I broadly agree with this and have also previously made a case for Wikipedia editing on the Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FebKgHaAymjiETvXd/wikipedia-editing-is-important-tractable-and-neglected
DM
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One other relevant resource I’d recommend is Will and Toby’s joint keynote speech at the 2016 EA Global conference in San Francisco. It discusses some of the history of EA (focusing on the Oxford community in particular) and some historical precursors: https://youtu.be/VH2LhSod1M4
I enjoyed reading this and would love to see more upbeat and celebratory posts like this. The EA community is very self-critical (which is good!) but we shouldn’t lose sight of all the awesome things community members accomplish.
I recently had to make an important and urgent career decision and found it tremendously valuable to speak with several dozen wonderful people about this at EA Global SF. I’m immensely grateful both to the people giving me advice and to CEA for organizing my favorite EA Global yet.
Going very broad, I’d recommend going through the EA Forum Topics Wiki and considering the concepts included there. Similarly, you may look at the posts that make up the EA Handbook and look for suitable concepts there.
See also this recent post: What happens on the average day?
For inspiration, here are some other examples of TEDx talks given by EAs:
1. Beth Barnes (2015): “Effective Altruism”
2. Gabriella Overödder (2019): “How Using Science Can Radically Increase Your Social Impact”
3. Linh Chi Nguyen (2020): “5 Lessons for choosing an impactful career”Feel free to add others below that I’m not aware of.
At the risk of self-promotion, I wrote a motivational essay on EA a few years ago, Framing Effective Altruism as Overcoming Indifference.
Well done! The article receives about 50,000 page views each year, so there are a lot of people out there who benefit from your contribution.
Toby Ord explains several related distinctions very clearly in his paper ‘The Edges of Our Universe’. Highly recommended: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01191
Copied from my post: Notes on “The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution” (Lieber & Press, 2020)
I recently completed a graduate school class on nuclear weapons policy, where we read the 2020 book “The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age” by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press. It is the most insightful nuclear security book I have read to date and while I disagree with some of the book’s outlook and conclusions, it is interesting and well written. The book is also very accessible and fairly short (180 pages). In sum, I believe more people interested in nuclear security would benefit from reading the book.
In “The Definition of Effective Altruism”, William MacAskill writes that
“Effective altruism is often considered to simply be a rebranding of utilitarianism, or to merely refer to applied utilitarianism...It is true that effective altruism has some similarities with utilitarianism: it is maximizing, it is primarily focused on improving wellbeing, many members of the community make significant sacrifices in order to do more good, and many members of the community self-describe as utilitarians.
But this is very different from effective altruism being the same as utilitarianism. Unlike utilitarianism, effective altruism does not claim that one must always sacrifice one’s own interests if one can benefit others to a greater extent. Indeed, on the above definition effective altruism makes no claims about what obligations of benevolence one has.
Unlike utilitarianism, effective altruism does not claim that one ought always to do the good, no matter what the means; indeed...there is a strong community norm against ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning.
Finally, unlike utilitarianism, effective altruism does not claim that the good equals the sum total of wellbeing. As noted above, it is compatible with egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and, because it does not claim that wellbeing is the only thing of value, with views on which non-welfarist goods are of value.
In general, very many plausible moral views entail that there is a pro tanto reason to promote the good, and that improving wellbeing is of moral value. If a moral view endorses those two ideas, then effective altruism is part of the morally good life.” (emphasis added)
The following paper is relevant: Pummer & Crisp (2020). Effective Justice, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 17(4):398-415.
From the abstract:
“Effective Justice, a possible social movement that would encourage promoting justice most effectively, given limited resources. The latter minimal view reflects an insight about justice, and our non-diminishing moral reason to promote more of it, that surprisingly has gone largely unnoticed and undiscussed. The Effective Altruism movement has led many to reconsider how best to help others, but relatively little attention has been paid to the differences in degrees of cost-effectiveness of activities designed to [in]crease injustice.”
Great video, I was very happy seeing Kurzgesagt promote this frame! Also relevant: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckPSrWeghc4gNsShK/good-news-on-climate-change
Great post! While I agree with your main claims, I believe the numbers for the multipliers (especially in aggregate and for ex ante impact evaluations) are nowhere near as extreme in reality as your article suggests for the reasons that Brian Tomasik elaborates on in these two articles:
(i) Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World
(ii) Why Charities Usually Don’t Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness
I’m very excited about this development!
Excellent post! I really appreciate your proposal and framing for a book on utilitarianism. In line with your point, William MacAskill and Richard Yetter Chappell also perceived a lack of accessible, modern, and high-quality resources on utilitarianism (and related ideas), motivating the creation of utilitarianism.net, an online textbook on utilitarianism. The website has been getting a lot of traction over the past year, and it’s still under development (including plans to experiment with non-text media and translations into other languages).
Strong upvote! I found reading this very interesting and the results seem potentially quite useful to inform EA community building efforts.
Hi Timothy, it’s great that you found your way here! There’s a vibrant German EA community (including an upcoming conference in Berlin in September/October that you may want to join).
Regarding your university studies, I essentially agree with Ryan’s comment. However, while studying in the UK and US can be great, I appreciate that doing so may be daunting and financially infeasible for many young Germans. If you decide to study in Germany and are more interested in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would encourage you (like Ryan) to consider undergraduate programs that combine economics with politics and/or philosophy. I can recommend the BA Philosophy & Economics at the University of Bayreuth, though you should also consider the BSc Economics at the University of Mannheim (which you can combine with a minor in philosophy or political science).
In case you are interested in talking through all this sometime, feel free to reach out to me and we’ll schedule a call. :)
As a caveat, there are some nuances to Wikipedia editing to make sure you’re following community standards, which I’ve tried to lay out in my post. In particular, before investing a lot of time writing a new article, you should check if someone else tried that before and/or if the same content is already covered elsewhere. For example, there have been previous unsuccessful efforts to create an ‘Existential risk’ Wikipedia article. Those attempts failed in part because relevant content is already covered on the ‘Global catastrophic risks’ article.