Recent Discussion
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New to effective altruism?
Learn the basics
A lot of posts on the Forum might be confusing if you’re not very familiar with effective altruism (“EA”). If you’ve just begun to learn about EA, try these resources:
- The EA Handbook covers a range of core concepts in effective altruism. You can read the content on your own, or take an online course to discuss the ideas with other people.
- If you want to really dive in, this is a great place to start. If you'd prefer just one article, try
If you run an EA student group we’d be interested in potentially enabling you to receive dozens to hundreds of EA books for you to use and give out at your student group. This service is run by a new student group support team made up of: James Aung, Emma Abele, Bella Forristal, and Henry Sleight; with support from Ed Fage.
If eligible, you’d be able to on-demand request books to be delivered to you within a few days and we’d cover the costs of the books and delivery.
Giving out EA books is a potentially quite cost-effective means of outreach: We think books are great because you can get someone to engage with EA ideas for ~10 hours, without it taking up any of your organiser time. Even...
Building on Brian Tan's comment below, what about a way for anyone to get EA book cheaply or free but you have to tick a box saying it isn't for yourself or that you can't afford it.
I don't think any EAs would lie on this box (what would the point be) but it might help poorer EAs or children get copies.
I have in the past said "I'll send anyone a copy of this book" at my own expense and given away my copies and I reckon these are more likely to be read.
A response to Aaron Gertler's you should write about your job.
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Background:
I had no interest in foreign policy, and wasn't particularly keen on the civil service. However, on a whim I applied for the statistics graduate fast stream in the UK civil service, failed a technical test but did well on generalist tests, and was offered a role in the foreign office.
I work at an entry-ish level: a 'Higher Executive Officer' is officially a middle management role, but it can be reached straight from graduation through the fast stream. It required zero relevant policy experience, but did require generalist skills such as working to deadlines, working productively with others, making effective decisions- which can all be gained from a range of roles (I worked as a receptionist, a...
Thanks for the questions- and sorry for the delay answering. I'll go through 1 and 2 in turn but think 3 is too political for me to answer - sorry!
1)I was instrumental in setting up and playing secretariat to a group of development ministers that convened during the beginning of the covid pandemic. This allowed like-minded ministers to share best practice and coordinate in what was a rapidly changing crisis for many developing countries. Some new principles spun from this group for how to support certain countries and I think it probably made a very slight... (read more)
Executive Summary
Effective altruism aims to allocate resources so as to promote the most good in the world. To achieve the most efficient allocation of resources, we need to be able to compare interventions that target different species, including humans, cows, chickens, fish, lobsters, and many others.
Comparing cause areas and interventions that target different species requires a comparison in the moral value of different animals (including humans). Animals differ in their cognitive, emotional, social, behavioral, and neurological features, and these differences are potentially morally significant. According to many plausible philosophical theories, such differences affect (1) an animal’s capacity for welfare, which is the range of how good or bad an animal’s life can be, and/or (2) an animal’s moral status, which is the degree to which an animal’s...
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your comment. I've written a bit about the potential relevance of intelligence and emotional complexity to capacity for welfare here. But I share your skepticism about their relevance to moral status. I'm reminded of this comic:
In international relations, polarity is any of the various ways in which power is distributed within the international system. International relations scholars distinguish among unipolar, bipolar and multipolar scenarios depending on whether there is at the global level one, two, or more than two centers of power, respectively.respectively, though the term "multipolar" is also sometimes used to refer to scenarios that are not unipolar, i.e. where there is more than one center of power.
This is a cross-post from 80,000 Hours. See part 2 on the allocation across cause areas.
In 2015, I argued that funding for effective altruism – especially within meta and longtermist areas – had grown faster than the number of people interested in it, and that this was likely to continue. As a result, there would be a funding ‘overhang’, creating skill bottlenecks for the roles needed to deploy this funding.
A couple of years ago, I wondered if this trend was starting to reverse. There hadn’t been any new donors on the scale of Good Ventures (the main partner of Open Philanthropy), which meant that total committed funds were growing slowly, giving the number of people a chance to catch up.
However, the spectacular asset returns of the...
Doubling costs to get +10% labour doesn't seem like a great deal
I agree in principal, but in this case the alternative is eliminating$400k-4M of funding, which is much more expensive than doubling the salary of e.g. a research assistant.
To be clear, I am more so skeptical of this valuation than I am actually suggesting doubling salaries. But conditional on the fact that one engaged donor entering the non-profit labor force is worth >$400k, seems like the right call.
I agree with you that situations like the current one in Afghanistan might be among our most impactful issues, but:
- If you wanna talk about iidm, I'd rather think more about how to make failing states in developing countries more viable and functional than improve US government decision-making. Tbh, idk if US decision was a matter of a judgment mistake: Biden's recent statements seem to show that he doesn't really regret the decision - that the unwillingness to keep troops in Afghanistan dominated the risk of having Taleban back in power.
- I'm not sure
What groups do know of that are similar to EA but wouldn't fit into the framework directly.
Might include:
- communities that think in an EA way about problems that EA's don't consider important (EG ones that aren't tractable for instance)
- people who use EA modes of thought but not on EA problems (people who like spaced repetition, spreadsheets etc)
- people who are moved by similar impulses but in a different direction (more general activist movements)
Answers will include:
- groups who EA ought to reach out to
- strange parallels that surprise us
- groups who find EA a bit icky and it's worth figuring out why
I like the answers so far. I'll add a few more:
- Professional Futurists
- Wisdom -- Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
- Holos Earth Project, "The essence of the holistic perspective and practice is willingness to explore relatedness; to self, to others, and to the world."
My impression is these groups (and systems/complexity groups) find EA thinking "icky" because it is overly:
- linear
- mechanistic
- reductionist
- deterministic
Local groups have an opportunity to do much more than just creating and connecting local effective altruists. Being local to a place, we have special knowledge and influence. A few ideas:
- Fundraising for effective charities: Being local, we can promote effective organisations to local rich people.
- Help existing local organisations to be more effective.
- Manage a small fund and be forced to actually live and think through the challenges of prioritization.
Anything else?
Hi Aaron