Is it possible to create a postsuffering future where involuntary suffering no longer exists?
I’m in the International Suffering Abolitionists group and began the Wikipedia article eradication of suffering.
Michael Huang
Karma: 735
(Sorry, I didn’t see your comment until now.)
Animal Ethics has some bibliographical lists: https://www.animal-ethics.org/bibliographical-lists/
Kyle Johannsen’s book Wild Animal Ethics has extensive reference lists https://philpapers.org/rec/JOHWAE-2
Thanks very much!
Great feature! Just wondering whether Our World in Data charts can be embedded into Substack and Ghost in a similar way.
Here’s a related question that may help: “What are the EA movement’s most notable accomplishments?”
Charity Entrepreneurship has a report called “Welfare Focused Gene Modification” from March 2019 that mentions golden rice and other GMOs, mostly farm animal interventions. The report might be superseded though because it no longer appears on the website.
This is an interesting idea from the report: “A ‘Good Gene Institute’, similar to the Good Food Institute, that is focused on carefully and thoughtfully building public awareness and interest in individuals getting into the science of genetics-based animal issues.”
Thanks for your post. There’s a reasonable case for GMOs and malaria to be a cause area. Target Malaria is using genetic modification to reduce the population of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes.
Open Philanthropy writes, “It seems likely to us that the cost-effectiveness of this grant will be competitive with donations to the Against Malaria Foundation (though unlikely that it will be more than 10 times as cost-effective)” (Open Philanthropy, 2017).
An introductory reading list on wild animal welfare that covers all the important debates:
Should we intervene in wild animal welfare?
Will interventions work? Are they tractable?
What impact will wild animal welfare have on the long-term future?
The post was part of a 2018 series, the Wild Animal Welfare Literature Library Project.
Wild animal welfare has increased in prominence since then, e.g. Animal Charity Evaluators has regularly identified wild animal welfare as a key cause area.
It was Isaac Asimov’s favorite story of the hundreds of stories he has written.
I found the ending impossible to forget.
Spoiler:
Very utopian. This is what could happen if everything goes right with AGI. The story doesn’t cover all the things that could go wrong.
Thanks for your post!
Would an open access repository plus an open peer review system like PREreview or the Open Peer Review Module meet your needs?
Also, is there a need to create an open access multidisciplinary repository (green open access) for effective altruism researchers? Or is the existing network of repositories enough?
Hi Aaron,
Many thanks to you and everyone for organising and funding this contest.
If anyone is interested in a sequel, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
A good opportunity to expand that short story into a novel!
Thanks for creating this comprehensive list!
For the wild animal suffering section, there’s a book by Kyle Johannsen that covers the ethics of intervention:
The timelines do a great job of visualising how colonisation would be completed quickly on a cosmic timescale.
There was also a memorable visualisation in Scientific American depicting how space colonies grow exponentially to fill the galaxy: Crawford, Ian (2000) Where are they? Maybe we are alone in the galaxy after all, Scientific American, July.
The time it takes to colonise the galaxy depends on the speed of the colony ships and the time it takes for new colonies to create colony ships of their own.
The remarkable thing is that the home planet only needs to send out two successful colony expeditions to start the colonisation wave. That’s it. Just two ships to colonise the galaxy. One of the most high impact projects one can think of.
That would work. Or an information symbol ⓘ (the letter ‘i’ in a circle).
Or a green sprout. Some games have that to indicate new players.
No worries, thanks for renaming it. I have added a short lead section.
Hello! The EA Hub has some scripts and slides in English: https://resources.eahub.org/events/intro/
Try contacting a staff member from the Groups Team, e.g. Catherine Low, for tips and pointers: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/team/
Humanitarian Assistance for Wild Animals
New article about wild animal suffering, interventions, genome editing and gene drives:
Johannsen, Kyle (2021). Humanitarian Assistance for Wild Animals. The Philosophers’ Magazine 93:33-37. Available on PhilArchive: https://philarchive.org/archive/JOHHAF-5
Michael Huang’s Quick takes
Good idea, but one issue with donating books to a library is that the librarian still has to decide whether to accept or reject the donation. Most librarians are very selective about what gets included and what gets weeded out of their collection.
Another option is to use the library website and find the “Suggest items for the library” web form. (Search the library catalogue first to see whether the library already holds the item.) If the librarian decides to purchase the book, it is completely funded by the library budget.
You can suggest the format too: print, ebook or both. I would say both because both print and ebook formats have their respective strengths and limitations.
For university libraries, if you mention the course or unit (e.g. ethics, philosophy) that would benefit from the book, it helps the librarian to justify the purchase.
To add to arguments for inclusion, here’s an excerpt from an EA Forum post about key figures in the animal suffering focus area.
“Major inspirations for those in this focus area include Peter Singer, David Pearce, and Brian Tomasik.”
Four focus areas of effective altruism by Luke_Muehlhauser, 8th Jul 2013
David Pearce’s work on suffering and biotechnology would be more relevant now than in 2013 due to developments in genome editing and gene drives.
$90 to $120 billion:
“Any costing of a 25-year eradication effort is speculative and involves uncertainties that increase over time. Nonetheless, initial modeling suggests that the costs of eradicating malaria could be $90–$120 billion between 2015 and 2040.”
From Aspiration to Action (2015)