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by giraffe_lady 973 days ago
> The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood?

Not quuiiite. Many other groups would accept that value, framed that way, maybe even a majority of people. What differentiates EA isn't their intention to improve livelihood, but their belief that it is possible to know how to do that.

And in fact other groups also have high confidence in their understanding of how to achieve this goal. It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.
1 comments
nyssos 973 days ago
> It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.

Ok, but that's not the competing option here. However good being a bodhisattva is, being a bodhisattva and saving someone from kidney failure is even better. And most people, of course, aren't going to become bodhisattvas at all: we're only choosing between being ordinary flawed people... and ordinary flawed people who also saved someone from kidney failure.

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giraffe_lady 973 days ago
Do all EAs donate kidneys? Or even at higher rates than other groups? Everyone thinks their religion makes them better at being good. EAs might be uniquely positioned to demonstrate it statistically, if it's true.
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Crimson_Wool 973 days ago
The number of people who altruistically donate kidneys per year in the USA is like 1-200, so the fact that Scott knows multiple EAs who did so (and that the kidney donor people are used to EAs) is pretty high-tier evidence that either there are a LOT more EAs than I thought, or they do it MUCH higher rates than the general population.
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scarmig 972 days ago
Scott alone donating would probably set the rate of altruistic kidney donation at a higher rate among EAs than the general population, at least for this year; there'd have to be around 2M EAs in the USA to match the baseline rate, while the real number is almost certainly significantly lower.
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