Indeed. It occurred to me driving home last night that we all want approval and people to value us, but we very rarely do the sorts of things that people really appreciate. Helping someone with something they really want help with, that's about the best thing you can do. Not just doing it for them, but helping. We seem to be trending towards never helping other people, for some reason.
Word. The older I get, the clearer it has become that the greatest amount of meaning is found when I'm doing things that directly help the people I care about. Doc's meditation on moving day is a case in point (and that's the kind of thing where, when necessary, I can generally be relied on ... although my friends tend to be of the 'single guy in a one bedroom apartment' variety rather than the 'dad with 3 kids in a 2-story house' variety so moving isn't terribly onerous, but still).
A week ago a close friend of mine drunk-called me at 3 AM in her timezone, and told me how I'd made a deep, positive impression in the lives of mutual friends, just by being a human being with them. In at least one case I know she's right - I did what I could to help a close friend get out of a depressive funk, building up his confidence and such, and he turned his life around completely. It took her telling me this for it to really sink in though, which it did like a punch to the gut, in a good way. Ultimately, that's what matters most, maybe the only thing that does matter: making real bonds with others, and using those bonds to make their lives better in whatever ways, large or small, that we can.
Being under de facto house arrest for several months followed by another two years of work from home has been clarifying in that respect, too. There's no replacement for physical interaction.
Brutal and nasty. I can't claim to have been in survival mode myself - of anything, with the exception of chosen hardships like dropping 50 lbs and weight training, I've been too comfortable these last few years. But it's been more in the lines of existing than really living, and ennui is a hell all of its own.
I delved a bit into the Effective Altruism movement lately to know what this is all about (seems to be all the rage in certain quarters and gets lots of support from high places, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel apparently), and what I found is a total, monstrous cringe-fest: unhinged utilitarianism that argues the exact opposite of what you are describing here. They literally say that global problems are more important than local ones, because they are more "effective" in maximzing well-being and reducing suffering. Spending tons of time and money to prevent "extinction events", to them, takes precedence over the simple, good actions in everyday life that not only give meaning, but help you grow a soul. Such as helping your friends move!
I was pretty sure I'd heard of EA before, but had to check. And yep, connected to the LessWrong singularity folks. Isn't terribly surprising that that group of autists would utterly fail to grok the spiritual dimension of altruistic behavior, and misinterpret it according to their arid inner lives. Same people that think consciousness is just number crunching.
Indeed. I can see some margins where the Effective Altruism movement is a good thing. Most philanthropy seems to be entirely indifferent to whether or not the time and money donated actually helps, or even avoids hurting, the intended beneficiaries. The number of cases where "helping people" makes them worse off is disturbingly large, and most of the time non-profit and government philanthropy seems to be just waste. So measuring to find out what actually helps and what doesn't so that people can focus more on what helps makes a lot of sense.
What I think the EA movement, and utilitarians in general, get wrong primarily is they don't consider the effectiveness of their inputs at a distance their calculations, only the potential outcomes. For example, $1000 probably means a lot more to a struggling African farmer than a struggling American. I can believe that. The next question though is how do you find that farmer? How do you know the extra cash is exactly what he needs? Are you sure he isn't scamming you, or even just going to get robbed right after he receives the money? Do you know why he is struggling, really? Is he going to go right back to struggling once the money runs out? That is really hard to tell for some white collar Americans who might have visited Africa once, but sure as hell never worked on a farm or struggled.
Those problems are there when it comes to giving $1000 to the struggling American, too, but they are more solvable, less unknowable. Of course, one has to leave the office and actually meet people and learn about them to see if they can be helped. Hence the failures of government programs to actually end poverty. (That's a whole other kettle of fish, but it is worth noting that measured poverty hasn't budged in the US for something like 70 years.)
Anyway, long story short, I don't think helping people who live far away in an entirely different culture under an entirely different set of governments with entirely different needs and ways of life and entirely different life goals is as easy as EA people make it out to be. Considering our society is in a bit of a mess now it seems odd to try and go solve other people's problems for them.
