CB🔸
Bio
Participation3
I'm living in France. Learned about EA in 2018, found that great, digged a lot into the topic. The idea of "what in the world improves well-being or causes suffering the most, and what can we do" really influenced me a whole lot - especially when mixed with meditation that allowed me to be more active in my life.
One of the most reliable thing I have found so far is helping animal charities : farmed animals are much more numerous than humans (and have much worse living conditions), and there absolutely is evidence that animal charities are getting some improvements (especially from The Humane League). I tried to donate a lot there.Â
Long-termism could also be important, but I think that we'll hit energy limits before getting to an extinction event - I wrote an EA forum post for that here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wXzc75txE5hbHqYug/the-great-energy-descent-short-version-an-important-thing-ea
How I can help others
I just have an interest in whatever topic sounds really important, so I have a LOT of data on a lot of topics. Â These include energy, the environment, resource depletion, simple ways to understand the economy, limits to growth, why we fail to solve the sustainability issue, and how we got to that very weird specific point in history.
I also have a lot of stuff on Buddhism and meditation and on "what makes us happy" (check the Waking Up app!)
Posts 5
Comments356
I'm a bit torn on this one. On one hand, there are some very good elements in the list. Donating and avoiding chickens and eggs is very important.
On the other hand, it seems like there is little prioritisation on the list here. In general, I think the longer the list, the less likely people are to actually do it, so it's important to prioritise. But not drinking alcohol or avoiding pornography or not standing up to pee likely reduces suffering 10000 times less than donating 1% (I don't have a source, but I think that's the order of magnitude when donating to animal charities). And I already do most of the things on the list.Â
Part of it depends on the leverage you have. By donating, you support professionals who will work on changing laws, norms and companies. By stopping alcohol, you still have dozens of other people who are going to serve as negative examples, it seems (also, you said "stop alcohol", which is much harder than "stop drinking regularly").
But the "See the beauty in people" point is interesting, I might try that.
The list is an interesting concept, and maybe it can inspire billionaires to donate more. The visuals are good and it is clear.
However, I fear that as a tool it will have limited spread by design. There are the assumptions, of course (though I personally think including animals is great).Â
But it's mostly the fact that many people have in mind the terrible harms caused by several of the people on the list (shutting down USAid, developing social networks that favour addictions, making money from tobacco, investing in factory farms).
I don't know what criteria to use to deal with that, but I think entire segments of the population will be very skeptical of the project because they know that billionaire X did bad stuff and still appears the list as a life saver.
For me, your best shot at using this website is not at getting widespread adoption (which is always super hard), but by getting rich people to see that they are ranked lower than the other ones and wanting to improve their ranking.
I'm curious, when it comes to be a good person, what are you optimising for, then?