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If we want - but cannot afford - to help everyone, we need to prioritize to help as much as we can.
You can send me anonymous feedback on this essay here.
Was there some evidence that some psychedelics may have anti-addictive efficacy even at sub-psychedelic doses, or do the anti-addictive effects depend on the psychedelic experience?
Is the renewed interest in psychedelic research & psychedelic-assisted therapy happening only in Western countries? Are other countries more worried about these substances for some reason(s)?
What would you say to journalists who may (or may not) be:
- willing to do accurate reporting on these topics
- too time-pressured (or otherwise unable) to read the original research
- strongly incentivized to sensationalize these topics?
MDMA-assisted couples therapy has been studied a bit. Could MDMA also be useful for interpersonal conflict resolution more generally, such as for enabling more constructive conversations between people with very different perspectives?
Just a readability suggestion: have the column for n (etc.) on the left and book on the right, so that we can read a left-aligned list of book names without the eyes having to jump around so much :)
One needs to remove the dot after the URL :)
4) The direct translations of Effective Altruism can sound a bit forced. The dutch “Effectief Altruïsme” is a case in point. This can make you seem a bit “out of touch”. We checked with German and Spanish EA’s and they confirm that the direct translations sound rather awkward in their native tongue (a Polish EA we talked to have said that the name actually sounds really positive in Polish, so this point may not be relevant in all languages).
Finnish definitely shares this problem. The two predominant ways to translate 'effective' into Finnish are:
- tehokas (efficient)
- vaikuttava (impressive or impactful)
Efficient is problematic because it's not the same as impactful. Many people have emotional or ideological problems with the ideals of efficiency, productivity, and optimization, and would have a gut-feeling of resistance against, e.g., this definition (from Google Translate) applied to human behavior:
- efficient: (especially of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
Impressive is even more problematic because an EA group would be wise to actively avoid the air of elitism which you mention. So "vaikuttava altruismi" is basically equally close to "impressive altruism" as it is to "impactful altruism" — and there is not really a word in Finnish to separately capture the intended meaning of impactful.
The direct translation, efektiivinen, is very forced, and seems to have only rare and technical use in other contexts.
For these reasons (and other points mentioned in the post), I would encourage Finnish groups to consider alternative names!
‘Nordic school metamodernism’ has been an interesting complement and contrast to EA in my experience.
They have an active forum of people who are passionate about things like cognitive complexity, political philosophy, and societal development beyond moral relativism. They have two provocative books (dense with interesting ideas imo), the first of which was just released on Audible. In general, I find them to be ambitious, secular, sane, and attempting to make things better for all sentient beings. (The style of the half-fictional author, the great philosopher Hanzi Freinacht, has its pros & cons, though, and may not be for everyone.)
Some takeaways for me (in contrast to EA) include:
- complementing the often hyper-individualizing focus of EA;
- highlighting a ton of (often-overlooked) factors that might be possible to develop in our personal, social, and institutional matters;
- generally combating passivist misanthropy by doing a detailed & insightful tour through what things suck, how exactly, and how they could suck less in the future if we manage to actively develop all of them (i.e. inspiring people into activism in all areas of life).
I’m not up to date on what concrete things that community has done, but to be fair, it does seem necessary to first spread awareness about all those problems before tackling them. They might also be quite constrained by lack of effective coordination around their aims, which may be a main reason why not so many people within the EA community are actively even aiming to go the same way. But I think many people would already benefit from the (imo worldview-enriching) concepts in those books, if they can stand the rhetorics.