Views expressed here do not represent the views of any organizations I am affiliated with, unless mentioned otherwise.
Prabhat Soni
[Question] Factors other than ITN?
A List of EA Donation Pledges (GWWC, etc)
Hey I know this post is very old. But in case someone stumbles across this post, the best presentation for introducing EA in my opinion is:
this presentation by Ajeya Cotra or a slightly modified version (and IMO better) set of slides by Kuhan Jeyapragasan.
I’d be curious to discuss if there’s a case for Moscow. 80,000 Hours’s lists being a Russia or India specialist under “Other paths we’re excited about”. The case would probably revolve around Russia’s huge nuclear arsenal and efforts to build AI. If climate change were to become really bad (say 4 degrees+ warming), Russia (along with Canada and New Zealand) would become the new hub for immigration given it’s geography -- and this alone could make it one of the most influential countries in the world.
Strong upvote. This post caused me to deprioritize longtermism and shift my focus to presently alive beings.
Hmm this is interesting. I think I broadly agree with you. I think a key consideration is that humans have a good-ish track record of living/surviving in deserts, and I would expect this to continue.
Hey, thanks for putting this together. I think it would be quite valuable to have these lists be put up on Effective Thesis’s research agenda page. My reasoning for this is that Effective Thesis’s research agenda page probably has more viewers than this EA Forum post or the Google Doc version of this post.
Additionally, if you agree with the above, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how we could make Effective Thesis’s research agenda page open source?
I think this is a very relevant point. I think (correct me if I’m wrong) the effectiveness of the best intervention in the world >>> the effectiveness of the best intervention in a random country X. So, it would be more beneficial to have 100 donors for effective global issues compared to 500 donors for effective national issues.
A caveat, however is value promotion. This is difficult to measure or quantify. There is a chance of large spillover effects due more people having an “effective giving” mindset. These people may further spread the idea of effective giving, or may become globally-aligned in the future. Off the top of my head, I think the spillover effects would be rather modest, but we’d probably need more “hard evidence” for this argument.
I am skeptical if making an EA Wiki is better than uploading EA-relevant articles on Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/).
There are many other arguments for why it wouldn’t be a good idea, but I want to focus on the target group.
Case 1: The target group is EAs. In this case, the EA Wiki would probably host in-depth/comprehensive knowledge that is not available on places EA’s normally visit like 80000hours.org or effectivealtruism.org. It would serve for questions like “Has anyone in EA ever talked about __?”. As of now, most of this “in-depth” knowledge is present in the form of EA Forum posts and comments. Most of the content on the EA Wiki would be copy-pasted from the EA Forum. The EA Forum is well-searchable, and it already fulfills this purpose. For long-run things like “how should the EA content be organized in the long run (e.g. 5 years later)”, an EA Wiki may be more promising. But, for the reasons written above, it is difficult to see any real use of it in the short term (e.g. 1-2 years).
Case 2: The target group is non-EAs. The EA Wiki wouldn’t show up in search engines. Period. Wikipedia articles appear much more easily on search engines and are linked to by other Wikipedia articles. A much better idea would be to upload EA-relevant articles on Wikipedia. Also, there is more scope for extending EA to other languages since Wikipedia supports articles in a 5-10 other languages.
I think your question is: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
Let’s go through which countries are good for specific causes:
Artificial General Intelligence: USA, China, UK
Engineered Pandemics: USA, China
Earning-to-give: rich countries like USA, Qatar, Singapore, Norway, UAE, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland
Nuclear Security: Russia, USA, North Korea
Climate Change: Countries developing rapidly like Brazil, India and countries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases as of now like USA, UK, etc
Improving Institutional Decision Making: Corrupt countries like Colombia, Brazil, India Mexico, Ghana, Bolivia and influential countries like USA, UK
Malaria Interventions: A lot of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
Influencing long-term future: Potential superpowers like Russia, China, India, Brazil
Alternative meats: Brazil, China, USA, Israel, India
Food/Water Fortification: India, West African countries
The countries that are good for specific problems/interventions are good because they exhibit certain “structural” properties. For example, countries good for earning to give are rich; countries good for factory farming have high consumption of meat; countries good for institutional decision making are corrupt or influential; countries good for influencing long-term future are potential superpowers; and so on.
These “structural” properties are present in multiple (on average around 5) countries, and thus there are around 5 countries that are high-impact for a specific cause area/intervention. Also, these countries are generall geographically and culturally dispersed—often belonging to different continents.
Coming back to the original question: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
If what I have argued above is correct, the premise that “a problem/intervention is specific to my country” is generally false. Going by the trend that the top ~10 problems/interventions today are not region-specific, I see no reason why a very promising problem/intervention would be found that is region-specific. And, so I argue that region-level cause prioritization research is not particularly valuable.
EDIT: I’m proposing that a majority of the promising problems are not restricted to a particular region. Ofcourse, there are some exceptions to this like war, US immigration, (maybe) health development in Sub-saharan Africa, etc.
