Don't Campaign for Yourself
People often
have pet charitable issues. Whether it is some issue that affected them in the
past, affects them now, or affects someone close to them. Part of the reason
for this might be that these issues have solidified into what might be called a
new terminal value. I suspect that some of the motivation, though, is that they
believe at some level that they stand to benefit themselves by campaigning for
themselves. If for example, you are a US cotton farmer you are probably going
to pick up the bug and advocate for increasing subsidies on US cotton. I don't
imagine that given the number of US cotton farmers the net return is going to
be even close to being worth the time invested in campaigning. For example if
there are 2 million US cotton farmers, and you sign a petition or attend a
rally for US cotton farming, the extra revenue you are generating, even if it
is large, is going to be distributed over 2 million cotton farmers. The
consequence of this is that to the extent you are doing this for self-serving
reasons, you are getting a horrible deal. Part of the reason that people do
things like this is that their values shift slightly from helping themselves to
helping people who are like them. In
most cases it is going to be a mix of the two and so they really ought to
consider this factor.
In
relation to effective altruism, you may want to think about which of the causes
you advocate follow the pattern described and so which you might be advocating
and donating to because of (mistaken) self-serving motivations. There are some
tricks for accessing your motivations on this point such as asking what the
chances are of, say, a disabled person advocating disability rights. If each of
these were present at a rate of, say, 1% in the population then the chances
that they would co-occur in you would be 1 in 10,000 unless they were related
by the sort of biasing factor being discussed.
Some factors that might make it a good idea to
advocate for a pet idea, that by being subject to the issue you might have an
uncommon insight into how important this issue is and/or you might be
especially qualified to work on or talk about the issue because of relevant
knowledge or experience. The second factor only seems useful if the issue
happens to be effective altruism already because your increasing expertise
probably wouldn't push it into it being effective for you.