Dickens was savage on this score back in the day. He called it telescopic philanthropy - the desire to performatively 'help' those in far away countries, while ignoring the suffering under one's nose. In practice it's just an excuse to make oneself look virtuous to one's peers without actually getting one's hands dirty by lowering oneself to interact with the poors. As you note, that dynamic is still very much in play today.
It's also a profound misunderstanding of what charity is and why it works. 'Love thy neighbor' should be taken quite literally. The purpose isn't to increase living standards or whatever, it's to form cross-class bonds that knit society together. If rich and poor know one another as human beings, society becomes an organic whole, and as a happy side benefit of it the poor are less likely to be desperately poor and the rich less likely to be miserable and insufferable.
Exactly. The earlier charity theorists were a lot better on this, probably because they had so many fewer resources available that they had to actually get good at it if they cared. The successful ones really focused on individuals and their needs with an eye towards correcting behaviors that were keeping them down.
Your second paragraph gets down to the root question in my dissertation, about why it is that everyone likes and approves of charity but everyone is unhappy with the welfare state. Short version is that it splits apart the human bonds and virtue, on both sides of the transfer, and thus bleeds all the moral virtue out of the process (save for what little the politicians and administrators can misappropriate for themselves). I ought to get around to publishing that properly one of these days.
Yeah, all good points. The crucial thing is that you need to be connected to the people you are trying to "help", as you said, know them, judge their character, figure out what they really need etc. But there are even deeper issues: suffering is crucial for moral development, which alone gives life meaning. So the basic assumption that to "minimize suffering" should be the primary goal is not valid. Same for well-being: even Mill saw that there are higher and lower forms of pleasure. Plus, you cannot scale up from local experiences in your community.
Then there is the problem of the hieararchy of values: it is by no means clear that "saving lives" for example represents a better utilitarian pay-off than, say, donating to a local charity focussing on art where you know and respect the curator. I won't even mention your local church, which the EA people probably don't even have on their radar.
Which is another thing with them: philosophical and historical illiteracy, which means they bring a TON of unconscious assumptions and presuppositions to the table. What happens is that they just spout out their preconceived and ill-conceived opinions and preferences, and then justify and rationalize those using fancy metrics.
BTW, some of my fondest memories are about helping people move (and getting help myself). Including near-death-by-washing-machine, injured knees, bleeding all over the freshly-painted walls, anger about guys leaving early while I was left doing all the work, glorious after-work beers and barbecues... These are the things!
EA seems to make the same error as any overly abstracted system: it attempts to substitute the general for the specific, and thereby loses all sense of depth, without which effective action becomes impossible.
Re: moving. My favorite story was attempting to get a friend's bed out of his room. We failed entirely, and we've been joking ever since: how many physicists does it take to figure out the correct series of rotations to remove an object from a room into which it had obviously been inserted? Answer: more than we had available, clearly. We suspect the bed may have been a spin 1/2 particle.
Other than the after-work beer and barbecue, name me one thing that ever tasted better in your life than the ice-cold Cokes or Gatorades you had while taking a break from moving your buddy from one non-air-conditioned apartment to another during the peak of summer.
I wonder if your point on suffering relates to why so much charitable giving is channeled through events, such as running a marathon, abstaining from drink, shaving your head etc? Everyone could give the money to the charity in exactly the same way without this but the suffering makes the process feel real and worthy in a way ?
PS some interesting discussion of EA on Astral codex ten recently which I suspect some people here have seen already.
That’s a good point. It probably does rub the same brain region that expects effort to make the fact you did something seem real. Tying effort to the donation makes it no more real, to outsiders, but to you it feels more relevant. The fact that it is usually not actual suffering, something that you would avoid anyway, probably helps. Hence why people volunteer to do the work themselves relatively less frequently.
