Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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This is not fun. But I need to discuss it.
This is a bit naive. But I think one of the underrated aspects of living in our times is that we get to see poverty being eradicated in real time. And there is a real chance that it might be a thing of the past by the time Im old.
Im at a place now where I can start making dents myself. As in donate to charities.
The weird part. I only feel the want for Asia and Latin America to improve. Even though the biggest improvements are to be had in Africa. When I think of Africa I just think that they are so far gone, there is really nothing to be done about it. And in part they also deserve it. Ive seen with my own eyes Asians of various flavors put their lives on the line just to make a living. Africans not so much. The ones Ive met have been on general much more prone to a life of free riding, crime and whatnot than their poor Asian counterparts who are working machines who make massive sacrifices for a better standing.
The dilemma is obviously the highest "ROI" of my charity money is to be had in Africa. But I dont want to help Africans.
Can you not post this kind of thing in the friday fun thread?
It would be fine in the general culture war thread.
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It's perfectly fine to value lives differently.
There can be vast swathes of populaces and their future descendants that could be a net-negative value to you and your descendants, current and future. It'd be foolish to subsidize such populaces, and/or to boost their fertility via your donations, only to cause more problems for future you and your descendants.
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Not entirely true. India is a lot poorer than people think.
India as a whole is already poorer than a bunch of African countries. But entire regions housing 400+ million people (Bihar & UP) have sub-saharan Africa level HDI.
On the bright side, the YOY improvement in UP and Bihar is astonishingly fast. But, 50% growth over a small base, is still a small number.
It's a real shame. Bihar has some of India's smartest, producing the highest math scores in the country, but the entire state has been run by gangsters for the last 50 years. You know Biharis love math when their biggest celebrity is a math teacher who finds geniuses and sends them to IITs. It's no surprise given that Bihar was home to India's Archimedes in Aryabhatta & inventor of proto-medicine in Shrushruta. The Biharis are notoriously hard working, cultured and scrappy (for better or for worse), but the region has been stuck in a 1000 year slump (post islamic invasions), which shows no signs of changing. UP was in the exact same situation for decades, but has been turning a new leaf with a much needed hard-ass leader in Yogi. (India's most popular state level leader, very much a Modi++)
Funding schools, education and manufacturing in UP and Bihar is the surest way to pull these regions out of poverty. Sadly, almost every NGO is in cahoots with the worst aspects of society. So you really need to know someone on the ground level to fund the right institutions.
Africa is an entire continent. You can simply start with funding the Africans you no issues with.
Wildlife conservationists are a good place to start. The East Africans, North Africans, West Africans & Southern Africans are geographically and culturally distinct. Pick your poison ?
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Yeah this is severely not fun. I really don't understand why you put this in this thread instead of the cw thread, it would fit in much better. There is nothing fun about this thread.
Spend your money any way you like, don't try to justify it. Personally I'm with @CertainlyWorse - spend it locally. Improve the lives of people in your area, especially if you are concerned about the efficacy of your charity - Africa, Asia, South America - you might as well be shooting your money directly at the moon for all the impact you'll see.
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There's a real understanding that you can only rescue the few. There seems to be a schocastic application of this in Western education systems where teachers try to pull out high potential kids out of the thunderdome. There is nothing wrong with spending your money where you think it will do the most good.
Personally, on an individual level I think I'm at the point of keeping an eye out for young boys and men stuck in a bad upbringing and trying to either mentor them or whatever. No one else is coming. Girls have enough heroes.
I don't care what race they are.. and gender really. But I give myself license to pick and choose.
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Psst, you want to eradicate poverty in Asia? I'm right here, PayPal open.
Jokes aside, I agree with you that in certain important ways, charitable spending on Africa is a waste. Call it pearls before swine, but it seems to me a great deal of the dysfunction in the place is for HBD reasons that are immune to milquetoast interventions like giving them money, education or slightly better infrastructure. We've been trying for like 50 to 60 years to get them up to speed.
