Happiness and Giving

Hello,

We wish you happy times. Giving What We Can published an article, “How to Buy Happiness?”, on the relationship between happiness and giving. Could it be that every new thing we buy is making us less happy?

Effective Altruism Fellowship: Oxford

In many parts of the world, there are communities called “Effective Altruism Fellowship” that offer free seminars on effective altruism. Oxford University’s effective altruism society will start its new program soon. If you want to be notified when applications open, you can fill out this form.

The dangers of short-termism

It can be said that we have difficulty in going beyond the latest news flow and in shaping our current actions by thinking about the future. Which of us can say that we truly think about the welfare and well-being of future generations and act accordingly? This is also a bit of an attention problem. Everything that happens in the present attracts much more attention. We encounter this temporal bias in many fields.

The dominant time horizon in politics corresponds to a single term in office (4-5 years). In popular culture and fashion, we talk about a season; in companies, quarterly periods; on the internet, minutes; and in financial markets, thousandths of a second. We struggle so much with the problems of the present or the near future that we have neither the time nor the energy to shape the future. On the other hand, short-term thinking has undeniable consequences and dangers.

The actions we take now and the choices we make will play an undeniable role in determining the living conditions of future generations. According to philosopher Roman Krznaric, failing to give future generations the value they deserve is equivalent to dominating the future. Krznaric says that humanity sees the future as a distant destination and that we are leaving environmental problems, nuclear waste, public debt, and technological risks to future generations without thinking seriously about them.

The antidote to short-termism: Long-termism

The effective altruism movement defends long-termism against the great dangers of short-term thinking and acting.

Long-termism proposes the idea that we should shape our actions in the present by taking into account the long-term effects of those actions in the future. Within the effective altruism community, three subcategories stand out within the definition of long-termism: Long-termism, strong long-termism and very strong long-termism.

Trillions of fish…

What can be done on a mass scale about the most used animals in the world?

Organizations focused on effective altruism are trying to improve the conditions of trillions of fish used in industrial animal agriculture and to reduce this number. Two examples are Rethink Fish and Aquatic Animal Alliance.