Strangers drowning
by Larissa MacFarquhar · first published 2015
2mentions
1recommended by
2HN commenters
2018–2019first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
"What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another
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I absolutely LOVED her book Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Drowning-Impossible-Idealis...
on “Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone’s Head” ↗I first heard of this movement in the book Strangers Drowning. The book is structured as a varied series of accounts of extreme altruism along with some philosophical discussion of cultural attitudes towards it. This movement appears in one chapter about members…
on “Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each charitable buck?” ↗