UK Medical Student.
freedomandutility
Karma: 34
[Question] What are good institutes to conduct a research-based Masters in ageing research?
How do they think funding the development of alternative proteins might compare to donations to the Clean Air Task Force?
I’m not comfortable sharing an excerpt publicly on the forum since it could compromise my anonymity, but I’m happy to send it to anyone who’s interested over the forum’s messaging function.
I’m going to a more detailed post on this when I have time, but I think we should be more stringent in thinking of EA’s priority cause areas as problems with cost-effective interventions that are easier to find, and other areas as problems with cost-effective interventions that are harder to find.
I think some people might have downvoted on the basis of “the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t seem like it should be a priority EA cause area” (which I’d agree with), rather than “this intervention doesn’t seem cost-effective”.
There is a very large amount of suffering in the world. It is morally good to alleviate this suffering. But alleviating suffering costs resources of some kind, like money or effort.
So if there are opportunities to alleviate more suffering using the same amount of resources, it makes sense to seek out these opportunities, and take them.
I’m a student, and I have a Google document that I refer to whenever I feel demotivated in terms of my goals or don’t feel like studying.
It’s essentially my personal EA ‘theory of change’ - it covers the sequence of events from me studying now / working on EA stuff now, all the way to lots of people suffering a lot less and lots of people being far happier.
I think it really helps me and I’d definitely recommend it! ὠ0
Thanks for your posts about ESG!
One thing I’m unclear on is “To judge whether ESG investing is actually having an impact, we need to look at scenarios where there is a tension between ESG factors and profitability factors.”
In my view, given that businesses / investors aren’t perfect at profit maximisation, it seems like situations where ESG increases profits compared to no ESG should still be thought of as part of ESG’s impact.
Yes it is, thank you!
Thank you for writing this!
One question I have for you:
How do you think a UK parliamentary assistant role compares to a role doing policy work at an NGO working at a more international level / in a less affluent country?
I think it’d be harder to scale up
My opinion is no, but a related initiative I might make a more detailed post on in the future would be something along the lines of making it easier to adopt children from abroad (or even in the same country) / advocating for more adoptions
Great! I’d also recommend reaching out to leaders of university EA groups who might be able to share the videos on social media
I think this is a brilliant idea! I’d like to recommend a video on how the news tends to focus on novel and infrequent problems, and how this systematically misses some of the worst problems which are happening far more frequently, which messes with our ideas of what the worst problems are.
I didn’t downvote this comment, but
a) This may have not been your intention, but even in context, the “white supremacy” claim in the e-book does read as your claim
b) I don’t think “poorer countries should transfer their wealth to richer countries” supports “a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources”. The richest countries include many countries that aren’t majority white such as Singapore, Qatar, UAE, Taiwan etc, so I don’t think the ‘overwhelmingly’ criterion is met here.
c) I’m of the opinion that people should refrain from ever using terms “in a legal scholarly sense”; instead they should either use the term in its usual sense or create a new term with a more specific definition.
That being said, I think a charitable reading of your e-book makes it seem like you are describing certain conclusions of longetermism as supporting ‘white supremacy’, and that you are using the term in a ‘legal scholarly sense’ and defining it as “a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources”. I don’t know if you have made this claim elsewhere but it did not seem like your e-book claims that “longtermists are white supremacists”.
I think this is a great idea and personally I think it’s relevant enough for the forum
Should someone start a grassroots campaign for USA to recognise the State of Palestine?
I think this is still a good cause area for EAs:
I think the potential positive effects of global drug legalisation on opioid access in LMICs adds massively to the expected value
I agree that this area is probably not neglected in absolute terms, but I suspect that it might be neglected relative to the expected value of global drug legalisation
I think a global angle (which might have more of a focus on working with WHO and the UN) might not even be neglected in absolute terms
[Question] Are global pandemics going to be more likely or less likely over the next 100 years?
Thanks, exactly what I was looking for!
Some people argue that we not only need to prevent further greenhouse gas emissions, but that it should also be a priority to reduce the current amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Do they share this position, and if so, do they think that it could be more effective to fund the development of greenhouse gas absorbing technologies (which could potentially reduce the current amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) than to fund initiatives to reduce further GHG emissions, which do not share this potential.