I remember going to a ‘fireside chat’ at EAGxOxford a few years ago—the first such conference I’d been to. The topic was general wellbeing amongst EAs. Hearing Will and the other participants talk candidly about difficulties they’d faced was very humbling and humanising.
I don’t think we should necessarily shy away from such questions.
Are you happy with where EA as a movement has ended up? If you could go back and nudge its course, what would you change?
Awesome—looks like a great podcast. Looks like it’s still early days, but would love to see a write-up of your experience getting a new podcast off the ground. Seems like it’s something more EAs could be doing.
[Meta note: this post doesn’t appear on the front page and it probably should! I only found it through the RSS feed.]
Even though ‘utilitarianism’ gets several times the search traffic of terms like ‘effective altruism,’ ‘givewell,’ or ‘peter singer’, there’s currently no good online introduction to utilitarianism. This seems like a missed opportunity.
What similar gaps in easily-accessible EA topics do you think exist?
(I think Rob Wiblin’s now-archived effective altruism FAQ was the best intro to EA around—much better than anything similar offered ‘officially’. I’ve also toyed with writing up some of David Pearce’s work in a more accessible format.)
These look kinda shonky. Maybe CEA offers them somewhere?
On your final point: I’ve often been torn on the question of “how big should EA get?” (cf. Buck Shlegeris’ point about EA saying ‘small and weird’). For what it’s worth, I asked Peter Singer this and he emphatically said we should be trying to grow the movement as much as possible.
Relatedly, I often notice that most EAs are media-shy. I can recall a handful of occasions where an EA (individual or org) had the chance to speak with the press and declined for fear of a negative outcome. Maybe it’s time to embrace the limelight?
While unpleasant, I don’t think being punched in the face is comparable to having kidney stones (a pain so excruciating that often morphine can’t touch it). It seems totally believable to me that such an experience might rank as among the worst in one’s life.
There are probably also two systems at play here: the experience itself and the lingering memory of it. It’s conceivable you might not remember some extremely painful experience as ‘bad’ (through post-hoc rationalisation, or the peak-end effect or similar); I’m not sure how to weight that against the actual raw badness of the experience itself.
You might be aware of this, but Lant Pritchett largely agrees with your criticisms at the end of the piece—that the focus on RCTs isn’t likely to be helpful in finding interventions that accelerate economic development.
Yeah, I’m also wondering about the price. Is this just because costs have gone up, or is the higher price going towards bigger discounts for those less able to pay the full cost?
Done. Can we get Markdown support for bios please?
I’ve seen a few folks talk about psychedelics research as a potential “cause X”; given the decades of work already done and the many millions of dollars spent on research, is it likely to be a neglected cause area?
(Really enjoyed the article though. Also, Tim Ferriss has an interesting discussion on psychedelics with Peter Atilla in this podcast episode)
Great idea. When getting a new tech job, Haseem’s article was really the only useful resource out there for salary negotiations.
For me, the very first ‘EA’ thing I came across was from before EA was a thing: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post on money as the unit of caring. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring
It genuinely was a lightbulb moment—the idea that doing the most good might mean making a bunch of money and giving it to someone who can do the good thing better than you can.
And, maybe most importantly, it turned me on to ‘doing good’ in general. If I’m honest, I hadn’t really considered it as a priority before then. A couple years later I took an 80K career consultation, went into software engineering, pledged to give away 10%+ and am now in the early stages of starting an EA org!
I’m also interested in any slightly unorthodox resources—like, someone coming to the movement for the first time might also want to see criticisms, unusual points of view within the movement (e.g. negative utilitarianism), etc.
Thanks, have added ’em.
Thanks, that’s been added.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer, Will! :)