Thanks for the clarifications in your previous two comments. Helpful to get more of an insight into your thought process.
Just a few comments:
I stronglydon’t think a charity to work on philosophy in schools would be helpful and I don’t like that way of thinking about it. My suggestions were having prominent philosophers join (existing) advocacy efforts for philosophy in the curriculum, more people becoming philosophy teachers (if this might be their comparative advantage), trying to shift educational spending towards values-based education, more research into values-based education (to name a few).
This is a whole separate conversation that I’m not sure we have to get into right now too deeply (I think I’d rather not) but I think there are severe issues with development economics as a field to the extent that I would place it near the bottom of the pecking order within EA. Firstly the generalisability of RCT results is highly questionable (for example see Eva Vivalt’s research). More importantly and fundamentally, the problem of complex cluelessness (see here and here). It is partly considerations of cluelessness that makes me interested in longtermist areas such as moral circle expansion and broadly promoting positive values, along with x-risk reduction.
I’m hoping we’re nearing a good enough understanding of each other’s views that we don’t need to keep discussing for much longer, but I’m happy to continue a bit if helpful.
Thanks for the clarifications in your previous two comments. Helpful to get more of an insight into your thought process.
Just a few comments:
I strongly don’t think a charity to work on philosophy in schools would be helpful and I don’t like that way of thinking about it. My suggestions were having prominent philosophers join (existing) advocacy efforts for philosophy in the curriculum, more people becoming philosophy teachers (if this might be their comparative advantage), trying to shift educational spending towards values-based education, more research into values-based education (to name a few).
This is a whole separate conversation that I’m not sure we have to get into right now too deeply (I think I’d rather not) but I think there are severe issues with development economics as a field to the extent that I would place it near the bottom of the pecking order within EA. Firstly the generalisability of RCT results is highly questionable (for example see Eva Vivalt’s research). More importantly and fundamentally, the problem of complex cluelessness (see here and here). It is partly considerations of cluelessness that makes me interested in longtermist areas such as moral circle expansion and broadly promoting positive values, along with x-risk reduction.
I’m hoping we’re nearing a good enough understanding of each other’s views that we don’t need to keep discussing for much longer, but I’m happy to continue a bit if helpful.
Acknowledged.