practicing various forms of compassion meditation (e.g. India, Tibet, etc.), but a corresponding lack in correlation between those practices and people working on key global problems.
As you mentioned, spreading mindfulness practices is attempted by large parts of the buddhist religion, hundreds of not thousands of monasteries around the world, as well as a good number of institutions in the U.S. Spreading altruism has also been a major goal of most organized religions including Christianity.
Spreading altruism broadly seems to me like one of the least neglected cause areas in the charitable sector.
Free to teach does not mean easy to teach. I do not know of any intervention that actually successfully teaches those principles in a scalable way, and individual instruction is going to be very slow and costly. You also do not actually propose any concrete interventions besides teaching CCT, which I do not expect will cause major shifts in the behavior of people who do so (you might be able to squeeze a p<0.05 study out of it, but I would be surprised by much more).
Overall I find the arguments in this post relatively weak. I think interventions in this space could be promising, but I don’t think this post gave much evidence either way. I would however be interested for other people, or the author of this post, to look into this topic with more rigorous standards of evidence, more rough quantitative estimates, and generally a more neutral perspective.
I was at a talk at the EA hotel that claimed there’s evidence that a specific type of compassion meditation for 30 minutes a day for a few weeks has large effects sizes on compassion. I would be surprised however if this caused people to work on large global problems. I woudn’t be surprised if the combination of interventions that improve compassion and interventions that improve rationality caused more people to work on large global problems.
Hi habryka,
Thanks very much for reading and taking the time to give this feedback. It’s much appreciated. I’m taking it all into account and plan to do a more rigorous investigation with a deeper, more neutral look into the evidence (one problem is that when it comes to CCT, metta meditation etc., there aren’t too many studies assessing their direct impact on altruistic action). But it seems obvious to me that they can do this, after I have experienced it very strongly in my own life, and have seen it happen in others, too—but all this has definitely given me some personal bias/motivation to argue for their dissemination!
This post was, I guess, a pretty rough initial outline of how these practices might help a lot of different causes.
You’ve certainly helped me be aware that my enthusiasm for these practices has overshadowed my commitment to solid evidence, and for that I’m grateful.
Best,
Will
A compassion-competent mind (an acquired trait) is not necessarily one focused on “key global problems.” Look at this: a compassionate mother and father raise three well-functioning children. A non-compassionate single parent has three children who are dysfunctional, harm many others and are a great financial burden on society (policing, courts, incarceration, medical, material damage). Neither, however, have extra resources to donate to “key global problems.”