Published on August 31, 2022 8:45 AM GMT This essay was submitted to Open Philanthropy's Cause Exploration Prizes contest   INTRODUCTION It’s easy to connect the concept of biodiversity to wildlife protection. After all, the more we prevent illegal wildlife trade (IWT), the better the chances of improving a locale’s biodiversity index.  But who could make the connection between wildlife protection, global health and the prevention of pandemics?  On the seemingly other side of the spectrum, who could predict a correlation between the illicit trading of wildlife with transnation ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 5:01 AM GMT Currently, I am organizing a speaker series to raise money for Peter Singer’s charity The Life You Can Save. To make an experiment out of it, I structured the event as a blind auction. People donate to the charity and email me the receipt. On the day of the event, I release invitations to the top-thousand most generous donors. So far, I’m really pleased with the response! I feel like this approach is inducing people to donate, which is exciting. On the other hand, it has led me to ask myself (1) to what extent do unique fundraisers induce more aggregat ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 6:58 AM GMT             This post was written for Lizke, Fin and Joshua's EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest and represents my views on a tension I perceive between EA's desire to muster professional ranks in high-impact cause areas and its strong rootedness in shared epistemic processes and personal epistemic virtues. To the best of my knowledge, all views (and certainly all mistakes) here are my own.             Within Effective Altruism, a great deal of time, effort and resources are spent trying to ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 7:18 AM GMT This is a link-post to a study published a week ago in PLoS Biology by researchers at UC Berkeley that found that sleep loss lead to lowered altruistic tendencies across scales. From the abstract -  Across 3 replicating studies, here, we demonstrate that sleep loss represents one previously unrecognized factor dictating whether humans choose to help each other, observed at 3 different scales (within individuals, across individuals, and across societies). First, at an individual level, 1 night of sleep loss triggers the withdrawal of help from one ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 5:02 AM GMT Effective Altruism (EA) is a philosophy and social movement with the explicit goal–and real potential–to do a great deal of good in the world. As with many philosophies and ethical systems, EA becomes absurd or counterproductive when taken to an extreme. For example, an exclusive focus on quantitative outcomes would not only neglect qualitative outcomes like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) but also miss out on the perspectives that come with DEI that help an organization to be more effective. Like other social movements, EA is based on ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 6:07 AM GMT TL;DR As some have already argued, the EA movement would be more effective in convincing people to take existential risks seriously by focusing on how these risks will kill them and everyone they know, rather than on how they need to care about future people Trying to prevent humanity from going extinct does not match people’s commonsense definition of altruism This mismatch causes EA to filter out two groups of people: 1) People who are motivated to prevent existential risks for reasons other than caring about future people; 2) Altruistically motivat ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 4:36 AM GMT Summary In this post we[1] look at two common high-level criticisms of the EA movement, and evaluate them against specific examples from the global health and development cause area.  These high-level criticisms are [Section 1]:  EA’s narrow demographic is bad for the movement, and EA has power structures that mirror (neo)colonialism, paternalism and institutional racism. We evaluate these through three case studies [described in Section 2], and we identify three issues that we believe are restricting the EA movement's effectiveness an ..read more

Published on August 31, 2022 2:05 AM GMT In this blog post I’m going to try to do two things. First I’m going to make the case that failures of both the US and Soviet intelligence services have substantially increased the risk of nuclear power in the atomic age, then I’m going to argue that these case studies provide potentially the best example of how Tetlock style forecasting can be used to improve the world.  Forecasting  Tetlock style forecasting is the practice of individuals or, even better, groups of individuals and having them predict the probability of events on scale fro ..read more

Published on August 30, 2022 10:58 PM GMT Summary: (1) EA will be more effective if we learn to be more succinct.  (2) Well-written summaries achieve similar benefits (sometimes).    Reasoning:  (1) Maintaining nuance is not the same as bloat & unnecessary wordiness.  (2) Longer articles/posts mean people skim.  (3) Longer articles mean people may not read content at all.  (4) Or catch the most important parts of it.  (5) With regards to growing the movement: Good, concise writing captures readers.  (6) A single (non-obsessive) editing pass tha ..read more

Published on August 30, 2022 11:07 PM GMT This has been cross-posted to lesswrong, you can access it here.   Projectlawful.com: Eliezer's latest story, gives readers entry-level policy experience. For the surprisingly large proportion of us that didn't already know, Projectlawful.com is essentially HPMOR 2. Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks "how can I become smart like you?", you no longer need to answer "Have you ever read Harry Potter?" because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it. Specifically, projectlawful is a resource I highly recommend for an ..read more