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by jancsika
1305 days ago
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> 1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job. It isn't obvious, and I'm skeptical both by cases like this and by the lack of domain expertise of a white-collar worker to be able to judge the veracity of charitable activities. I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there. If there are too few domain experts or even too weak a web of trust to connect them to white collar donors, what you describe doesn't sound like an effective strategy. (Not to mention whatever it is that causes you to think that the approach is obviously superior to drilling down in some domain.) |
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I don't get what you're arguing here. The white collar worker lacks the expertise to "judge the veracity of charitable activities" therefore we should...
* fly over to africa so hey can dig a well and find out first hand whether it's actually doing good? Leaving aside the massive amounts of resources needed for this endeavor, there's no evidence that the same unqualified white collar worker would be qualified to judge what's happening on the ground
* not practice effective altruism, and donate to whichever feels the cutest and/or is in vogue?
* when we're 18, choose a random field and hope 18 year old self is qualified to figure out which field would do the most good?
>I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there.
I'm baffled as to why you think sending a team from virginia tech was the best course of action here. Google maps says that such a trip would take over 8 hours. Assuming the "team" had at least 2 people, then that's at least 32 man-hours for such an excursion. At median college graduate wages that translates to $880 in travel time alone. They couldn't have crowdsourced water collection and had it delivered via courier (maybe $20/package) to their campus?