Rhys Southan’s Effective Altruism

I read an essay by Rhys Southan, explaining Effective Alruism (EA). Southan explains that EA is a step towards ending world suffering. I agree that its a very good belief, but I feel like the EAs are very extreme in all their views except the thought of helping people. They believe art is a waste of time because ” most of them seem doubtful that art had much power to alter the work for the better.” Since art “does not” establish any relief on peoples’ suffering, it is automatically not an interest to them, unless it can be used to promote them and recruit more EAs.

As I read the essay for the second time, I just noticed more about how they believe art influences our society. I really got to understand the implied meanings in certain places due to looking up words I didn’t know. This technique is called decoding and it made me read deeper the second time. I fully understood the implied meaning of paragraphs by simply looking up the word. The essay was scattered with dense words such as frivolous, Net Positive, and religious words such as Übermensch. All I had to do was go to: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/frivolous and it immensely increased my understanding.

I first read it with mixed feelings; I empathized how the people suffering felt and realized that the help would mean the world to me. As I thought deeper about this article, I looked at the opportunity that is offered to everyone. Everyone in school has a chance to be attentive and really participate in the class, but not everyone does this. I see kids fooling around and skipping class and my empathy for them is instantly gone. It makes me feel like it is not my job to work as hard as I can to ensure I have a happy life to also give some relief on to their mistake they made years ago. I fully understand the factors that can not be controlled and I would love to contribute to the eventually end of there suffering.

The EAs believe that we should work hard and get a lucrative job and donate half of our salary to create relief for people. I agree that it would be very important to to try and contribute to the end of there suffering but can we fully end all suffering?

 

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