I think EA attempts to solve the efficiency problem that many charitable non-profits exhibit--that of sinking donated funds into creating BS jobs for people who otherwise suck at capitalist endeavors, to the detriment of actually helping the "cause"--which is fine, but misses the larger reasons why person-to-person charity is so important, which you have done a great job of pointing out. I guess I would say EA has the right model, given its assumptions and goals, but I personally think some (not all) of EA's assumptions and goals are misguided.
Also, I must say that your comment above contains multitudes. It got me writing a long rambling reply about moral dyad theory, Seeing Like A State, moral hazard issues, small-L libertarianism, and all kinds of other nonsense, from which I have decided to spare you. All of which is to say, thanks for writing a really thought-provoking, thoroughly intellectual piece even though on first glance it had an "ah, shucks" simplicity to it.
p.s. I am no harsh critic of nerd culture, being somewhat of a low-performing nerd myself, but I must say there is something rotten in the state of Denmark when we nerds, through EA, take the enriching impact that charity can have on individual lives and community bonds and strip it down to a dreary monthly ACH transfer and an Amnesty International bumper sticker to show off our good deeds to the neighbors we will never talk to.
Thank you for the kind words :) I'd be interesting in reading your rant with only the minimum of editing. This topic really is interesting to me, and I really did write my dissertation on why modern philanthropy (whether state or large scale private) doesn't have the same emotional and social benefits as small scale, individual charity seems to. Maybe I will get Rollins to help me edit all... Christ, 150 pages of it and post it up these days. Maybe a few pages at a time.
I think you nailed the problem with nerd culture: while we don't lack the ability to empathize and sympathize* we tend not to pay attention to things we can't measure easily and strip everything down to the minimum of what we can. I think that often works out if we nerds are working on the issue over and over, able to get feedback directly in terms of what works and what doesn't. When there isn't the opportunity to see first hand the results with resultant feedback (or we don't feel like dealing with it) we defend the theories instead of testing to see if they work. I have seen that everywhere from effective philanthropy to wargaming forums.
One part of my unedited now-deleted diatribe touched on the feedback issue you just highlighted (which EA tries to fix on a grand level but can't see, and therefore ignores, at more granular levels). For example, if my neighbor needs $1000 for a new [whatever] and I think it would be charitable to get him a new one, that specific problem is solved if I do. I know it is solved because I watched him accept the new whatever machine and plug it in and it worked. If he comes up to me a day later and asks for the same $1000 for the same whatever machine, I know he doesn't need it, so I won't give it to him. I have effectively ended the Organization to Get Jim a Whatever Machine Cuz His Machine Broke because the problem was solved in exactly the way it needed to be solved. At higher levels of abstraction and organization (even with EA analysis and executrion), Huge Organization to Get Lots of Jims Lots of Whatever Machines will be a) less good at perfectly matching need with solution at the granular level; and b) more likely to keep accepting donations 1) long after the need for them has gone, without realizing the need has gone; or, more cynically, 2) despite the organization's methods of trying to solve the problem not actually solving the problem (due to fraud or bad incentives of recipients and/or Organization employees keeping the problem alive to keep their jobs relevant).
More granular feedback loops, accumulated thousands of times, can often yield a better overall outcome than a few all-inclusive feedback structures that miss out on a lot of imporant small-scale feedback. In this way, EA can be less efficient than it appears by gaming the metrics. It's somewhat similar to the effects described in James Scott's Seeing Like A State, where top-down programs miss key variables that the composite local knowledge accounts for in an I, Pencil-sort of way. And this only hits at the efficiency issues. The loss of individual and society-wide benefits that person-to-person charity can provide are another thing altogether.
Nailed it. Add in the fact that the beneficiaries never know who helped them, and vice versa, and so there is no opportunity for reciprocation and mutual aid, no reasonable target for appreciation and approbation... all the little stuff people don't think about but really matter to humans.