Asia pulled itself up by its bootstraps from comparatively dire straits. Crushing poverty of the type where people die of starvation or have their potential ruined by nutritional deficiency is rare now. Sub-Saharan Africa it isn't.
You can no more improve their lot in life in the long term than you can give an orangutan a mansion and credit card and come back 5 years later expecting to the see the rise of the Organuschild Family. You have to solve the problem of them being orang in the first place, and nothing short of gene therapy or other forms of enhancement will help.
(In case anyone anyone accuses me of being more racist than I deem strictly necessary based on HBD metrics, given observable reality, the comparison to another ape is solely because that's about the only other clade of animal for which the metaphor works. It's more labored with crows, dolphins and pigs isn't it?)
At any rate, don't feel weird about it and don't let anyone shame you. Your values are your own, and anyone who hates people for doing something more than the already societally acceptable default of nothing is a retard.
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Object-level: Obviously, Effective Altruism's concept of effective charities is what you want here. The usual place to start is GiveWell, but all of their top charities work mostly in Africa. Individual EAs often donate to other specific causes though, and there are many smaller projects and charities catalogued in various places. There's GWWC, maybe the places open philanthropy gives grants to, maybe just browse posts on the EA forum. Some of them do most of their work in specific places, some of which are in Asia, so you'd just look around there.
I think, even from a universalist hedonist utilitarian perspective, the longtermist idea that something like AI safety research or governance work is more important than malaria nets is very compelling. Marginally preventing a few dozen unnecessary deaths vs playing a part in shaping the entire future. Or at least, it would be if AI safety research and governance work was net positive or doing anything important, which isn't obvious. But however you approach it, the issue of AI and future technology transforming everything does seem to eat every other ethical concern if you think enough about it. Holden Karnofsky, previously co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, recently stepped down to focus on AI and is now "Director of AI Strategy".
If someone things that whatever goal is so important that all tool are justified and ethical concerns are unimportant, then it will not go well
I despise such hand wringing on whether or not something as basic as cause prioritization is warranted. The question is whether its true, and everything follows downstream of that.
Do you deny the general principle that some things can be considered to be more important than others? If not, then your issue is with the object level arguments for why AI is the most pressing issue of our time. Anyone who doesn't see the blistering speed of progress and the obvious issues arising from us creating something smarter than us that we are not ~100% sure we can control is, to put it bluntly, not making full use of even their own human intelligence. I don't trust their judgment of what a superhuman one would do.
Otherwise it's going "Oh no, won't someone think of the clogged toilets!" when your ship is about to hit an iceberg. Humans have been trading off things for each other for as long as we've existed, and I don't want to waste both of our time by giving a billion examples of it being true.
cause prioritization is entirely fine, deciding that anything is justified to reach goal X is not
Who exactly says "anything" is justified? That's a strawman if I've seen one.
Even Yudkowsky claims that dropping bombs on data centers is justified, not that we should blow up the entire planet in advance or return to the stone age.
Serious problems justify serious solutions, that's the whole point.
maybe I misunderstood
or extrapolated it too far
Fair enough, but I'd like to reframe your concerns with a hypothetical example-
Imagine we spot an asteroid on some deep space scan that has a significant non-zero chance of hitting Earth within a decade and causing a mass extinction event. For anything but <1% odds, any intervention necessary should necessarily take precedence over everything else.
As for AI, plenty of people think the odds are much much worse, and the time scales shorter
My position is that some basic and minimal rules should be upheld, for several reasons.
many ethical positions are actually coordination rules: society with random murder, rape and looting is simply less efficient than one that manages to avoid such destructive tendencies (and while you can claim that some external looting may be efficient: it got less efficient over history, and for asteroid impact we would want global coordination anyway)
if scenario X gives unlimited power to powerful they will happily invent fake X scenario or exaggerate it, we should limit incentives to that
there are many ethical positions that I would not want abandon, even if someone credibly claims that it will would have good consequences (I do not care how much convincing sophistry would be applied is that slavery and rape should be legal, I am going to oppose it anyway even if superintelligent aliens would arrive and announce that it should be done)
scenario X may be based on serious mistake and not actually apply
For asteroid impact: I would accept 50% asteroid tax, I would not accept slavery and outlawing criticism of government.
