Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I have $92,000 in my Donor-Advised Fund. I haven't made a grant in 30 months, which means I have 6 months to make a grant or the fund will be liquidated and merged into some generic charity fund. I only need to donate $500, but I'm inclined to donate at least half the fund.
Who should I give to?
The first place I went to was GiveWell. Unfortunately, it would appear all their top charities are woke. For instance, here is what Helen Keller International had to say:
"We are overwhelmed with grief and concern over the killing of George Floyd—on the heels of the recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Racism has no place in America, or our world."
Should I just give these people my money anyway? My problem is that I think wokeness makes the world a worse place, so while I think it's probable that the organization does good by preventing blindness, they are also harming the world by propagating a quasi-religious framework which hinders human thriving.
Are there any charities that would meet GiveWell's criteria for effective donations that are non-woke (or ideally even anti-woke)?
If you have any pet causes, now would be a good time to post them. My chance of donating is fairly high in the next week or two. I've been feeling a bit Scroogish lately and would like to turn that around.
Let me describe some of my beliefs and the very tentative conclusion they've led me to, and you can decide how many of these beliefs you share and thus how seriously you should take my conclusion. I frame this as a description rather than an argument because I don't think I can capably advocate for any of these views, at least not succinctly the way someone with more talent could, and thus I must simply hope you already share them.
Suffering is bad, but, lacking a good word to describe this, [failure to reach potential / absence of joy] is far worse. The worst suffering is caused when a source of joy disappears. Some of the worst pain you can experience is losing a loved one or getting divorced, with physical pain a very distant runner-up. I'd rather have a child, experience a few years getting to know them, and then lose them, than never have them at all. Same with marriage etc. The worst position you can be in, I think, is to squander great potential and end up living a bare-minimum life without having tried hard to better your situation.
So, all else being equal, I think the life of a paraplegic with a good attitude is more valuable than the life of an able-bodied person with a bad attitude. Second-order effects and other caveats aside, I think it's pretty easy for anyone to squander all of their gifts, and I also think it's doable for someone with no gifts to live an extremely meaningful and joyful life pretty much unrelated to their material circumstances.
In the long run, I think culture beats charity. As Zero HP Lovecraft says:
I think this is true, but culture, and human belief, are in the end what determine human wellbeing along multiple dimensions. Optimistically: everything is downstream from culture in the sense that if you fix culture, literally everything else will be fixed in short order. Culture is downstream of everything else in the sense that there are actual actions you can take which will meaningfully affect culture.
Fund a woke charity, and you may save 3 bazillion lives, but you're also subsidizing the status and reach of some of the most woke people in the world. In the long run I think this may actually matter more--the poor people will survive, which is great, but they or their descendants will be forced to bend the knee to ideologies which will ultimately destroy them, spiritually if not physically.
So I think the best sorts of charities do one or more of the following:
I think #3 is probably the lowest-hanging fruit, and usually leads to #2, so that's where most money should go. Find someone who makes good art, but isn't crazy enough to pursue that rather than support their family. Pay for a year of their work and see what happens. Maybe if a few thousand people do this we'll get an excruciatingly beautiful work of art which we wouldn't have otherwise, valuable both in its own right and as a cultural cudgel against competing ideologies. I'm not sure what all of Lars Doucet's beliefs are, but he strikes me as a good writer, and were it not for his obligations to his family he would be producing art right now (at least if you count indie games as art). Instead he's working in real estate on something lucrative but ultimately meaningless. I'm sure there are plenty of people like him, both skilled and with their priorities straight, who could be unleashed by those of us with the same priorities but considerably less artistic talent.
I'm also interested in #1, but tbh I think capitalism is probably the best way to accomplish that, so if your talents lie in that direction it's probably better to create/fund a startup than to create some ridiculous scientific institution aimed at promoting conservative values.
That’s a strange way to value a life.
On the capitalist side, it’s hard to imagine funding some guy to not work a standard job is more efficient than funding a bunch of people to not be starved or blind or diseased. $50,000 is supposed to save, what, 10 to 15 lives?
Evaluating cultural impact is even weirder. The right side of the scale gets one man’s cultural output. The left, whatever cachet is gained by allocating an extra 0.012% to bed nets, scaled down by how much that reflects on distantly correlated progressive projects. These both feel like laughably small quantities.
