Journalist and media studies professor, virtual communities consultant, climate change, urban planning and transit activist
drbrake đ¸
Karma: 80
I am sure this has been answered somewhere and it really is a question of more historical relevance but if thereâs one thing that people with any knowledge of âoriginalâ effective altruism knows, it is that anti-malarial bed nets are either the most or nearly the most effective global health intervention. (I believe anti-malarial vaccination may have inched past bed nets by some calculations). AMF has been at or near the top of the charts as a recommended organization tackling this for several years. There are many very wealthy people who claim to have an interest in effective altruism, so how was this not a near-fully funded issue back before 2024 when US and other major donors dropped out? Was it in part just a difficulty in scaling up capacity to meet new funding? What proportion of the total amount of funding available through the AMF or through the international bed net effort can be said to have come via the effective altruism movement?
I notice it receives/âpays in Euros, a currency my credit card and bank donât support ânativelyâ. Is this liable to cause you problems with your costs? Would you need to support more currencies? Even if the underlying currency were the Euro, you should probably provide an option to see the amounts to be paid in the userâs preferred currency as that makes it easier for people to visualise.
It would be nice if there was a way to replace a normal âpeer paymentâ app with GoodWallet so that I could receive a payment as before but with a percentage for effective giving either prompted to the payer or automatically subtracted from what I receive and given to my chosen charity.
Can you afford to continue to sustain the transaction cost of the donations indefinitely if this became popular? What is the percentage it actually costs you/âsomeone to receive and pass on a payment?
Depopulation is Bad
There are some realities about the problems caused by populations of the size we have now that simply cannot be âtechnologied aroundâ. The wealth of the world is profoundly unequally distributed and if we address this, overall consumption would radically increase as would the burden on the planetâs resources. And there are limits to our ability to move around and find space for this many people to live (mainly in cities) in a comfortable way. Population decline needs to be managed to ensure it does not happen too quickly for our systems to cope and will eventually need to be encouraged to âlevel outâ, but only once we have established a path is set towards a human population which can live without overstraining the planetâs finite resources. We have been fairly fortunate that for the most part our productive capacity has more than matched our population growth but we have no convincing guarantee that this would continue indefinitely while reducing ecological damage at the same time.
I think @conflictaverse is on to something with his notion of âbrand confusionâ. I wish there was an easy, widely understood shorthand I could use that would indicate I am inspired by the âearlyâ EA project although I am now concerned that the movementâs centre of gravity seems to have drifted both organizationally and philosophically in directions I am not comfortable with. I am reluctant to abandon the EA label altogether, leaving it to that âwingâ of the movement.
I hope you are right but you should be aware that the opposite may also be true. Depending on the weights we give AI in valuing human and non-human thriving, AI may discover new ways that would make humans happier at the expense of non-humans. There are people and organizations who would assign a moral weight of zero to the suffering of some of even all non-humans, and if those people win the argument then you might end up with an AI which is less to your taste than one that just emerges organically with basic guide rails.
For example, leaving aside second order effects on wider ecology, if you asked me how much intense suffering I would inflict on shrimp to save a human life, I would personally choose an almost unlimited amount.
While this is an important question to consider, it is by no means clear that we could get any short term consensus about how moral alignment should be implemented. In practical terms, if an AI (AGI) intelligence is more long lived and/âor more able to thrive and bring benefits to others of its kind, wouldnât it be moral to value its existence over that of a human being? Yet I think you would struggle to get AI scientists to embed that value choice into their code. Similarly, looking âdownâ the scale, in decisions where the lives or wellbeing of humans had to be balanced against animals, I am not sure there would be much likelihood of broad agreement on the relative value to attach to each in such cases.
I would encourage further research and advocacy on this point but at best this will be a long, long process. And you might not be happy with the eventual outcome!
At the moment there are no established guidelines in this area I am aware of in the existing not-AI-related space (though I have not looked hard...) but if AI-related research/âdiscussion did establish such guidelines, it might cause the guidelines to be propagated out into the rest of the policy world and set a precedent.
This does not address one possible use of alternative proteinsâfeeding them to domesticated carnivorous animals. Obviously many EA folks might prefer that we donât eat such animals or have them as pets but if we do it would be better if their food did not have an adverse climate impact or did not involve more animal suffering (or both!). Alt proteins here would not need to have the same taste as the foods they replace, be tasty to humans, or pass strict safety guidelinesâthey would just need to be minimally acceptable to (and digestible by/âsafe for) their âtargetâ animals. I recall those breeding insects as food (not alt proteins of course) are targeting this marketplace. Any thoughts? Research? Evidence of success?
You are rightâI wrote in anger and take that part back (have edited above).
The EA movement has no single leader but communication and recruitment are of course vital to its continuation, so there are mechanisms for senior figures to make their views known. It is not necessary for the movement to âtake sidesâ in particular political battles, but the fact that Musk has funded EA work, is friends with key EA figures and has taken actions (like the all-out attack on USAID) that run directly counter to mainstream EA thinking suggests to me EA needs to make its concerns clear.
If a public figure or organization (political or not) is aligned with the EA movement in the public mind (because of donations, common positions or their stated adherence to EA principles) and does things that are not consistent with EA values, the movement needs to condemn those actions.
Framing this as taking a political stand is misleading and misguided. I happen to oppose Muskâs politics but that is not why I urge EA leadership to oppose himâitâs the ethical lapses I expect EA to condemn. If a populist left wing leader in the US scrapped USAID because it was an instrument of American imperialism and the money was needed at home to fund social programming, Iâd argue EA should condemn that in a similar manner.
The EA moveÂment needs to be able to diÂsÂown rogue âsupÂportÂersâ, startÂing with Musk
âit does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. â⌠actually, this is just one more reason why what the CATF is doing is retrograde. Supporting and aiding development of CCS for, say, cement making is OK in my book and there is plenty of room for experiments there that are directly applicable to future need. This podcast is good on this point. The danger is that learning how to capture emissions from near end of life coal plants in the US may not tell us all that much that is useful to deploy CCS where it is needed.
This is the kind of thing I would like to see more of. I would not invest myself because all investments seem to be in individual projectsâI would want to be able to invest in some fashion in a âbasketâ of companies and/âor projects (ideally through a large, well-known investment company like Vanguard...)
[Question] InÂvestÂing in cliÂmate mitiÂgaÂtion in Africa
I know your long run goals are the least âbindingâ but I would encourage you to be a little more cautious and evidence-based in your approach to growth as an intervention. Economic growth clearly offers benefits overall in developing countries but it would surely be safer to say your objective should be to study the relationship between economic growth and human development and work to understand the circumstances in which aid that enhances economic growth in particular circumstances is more effective than alternative forms of aid.
Youâve reminded me about Dollar Street: https://ââwww.gapminder.org/ââdollar-street/ââmatrix which does the same thing as Children Just Like Me but online and interactive.
EA gifts for kids?
Hadnât thought of thatâseems a likely explanation!
The discussion about Fistulas was here https://ââblog.givewell.org/ââ2008/ââ08/ââ20/ââfistula/ââ
Itâs certainly worthwhile that this helps less-well-supported non-profits reach a larger audience, but I find the current ranked list somewhat disturbing and disappointing. As an âEA 1.0â person these are not my priorities and I think they would puzzle many outsiders.