It’s interesting that (being from the Guardian), that article presents the story as being a scandal, with the implication that Cummings was being corrupt.
Tom_Ash
Karma: 1,149
I don’t know the answer to that myself, but if you find it out and let me know I’d be happy to update the guide.
Thanks for doing this Richenda!
Is anyone familiar with the philosophical literature on that? My understanding is that it’s controversial.
Separately, what’s the connection to moral realism?
Yes, the .impact team (particular Patrick Brinich-Langlois) have been working on this for a little while, and it’s long been part of our to do list for the forum.
(There’s a whole set up procedure for them that they follow, including there being once a month. It’s part of their procedure for doing the EA Newsletter to post an open thread with its contents at the same time. What sort of a board member are you not knowing every single detail? :p ;) )
Yes, the .impact team has the details—probably neatest if I don’t post it here!
When we did them once a month they got only a few comments, but I’d say that’s no problem and they’re still helpful. We added that link to them in the sidebar, so that’s a reason to keep them up. We should change the intro text to explicitly welcome people new to EA with any sorts of questions or observations.
Great post—thanks Georgie!
Good catch, that was in from before we switched to AMF and away from CauseVox!
2016’s Living On Less fundraiser: join EAs around the world getting sponsored to eat for under $2.50 a day
This stuff is genuinely tricky, and I’m deeply aware of that! Does deworming increase population though? My guess is it might even decrease it. Remember that my concerns are slightly different than Michael’s, and focused on the general difficulty of knowing how and why deaths are bad, making me want to prioritise easing suffering (and increasing welfare).
Probably not! We plan to use an off-the-shelf service from somewhere like Vanguard in the US or the UK’s Charities Aid Foundation if we do this at all, but even so.
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Good luck! I think having a set of material which doesn’t make EA (or effective giving) seem too demanding is very sensible—even though the three people you’ve started with, all of whom I know, definitely seem like “full time” EAs, to use the least-bad terminology people could come up with when this was last discussed on the forum!
(*For my part, I’m unsure of my credence that I can, but if forced to pick one I’d put it at below 50%, though that’s for various reasons which are quite idiosyncratic to me.)
I’m interested as to different people’s views on whether they can beat the wisdom of the EA crowds on this.* Those who think they can’t might theoretically want to give to a portfolio of charities based on a particular crowd’s pick. We’ve been talking about collaborating with Michael Page to make something like this happen, though my purely personal estimate is that it won’t happen any time soon, and I’m not sure how many people would donate to certain sorts of portfolios—that’d also be interesting to hear!
Are there actually infoboxes? Where? I don’t see them—all I see is manually centered links at the top of e.g. http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Library/Giving_What_We_Can
I thought you might like to know that, after a few days’ thought and discussion, this reminder of my population ethics concerns has made me switch my donations from AMF to SCI; I originally favoured this over life-saving interventions for population ethics reasons back in 2010, six years ago. (My concerns are slightly broader ones about the difficulty of knowing how and why deaths are bad—without doubting that they are—but I don’t have time to go into them any time soon.)
To the people voting ‘disagree’, what OP said above is clearly true. Perhaps people are taking it to imply that the utilitarian course of action here is correct, but I see no such implication.
I think a better forum norm would be for someone to comment spelling out the perceived implication and why they disagree with it, and have other people upvote that.