I would prefer LW not to be spammed by HuffPo-quality advertisement pieces for charity donations, even if it's for a charity many people here like.
Harsh, but this does have two HuffPo-like traits: first, he uses his opening line to make a point that's grossly misleading, and repackages his generic pitch for EA as something relevant to an upcoming holiday. "Hey, you know what's the most romantic thing to do? Turns out that it's the same thing we recommend doing all the time. What a coincidence!"
Second, his factoids about the psychology of generosity are as misleading as HuffPo-tier science reporting. Generally speaking, the psych/neuropsych studies I've read don't really support the conclusions that EAs seem to want them to, including those studies that they cite as evidence. Specifically speaking, in this case, the studies don't seem to indicate that charitable giving is special, broadly or vis-a-vis the activity that this post is contrasting them with. I.e., neither of the articles provide evidence that giving to charity has a particular advantage in making people feel good over other forms of generous behavior, including the conventional Valentine's Day one of giving something nice and romantic to someone you love. Indeed, most of the research I've seen on the subject indicates that a wide range of actions taken ...
Maybe my preferences have been programmed to be hopelessly irrational by decades of conditioning via Hallmark and the rest of this damned capitalist society, but this strikes me as terribly unromantic.
I think two people can agree that (A) giving to charity is good, and (B) that lavish gift giving at invented holidays is excessive, but to combine the two on Valentine's Day and pretend it is romantic according to some strange definition of the word is a stretch, methinks.
How do you define "romance", by the way?
I'm wondering how one offers a way out-- suppose that one partner is much more enthusiastic about EA than the other. The couple tries the combination of reasonably priced fun and EA one year, and the less enthusiastic one doesn't feel it's satisfying. Can that partner say "let's not do it that way next year?" without feeling shamed for it?
This seems to fall under http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n7w/beware_surprising_and_suspicious_convergence/ . Isn't it a little unusual that EA just happens to be a good Valentine's Day substitute?
I was expecting this gift to be charity, yes, given that it was you who wrote the article, but I was hoping for it to be condoms.
Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, people are not tuning it out. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.
500 FB likes the first day it was posted
Reading through the Intentional Insights fb page [1] it looks to me like you're using paid likes? The "people" who liked those posts all look like fake accounts. While I can't see the specific accounts that 'liked' your TLYCS post, is that what you did there too? If so getting 500 fb likes doesn't tell us that it was unusually good.
This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruism-aligned Less Wrongers. Thanks to Agnes Vishnevkin, Jake Krycia, Will Kiely, Jo Duyvestyn, Alfredo Parra, Jay Quigley, Hunter Glenn, and Rhema Hokama for looking at draft versions of this post. At least one aspiring rationalist who read a draft version of this post, after talking to his girlfriend, decided to adopt this new Valentine's Day tradition, which is some proof of its impact. The more it's shared, the more this new tradition might get taken up, and if you want to share it, I suggest you share the version of this post published on The Life You Can Save blog. It's also cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and on the EA Forum.
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The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives
Last year, my wife gave me the most romantic Valentine’s Day gift ever.
We had previously been very traditional with our Valentine’s Day gifts, such as fancy candy for her or a bottle of nice liquor for me. Yet shortly before Valentine’s Day, she approached me about rethinking that tradition.
Did candy or liquor truly express our love for each other? Is it more important that a gift helps the other person be happy and healthy, or that it follows traditional patterns?
Instead of candy and liquor, my wife suggested giving each other gifts that actually help us improve our mental and physical well-being, and the world as a whole, by donating to charities in the name of the other person.
She described an article she read about a study that found that people who give to charity feel happier than those that don’t give. The experimenters gave people money and asked them to spend it either on themselves or on others. Those who spent it on others experienced greater happiness.
Not only that, such giving also made people healthier. Another study showed that participants who gave to others experienced a significant decrease in blood pressure, which did not happen to those who spent money on themselves
So my thoughtful wife suggested we try an experiment: for Valentine’s Day, we'd give to charity in the name of the other person. This way, we could make each other happier and healthier, while helping save lives at the same time. Moreover, we could even improve our relationship!
I accepted my wife’s suggestion gladly. We decided to donate $50 per person, and keep our gifts secret from each other, only presenting them at the restaurant when we went out for Valentine’s Day.
While I couldn’t predict my wife’s choice, I had an idea about how she would make it. We’ve researched charities before, and wanted to find ones where our limited dollars could go as far as possible toward saving lives. We found excellent charity evaluators that find the most effective charities and make our choices easy. Our two favorites are GiveWell, which has extensive research reports on the best charities, and The Life You Can Save, which provides an Impact Calculator that shows you the actual impact of your donation. These data-driven evaluators are part of the broader effective altruism movement that seeks to make sure our giving does the most good per dollar. I was confident my wife would select a charity recommended by a high-quality evaluator.
On Valentine’s Day, we went to our favorite date night place, a little Italian restaurant not far from our house. After a delicious cheesecake dessert, it was time for our gift exchange. She presented her gift first, a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. With her $50 gift in my name, she bought 20 large bed-size nets that would protect families in the developing world against deadly malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In turn, I donated $50 to GiveDirectly, in her name. This charity transfers money directly to recipients in some of the poorest villages in Africa, who have the dignity of using the money as they wish. It is like giving money directly to the homeless, except dollars go a lot further in East Africa than in the US.
We were so excited by our mutual gifts! They were so much better than any chocolate or liquor could be. We both helped each other save lives, and felt so great about doing so in the context of a gift for the other person. We decided to transform this experiment into a new tradition for our family.
It was the most romantic Valentine’s Day present I ever got, and made me realize how much better Valentine’s Day can be for myself, my wife, and people all around the world. All it takes is a conversation about showing true love for your partner by improving her or his health and happiness. Is there any reason to not have that conversation?