Why is it that $50,000 can save 10 to 15 lives? That's such a laughably small amount of money. We abhor slavery in the States (as we should) but there are probably hundreds of millions of people whose temporal circumstances would be immediately and meaningfully improved if they became slaves. Not to advocate for that, I think a poor free life is much better than a slightly less poor enslaved one, but where did things go so wrong?
I have a very successful African friend. He came to America with the explicit goal of getting rich, returning to Africa, and lifting his countrymen out of poverty. He did get rich, he did return to Africa, he started an array of businesses designed to help the people more than to earn money, and corruption sank all of them. Employees, customers, and government officials all stole from his business. At one point he essentially had an entire company stolen and had to steal it back, which is when he gave up on the project entirely and returned to America.
$5000 apiece is a steal to save a human life, and anyone who donates is absolutely making a good decision, but more than saving those lives I want to fix whatever problem made those lives so cheap in the first place. The AMF does great work, but should be, and as far as I know is not, dwarfed by our efforts to fix the underlying system. From what I can tell the issue lies not in physical technology but in social technology--if they could build a more high-trust society most of their problems would evaporate instantly.
They don't do so because culture is nigh-impossible to change. We could help--we could, and have, forced better social technology upon them via colonies, which seems to have produced meaningful and lasting benefits to the affected countries. We have also given up on that due to culture.
Culture created Africa's problems, culture can fix its problems, and culture prevents us from fixing its problems. Organizations like the AMF do great work treating the disease but ultimately do very little to cure it.
"One man's cultural output" is on a power law distribution depending entirely on the man. I happen to believe that the sort of person I have in mind--one who is inclined to put their family above their personal artistic dreams--is 2-3 standard deviations better at art than those who will sacrifice everything for an artistic pursuit. Art benefits from real life experience, and so the most passionate artists (relative to their passion for more grounded things, not relative to a baseline of apathy) may paradoxically be the worst at actually creating good art. This is why I think a cultural patronage movement has a chance to succeed big and create at least one major artist, though on its face "pay someone for a year to write that novel they've always talked about" sounds like a terrible idea.
Maybe focus on fixing African culture, then, instead of US culture? (unless you also suggest opening immigration way up, which would help the people on its own)
My perspective is that all culture is incredibly flawed. Africa might look bad in comparison to America but we're all hives of scum and villainy compared to what we could be, so Africa is less of a low-hanging fruit than it appears to be at first glance. $5,000 is, again, an extremely low price to pay to save a life, and the fact that that need isn't completely and easily met by Americans reflects extremely poorly on us.
Also, I'm not African, and have a much better chance to (directly or indirectly) affect American culture than African.
Immigration is sort of related to what I was saying about colonialism, but with colonialism you don't cause nearly so much brain drain, one of many reasons to prefer it.
Nah... I don't think anybody has an obligation to help people who won't help themselves. There might be an obligation to teach a man to fish, but a positive obligation to give a man a fish just encourages helplessness.
I think we do have a positive obligation to help others, which when taken seriously also leads to considerations like encouraging self-sufficiency. There's no contradiction there. I don't think we should really ever let people die from easily preventable causes. Either we should step in and forcibly change their culture if it's that bad, or we should feed them if it's not that bad (and thus their issues are caused by external factors outside of their control).
It depends what you mean by "help". I know a woman who "helps" her stoner grandson by covering his rent and living costs, while dude does absolutely nothing with his life. I don't think she has any obligation to do that, and I think she's making thing worse, in fact.
Not strictly speaking, but these are forces pulling in opposite directions.
You do you, but I disagree, and again would argue that people have no obligation to help those that won't help themselves, no matter how preventable their causes are.
This has been deemed taboo by the powers that be, and until that taboo is abolished you have no right to wag your finger at people who won't shell out $5K to save the life of someone on the other side of the planet.
Nowadays this is only true on an individual level (talented people born into corrupt societies), or as an immediate result of a natural disaster.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, I was just addressing:
What I meant by that last part is that our culture prevents us from fixing its problems, though I suppose its culture does as well, to a lesser extent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link