Comment by Hammershaft
14 days ago
I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.
So you mean like buying moral offsets, kind of like how people buy carbon offsets, to achieve morality-neutral jobs? Sounds like a brilliant idea - I'd definitely want to know I'm saving at least as many lives as my company's product is killing. Have you considered recording the morality offsets on a blockchain? Could be a great startup.
The gains from effective charities would massively outstrip the damage of a job at Meta even with a meagre percentage donated.
A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.
The idea that all decisions under capitalism are value-neutral is ludicrous.
By your definition, selling arms to dictators and using the money to buy a yacht and private security qualifies as "service to humanity."
The entire point of capitalism is that they are not. That is also the reason why there is no real alternative to the price mechanism wrt. resource allocation at scale.
There is no reason to expect "buy stuff you want" to be more charitable than charity. At a glance, the stuff itself obviously takes up a good chunk of the money and much is going to end up in the hands of people who already have plenty.
You emphasize "sustainably", but how is it more sustainable to give 500k/year to capitalism until you don't make that much / retire / die? In either option, that 500k/year is there until it isn't. With charity, you'd help more people but it would be no more or less sustainable.
“More charitable than charity” is circular – nothing can be more charitable than charity.
Something can however be a lot more valuable than any action by which value is destroyed. Destroying value, by the way, can by definition not be sustainable. Alas, opportunity cost is (also by definition) not directly observable, so it gets dismissed. Hence, e.g., the broken window fallacy.
You don’t “give to capitalism”, you engage in voluntary transactions with other individuals and legal entities, such that they are a net (expected) gain in value for all parties involved.
Sounds like completely self serving BS. I don't understand what possible definition of 'service to humanity' that could be true under.
EA charities estimate that the cost of malaria prevention that will save a person's life for 1 year is ~$150. So what is a 'better service for humanity'? Buying yourself one night of sushi & wine or donating one year of life to somebody who wouldn't have it otherwise?
In addition to being unnecessarily aggressive, this is a strawman and whataboutism.
Food for thought: Do you think slavery is or was a “service to humanity”? Because that is what you are advocating: Forcing some set of people to work for free for another.
Also why do you think it has become so cheap in the first place?
This is not to say that eradicating malaria might not make a lot of sense by the way. But you are being incredibly disingenuous, and your argument is based on bad premises.