I wish Seeing Like a State was published (or at least on my radar) when I was writing my dissertation, although I was focusing more on the moral and emotional aspects than the actual effectiveness of programs.
I will have to think of how I can break it down into chunks and post it here. I always feel badly if I don't post during a week, and it would make for a convenient on going series to plop out as needed :D
"Add in the fact that the beneficiaries never know who helped them, and vice versa, and so there is no opportunity for reciprocation and mutual aid, no reasonable target for appreciation and approbation... all the little stuff people don't think about but really matter to humans."
Yep. And we haven't even gotten into the personal agency and responsibility issues that could be brought up.
There is also the distinction between a "cause" and a "program". Making a program more efficient can obviously be useful, but this is merely a bureaucratic management problem like any other. Choosing the right cause is a different thing altogether. I think what happens with real charitable work is that people are "called" to doing it, it's part of their destiny - often involving their own suffering, which they overcome, which then propels them to help others who go through a similar problem.
I promise I have a draft response going. If you're comfortable with email sharing, you can go ahead and email me at my subscriber email and I'll send you what I have. I'm not really a trained academic so laying out my entire philosophy in a way that hits all of your points seems like an impossible task. But I'm happy to send what I have and interact with you about it. I would just feel bad cluttering up your comments sections with loads of heavily caveated nonsensical miscellany that probably mostly is unrelated to your original post. Happy to use the comments section though if you want.
Indeed. It occurred to me driving home last night that we all want approval and people to value us, but we very rarely do the sorts of things that people really appreciate. Helping someone with something they really want help with, that's about the best thing you can do. Not just doing it for them, but helping. We seem to be trending towards never helping other people, for some reason.
It is nice to see how we seem to find each other :D
Doc has been writing and hammering left-handed all this time. Wait until he reveals he's actually right-handed...
Wait till I reveal what I was doing with my right hand during that time...
I'm going to take this in a PG direction and guess origami.
Data collection... the answer was data collection. ;P
Word. The older I get, the clearer it has become that the greatest amount of meaning is found when I'm doing things that directly help the people I care about. Doc's meditation on moving day is a case in point (and that's the kind of thing where, when necessary, I can generally be relied on ... although my friends tend to be of the 'single guy in a one bedroom apartment' variety rather than the 'dad with 3 kids in a 2-story house' variety so moving isn't terribly onerous, but still).
A week ago a close friend of mine drunk-called me at 3 AM in her timezone, and told me how I'd made a deep, positive impression in the lives of mutual friends, just by being a human being with them. In at least one case I know she's right - I did what I could to help a close friend get out of a depressive funk, building up his confidence and such, and he turned his life around completely. It took her telling me this for it to really sink in though, which it did like a punch to the gut, in a good way. Ultimately, that's what matters most, maybe the only thing that does matter: making real bonds with others, and using those bonds to make their lives better in whatever ways, large or small, that we can.
Being under de facto house arrest for several months followed by another two years of work from home has been clarifying in that respect, too. There's no replacement for physical interaction.
Brutal and nasty. I can't claim to have been in survival mode myself - of anything, with the exception of chosen hardships like dropping 50 lbs and weight training, I've been too comfortable these last few years. But it's been more in the lines of existing than really living, and ennui is a hell all of its own.
I feel I should point out, I am not planning on moving for another 10 months or so. This isn't a thinly veiled attempt to guilt people into helping :)
So well said.
I delved a bit into the Effective Altruism movement lately to know what this is all about (seems to be all the rage in certain quarters and gets lots of support from high places, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel apparently), and what I found is a total, monstrous cringe-fest: unhinged utilitarianism that argues the exact opposite of what you are describing here. They literally say that global problems are more important than local ones, because they are more "effective" in maximzing well-being and reducing suffering. Spending tons of time and money to prevent "extinction events", to them, takes precedence over the simple, good actions in everyday life that not only give meaning, but help you grow a soul. Such as helping your friends move!
