More to explore on ‘The Effectiveness Mindset’
Other introductions
Introduction to EA | Ajeya Cotra | EAGxBerkeley 2016 (Video − 30 mins.)
Doing Good Better—Introduction through to the end of Chapter 3 (50 mins.)
Effective Altruism: An Introduction − 80,000 Hours—Ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast. (Ten 1.5 hour − 4 hour podcasts)
Effective altruism as I see it (7 mins.)
No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact − 80,000 Hours (20 mins.)
Other-centered ethics and Harsanyi’s Aggregation Theorem (107 min)
Essays on caring
The value of a life—Minding Our Own Way—Disentangling the difference between the value of a life and what it costs to save a life in our broken world. (15 mins.)
Excited altruism—GiveWell—Where does our own passion and excitement fit in? (10 mins.)
Tradeoffs
Tradeoffs—How can we balance our own needs with the needs of others? (5 mins.)
Famine, affluence, and morality (15 mins.) Note that many people in effective altruism disagree about exactly how demanding these ideas are.
Sustainable motivation—How can we stay motivated when facing massive problems (24 min talk)?
Thinking carefully
Minimal trust investigations (18 mins.)
Outline of Julia Galef’s “Scout Mindset” (20 mins.)
Humans are not automatically strategic (5 mins.)
Beware surprising and suspicious convergence (22 mins.)
Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy (25 mins) - talk by Nick Bostrom on the almost overwhelming difficulty of knowing what kind of impacts actions have.
My favorite from this list of those I’ve read is The value of a life—Minding Our Way (15 mins) by Nate Soares.
When I first read it years ago it helped me grok the idea that the value I place on a life is so much greater than the price I can save lives at. In other words, the consumer surplus, or philanthropist’s surplus or altruist’s surplus, if you will, is tremendous.
A soaring tribute to the constraints we face in the material world. We can still do much much more.
This link is the top link on google and should redirect to the handbook home page. Adding an extra click is confusing and probably loses people. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/handbook
It’s pretty daunting for me to, to start a handbook with a load of other things I might read instead.
Is this the first article in the handbook? It says it is but then there are previous ones?
I think there’s currently a bug with sequences—we’re aware and someone’s looking into a fix.
This series has been helpful in developing a curriculum for the EA Lagos Introductory Program. The articles are also well-referenced which is a big plus as I’m trying to put the ideas in a relatable context for my audience.
Distilling these to relatable content isn’t easy but I know my audience and don’t want to be guilty of expecting short inferential distances.