Part 3: Reflections after attending the CEA Intro to EA Virtual Program in Summer 2023 – Chapter 3: Radical Empathy

By Andreas P @ 2023-10-13T17:40 (+3)

Welcome back! If you missed it, part 1 details some background on this post series, which in essence is a collection of my reflections after taking the CEA Intro to EA Virtual Program course this past summer. You can find additional previous parts here: part 2. This post is for Chapter 3: Radical Empathy in the EA Handbook.

My awesome facilitator during the EA virtual program course  (and the first person I've ever exchanged EA thoughts with) was kind enough to edit and help me further enrich this post. Thank you @NBjork!

• When discussing helping the world, one of the most straight forward means of such help is saving and extending lives. If you can save someone from dying or delay their death, then generally the help is meaningful. That is the extreme benefit. Another, maybe more common level of help is to simply reduce the suffering of a living being by some margin. Then the impact of the help correlates to the magnitude of the decreased suffering. 
• This chapter, called radical empathy, focuses on the impartiality of helping. Some of us might usually be biased in different ways, but we should try to help the most we can, regardless of location, time or species (if our aim is to maximize our impact/help). So don’t over-value your own community if others in the world need more help. Don’t focus on living beings at this moment only, but also in the future. Finally, don’t focus on just people, but all life which can experience suffering
• In EA it seems to me that there is significant backing and balance on both sides of the time and species bias, but maybe not so much the location bias. I have seen plenty of EAs focused on both reducing suffering today and existential risks in the future. I have seen EAs focused on both human beings, and many others focused on other species. However, when it comes to location there is a strong leaning towards helping those who need it most and are very far away (considering EAs often live in the richer parts of the world), rather than helping more local communities. This might be because it’s easier to calculate the cost effectiveness differences and complete a quantitative analysis between locations, but not as easily between species or the future. 
• Being newer to EA, I had previously encountered charity effectiveness assessments that highlighted their overhead cost ratios. However, EA holds that that there is no reason to dive into that detail. Instead, just assess the full impact based on the full budget of a charity. I do like that standpoint. 
  • However, if a charity is having great impact and has higher than average overhead to some degree, they can further their effectiveness by lowering their overheads internally. The logical net result would be improving the total cost effectiveness. For example even the most cost effective orgs should look at their overhead because their biggest future gains on cost effectiveness may be due to improving internal processes, rather than from further efficiency in external operations. 
• We should understand human beings are, today, most likely widely accepting (and practicing) of some behavior or norm which will be categorically prohibited in the future. This moral progress is positive and useful for humanity. It should highlight and reinforce feelings of humility in all our actions because no matter what impact we have, we are almost assuredly also taking some action which the future will deem immoral (ie. pet ownership?)
• One of the features that I have grown to respect the most about EA is the acceptance of people who don’t follow the same path or practice the same actions. It is very hard in life for any individual to see truth, and even harder to accept it and synthesize it with everyday life. For example I don’t know what percentage of EAs are vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, etc but from what I’ve seen so far there is acceptance and peace displayed in letting each person follow their own path on their own timeline with their own convictions; meanwhile the movement supports each other while we're each on our journeys

Thank you all for taking the time to read through these reflections and feel free to leave any feedback you think relevant. I am especially open to resources that expand on these thoughts further! 

Look out for the chapter 4 reflection post soon!