Blog #2

My second reading experience was very different from my first. The first read through I did I was reading more to become familiar with the text and the message it was trying to portray.  After discussing different parts of the essay in class today and after looking at the Effective  Altruism website, I feel as though my understanding of what the topic of the essay was is stronger. Therefore as I read the essay a second time I was reading much more critically. I disagreed with more statements made, as well as felt as though more parts of the essay were contradicting.

One particular part of the essay I picked up on during my second read through was about a retreat. Southern states two important Das that introduced him to the movement, “…were heading to East Devon with a few others for a cottage retreat, where they were going to relax among sheep and alpacas, visit a ruined abbey, and get some altruism-related writing done”. I could this extremely interesting for a few reasons. First, they were going on a retreat and “relaxing” and I am not sure how this directly helps those suffering, which is the main goal of EAs to do with their lives. Second, they were getting “altruism-related writing done”, but isn’t writing considered a form of art, even if it is for educational or informative reasons. Therefore, isn’t art needed to help their movement thrive and spread to others around the world. The Effective Altruism movement claims to not need art and to use their lives to make the greatest impact possible on global suffering; based on these two passages taken from the essay one could argue that EAs can sometimes contradict themselves.

Glossing the text definitely helped me to better understand the text. By looking up the words I did not quite understand and using the definitions given to then make sense of the statement made I could better understand what the paragraph’s message or point given to the reader was. I looked up the words lucrative (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/lucrative?s=t), egalitarianism (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/egalitarianism?s=t), crass materialism (http://www.univsource.com/words/crass-adj.htm), anti-apartheid (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/anti-apartheid?s=ts), and serendipitous (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/serendipitous?s=t). In parenthesis is the hyperlink to the definitions I found for each word. These definitions helped me to further understand the essay.