Dave Cortright 🔸

• Dave Cortright 🔸 20 May 2026 2:54 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Why are longter­mists so much less fo­cused on hu­man ex­tinc­tion these days?

  I know this is likely an unpopular view, but what makes the human species so precious? Going back in evolutionary time, what if Neanderthals or T. rex or even jellyfish decided they were the pinnacle of evolution and closed the door behind them?

  I’m not saying I want humans to go extinct, but it is speciesist to say we are as good as it gets and halt the process of natural selection.

AI agents in­evitably com­mit crimes in simu­lated worlds

• Dave Cortright 🔸 4 Mar 2026 19:53 UTC

  1 point

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  on: How Are EAs Really Do­ing? Help Us Find Out (~15 min sur­vey)

  This dropdown is clipped for me in Chrome on my laptop. I can’t read the full text of the options

  

• Dave Cortright 🔸 2 Mar 2026 20:52 UTC

  1 point

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  on: The best cause will dis­ap­point you: An in­tro to the op­ti­misers curse

  The other major problems with trying to calculate your way to a neat and orderly table of “the best” interventions:

  1. There is no single absolute objective perspective on value weights. Just listen to conversations at EAG or in the forum. There will never be full consensus on the value of a quadrillion crustaceans vs. billions of mammals, or on the value of future sentient beings vs. current ones.

  2. Preferences matter. And in fact, a diversity of preferences is essential. If we only used the final ranking, in the extreme case we devote 100% of our resources to Program A. But not everyone is passionate about A, and the world probably can not handle the capacity for everyone to productively contribute to A. So we need people to have a preference for all projects, even and especially those further down the list so we have reasonable coverage of interventions across the entire problem space.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 2 Mar 2026 16:41 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Don’t scale up your lifestyle

  For some, spending can be a soothing activity, but being a shopaholic is harmful, like many other addictions. The hole most people are trying to fill with any addiction: a lack of strong, close, healthy relationships. You must have at least one relationship (and ideally 3–5 according to Dunbar) where you can regularly be vulnerable and talk about all your feelings. If you don’t, work on that 😇 You can start with therapy or a support group to help you build up your skills. That’s what I did, since I didn’t learn this in my family of origin.

Don’t scale up your lifestyle

• Dave Cortright 🔸 23 Jan 2026 3:19 UTC

  6 points

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  on: Cel­e­brat­ing wins — dis­cus­sion thread

  Good.store showed the Profit for Good model works (100% of profits go to charity). They continued to grow, expanding from coffee, socks, and soap into tea, undies, and cleaning products. The big milestone in 2025: they opened the maternal health center in Sierra Leone.
  
  I bring it up because I think anyone who cares about being compassionate and effective (you 😇) should consider voting for maternal health in Africa over contributing to the profits of large international conglomerates.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 26 Dec 2025 20:11 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Anton’s comment on: 3 doubts about veganism

  I was responding to the No space for sinners section above, where the author claims the opposite.
  

• Dave Cortright 🔸 28 Nov 2025 21:31 UTC

  1 point

  1 ∶ 2

  on: 3 doubts about veganism

  Is Barack Obama black? Technically, no; he is bi-racial. But he identifies as black, and most people—when asked—would say he is black (Wikipedia concurs).

  I think veganism should be treated the same way. You don’t have to be 100% perfect for you or others to consider you vegan.

  Being pedantic about definitions does not help reduce suffering, IMO.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 25 Nov 2025 16:21 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Dona­tion Elec­tion Dis­cus­sion Thread

  They all touch on mental health interventions in some way.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 18 Oct 2025 19:05 UTC

  5 points

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  on: What If EA Ac­tu­ally Picked One Goal?

  Maybe your belief is that if enough people “at the top” of EA agree to this, they can influence a majority of the EA community to follow. My sense is that EAs are more independent freethinkers than most other groups, so I don’t think this scenario is likely.

  Given that, what you’re proposing is essentially relabeling the current set of “EAs who care about animal welfare” to “EA”. A few EAs who aren’t already in this camp might follow you over, but on the whole I strongly suspect this would alienate everyone else who doesn’t sign up for this worldview, and it would just fracture the community.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 16 Oct 2025 18:00 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Thoughts on great­non­prof­its.org?

  I’m a fan of “wisdom of crowds”. But I suspect—at least for the top-rated ones—there has been coordinated ballot box stuffing by staff and supporters. And like many user reviews online, it tends toward bimodal of “great” or “awful”. Most people don’t make the effort to write “it was ok” reviews.

  I feel there’s too much noise and not enough signal to make it a worthwhile source.

Com­mu­nity-based wildlife con­ser­va­tion de­serves more at­ten­tion in EA

• Dave Cortright 🔸 16 Sep 2025 15:41 UTC

  0 points

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  on: DaveC’s Shortform

  EoL Competition, EOL in the software world means “End of Life”. I’d recommend choosing a different acronym. LongTermism could be abbreviated LT, so EoLT or Thoughts on Longtermism, TLT. (LTE is already taken 😇)

• Dave Cortright 🔸 8 Sep 2025 19:32 UTC

  2 points

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  on: How big a deal is donat­ing 10% of your in­come re­ally? A perspective

  For me, the foundational question is “How much is enough?” How much do I need to live a reasonably healthy, happy life? Kahneman & Deaton (2010) found this to be $75,000, which would be about $100k in 2025. I use this as my baseline (adjusted for the cost of living in my area). Maybe this will help others contextualize.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 26 Aug 2025 15:38 UTC

  3 points

  3 ∶ 11

  on: You’re Enough

  I encourage everyone to lower their achievement bar all the way down to “minimize harm”. There is no rational reason to beat yourself up for not reaching some arbitrary goalpost, even if it is one that you set for yourself and was arguably achievable. Life happens, and new circumstances and data can easily shift things.

  For example, if you were hit by a bus and in the ICU recovering, no one would expect you to be productive. Why is it any different for milder versions? Have the flu or a cold? Didn’t sleep well last night? Completely exhausted and burnt out?

  “Should” is the most insidious word we use. “I should be able to achieve more or give more or be better”. Love and accept yourself where you are. Then, if you want to make step towards improvement, do so. But keep them small and don’t compare against others or hypotheticals. The only comparison that matters is against yourself.

A prac­ti­cal guide to suici­dal ideation

• Dave Cortright 🔸 11 Aug 2025 15:17 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: Indrek Kivirik’s comment on: Al­co­hol is so bad for so­ciety that you should prob­a­bly stop drinking

  I agree it is a factor, but it is naïve to think that is the only explanation.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 7 Aug 2025 9:36 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Al­co­hol is so bad for so­ciety that you should prob­a­bly stop drinking

  Alcohol is indeed a Class 1 carcinogen. As the WHO says bluntly, “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”

  But it is also one of the nine factors in Blue Zones—longevity outlier populations.

  So, how to explain the contraction? The power of community and relationships:

  The positive effects of consistent, strong, and healthy relationships are so much more powerful than other factors, they become essentially rounding errors in the equation.

  I overall agree that alcohol is a net negative to society. But if it is ingested in moderation as part of social bonding rituals like evening meals together or spiritual services, the positive effects of these rituals on our health—especially bolstering our amazing immune systems that constantly repair mild to moderate damage in our bodies—more than make up for the negatives of the alcohol.

• Dave Cortright 🔸 1 Aug 2025 16:00 UTC

  1 point

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  on: On the Mo­ral Pa­tiency of Non-Sen­tient Be­ings (Part 2)

  In the infinite game there is no win condition

  The winning condition is that the game is still ongoing. As long as the infinite game is in progress, it is in the winning state.