The world can be a happy place filled with joy and glee
Every human action eliciting reaction
Kindness pouring through us all
We can have a place with differences understood
Doors open to all
The world becoming ever better
Till we reached it all
There are many people working for a better world but I think effective altruists might be the group doing so most effectively. I first got hooked when I read the following article:
selon nerias 
Thank you for sharing this article on EA: I’ve been looking at some of their docs for a while, pondering whether my blog fits into a useful, actionable, and low-volume niche. It’s good to find someone else looking into EA as well.
Stay safe,
-Shira
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I feel the same way. It’s always nice to see people getting into EA. Would love to be part of an EA blogging community, though my blog isn’t that focused on EA at the moment.
I did two EA related poems so far. This one and the one after that on existential risk. For the poem on existential risk, I couldn’t find an article which does as good of a job as this Atlantic article at making the topic relevant to a broad audience (imo). Which is really too bad. Might not matter much that my article selection wasn’t on point since, if WordPress stats are to be believed, my audience rarely clicks through the links in my posts.
I could also experiment with putting EA links underneath my poems, if anything it’ll help EA places rise in Google search and maybe if people keep seeing a link they might eventually click it. The mere exposure effect is a thing after all.
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Likewise: I rarely get click-throughs, so I decided to focus on short posts (mostly) that would make my point quickly, these days. Seems that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, but I am glad to find other writers working on this problem.
You would experiment with…
?
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I think if you really want to make people click a link it’d probably need to be highly relevant to what you talk about. It’d probably help too if the blogpost makes use of the article as a source and perhaps gives a brief summary or preview of the article, without giving the reader the impression he already got the full story. This is just me speculating though.
About the attention span of people, I can’t really talk in general here, since I’ve not done the required research, but for me my attention span is highly context dependent. Much longer when I read a book, almost non-existent when reading email or tweets.
Sorry, I miss clicked and accidentally posted the previous reply before I was done writing it. I edited it just now.
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No worries. I think you are right on both points, but I’m happy just to get anybody to read and ponder the words “empathy” and “critical thinking” together for more than five minutes! 🙂
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Yeah, I agree. If people stumble upon GiveWell or one of the EA funds in those 5 minutes, it could do so much good.
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Or if they give those 5 minutes over to pondering how they (poor or non-poor) could help contribute to the levels of empathy in this world, and especially to make that empathy more effective. I’d be happy if they gave time to their local public libraries!
But then that is why we write, right?
🙂
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I think I agree, though I notice I’ve perhaps given this topic not enough thought myself. I do often think about the effectiveness of things I do, but I seem to have given, increasing the amount of empathy out there, too little thought.
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Not to worry: it is easy to overlook. I think that most people do not immediately see the connection between empathy and critical thinking, so when a friend told me to “connect the dots for people,” I decided to change my focus in this direction.
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