How to intro Effective Altruism
Hey,
So I am about to go be one of the camp leaders on a winter camp of a youth movement. I have been given the opportunity to plan a set of late evening activities for the older kids (targeted at the 13-16 year olds). The format of this will be 30 minute sessions over three nights where we split up the kids into groups of mixed ages (usually they’re in school-grade groups throughout the day).
I’m planning on making it lightly educational (since we’re running these for half an hour starting at 10pm), but want to make them all on the topic of effective altruism.
So does anyone have any suggestions about how I can introduce a group of teenagers to the idea of effective altruism in 1.5 hours spread across three evenings?
I’m not sure introducing them directly to effective altruism (in the form of giving to charities) is the best thing to do. Actually teaching some rationality may be more instrumental, or motivating them to think about big questions like future of humanity.
One thing you could try would be a giving game. You could divide your listeners into small groups and give them a few charities to choose from with a few bullet points of information for each of them. The charity that gets the most votes gets a previously agreed to ammount of money from whatever source.
Another thing would do to have them answer the questions of this quizz by 80,000 hours about which social programms actually work and which don’t.
Both of those activities show how you can’t really trust you intuition on these things and deeper investigation is important, nicely demonstrating one of the core ideas of Effective Altruism.
You also could explain and discuss the drowing child thought experiment, but how well this will work out likely strongly depends on the group you are talking to and how much they like discussing these kinds of question.
Btw, if you didn’t do so already i’d recommend you to ask this question in the Effective Altruism Facebook group or the Effective Altruism Group Organizers Facebook group.
Indeed; as a data point, the drowning child argument is one of the things that clarified my thinking about these things, and convinced me not to support EA.
To not support EA? I am confused. Doesn’t the drowning child experiment lend credence to supporting EA?
To not support EA, yes.
The point of my comment was to agree with Yannick_Muehlhaeuser about the fact that discussing the “drowning child” argument can have different effects on different people. (It’s a classic “one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens”, in fact.)
This old comment thread makes for useful reading on this topic.