Periodically people ask what I thought of Larissa MacFarquhar’s coverage of Jeff and me in Strangers Drowning. The book is about extreme altruism, and one of the chapters focused on us and other people in the budding effective altruism movement. Overall, she was an extraordinarily careful and in-depth researcher and writer. But a couple of things feel strange to me about the chapter.
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I met Larissa in 2010, when I was 25. Jeff and I had met precisely two other people interested in significant charitable giving: the couple who ran Bolder Giving, who we’d met through a chance connection. They introduced us to Larissa, “a woman writing a book.”
At that time, I was isolated and had a chip on my shoulder. I felt scared about how much suffering was out there in the world, and angry about how little anyone else seemed to be doing. I had worked for two years at a mainstream charity I cared about, and was shocked how little the staff cared about donation. I tried to hold a discussion about charitable giving there, and no one came.
Jeff and I talked to people around us about donation, but none of them were all that interested at the time. There was no community around this. (There were pockets of Giving What We Can people in Oxford, GiveWell people in New York, and Singularity Institute people in Berkeley. But we didn’t know any of them.) The phrase “effective altruism” wouldn’t exist for another year.
Larissa met with us several times over the next few years. Our last conversations about changes to the chapter were in early 2015. Beyond those four years of conversations, she delved into the past: she interviewed our parents, she asked what our favorite books had been as children and read the books. One of the quotes in the book is from my high school blog, with all the sentimentality and poor writing that you’d expect of a seventeen-year-old.
Much of the chapter reflects the isolation of my teens and early twenties.
But things were changing. Via Bolder Giving, we connected with two philosophy grad students: Nick Beckstead and Mark Lee, who were running a Giving What We Can chapter. Mark moved to Boston for law school, and he somehow drew other people out of the woodwork. We started hosting dinners at our place, but Mark brought the people – mostly Harvard people, which intimidated me until I realized they weren’t a separate species from normal humans. The EA group in Boston, originally nameless and then called “smart giving dinners,” grew out of those first gatherings with Mark and his friends.
Jeff and I both joined Giving What We Can. While in England for a family wedding, we stayed in Oxford and met the Giving What We Can people. It had the feeling of a reunion, though we’d only talked online with most of them. One of them put us up at her house despite never having met us in person. Another needed a cell phone, so I gave him my old one. Another sent us a mix of lullabies for our baby. I felt I had finally found my people.
Larissa’s book came out in 2015. My life was in a very different place than when we first talked to Larissa. I was on the board of GiveWell and had started working for the Centre for Effective Altruism. There were EA groups all over the world. The problems in the world still seemed huge, but I didn’t feel alone against them.
I think it’s possible to come away from the chapter without a sense of the timing. The loneliness and frustration was real, but it was from the 2010 era. That’s not how I felt by 2015.
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The other thing that doesn’t feel right about the chapter is the final passage about when a family member becomes sick. I wrote that to Larissa shortly after my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. I was talking about whether I would change where I donate based on this family tragedy. I wouldn’t: “I love Suzie, and I hate that she’s sick, and other people love their mothers and hate that they’re sick. . . If their mothers (or whoever) are cheaper to cure, we should cure them first.” But I was talking about using donations to fund research on her specific type of cancer vs. other life-saving research or work.
In the book, the quote was paired with one from Peter Singer about the money he spent on nursing care for his mother in her final years. In our situation, there was no question of whether the family could afford Suzie’s treatment; her health insurance and the family covered everything she needed. If we had needed to help pay for that, we would have (out of our personal budget as much as possible, not our donation budget.)
I’m less intense about all this than I was. There were times when I believed that if I could help someone I loved or help multiple strangers, I should help the strangers (as in the title of the book). I never needed to make a particularly stark decision like that, and in many situations I no longer think I would decide the same way.