Great. I didn’t read the book yet, but where I think we fail the most, is underestimating the investment into new technologies. It is often through new technologies that we can solve a problem at large, and often, to develop these new technologies may require much less than buying the existing technology solutions in bulk,… if we could be just a little more creative in our altruism. So, I would like to propose another term: Effectively Creative Altruism (ECA).
ECA would rely thinking how to solve a problem once and for all, and not in some isolated case. For example, an effectively creative thinker who is strongly upset about the harm that mosquitoes transmitting malaria do, would tend to come up with more general solutions, like genetically modified mosquitoes, that pass on deadly genes, and destroy them all.
An ECA thinker would, instead of seeing the simple numbers of how much investment saves how many lives according to current best statistics, would consider, what technology under development would save many more lives, if it received the little money it needs to get developed and scaled.
For example, how much do we need until we can mass-produce and introduce use the paper microscopes.
While a simple Effective Altruist relies on well-known statistics, an Effectively Creative Altruist would rely on as-of-yet unrejected hypotheses that follow from well-founded creative reasoning, and donating for such innovation, and that require that little bit of financial support and effort to verify.
My point is—we should not reject great ideas, because they have no statistical evidence yet.
Great. I didn’t read the book yet, but where I think we fail the most, is underestimating the investment into new technologies. It is often through new technologies that we can solve a problem at large, and often, to develop these new technologies may require much less than buying the existing technology solutions in bulk,… if we could be just a little more creative in our altruism. So, I would like to propose another term: Effectively Creative Altruism (ECA).
ECA would rely thinking how to solve a problem once and for all, and not in some isolated case. For example, an effectively creative thinker who is strongly upset about the harm that mosquitoes transmitting malaria do, would tend to come up with more general solutions, like genetically modified mosquitoes, that pass on deadly genes, and destroy them all.
An ECA thinker would, instead of seeing the simple numbers of how much investment saves how many lives according to current best statistics, would consider, what technology under development would save many more lives, if it received the little money it needs to get developed and scaled.
For example, how much do we need until we can mass-produce and introduce use the paper microscopes.
While a simple Effective Altruist relies on well-known statistics, an Effectively Creative Altruist would rely on as-of-yet unrejected hypotheses that follow from well-founded creative reasoning, and donating for such innovation, and that require that little bit of financial support and effort to verify.
My point is—we should not reject great ideas, because they have no statistical evidence yet.