In general I would not accept "any intervention necessary", as it often results in counterproductive interventions or utterly not needed evil. Though I have no big illusions about my potential influence. Or would be likely to be convinced to support stupid policies anyway, lockdowns initially seemed a good idea to me (not examined yet whether it made sense to start them or whether it was stupid/evil/based on pure panicking).
Note that we had several cases in history of (2)/(4) scenario happening
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The impression that people who spend a lot of time in dissident right circles (ie our corner of twitter), regardless of their own politics, have of Africa is indeed an unsalvageable shithole, The Camp of Saints, 7.5 tfr Nigeriens trapped between the desertification of the Sahara and ISIS, millions in desperate Libyan camps trying to make it to Europe with the belief they’ll be soccer stars, millions more in the Congo being raped and butchered by gangs fighting over diamond and rare earth metals mines, an orgy of violence and - even in comparatively peaceful parts of Africa - miserable, grinding, absolute poverty. Africa, Addio in other words.
And it is true, of course, that all those things exist to some extent in Africa. But it is also true that they provide, at best, an extremely incomplete picture. Since 2016 I’ve travelled regularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, everywhere from Nigeria to Namibia, from Sierra Leone to South Africa, from Zimbabwe to the DRC to Ethiopia. And the world I see, as someone in finance, is obviously as skewed as the world a UN volunteer in a refugee camp sees.
But I have to say, the progress in the last ten years alone has been incredible. Often it’s obscured on statistics because of the collapse of EM currencies since 2014 (and more generally since 2010), and because population growth, which is slowing down, has been so high. Sometimes the stats do show this, as in e.g. Rwanda. Kinshasa is a completely different city to the one it was a decade ago. So is Addis, which has hugely developed and is now often (airport aside) quite pleasant, with a neat monorail that’s mostly clean, some good public spaces, despite the fact that they’ve been fighting a civil for for a few years now. Both cities, by the way, are cleaner than Mumbai. The growth of the middle class in many of the places I work has been extraordinary, entire suburbs with air conditioned malls and movie theaters emerging wholesale from the earth, even in countries not blessed or cursed with great natural resources. Government is (slowly) getting more competent, things are moving beyond paper into digital, where they’re more easily tracked and the petty corruption that cripples all developing countries is slightly more easily detected. The living condition of the great majority of Africans, who do not live in war zones or even in grinding poverty (perhaps a third do, which obviously isn’t great, but it isn’t the majority), is improving.
Things are being built, sometimes to great (although underreported) success, some of which I have helped to fund. New hotels and restaurants and luxury apartment buildings line the main streets of nearly every major sub-Saharan capital, along with new parks and gardens, the emergence (at last) of actual public services, including street cleaners and so on. And there is, a few countries (like South Africa) excepted, an air of infectious, absolute optimism. Last time I was in Kinshasa our clients took us out to try interesting Chinese-African fusion food, we went to a warehouse gallery that could have been in LA, we even walked around which I’d never have done 5 years ago. Small things, of course, and limited to the country’s top 5% at most (and in any case, some will say, evidence of the American monoculture spreading far and wide), but still progress in some sense. Many Africans live lives that are now comparable to the ‘global middle’, including in large parts of Latin America, India, parts of the Middle East and so on.
Even if one accepts the DR position on various evopsych concepts, it is a fallacy to suggest this means there is some “maximum level of development” to which a people or nation can aspire. Does that mean charity is warranted? I wouldn’t say so, but then I think charity is never warranted beyond one’s immediate community, where judgment about impacts is easiest. But Africa is far from a lost cause, and I’m very optimistic about its future (although, of course, I have every incentive to be).
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