Blog #1

Transcript of underlined and written pieces:

Page 1: I think this world would be unlivable without art. Art can help people through bad situations, maybe not physically, but mentally

It would be highly controversial to say ‘no’ – and yet most of us manage to ignore those dying of poverty and preventable diseases all over the world, though we could easily help them. One incident is different from a lifetime of service though?

which suggests a baseline donation of 10 per cent of your income to effective charities. 10% is much more manageable than 100%

Page 2: This is a disconcerting calculation, because even if you think you’ve been doing great work, your final score could be small or negative. This might discourage people from helping if they know they can’t do better than everyone else

If you happen to be successful already, you can always earn to give. Yeah good luck finding someone like that

It would be great to have people think about how Effective Altruism could be promoted through art. Would the art to promote EA be less effective than actual EA? Also how do you get art skills to promote EA if practicing art is bad?

Page 3: If all people are alive in the quantum multiverse, isn’t that good enough?

While reading this article, I found several things that I found interesting, and wanted to talk about more. The first was a part where the author started explaining the ideology of Effective Altruism, stating that to truly be considered important or irreplaceable, you have to do better than the average of your peers. I felt that, along with the idea that nothing else matters except helping, that this might discourage other people from joining the group. Not everybody has the time or money to contribute that much to the movement, so the feeling that that aid is ultimately useless may make some people feel like they might as well just use their resources on other things. It’s also fundamentally false. even if someone contributes just an hour of service or a dollar of donations, that would be one more hour or one more dollar that goes to helping people. However, this ideal may be beneficial to hardcore members of the movement, because it encourages them to help more. In other words, it might increase service and donations for current members, but prevent new members from joining the movement.

The second part that I thought was interesting was when the author talked to one of the members of EA, and he explained the movement’s relationship to art. While art is seen as a complete waste of time to the ideology of EA, there are two, extremely difficult to obtain, ways to contribute to the movement. The first is to earn enough to donate to effective causes, which is difficult because art is not usually a very lucrative job. In my experience, many artists struggle to take care of themselves through their job, or live paycheck to paycheck. The second is to exclusively promote Effective Altruism through their art. Which begs the question: is art promoting EA less or more helpful than actual EA? Also, if a person practices art for years to make promotional art for the movement, is that time spent practicing and learning the craft less helpful than actual EA? I’m not part of the movement, but I feel like practicing actual Effective Altruism would help more people than creating art about it.