Fake Charity Nerd Girl (#ursae don't look)

There is an argument commonly known as the Drowning Child Argument, which goes something as follows: Imagine that you’re walking across a shallow pond and you notice that a small child has fallen in, and is in danger of drowning…Of course, you think you must rush in to save the child. Then you remember that you’re wearing your favorite, quite expensive, pair of shoes and they’ll get ruined if you…

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It is kind of annoying for the drowning child thought experiment that most people don’t have $3500 shoes. (I sometimes ask people to imagine they’re going to ruin their most expensive suit, or dress–for a lot of people this is pretty expensive.) But I feel like the important function of the thought experiment is

establish that people have an intuition that it is obligatory to save the life of a person dying in front of you, even at nontrivial cost to yourself
ask why that intuition doesn’t extend to cases where the person is somewhere else and you can’t actually see them

Why do most people who say “yes you should save the child” not donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities? If it turns out most people don’t actually think it’s obligatory to save the drowning child when you specify that it is a person of their income, wearing $3500 shoes for some reason, then that seems like an important flaw in the thought experiment. But I would guess the reason for most people is that kids saved by AMF are far away and don’t really seem real compared to the kid right in front of you.

Weirdly, “spend a month of every year going on quests to save children” sounds way more demanding and daunting to me than “give 10% of your income.”

#ursae don't look #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

People talk about EA being this all-consuming thing sometimes, but for me it doesn’t really feel that way. Right now I’m earning to give, and so the main thing I need to do for EA is go to work every day and work hard, which is what I would want to do anyway. For the most part I don’t get paid any more money for working more hours. I guess there are things I maybe should be spending time on, like EA community-building and thinking about cause prioritization, but for the most part I think the official EA take on what I should be doing in my free time is “idk, maximize your personal happiness?”

And like, there’s something scary about that? Sometimes on a weekend afternoon I’ll find myself switching from activity to activity, opening and closing a book, starting and stopping a TV show, because the only point of anything right now is to maximize my happiness, and if I’m not really enjoying myself then why am I doing this? I find myself imposing structures, deciding “I will go to Mass every Sunday,” even though I don’t quite know what the point of that is either. And then I go, even though I’m tired and I want to sleep in and I don’t exactly enjoy it, because that seems better somehow than sleeping in and drinking tea in bed and watching Outlander.

I’ve been fantasizing more about having kids lately, and probably part of that is normal biological clock stuff, but I think part of it is that once I have kids, I won’t be trying to be happy anymore, I’ll be trying to make my kids happy. And that seems like a more fulfilling thing to live by.

When I was a kid, I always thought my mom’s life seemed kind of terrible. After a week of school, all I wanted was to do was play with Barbies and read books and dress up in costumes and generally have fun. Whereas my mom didn’t seem to have fun on weekends, really: when she wasn’t taking us to lessons and activities and playdates, she was cleaning the house or gardening or dropping off the dry cleaning. Even her fun was work: she’d invite friends over for dinner, but that meant hours of grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning up. Now I see it differently; she has a very firm conception of what a good life looks like for her family, and she works to achieve it. And that seems really appealing.

#ursae don't look #scrupulosity cw #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

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