Diego Caleiro · 2015-05-17 · EA Forum
These points seem very dangerous to me:
Avoid images and videos unless you’re sure you can dissociate sufficiently. Academic prose is safer. Don’t visit the countries where you’re helping. There is great value in understanding the local conditions better to run better interventions, but the top charities and GiveWell are doing that already so you don’t have to. Related to that, try not to get to know anyone you might be helping. The decision to donate someplace and not someplace else may consign some to death so others (and hopefully more) can live. It helps to not know either to make better decisions.
As someone who's been on academia for 10 years, and intends to be for 10 more. It seems clear to me that academia fosters working on the wrong problems, and that academic prose, besides awfully written - see Pinker's Sense of Style on that - is unlikely to lead someone into fruitful EA behavior.
Not visiting countries sounds equally dangerous to me. People with first world problems, and in my experience, especially Americans who didn't have luck in their parent's school choice, have an incredibly distorted sense of what day to day life is in the world. I'm not particularly talking about the suffering from which you are trying to get people to dissociate, but particularly about the scarcity of money. In NY, SF, Sweden etc... I've seen people considering the prices of some things "reasonable" that are unfathomable in a small city in the Brazilian jungle, the Syrian desert or the Bolivian mountains. The important thing for EAs in this case of course is not to feel bad for buying a book or a Chai, but to understand how tremendously valuable their money and money acquiring capacity is.
Finally, not getting to know - at least a bit - who you are helping is a great way of being scammed, or, much worse, feeling paranoid of being scammed, or paralyzed into inaction by abstraction.
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