We may need to invest more to tackle future problems
Which types of “investments” are you talking about? Are they specifically financial investments, or a broader range of investments?
In case you mean a broader range of investments, such investments could include: building the EA movement, making good moral values a social norm, developing better technologies that could help us tackle unforseen problems in the future, improving the biological intelligence level of humans. This definition could get problematic since many of these investments are seperate cause areas themselves.
I think additional research on this would be beneficial. This question is also a part of the Global Priorities Institute’s research agenda.
Related questions the Global Priorities Institute is interested in:
There’s been a bunch of past discussion concerning an EA Wiki, and it took me a few hours to find it all. I’m writing the links to past discussion below so that it saves someone time if they choose to go down this rabbit hole!
Possible candidates/sources for EA Wiki:
Dead URLs:
http://effective-altruism.com (this just redirects to the EA Forum)
Relevant Forum articles:
I may have misunderstood your question, so there’s a chance that this is a tangential answer.
I think one mistake humans make is overconfidence in specific long-term predictions. Specific would mean like predicting when a particular technology will arrive, when we will hit 3 degrees of warming, when we will hit 11 billion population, etc.
I think the capacity of even smart humans to reasonably (e.g. >50% accuracy) predict when a specific event would occur is somewhat low; I would estimate around 20-40 years from when they are living.
You ask: “if you were alive in 1920 trying to have the largest possible impact today” what would you do? I would acknowledge that I cannot (with reasonable accuracy) predict the thing that will “the largest possible impact in 2020″ (which is a very specific thing to predict) and go with broad-based interventions (which is a more sure-shot answer) like improving international relations, promoting moral values, promoting education, promoting democracy, promoting economic growth, etc (these are sub-optimal answers; but they’re probably the best I could do).
Socrates’ case against democracy
https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/why-socrates-hated-democracy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it
Socrates makes the following argument:
Just like we only allow skilled pilots to fly airplanes, licensed doctors to operate on patients or trained firefighters to use fire enignes, similarly we should only allow informed voters to vote in elections.
“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”. Half of American adults don’t know that each state gets two senators and two thirds don’t know what the FDA does.
(Whether a voter is informed can be evaluated by a short test on the basics of elections, for example.)
Pros: better quality of candidates elected, would give uninformed voters a strong incentive to learn aout elections.
Cons: would be crazy unpopular, possibility of the small group of informed voters acting acting in self-interest—which would worsen inequality.
(I did a shallow search and couldn’t find something like this on the EA Forum or Center for Election Science.)
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell is a popular YouTube channel. A lot of its content is EA-adjacent. The most viewed videos in a bunch of EA topics are ones posted by Kurzgesagt. The videos are also of very high quality. Has anyone tried collaborating with them or supporting them? I think it could be high impact (although careful evaluation is probably required).
Most of their EA-adjacent videos:
- 5 Jan 2021 3:05 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on BrianTan’s Quick takes by (
High impact career for Danish people: Influencing what will happen with Greenland
EDIT: Comments give a good counter-argument against my views!
Climate change could get really bad. Let’s imagine a world with 4 degrees warming. This would probably mean mass migration of billions of people to Canada, Russia, Antartica and Greenland.
Out of these, Canada and Russia will probably have fewer decisions to make since they already have large populations and will likely see a smooth transition into a billion+ people country. Antarctica could be promising to influence, but it will be difficult for a single effective altruist since multiple large countries lay claims on Antarctica (i.e. more competition). Greenland however is much more interesting.
It’s kinda easy for Danes to influence Greenland
Denmark is a small-ish country with a population of ~5.7 million people. There’s really not much competition if one wants to enter politics (if you’re a Dane you might correct me on this). The level of competition is much lower than conventional EA careers since you only need to compete with people within Denmark.
There are unsolved questions wrt Greenland
There’s a good chance Denmark will sell Greenland because they could get absurd amounts of money. Moreover, Greenland is not of much value to them since Denmark will mostly remain inhabitable and they don’t have a large population to resettle. Do you sell Greenland to a peaceful/neutral country? To the highest bidder? Is it okay to sell it to a historically aggresive country? Are there some countries you want to avoid selling it to because they will gain too much influence? USA, China and Russia have shown interest in buying Greenland.
Should Denmark just keep Greenland, allow mass immigration and become the next superpower?
Should Greenland remain autonomous?
Importance
Greenland, with a billion+ people living in it, could be the next superpower. Just like how most of the emerging technology (e.g. AI, biotechnology, nanotechnology) are developed in current superpowers like USA and China, future technologies could be developed in Greenland.
In a world of extreme climate change, it is possible that 1-2 billion people could live in Greenland. That’s a lot of lives you could influence.
Greenland has a strategic geographic location. If a country with bad intentions buys Greenland, that could be catastrophic for world peace.
Another approach that targets high-schoolers that I can think of is promoting philosophy education in schools. How does EA outreach in schools compare with this?
Yes, I completely agree. In fact, most wars would probably require local-level knowledge and need to be prioritized by local altruists.
Task Y candidate: Writing (from scratch) and editing Wikipedia articles.