Interested in societal/civilizational resilience & improving individual/collective decision-making through non-behavioral means (e.g. through biological self-improvement)
founder & president of High Impact Medicine Berlin and EA Students Berlin
board team member of High Impact Medicine Germany
studying at Charité Berlin with current focus on neurotechnology and psychiatry (modular medical degree)
timfarkas
Karma: 315
Thanks for your comment!
Fascinating, haven’t heard of them thus far, I will look into their work!
Yes, I agree. I believe that past successes with cause prioritization and forecasting could lead to some overconfidence in regard to competence at discovering unknown cause areas: It will be important to keep up the cause-neutrality, especially in regards to the unknown!
Thanks for your comment! Yes I am not sure about this factor myself, it is not based on a comprehensive review of all EA efforts on global resilience relative to total efforts.
Checking OpenPhil’s Grant Database just now was not as conclusive as I’d hoped as grant categories such as ‘Global Catastrophic Risks’ or ‘Global Health & Development’ leave open whether these are spent on generalist resilience or specialist efforts.
Focus on Civilizational Resilience over Cause Areas
I love the idea , sign me up! Are you planning to also publish this in a printed form? I would be interested in ordering this as a haptic copy as well—if just for the feel of it.
I was one of the people that got to meet Ben at the Conference! I just wanted to independently verify that it was a great conversation and that it brought great value. :)
Love the statistics here and the ESH mission generally, all the best and hopefully see you soon at the next conference!
Great points, thanks!
I think the well-being enhancements you describe definitely fit this post’s definition of mind enhancement and could in many ways also affect ‘Benevolence, Intelligence, Power’ (especially ‘Power’). This means that in this regard most of the post’s considerations would equally apply to well-being enhancements too.However, the aspects I list mostly focus on the instrumental implications of mind enhancements, i.e. how they could increase/decrease effective-altruist impact done by certain actors/society. As the enhancements you describe could be seen as constituting direct impact on QoL/QALY, other considerations would also become important.
E.g. in some cases there could be trade-offs like certain well-being enhancements enhancing subjective quality of life but decreasing ‘Benevolence, Intelligence, Power’. In such a case, expected desirability would depend a lot on your set of assumptions regarding the world like existential risk, long-termism, which could make it much harder to draw any definitive conclusions there.Definitely a very interesting sub-area and probably also very neglected and worthy of thorough EA examination! :)
Psychedelics could be a tool for enhancing ‘benevolence’ in a mind enhancement context.. (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FvZmZdqHNofJyw4Xv/mind-enhancement-a-high-impact-high-neglect-cause-area) Also, there is quite a bit of literature on moral enhancement, some of it focusing on psychedelics. I am planning on writing a cause area profile examining Importance, Neglectedness and Tractability of moral enhancement soon. Would be happy to collaborate/chat!
Important point! I think a healthy lifestyle including optimal sleep, exercise, diet and sufficient recreational/social time are most probably the most important things you can do to reach optimal baseline for possible further mind enhancement. This has the nice effect of also reducing risk for almost all mental diseases. It would be exciting to know if certain MEIs further lower the risk of mental disease, but AFAIK there are already a few examples of this, e.g. certain substances having neuroprotective effects or language learning possibly postponing onset of dementia by a few years!
+1 für Zukunftsschutz, da sehr treffend und relativ kurz, dadurch wahrscheinlich für die breitere Öffentlichkeit weniger abschreckend als andere Wortmonster in diesem Thread; positiv konnotiert durch Nähe zu Naturschutz!