Reflective altruism
I’m a philosopher at Vanderbilt University (views my own). The purpose of this blog is to use academic research to drive positive change within and around the effective altruism movement. Discussions are long-form and structured around thematic series. Subscribe below for biweekly posts.
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Papers I learned from (Part 1: Time discounting, consistency and special obligations)
Is there anything that can be said in favor of pure temporal discounting? A recent paper by Harry Lloyd shows one way that the case might be made.
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Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (Part 5: Implications)
I draw five implications from my discussion of mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk.
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Epistemics: (Part 6: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence)
Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, but that evidence is not always provided. I look at two examples of extraordinary claims based on rather less than extraordinary evidence, then draw lessons from this discussion.
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Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (Part 4: Optimistic population dynamics)
I expand on the moral importance of modeling population dynamics by studying an optimistic growth model due to Christian Tarsney. I show that even in optimistic models, incorporating population dynamics tends to substantially decrease the expected value of existential risk mitigation.
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The good it promises (Part 6: Alice Crary)
Alice Crary’s essay “Against `effective altruism'” argues that effective altruism inherits a number of assumptions from consequentialism, including a focus on moral questions about particular actions and a framing of those questions in terms of the point of view of the universe.