I was pretty sure I'd heard of EA before, but had to check. And yep, connected to the LessWrong singularity folks. Isn't terribly surprising that that group of autists would utterly fail to grok the spiritual dimension of altruistic behavior, and misinterpret it according to their arid inner lives. Same people that think consciousness is just number crunching.
Indeed. I can see some margins where the Effective Altruism movement is a good thing. Most philanthropy seems to be entirely indifferent to whether or not the time and money donated actually helps, or even avoids hurting, the intended beneficiaries. The number of cases where "helping people" makes them worse off is disturbingly large, and most of the time non-profit and government philanthropy seems to be just waste. So measuring to find out what actually helps and what doesn't so that people can focus more on what helps makes a lot of sense.
What I think the EA movement, and utilitarians in general, get wrong primarily is they don't consider the effectiveness of their inputs at a distance their calculations, only the potential outcomes. For example, $1000 probably means a lot more to a struggling African farmer than a struggling American. I can believe that. The next question though is how do you find that farmer? How do you know the extra cash is exactly what he needs? Are you sure he isn't scamming you, or even just going to get robbed right after he receives the money? Do you know why he is struggling, really? Is he going to go right back to struggling once the money runs out? That is really hard to tell for some white collar Americans who might have visited Africa once, but sure as hell never worked on a farm or struggled.
Those problems are there when it comes to giving $1000 to the struggling American, too, but they are more solvable, less unknowable. Of course, one has to leave the office and actually meet people and learn about them to see if they can be helped. Hence the failures of government programs to actually end poverty. (That's a whole other kettle of fish, but it is worth noting that measured poverty hasn't budged in the US for something like 70 years.)
Anyway, long story short, I don't think helping people who live far away in an entirely different culture under an entirely different set of governments with entirely different needs and ways of life and entirely different life goals is as easy as EA people make it out to be. Considering our society is in a bit of a mess now it seems odd to try and go solve other people's problems for them.
Dickens was savage on this score back in the day. He called it telescopic philanthropy - the desire to performatively 'help' those in far away countries, while ignoring the suffering under one's nose. In practice it's just an excuse to make oneself look virtuous to one's peers without actually getting one's hands dirty by lowering oneself to interact with the poors. As you note, that dynamic is still very much in play today.
It's also a profound misunderstanding of what charity is and why it works. 'Love thy neighbor' should be taken quite literally. The purpose isn't to increase living standards or whatever, it's to form cross-class bonds that knit society together. If rich and poor know one another as human beings, society becomes an organic whole, and as a happy side benefit of it the poor are less likely to be desperately poor and the rich less likely to be miserable and insufferable.
Exactly. The earlier charity theorists were a lot better on this, probably because they had so many fewer resources available that they had to actually get good at it if they cared. The successful ones really focused on individuals and their needs with an eye towards correcting behaviors that were keeping them down.
Your second paragraph gets down to the root question in my dissertation, about why it is that everyone likes and approves of charity but everyone is unhappy with the welfare state. Short version is that it splits apart the human bonds and virtue, on both sides of the transfer, and thus bleeds all the moral virtue out of the process (save for what little the politicians and administrators can misappropriate for themselves). I ought to get around to publishing that properly one of these days.
Yeah, all good points. The crucial thing is that you need to be connected to the people you are trying to "help", as you said, know them, judge their character, figure out what they really need etc. But there are even deeper issues: suffering is crucial for moral development, which alone gives life meaning. So the basic assumption that to "minimize suffering" should be the primary goal is not valid. Same for well-being: even Mill saw that there are higher and lower forms of pleasure. Plus, you cannot scale up from local experiences in your community.
Then there is the problem of the hieararchy of values: it is by no means clear that "saving lives" for example represents a better utilitarian pay-off than, say, donating to a local charity focussing on art where you know and respect the curator. I won't even mention your local church, which the EA people probably don't even have on their radar.
