imp4rtial 🔸

Karma: 1,835

imp4rtial 🔸Jun 14, 2021, 4:21 PM
5 points
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on: What are some high-impact paths for a young person in the developing world?
Here is an old, informal 80,000 Hours document on this topic: https://wiki.80000hours.org/index.php/Potentially_promising_career_paths_in_poorer_countries

imp4rtial 🔸Jun 3, 2021, 7:33 AM
10 points
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on: Help me find the crux between EA/XR and Progress Studies
Regarding your question:
What would moral/social progress actually look like?
This is a big and difficult question, but here are some pointers to relevant concepts and resources:
- Moral circle expansion (MCE) - MCE is “the attempt to expand the perceived boundaries of the category of moral patients.” For instance, this could involve increasing the moral concern in the wider public (or, more targeted, among societal decision-makers) for non-human animals or future people. Arguably, MCE could help reduce the risk of societies committing further atrocities like factory farming and also increase the resources spent on existential risk mitigation (as there is a greater concern for the welfare of future people).
- Improving institutional decision-making—this covers a very broad range of interventions, including, for instance, voting reform. The case for it is that “Improving the quality of decision-making in important institutions could improve our ability to solve almost all other problems. It could also help society’s ability to identify “unknown unknowns” – problems we haven’t even thought of yet – and to mitigate all global catastrophic risks”.
- See also this list of resources on differential progress (and in particular, Differential Intellectual Progress as a Positive-Sum Project)
- Global priorities research (GPR) - arguably, a key priority for GPR is to provide answers to the above question. For instance, this might involve rigorously investigating the plausibility of longtermism in the light of objections (such as the epistemic objection).
- The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe—a very interesting paper arguing “for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing.”. The paper ends by making two suggestions relevant to the above question: “The article then discusses what our society should do in light of the likelihood that we are doing something seriously wrong: we should regard intellectual progress, of the sort that will allow us to find and correct our moral mistakes as soon as possible, as an urgent moral priority rather than as a mere luxury; and we should also consider it important to save resources and cultivate flexibility, so that when the time comes to change our policies we will be able to do so quickly and smoothly.”

imp4rtial 🔸Jun 3, 2021, 7:06 AM
16 points
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on: Help me find the crux between EA/XR and Progress Studies
Regarding your question:
Does XR consider tech progress default-good or default-bad?
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s paper Existential risk and growth provides one interesting perspective on this question (note that while I find the paper informative, I don’t think it settles the question).
A key question the paper seeks to address is this:
Does faster economic growth accelerate the development of dangerous newtechnologies, thereby increasing the probability of an existential catastrophe?
The paper’s (preliminary) conclusion is
we could be living in a unique “time of perils,” having developed technologies advanced enough to threaten our permanent destruction, but not having grown wealthy enough yet to be willing to spend sufficiently on safety. Accelerating growth during this “time of perils” initially increases risk, but improves the chances of humanity’s survival in the long run. Conversely, even short-term stagnation could substantially curtail the future of humanity.

imp4rtial 🔸May 24, 2021, 6:59 AM
12 points
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on: AMA: Working at the Centre for Effective Altruism
My impression is that as an organisation CEA has undergone substantial change over time. How might working at CEA today be different compared to working there, say, 3/5/7 years ago?

imp4rtial 🔸May 24, 2021, 6:56 AM
7 points
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on: AMA: Working at the Centre for Effective Altruism
Do you believe the EA community’s overall level of investment in community building is adequate/too low/too high?

(While this question isn’t strictly about CEA itself, I’d imagine a key motivating belief for many CEA staff members would be that community building work is neglected relative to other high impact opportunities.)

imp4rtial 🔸May 24, 2021, 6:53 AM
6 points
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on: AMA: Working at the Centre for Effective Altruism
What are the most positive and/or negative aspects of your work at CEA?

imp4rtial 🔸May 20, 2021, 8:56 PM
25 points
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on: How much do you (actually) work?
This is an interesting question, though I am somewhat concerned that the responses will be biased towards high numbers because people who work relatively fewer hours may be less likely to respond. I would give much more weight to an anonymous survey.

On a different note, I have personally found it useful to track my working hours using Toggl Track (https://toggl.com/track/). This has given me a much more accurate sense of how many hours I usually work per week and how long I should expect projects to take.

