Rafael Ruiz

• Rafael RuizDec 15, 2023, 10:12 PM

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  in reply to: Niki Kotsenko’s comment on: PhD on Mo­ral Progress—Bibliog­ra­phy Review

  Thanks for your comments!

  Regarding (1), I’ll get in touch with you if I have a specific question.

  (2) I’ll rewrite my characterization of Robert Wright’s work. I think his main line of argument is that cultural evolutionary processes lead to bigger networks of cooperation, which foster positive sum games, which in turn foster further cooperation in a positive feedback loop. (Though certainly not everything fosters further growth or cooperation, conspicuous consumption being one exception)

  (3) Could you say more? Do you mean differences between people’s personalities (as in the OCEAN Big 5 Personalities)? Or more like character traits such as obedience to authority? Whatever the case, I definitely haven’t seen much of this work. Might be my personal ignorance or lack of search in psychology journals, but I think there’s general lack of work. Perhaps something that partly explains it are the controversies that surrounded the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Experiment, which set back psychological research on morality quite a bit for several decades. Hopefully some moral psychologists pick up the topic of moral progress.

• Rafael RuizDec 10, 2023, 12:37 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: PhD on Mo­ral Progress—Bibliog­ra­phy Review

  I hope you find it Kitcher’s book worthwhile read! I always learn something from him.

  (Typo fixed!)

• Rafael RuizDec 10, 2023, 11:42 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: finm’s comment on: PhD on Mo­ral Progress—Bibliog­ra­phy Review

  Thanks for the support, Fin! I definitely agree with you, and I hope this way people can get most of the bang for their buck and save their research time. This topic is greatly time-inefficient, just because it’s very broad and interdisciplinary, and there was no clear initial indication of what’s good and what’s not. So I think reading from either the “TL;DR /​ Recommended Reading Order”, or some of the “Five Star” or “Four Star” books, or the “Worthwhile Articles” should be more than enough for the interest of EAs. The rest are more for completeness’ sake.

  Hopefully I was able to highlight some hidden gems. For example, Hanno Sauer’s “Moral Teleology”, Victor Kumar’s “A Better Ape” and Philip Kitcher “Moral Progress” have flown under people’s radar, but they’re really good recent contributions. It’s a literature that has grown a bit in the past five years.

  Sorry for the headers thing. That was never my intention, I just didn’t know putting something in Bold made it a header. I’ve fixed it now.

PhD on Mo­ral Progress—Bibliog­ra­phy Review

• Rafael RuizAug 24, 2022, 11:06 AM

  3 points

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  on: An­nounc­ing a new in­tro­duc­tion to effec­tive altruism

  Interesting introduction! I have a couple of first impressions that I’d like to share:

  1. The beginning of the article seems strange to me. This is the first time I have seen “Effective Altruism” defined as “a project”. To me, “a project” seems to have the connotation of something happening within a specific organization, rather than an idea, question, ideology, philosophy, or social movement. I think Effective Altruism is not a project. Rather, it contains hundreds or thousands of projects. I think there might be a better concept to encompass the idea.

  2. I find it weird to put “What are some examples of effective altruism in practice?” before outlining the ideas in “What values unite effective altruism?”. Although it might be more boring, I think our cause areas are better understood once we outline our core philosophy. Also, we try to be cause neutral, so our projects might change radically in the future.

  3. On a more positive note, I like the bar charts! They’re very illuminating regarding the magnitude of the issues. :)

• Rafael RuizJul 23, 2022, 10:48 AM

  9 points

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  on: Who Want to Col­lab­o­rate on an Effec­tive Altru­ism for Dum­mies Se­quence?

  Just in case some people don’t know them, some useful material I’ve found related to introducing EA to newcomers is the following:

  • EA Wiki Key Concepts and Tools.

  • GCP Library.

  • GCP Student Handbook.

  • EA Groups Resource Centre. (Particularly their Communicating about EA section)

  It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but I thought it would be good to mention them. That way more people can know about them and we can also avoid repeating efforts. :)

• Rafael RuizJul 6, 2022, 11:18 AM

  2 points

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  on: Em­pha­siz­ing emo­tional al­tru­ism in effec­tive altruism

  This is post great! I had the idea for a similar post but you put it better than I could.

  I hope more diverse messaging attracts a variety of people to EA and makes them more engaged overall.

• Rafael RuizJul 5, 2022, 2:04 PM

  2 points

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  on: An un­offi­cial Re­plac­ing Guilt tier list

  Thanks for sharing! I might start reading from your most recommended. :)

• Rafael RuizJul 5, 2022, 9:48 AM

  2 points

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  on: All moral de­ci­sions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution

  Thanks for posting this! I’ll be sharing some of these graphs with people new to EA

• Rafael RuizJun 29, 2022, 12:02 PM

  2 points

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  on: Things that limit my am­bi­tion in EA

  I share many of your worries, but I think that luckily they have solutions! Here is what I’ve learned from my own experience in the past couple of years.

  Regarding financial stability, I think it’s wise to save in order to have the runway to sustain yourself for several months without income.

  Regarding burnout, often my advice to others in this situation is to “try to give 80% effort”, because attempting to give 100% effort leads to burnout in just a few weeks or months.

  If you want to maximize positive impact in the world, it has to be sustainable. This means taking care of your physical and mental well-being by exercising and maintaining your friendships and personal connections.

  Human psychology is not impartial. As biological and social beings, we need connection and companionship. I’d rather be an “80% effort” Effective Altruist for my whole life instead of being a “100% effort” Effective Altruist for 3 months.

  Regarding rejection, I recommend taking rejections as a positive thing showing that you tried your best. I keep a document where I track the things I’ve applied to. I cross off the ones I don’t get, but it’s very satisfying to underline the ones that I get with a nice green color!

  Even if the rate of acceptance for publications/​uni acceptances/​jobs is like 5%, it still means you’ll get accepted to several places every year if you keep on applying and talking to EAs that can give you feedback on your application materials.

  Also, don’t take rejections too personally, people don’t really know you. Their perception of you is based on a couple of brief documents.

• Rafael RuizJun 17, 2022, 2:23 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Markus Amalthea Magnuson’s comment on: EA or­ga­ni­za­tions should be more coordinated

  Thanks for the source. I had never heard about this organization before.

  Precisely the “ad hoc and informal” nature of the current system is what I criticize in the main post. I wish that there was a website maintained by CEA or a similar organization filling this role, similar to the EA Groups Resource Centre.

• Rafael RuizJun 17, 2022, 2:14 PM

  4 points

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  in reply to: Pablo Melchor 🔸’s comment on: EA or­ga­ni­za­tions should be more coordinated

  Thanks for sharing! I had no idea these resources existed. (I think most people don’t know about them either)

  Just two points:

  -By a very rough estimate, I think the Wiki is missing like 70% of EA organizations, particularly the smaller ones. Seems like there’s a lot of work left to be done adding them!

  -How do we join the EA Operations Slack?

EA or­ga­ni­za­tions should be more coordinated