Which is another thing with them: philosophical and historical illiteracy, which means they bring a TON of unconscious assumptions and presuppositions to the table. What happens is that they just spout out their preconceived and ill-conceived opinions and preferences, and then justify and rationalize those using fancy metrics.
BTW, some of my fondest memories are about helping people move (and getting help myself). Including near-death-by-washing-machine, injured knees, bleeding all over the freshly-painted walls, anger about guys leaving early while I was left doing all the work, glorious after-work beers and barbecues... These are the things!
EA seems to make the same error as any overly abstracted system: it attempts to substitute the general for the specific, and thereby loses all sense of depth, without which effective action becomes impossible.
Re: moving. My favorite story was attempting to get a friend's bed out of his room. We failed entirely, and we've been joking ever since: how many physicists does it take to figure out the correct series of rotations to remove an object from a room into which it had obviously been inserted? Answer: more than we had available, clearly. We suspect the bed may have been a spin 1/2 particle.
Right? You would swear furniture could grow or at least breed in place the way it can get into a space it apparently can't exit.
Other than the after-work beer and barbecue, name me one thing that ever tasted better in your life than the ice-cold Cokes or Gatorades you had while taking a break from moving your buddy from one non-air-conditioned apartment to another during the peak of summer.
I wonder if your point on suffering relates to why so much charitable giving is channeled through events, such as running a marathon, abstaining from drink, shaving your head etc? Everyone could give the money to the charity in exactly the same way without this but the suffering makes the process feel real and worthy in a way ?
PS some interesting discussion of EA on Astral codex ten recently which I suspect some people here have seen already.
That’s a good point. It probably does rub the same brain region that expects effort to make the fact you did something seem real. Tying effort to the donation makes it no more real, to outsiders, but to you it feels more relevant. The fact that it is usually not actual suffering, something that you would avoid anyway, probably helps. Hence why people volunteer to do the work themselves relatively less frequently.
I think EA attempts to solve the efficiency problem that many charitable non-profits exhibit--that of sinking donated funds into creating BS jobs for people who otherwise suck at capitalist endeavors, to the detriment of actually helping the "cause"--which is fine, but misses the larger reasons why person-to-person charity is so important, which you have done a great job of pointing out. I guess I would say EA has the right model, given its assumptions and goals, but I personally think some (not all) of EA's assumptions and goals are misguided.
Also, I must say that your comment above contains multitudes. It got me writing a long rambling reply about moral dyad theory, Seeing Like A State, moral hazard issues, small-L libertarianism, and all kinds of other nonsense, from which I have decided to spare you. All of which is to say, thanks for writing a really thought-provoking, thoroughly intellectual piece even though on first glance it had an "ah, shucks" simplicity to it.
p.s. I am no harsh critic of nerd culture, being somewhat of a low-performing nerd myself, but I must say there is something rotten in the state of Denmark when we nerds, through EA, take the enriching impact that charity can have on individual lives and community bonds and strip it down to a dreary monthly ACH transfer and an Amnesty International bumper sticker to show off our good deeds to the neighbors we will never talk to.
Thank you for the kind words :) I'd be interesting in reading your rant with only the minimum of editing. This topic really is interesting to me, and I really did write my dissertation on why modern philanthropy (whether state or large scale private) doesn't have the same emotional and social benefits as small scale, individual charity seems to. Maybe I will get Rollins to help me edit all... Christ, 150 pages of it and post it up these days. Maybe a few pages at a time.
I think you nailed the problem with nerd culture: while we don't lack the ability to empathize and sympathize* we tend not to pay attention to things we can't measure easily and strip everything down to the minimum of what we can. I think that often works out if we nerds are working on the issue over and over, able to get feedback directly in terms of what works and what doesn't. When there isn't the opportunity to see first hand the results with resultant feedback (or we don't feel like dealing with it) we defend the theories instead of testing to see if they work. I have seen that everywhere from effective philanthropy to wargaming forums.