[Linkpost] How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life—NYT

imp4rtial 🔸May 1, 2021, 7:34 AM

10 points

0 comments3 min readEA link

imp4rtial 🔸Apr 14, 2021, 11:18 AM
2 points
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on: Moral circle expansion
Suggestion to change this tag’s URL from ”/moral-circle-expansion-1/” to ”/moral-circle-expansion/”.

imp4rtial 🔸Apr 11, 2021, 12:39 PM
1 point
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on: Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism
Here are several more recent resources addressing the differences between effective altruism and utilitarianism/consequentialism:
- William MacAskill (2019) Effective Altruism, The Norton Introduction to Ethics, Elizabeth Harman & Alex Guerrero (eds.).
- Utilitarianism.net: Section on effective altruism
- Effective altruism FAQ: Is effective altruism the same as utilitarianism? What if I’m not a utilitarian?

imp4rtial 🔸Apr 11, 2021, 12:29 PM
2 points
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on: Act utilitarianism: criterion of rightness vs. decision procedure
To learn more about the difference between criteria of rightness and decision procedures, and how this difference entails a distinction between “single-level utilitarianism” and “multi-level utilitarianism”, please see the section Chapter 3: Elements and Types of Utilitarianism: Multi-level Utilitarianism Versus Single-level Utilitarianism on utilitarianism.net.

imp4rtial 🔸Apr 11, 2021, 11:18 AM
9 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: On the longtermist case for working on farmed animals [Uncertainties & research ideas]
Another way to approach this is to ensure that people who are already interested in learning about utilitarianism are able to find high-quality resources that explicitly cover topics like the idea of the expanding moral circle, sentiocentrism/pathocentrism, and the implications for considering the welfare of geographically distant people, other species, and future generations.
Improving educational opportunities of this kind was one motivation for writing this section on utilitarianism.net: Chapter 3: Utilitarianism and Practical Ethics: The Expanding Moral Circle.

imp4rtial 🔸Mar 11, 2021, 12:38 PM
25 points
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on: Why Hasn’t Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?
Another indicator: Wikipedia pageviews show fairly stable interest in articles on EA and related topics over the last five years.

imp4rtial 🔸Mar 6, 2021, 4:53 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Utilitarianism
Hi Pablo, I have only just seen your comments. Yes, of course, I am more than happy with all the changes you have made and trust your sense for how this Wiki should be designed/structured! Thank you and keep up the good work.

imp4rtial 🔸Mar 4, 2021, 10:25 PM
13 points
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on: How many hits do the hits of different EA sites get each year?
Wikipedia pageviews could serve as a useful indicator that I expect is strongly correlated with website views.
E.g. see the following comparison of the pageviews of several EA-related Wikipedia pages in 2020. As it turns out, Peter Singer gets about 2x the number of views of Nick Bostrom, 2.5x of effective altruism, and 12x FHI or GiveWell.

imp4rtial 🔸Mar 1, 2021, 10:07 AM
3 points
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on: Notes on “Bioterror and Biowarfare” (2006)
A somewhat related thought I had while reading this post: Several of the nuclear-weapon states (including the US for all I remember) retain the right to retaliate with nuclear weapons against an attack with bioweapons, chemical weapons, and even cyber weapons. On the one hand, this might make the overall situation more stable because hostile actors (at least states, probably not so much terrorist groups) are deterred from using these other weapons types. On the other hand, it may be destabilising since many more actors (including non-state ones) may trigger a nuclear conflict.

imp4rtial 🔸Dec 15, 2020, 2:28 PM
5 points
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on: Books / book reviews on nuclear risk, WMDs, great power war?
On the topic of nuclear warfare, I have also read and can recommend The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan. The book provides a deep dive into the development of the US nuclear doctrine over time , covering all administrations across 70 years and outlining in great detail many issues and arguments around nuclear policy.

If you’re also interested in books on biological weapons, I particularly recommend (HT Chris Bakerlee):
1. Bioterror and Biowarfare: A Beginner’s Guide by Malcolm Dando
2. Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker
On the rise of China (relevant to Great Power Competition), I have found it interesting to read Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman. However, I am not too excited to recommend it, because the great majority of the book covers developments in ancient China for which the level of “insights per page” was fairly low for me.
All of the above books are also available as audio books on Audible.
What links here?

imp4rtial 🔸Dec 4, 2020, 10:46 AM
8 points
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on: AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
What are your thoughts on the desirability and feasibility of differential technological development (DTD) as a governance strategy for emerging technologies?
For instance, Toby Ord briefly touches on DTD in The Precipice, writing that “While it may be too difficult to prevent the development of a risky technology, we may be able to reduce existential risk by speeding up the development of protective technologies relative to dangerous ones.”

imp4rtial 🔸Dec 4, 2020, 10:36 AM
3 points
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on: AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
What are your long-term goals for The Roots of Progress? Are you pleased with how far you have come so far (e.g. quantity and quality of content produced, page-view or subscriber numbers)?

imp4rtial 🔸Dec 4, 2020, 10:33 AM
2 points
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on: AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
How do you prioritise between the various projects you are working on? What other projects, if any, do you consider working on to advance progress studies in future?

imp4rtial 🔸

[Linkpost] How Hu­man­ity Gave It­self an Ex­tra Life—NYT

[Linkpost] How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life—NYT