I’ll try to be gentler about my concern, but I really do want to caution against EA interventions that are targeted at EA members. Helping someone is a pure good, but there’s both a bias problem and an optics problem with helping people because they’re similar to yourself.
(and note: one of the reasons I don’t consider myself to be part of EA is that I prefer to help people close or similar to myself disproportionately to the amount of net human impact. I’m not saying “don’t do that”, just “be careful not to claim that EA justifies it”).
When it comes to publically recommending causes it’s worthwhile to focus on projects with good optics like the GiveWell recommended charities. At the same time it’s okay if individual people decide that they believe projects with worse optics are high impact interventions.
To the extent that there are fuzzies involved in helping fellow EA people, it’s worthy to acknowledge the fact and be conscious that they are part of the reason for your donation but in generating fuzzies isn’t a reason against donating.
I don’t mean to discourage helping friends, family, neighbors, or other groups where you’re a member. Or anyone else—all charity is good. I only wanted to point out that EA loses credibility if it suspiciously turns out that the detailed calculations and evaluation of options give clear support to your friends/co-believers.
I guess it needs to be made even more obvious that one can help their friends without having (or pretending to have) an exact calculation proving that this is the optimal thing to do.
I’ll try to be gentler about my concern, but I really do want to caution against EA interventions that are targeted at EA members. Helping someone is a pure good, but there’s both a bias problem and an optics problem with helping people because they’re similar to yourself.
(and note: one of the reasons I don’t consider myself to be part of EA is that I prefer to help people close or similar to myself disproportionately to the amount of net human impact. I’m not saying “don’t do that”, just “be careful not to claim that EA justifies it”).
When it comes to publically recommending causes it’s worthwhile to focus on projects with good optics like the GiveWell recommended charities. At the same time it’s okay if individual people decide that they believe projects with worse optics are high impact interventions.
To the extent that there are fuzzies involved in helping fellow EA people, it’s worthy to acknowledge the fact and be conscious that they are part of the reason for your donation but in generating fuzzies isn’t a reason against donating.
Thanks, that said it better than I did.
I don’t mean to discourage helping friends, family, neighbors, or other groups where you’re a member. Or anyone else—all charity is good. I only wanted to point out that EA loses credibility if it suspiciously turns out that the detailed calculations and evaluation of options give clear support to your friends/co-believers.
I guess it needs to be made even more obvious that one can help their friends without having (or pretending to have) an exact calculation proving that this is the optimal thing to do.