So, this is a fantastic exposition of how to be a rational altruist—but it still left me a little disappointed, because the title suggests that you will teach us how to “save the world,” i.e., how to accomplish some really epic-level quest like ending hunger or disease. You don’t actually do that here.
Instead, you argue that the most good we can realistically hope to accomplish is to educate people and to donate to efficient charities on a modest scale and to have fun, and so you set about teaching us how to do that.
Even assuming that you’re correct, it would still be nice to know how a rationalist might go about trying to succeed at an epic altruistic quest. I can’t quite let go of the ‘actually save the world’ option until I’ve thought about what the best strategy is for doing that and then seen, in all its depressing detail, how and why the optimal epic plan would be less good than the optimal modest plan. I suspect other people might also benefit from the comparison.
So, this is a fantastic exposition of how to be a rational altruist—but it still left me a little disappointed, because the title suggests that you will teach us how to “save the world,” i.e., how to accomplish some really epic-level quest like ending hunger or disease. You don’t actually do that here.
Instead, you argue that the most good we can realistically hope to accomplish is to educate people and to donate to efficient charities on a modest scale and to have fun, and so you set about teaching us how to do that.
Even assuming that you’re correct, it would still be nice to know how a rationalist might go about trying to succeed at an epic altruistic quest. I can’t quite let go of the ‘actually save the world’ option until I’ve thought about what the best strategy is for doing that and then seen, in all its depressing detail, how and why the optimal epic plan would be less good than the optimal modest plan. I suspect other people might also benefit from the comparison.