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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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a few years ago when I was giving more to Against Malaria, it was certainly nice to be able to think about how this small amount of money would help to save real people's lives.

Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"

there are complex social politics that will go on in situations of you and the people you personally know. they may be offended that you think they're a charity case, they may not want to accept money cause it'd get weird, etc.

Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?

I don't mean this as a reflection on you personally - I don't know you, of course - but these two quotes seems related. A person far away actually might be more "real" than a person nearby, at least insofar as their "realness" is as a pure, innocent victim who can be redeemed through charity. The person nearby, after all, is probably smelly and dirty and unsightly and low status. He might be crazy, or addicted to something, or violent and destructive. He might be resistant to help, or prone to relapses, or have other human foibles which so frequently are both the cause and result of being down-and-out. Even if he's none of those things, he might disagree about politics, or listen to the wrong music, or otherwise bear cultural marks that one might cringe from being associated with. And so it's hard and often unpleasant to help those nearby! Meanwhile, you don't see any of those things about the person far away, or if you do it's likely covered up by cultural unfamiliarity. Feels a lot better to help that person, I'd bet.

EA wasn't always like this - insofar as it's an attempt to cut through grift and bloat in charity efforts, it's still quite useful! But your comment seems to encapsulate a version of EA that flattens the world into fungible QALYs and tries to Moneyball-optimize QALYs-per-dollar, with an affective bias against giving and working where one is. And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.

Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"

No, those are good activities, too, and I did some of them as well. But that doesn't say anything about my main point in that paragraph, which is bang for the buck. The price of my time is generally considerably high, so really, I was contributing potentially a lot more than just a few dollars when I was volunteering my time. And still, even when I would give time or money to those places, I doubt I was really saving lives, the way paying for malaria nets would be.

Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?

Because they don't know the person who's giving it, and also they probably understand how life and death things are. If my life were at stake, I'd take aid from anyone.

And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.

I mean, maybe. I personally mostly thought about it as the QALYs-per-dollar thing. I wanted to try to help in the most efficient way possible. Save the most people with as little money as possible. I just think that some far away places probably need that kind of help more than the northeastern US.

And still, even when I would give time or money to those places, I doubt I was really saving lives, the way paying for malaria nets would be.

Why? Were there not hungry people at the soup kitchen who would otherwise starve? Depressed and troubled kids who, absent mentoring or sports-socialization, would have spiralled downward?

I personally mostly thought about it as the QALYs-per-dollar thing. I wanted to try to help in the most efficient way possible. Save the most people with as little money as possible.

We just disagree on whether or not the flattening of locality in the efficiency calculation represents a loss or not, I guess.

Why? Were there not hungry people at the soup kitchen who would otherwise starve?

Truly, I don't think the people who were coming were THAT bad off. Orders of magnitude below me in income, yes, but I don't think I saw a single person who was dressed in rags, strung out, covered in filth, or completely crazy, over the course of years that I volunteered there. I'd guess that they were all very low income, but not destitute. They were well off enough that almost all of them were able to afford to get there in a car, or get there with a friend who was in a car.

Then there's the factor that if I wasn't helping at that location, it was a fact that there would be other people who would be instead. There are more people in my area who want to volunteer than there are spots to volunteer in such facilities.

Then there's the factor that if I wasn't helping at that location, it was a fact that there would be other people who would be instead. There are more people in my area who want to volunteer than there are spots to volunteer in such facilities.

That's good, and honestly a bit of a bubble-burster. I guess I'm too used to living in "communities" which really aren't worth the name.

Even in ultra atomized liberal Chicago people never starve for lack of options unless they're profoundly crippled and somehow not known about. Freeze to death in the winter for lack of shelter(and unwillingness to abide by the rules of shelter)? Sure, occasionally. But the absolute floor of those around many of us are incomparable to the floor in these other places where life is cheap in every sense.

Anecdotal, but this was my experience with a decent variety of in-person volunteering (food banks, soup kitchens, summer camps for troubled teens and for mentally disabled, habitat for humanity, special olympics, etc) in the cities I spent my high school through early career years (pops ranging from around ~.5 mil to 1 mil).

For basically all of those, there were either decently long waiting lists, make-work (i.e assigning multiple people to perform a task easily performed by just one) or both. Also similar impression of the people I was helping- I do not believe that was because those cities lacked the truly destitute or the profoundly handicapped, just that they weren't who I was dealing with as an uncredentialled volunteer.

Honestly my experiences with volunteering in my younger years have led me to focus on the near (friends, family, immediate co-workers, same-block neighbors) and the far (malaria nets, etc) for giving. The middle seems saturated.

Wouldn’t you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League

an affective bias against giving and working where one is

You seem to fundamentally not understand EA. In principle, it is not about hating your local community, it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you. Even if your mentoring was able to save that kid’s life, that kind of one-on-one volunteering is a highly inefficient use of your time compared with just earning a few extra bucks to buy malaria nets with.

You can spend several hours per week for years as a Big Brother to save one kid, or you could take that time to earn money, donate it towards malaria nets and save many times more (depending on your earning ability).

Now you can say you just don’t care at all about the lives of African kids, which is fair, that’s why I’m not a part of EA. But if you claim to value their lives at all it renders these time-intensive charity efforts like coaching sports highly inefficient

You seem to fundamentally not understand EA.

There are a lot of things which would call themselves EA, or otherwise claim to be affiliated with or influenced by the movement, but which act very differently.

In principle, it is not about hating your local community

I recognize this...and yet...

it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you.

...then this kind of thing rears its head. The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods. Either that's a basic oversight made at the ideology's creation, or it is, as I put it, an "affective bias" against locality.

The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods.

If EA becomes widespread enough for this to become a serious concern, the low-hanging fruit of malaria nets will have already been dealt with, and new cost/benefit analyses will need to be conducted to find new causes to contribute to. At that point, local volunteering may well become the most cost-effective option, at least for someone without very high earning potential.

EA focuses on what an individual can do, and right now, the marginal benefit of a single individual devoting their time to earning money for malaria nets is much greater than the marginal cost of a single individual not volunteering in the local community.

Of course, EA assumes that your primary goal is to help others. Maybe someone finds coaching local kids fun and does it as a hobby, but in that case helping others as much as possible is not their goal.

If EA becomes widespread enough for this to become a serious concern, the low-hanging fruit of malaria nets will have already been dealt with, and new cost/benefit analyses will need to be conducted to find new causes to contribute to. At that point, local volunteering may well become the most cost-effective option, at least for someone without very high earning potential.

This is already widespread, and a serious concern. EA (in its full philosophical flowering) is just the lazy, mechanistic morality that naturally grows from wealth without community, and a world where physical technology has far outstripped social technology.

Are people quitting their positions as volunteer coaches en masse to work more to donate to malaria prevention, to the point that the operation of children's sports clubs is seriously affected? If not, then it's not a serious concern.

Yes. (Seriously, people are disengaging from their surroundings and the people around them generally and substituting economic relationships for personal ones. The depersonalized, remote, fungible, monetary "malaria nets" thing is just the sugar-water Jellyby-ish virtue-substitute that was inevitably going to replace actually being a person among people)