CarlShulman comments on Social Impact, Effective Altruism, and Motivated Cognition - Less Wrong

9 Post author: JonahSinick 08 June 2013 02:31AM

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Comment author: CarlShulman 09 June 2013 10:18:52AM 1 point [-]

This feeds back into the earlier discussion about the flexibility of donations vs careers. Hot money donors who switch to apparently better alternatives face less in the way of costs to encourage rationalization. They still have some pressures along these lines, since they don't want to say their previous donations were foolish, and would probably like to be able to point to some new evidence or justification for the switch, but the problem would certainly seem to be smaller.

Comment author: JonahSinick 09 June 2013 09:27:33PM 0 points [-]

This is a very good point, which I had not considered. As you know, I've generally erred in the direction of updating too much rather than too little, and so this issue hasn't been salient to me. It's something for me to brood on.

As I said in response to your comment on my earlier post, I think that this problem can partially be mitigated by developing transferable skills and connections that can be applied in a wide variety of contexts.