*I miss when those were the same word.
I would be interested to read that dissertation.
One part of my unedited now-deleted diatribe touched on the feedback issue you just highlighted (which EA tries to fix on a grand level but can't see, and therefore ignores, at more granular levels). For example, if my neighbor needs $1000 for a new [whatever] and I think it would be charitable to get him a new one, that specific problem is solved if I do. I know it is solved because I watched him accept the new whatever machine and plug it in and it worked. If he comes up to me a day later and asks for the same $1000 for the same whatever machine, I know he doesn't need it, so I won't give it to him. I have effectively ended the Organization to Get Jim a Whatever Machine Cuz His Machine Broke because the problem was solved in exactly the way it needed to be solved. At higher levels of abstraction and organization (even with EA analysis and executrion), Huge Organization to Get Lots of Jims Lots of Whatever Machines will be a) less good at perfectly matching need with solution at the granular level; and b) more likely to keep accepting donations 1) long after the need for them has gone, without realizing the need has gone; or, more cynically, 2) despite the organization's methods of trying to solve the problem not actually solving the problem (due to fraud or bad incentives of recipients and/or Organization employees keeping the problem alive to keep their jobs relevant).
More granular feedback loops, accumulated thousands of times, can often yield a better overall outcome than a few all-inclusive feedback structures that miss out on a lot of imporant small-scale feedback. In this way, EA can be less efficient than it appears by gaming the metrics. It's somewhat similar to the effects described in James Scott's Seeing Like A State, where top-down programs miss key variables that the composite local knowledge accounts for in an I, Pencil-sort of way. And this only hits at the efficiency issues. The loss of individual and society-wide benefits that person-to-person charity can provide are another thing altogether.
Nailed it. Add in the fact that the beneficiaries never know who helped them, and vice versa, and so there is no opportunity for reciprocation and mutual aid, no reasonable target for appreciation and approbation... all the little stuff people don't think about but really matter to humans.
I wish Seeing Like a State was published (or at least on my radar) when I was writing my dissertation, although I was focusing more on the moral and emotional aspects than the actual effectiveness of programs.
I will have to think of how I can break it down into chunks and post it here. I always feel badly if I don't post during a week, and it would make for a convenient on going series to plop out as needed :D
"Add in the fact that the beneficiaries never know who helped them, and vice versa, and so there is no opportunity for reciprocation and mutual aid, no reasonable target for appreciation and approbation... all the little stuff people don't think about but really matter to humans."
Yep. And we haven't even gotten into the personal agency and responsibility issues that could be brought up.
There is also the distinction between a "cause" and a "program". Making a program more efficient can obviously be useful, but this is merely a bureaucratic management problem like any other. Choosing the right cause is a different thing altogether. I think what happens with real charitable work is that people are "called" to doing it, it's part of their destiny - often involving their own suffering, which they overcome, which then propels them to help others who go through a similar problem.
Amen 👍
Dropping this here because I think it's relevant: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/desiderata-8-links-and-commentary (see no. 10 of 13)
Cool, thanks!
Now you owe me a comment on another post, preferably one that doesn't focus on immigration :D
Yes, I do. But, as usual, I'm behind on a few things.*
*Where "a few things" means "literally everything."
I promise I have a draft response going. If you're comfortable with email sharing, you can go ahead and email me at my subscriber email and I'll send you what I have. I'm not really a trained academic so laying out my entire philosophy in a way that hits all of your points seems like an impossible task. But I'm happy to send what I have and interact with you about it. I would just feel bad cluttering up your comments sections with loads of heavily caveated nonsensical miscellany that probably mostly is unrelated to your original post. Happy to use the comments section though if you want.
Is it c****heggi? Substack doesn't tie subscriber emails to comments so far as I can tell (which might be very wrong).
Also, feel free to dump your thoughts in the comments of the post!
I can neither confirm nor deny.