Aidan Alexander

• Aidan AlexanderSep 23, 2022, 3:00 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: In­tro­duc­tion to the Philos­o­phy of Well-Being

  +1 to this. I’ve been struggling figure out what seems wrong with every account of wellbeing and every form of utilitarianism I’d come across so far, and the answer was the lack of this account of wellbeing.

  Preference utilitarianism, in which a ubiquitous preference is to have quality subjective experiences, and where the quality of subjective experience is understood in terms of tranquilism is by far the most accurate-seeming account of wellbeing I’ve come across so far

• Aidan AlexanderFeb 7, 2022, 10:26 AM

  1 point

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  on: Com­ments for shorter Cold Takes pieces

  Hi there! Is there anywhere you can direct me to that makes the case that constant replacement occurs? In what sense do we stop existing and get replaced by a new person each moment? What is your reason for believing this? This is stated in the post but not justified anywhere. Apologies if I have missed it somewhere. I also tried googling ‘constant replacement’, ‘constant replacement self’, ‘constant replacement identity’ etc. and couldn’t find more on this.

• Aidan AlexanderSep 21, 2021, 11:07 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Is effec­tive al­tru­ism grow­ing? An up­date on the stock of fund­ing vs. people

  Thank you for your response! Makes sense. I’m not 100% convinced on the last point, but a few of your articles and 80k podcast appearances have definitely shifted me from thinking that E2G is unambiguously the best way for me to maximise the amount of near-term suffering I can abate, to thinking that direct work is a real contender. So thanks!!

• Aidan AlexanderSep 21, 2021, 11:00 AM

  3 points

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  on: Why do EAs have chil­dren?

  The link to “Why do so few EAs and Rationalists have children?” is broken and I can’t find it online but am keen to read it. Does anyone know where to find it? Thanks

• Aidan AlexanderSep 19, 2021, 3:42 AM

  18 points

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  on: Is effec­tive al­tru­ism grow­ing? An up­date on the stock of fund­ing vs. people

  Hi there!

  I’m a bit confused about the claim that the bottleneck is ways to deploy funding rather than funding itself.

  In global poverty and health cause areas for example, there are highly scalable EA-endorsed interventions like insecticide treated bed nets, deworming and cash transfers, and there are still plenty of people with malaria, children to deworm, and folks below the poverty line who could receive cash transfers. As far as I’m aware, AMF, Deworm the World /​ SCI and GiveDirectly could deploy more funds, and to the extent that they needed to hire more people to do so, I hypothesise they would be able to easily given that, as I understand it, there is a lot of competition to get jobs at organisations like these. What am I missing?

  Thanks in advance!