[will-burner]

I'm surprised the article and non of the comments I've seen in this thread mention effective altruism, which in the framing of the article is an attempt to scale caring in some sense.

The article helped me realize why so many people in the startup/tech/software engineering scene are drawn to effective altruism, it's a way to scale helping humanity in the best way possible. The effective altruism argument is that it's more productive to by mosquito nets in Africa than to volunteer at a food shelter because buying mosquito nets will save more lives.

But this article helps explain why I don't personally feel drawn to or buy into effective altruism. Because caring doesn't scale, you can only really care about a handful of people close to you. And to me that altruism feels better and seems like it goes further than donating money to help more people that I can't truly care for.

[Koffiepoeder]

Well, this may not be the best example.

Mosquito nets are oft being used as fishing nets. Since 1) the loopholes of malaria nets are much smaller than manually knotted ones (thus also killing baby fish) and 2) the impregnation chemicals kill riverbottom insects (thereby disrupting the foodchain), this has lead to a massive killing of fish. Instead of fixing malaria, this has instead led to aggrevated hunger crises in some places.

[will-burner]

Lol this is a perfect encapsulation of the white savior problem. Thank you.

[int_19h]

I think most people's problem with "effective altruism" is rather that some of its more prominent adherents end up defining "helping humanity" in very weird and rather counter-intuitive ways. Like that whole argument that we basically should care more about future humans than present ones because there's a lot more future ones.

[will-burner]

I agree that's most people's problem, but it's now mine. I've tried to think about effective altruism from first principals. For me, I can rationally understand effective altruism and why it's attractive. I even believe people that follow it (and actually do good) may in some sense be "better" people than me. But it none the less rubs me the wrong way and I can't follow it, so I've tried to understand why.