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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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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.

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