After reading about Effective Altruism I found that I made different connections. Effective Altruism is an organization that focuses on charity money to help people, animals, and most things alive with their well-being. When I first read Southan’s essay, I did notice that he does use many biased quotes to get his point across. Once I read more about Effective Altruism, I realized that they want to do more good than bad. They realize that our world is suffering and it needs help. Art is not as bad as Southan’s essay made it seem. EA actually believes that art influences us and our society. They don’t think that it will necessarily help the people suffering, but that it can provide information about what they are trying to fix. One quote that caught my eye and made me think was, “EA circles is that it doesn’t matter who does something – what matters is that it gets done.” This caught my attention because if art of some form was a way to help people’s suffering, I feel that EA would want to use it. As long as it helps, they would most likely use it.

Decoding helped me to better understand the article both the first and second time around. I never really used to annotate in high school, so doing some of it now is helping me to actively engage in my thoughts and assignments. With annotating and decoding, I will look up words that I do not know (through dictionary.com https://www.dictionary.com) and think about the definition in the stance that I am reading. I looked up the word coalescing, which means to bring together or make something one. Using this form of decoding helped me to better engage in my reading. All in all, the second time around of reading Southan’s essay, I did have some things that I still believed in, but some that I was not so sure about.