I'm Ezra, CEO of EA Israel, but am writing this in a personal capacity. My goal in writing this is to give the community a sense of what someone from a decent-sized local EA group is going through during a time of national crisis. I'll try to keep the post relatively apolitical, but since this is such a charged topic, I'm not sure I'll succeed. I will say that I’m quite nervous about the responses to the post, since the forum can sometimes lean towards criticism. Ideally, I’d want people who are reading this to do so with a sense of compassion, while keeping in mind that this is a difficult time and difficult topic to post or share experiences about. I also don't want the comments to be a discussion of the war per se, but of the experiences of an EA during the war. Finally, I'm sure that [...] ---Outline:(01:25) So what have I been doing since the outbreak of the war?(04:09) How has my experience changed the way I think about EA concepts?(04:35) Donation recommendations(05:39) Important aspects of suffering arent captured by usual metrics(06:17) Theres even more moral uncertainty(07:39) Caring about people far away can go wrong if the topic is trending(08:44) Models of complex situations can be overly simplistic and harmful(11:24) Optimisation is irrelevant(12:59) Ambition to improve the world(14:06) The importance of peaceThe original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
December 6th, 2023

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iXv6zjbAfwrpQy37B/ea-thoughts-from-israel-hamas-war
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.