Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…Why? In general, when people are thinking about charity, it’s mostly about feelings. I hate to use the word, but it’s a very artistic experience where people . . . It’s the warm glow. “What is it? Does this make me feel good? ” I think effective altruism is all about, let’s try to get some actual measures of how much good is being done and to raise the status of that. Rather than thinking of someone who asks, “How many lives is this going to save?” as being a Vulcan who doesn’t really care about people, to reframe that. No, he’s someone who cares a lot. That’s what you would do if you actually cared about people. I know that we talked about this. We blogged about it. I would just say, remember, most people have never heard of effective altruism, So it’s totally underrated relative to almost anyone else. If you were to go and look at the main philanthropic societies in the United States, how many of them have ever heard of effective altruism? It’s just some nerdy thing out in the Bay Area. The general idea of trying to go and spend money in a way that does the most good and using science in order to accomplish that seems great. The idea that this isn’t a generally good approach seems very odd to me. Of course, I do think that once you start thinking in this way, it also has all kinds of other good effects. It makes you realize there’s a bunch of things that people in politics are super concerned with that we should just never worry about again in a triage sense, that they’re just so small that we’ve already spent more mental energy than we ever should. There’s a bunch of other things hardly anyone worries about that we should think about a lot. Socrates, overrated or underrated?…

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