EA - Life in a Day: The film that opened my heart to effective altruism by Aaron Gertler

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Life in a Day: The film that opened my heart to effective altruism, published by Aaron Gertler on April 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.There are at least two kinds of "EA origin story":Some people discover it for themselves. They have EA-flavored goals, they Google something like "do the most good", and they find EA.Other people are introduced by others. They have EA-flavored goals, but they don't find EA until someone tells them about it.My story is the second kind. I saw Peter Singer give a talk, which I attended because I'd read GiveWell's website, which I'd seen on LessWrong, which I heard about from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.So I owe part of my ethical system to the guy who heard me discussing Harry Potter in a college dining hall, interrupted my conversation, gave me a five-minute pitch for HPMOR, and left. (I never saw him again.)But what about the rest of the story?Peter Singer convinced me to join Giving What We Can and earn to give after college. Hundreds of other people watched the same talk, in the same auditorium, and didn't do those things. There must be some other factor that made me especially receptive to EA (that is, gave me "EA-flavored goals").Of course, there are actually dozens of factors, because life is complicated. For example:I speak English, and live in a country that had EA presence early on.My parents are empathetic people who shaped me into an empathetic person.My parents are financially secure people who didn't need my support, so I could easily afford to give 10% of my income.I went to the kind of college where Peter Singer gives talks and students advertise HPMOR to total strangers.I saw a movie called Life in a Day.These are hard to replicate, except the last one, which anyone can do right now:The English (foreign language) subtitles seem broken, but English (full text) works.How the film worksYouTube decided to make a documentary. They asked people to film themselves on July 24th, 2010, and share the footage. They received 80,000 submissions and 4500 hours of film from 192 countries. They used it to make a 90-minute film about life on Earth.We start and end at midnight. For each part of the day, we jump around the world to see what people are doing. Because people are similar, we see similar actions, in parallel.For example, the sun comes up eight minutes into the movie. For the next 90 seconds, we watch people wake up. Some have alarms; some have roosters; some rise with the sun. Some are woken up by parents or lovers. Others wake up alone. One person sleeps on the street and wakes to the passing of cars. Everyone is different. But we all wake up.Submitters also had the option to answer questions: "What do you love? What do you fear? What do you have in your pockets or handbag?"We get three minutes of fear (ten for love). People are afraid of ghosts, spiders, lions, and small noises in the middle of the night. They are afraid of God, Hell, and people different from themselves. They are afraid of losing childhood, losing their hair, and losing the people they love. We are all afraid of something.This is what Life in a Day shows, over and over: In so many ways, we are the same.What the film did to meThis isn't a new idea. You can hear echoes of it in the Golden Rule, "all men are created equal", and "workers of the world, unite!".But I didn't really feel the idea until I saw Life in a Day, which conveys it more powerfully than anything else I've ever seen. I felt strange on the drive home; I could no longer look at the world in the same way.When I later heard about a philosophy that was dedicated to helping people as much as possible, no matter where they lived, it struck a chord. Without Life in a Day, I'm not sure I'd have felt the same deep sense of "yes, this is obviously righ...