For about a billion people in the world, $300 a year (or $500, as it sounds the numbers probably really are) would double their income, very probably increasing their quality of life dramatically. I’d rather give my money to them.
juliawise
Or Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins: “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.”
This assumes that people care what their friends think about their doings on the internet. I don’t need to use anything as an excuse for coming to this site, because none of my friends (male or female) are likely to know.
Your solution would apply more to being the only girl going to chess club in high school, and I don’t know any girls who avoided that because they were afraid of ostracization from other girls. For me, it was because I was afraid of looking stupid in front of boys when I inevitably lost. To me, that’s the most threatening part of entering an all-male or mostly-male space: the fear (whether founded or not) that my mistakes will be chalked up to my femaleness.
Although it eventually occurred to me that the gendered nature of the image was unwelcoming, it didn’t immediately put me off. But that may just be a fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites (an irrational and sexist bunch if ever there was one).
I vote against “Becoming Bayesian”, as it won’t make any sense to most people coming here for the first time. I’m still not clear on why the whole Bayes thing is so much greater than any of the other ideas on this site. For anyone to whom arithmetic doesn’t come easily, any of the explanations of Bayes’ Theorem are difficult to get through.
Possibly the people who give the most, albeit to relatives, are immigrants from less developed to more developed countries. Even though for many it means lowering their standards of living in the US (or wherever), they know the remittance they send is sending their younger sister to school, buying a new roof for the family house in Bolivia, etc.
In the US, the lowest income bracket gives a larger percent of their income than any other bracket. I haven’t seen numbers on whether this includes people on the brink of not having their basic needs met, but I bet a lot of them have been there at some point.
Most people don’t currently donate all their disposable income to charity.
I do. I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his, so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
People on cryonics may not feel the need to spend millions on costly end-of-life treatments
This would be good. But it would be good if people laid off the end-of-life spending even without cryonics.
Finally, ask yourself “If I was offered cryonics for free, would I sign up?”
Maybe. I only heard of the idea a week ago—still thinking.
Hello. I found LW from two directions: first, I’m serious about philanthropy, and saw references to LW on GiveWell. Second, my husband and I are reading aloud from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality each night.
I’m a grad student in social work. I find that social work has a lot in common with some of LW’s goals (mainly self-improvement). Given that LW is aimed at very high-functioning people, which most social work is not, it uses some different methods. But I suspect LW could benefit from some ideas from social work.
Hey, another social worker! Great!
numerical lives-saved estimate on the charities you’re donating to
The metric I care more about is more like quality-adjusted life years than lives saved. We’ve been giving to Oxfam because they seem to be doing good work on changing systems (e.g. agricultural policy) that keep people in miserable situations addition to more micro, and thus measurable, stuff (e.g. mosquito nets). The lack of measurement does bother us, and our last donation was to their evaluation and monitoring department. I do understand that restricted donations aren’t really restricted, but Oxfam indicated having donors give specifically to something as unpopular as evaluation does increase their willingness to increase its budget.
We may go with a more GiveWell-y choice next year.
Unless you have kids, in which case you should sign them up.
Only if I believe my (currently non-existing) children’s lives are more valuable than other lives. Otherwise, I should fund a cryonics scholarship for someone who definitely wants it. Assuming I even think cryonics is a good use of money, which I’m currently not sure about.
The ethics of allocating lots of resources to our own children instead of other people’s, and of making our own vs. adopting, is another thing I’m not sure about. If there are writings on LW about this topic, I haven’t found them.
My intro is a few above yours. I found this blog through my husband, who is a much more typical LWer (male, atheist, computer programmer, sci-fi fan).
I guess what attracts me to it is that most people I know write me off as unreasonable or cruel for trying to apply logic to situations where they go by convenience or custom. I would continue more or less doing this even if I never found a community of others, but it is comforting to see a community out there. The main turn-off for me is that most of what I’ve read here doesn’t apply to my life in a useful way (as far as I can tell).
3e sounds a lot like narrative therapy. If you’re interested in that method, reading more about narrative therapy could help.
More evidence that social work and LW have many similar aims, and methods that can be used for both.
Charities sometimes favor the work they believe to be popular with donors over the work they believe would be more useful. Specifically, I’m thinking of monitoring and evaluation. By designating money for unpopular but useful tasks, you encourage them to better fund it. Before doing this, I would talk to the organizations you’re considering funding and find out what unsexy projects they would like to fund more. Then decide if you think they’re worth funding.
I’m familiar with it. Thanks for checking!
I think it depends on whether you think another 60 or 20 (or whatever) years of dissatisfying existence is better than dying now with a 95% (or whatever your estimate is) of never being revivified.
My childhood copy has some stories marked with “TOO GORY” in my dad’s handwriting. I’m not clear on what messages I learned from Grimm—one could get anything from “women are prizes to be awarded to heroes” to “be kind to old people” to “trickery gets you what you want.”
I’m remembering a passage in Childcraft about eating soup made of negative numbers that made you hungrier.
Who is “us”? How should one let you know?
LWers would not be the only ones to try this tactic, though. There’s a whole movement based on producing more evangelical Christians.
Another tactic, better at changing ratios, would be to adopt existing children. This could propagate rationalists’ memes, though not genes, and it’s unpredictable how much those two things impact whether your children come out like you want (e.g. rationalist, or evangelical). And it assumes you want more rationalists compared to others, as opposed to just more rationalists, period.
Thank you.
I can’t speak for others, but I was in category d).