If you want to weight lives on the long view, shouldn’t you focus on the people who will most effectively shape the future into accordance with your values?
More or less, yes. Whether you’re donating money/time to individual people or causes/organizations isn’t necessarily relevant. Cryonics helps you to personally reap the benefits of a future where we already “won,” but I don’t think it actually helps achieve that future. (It helps shift cultural norms towards acceptance of cryonics and longevity if you are vocal about it, but I’m not convinced that this is more beneficial to the world than actually donating to life extension research).
It’s still a perfectly legitimate selfish choice (though I’m pledging to donate a percentage of my income to charity, I certainly still spend money on selfish things).
By “immediate good” I didn’t mean “save X lives today”, I meant more along the lines of “immediately help fund research which will enable us to develop the ability to save X*N lives tomorrow.” (Right now I’m thinking I might want to donate to a group that develops experimental education programs, with rigorous attempts to figure out what works and what doesn’t and how it can be replicated in different communities. Improving education seems like the ultimate “high level multiplicative action,” if it’s done effectively. I’m not sure such an organization exists.)
On the subject of organs, if you have a particular person who you think will do a lot of good who can live if and only if they receive an organ donation, I suppose that’s better than donating to some random person, but I don’t think that’s an event you can easily plan for.
If you want to weight lives on the long view, shouldn’t you focus on the people who will most effectively shape the future into accordance with your values?
More or less, yes. Whether you’re donating money/time to individual people or causes/organizations isn’t necessarily relevant. Cryonics helps you to personally reap the benefits of a future where we already “won,” but I don’t think it actually helps achieve that future. (It helps shift cultural norms towards acceptance of cryonics and longevity if you are vocal about it, but I’m not convinced that this is more beneficial to the world than actually donating to life extension research).
It’s still a perfectly legitimate selfish choice (though I’m pledging to donate a percentage of my income to charity, I certainly still spend money on selfish things).
By “immediate good” I didn’t mean “save X lives today”, I meant more along the lines of “immediately help fund research which will enable us to develop the ability to save X*N lives tomorrow.” (Right now I’m thinking I might want to donate to a group that develops experimental education programs, with rigorous attempts to figure out what works and what doesn’t and how it can be replicated in different communities. Improving education seems like the ultimate “high level multiplicative action,” if it’s done effectively. I’m not sure such an organization exists.)
On the subject of organs, if you have a particular person who you think will do a lot of good who can live if and only if they receive an organ donation, I suppose that’s better than donating to some random person, but I don’t think that’s an event you can easily plan for.