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.
Home | About Me | Navigation | Comment Policy | Stay in Touch
-
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.
-
Exaggerating the risks (Part 12: Millett and Snyder-Beattie on biorisk)
Can existing arguments by effective altruists ground high estimates of existential biorisk? I consider three estimates provided by Piers Millett and Andrew Snyder-Beattie.
-
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.
-
Exaggerating the risks (Part 11: Biorisk: Still more grounds for doubt)
Rounding out the initial case for skepticism about existential biorisk, I give four final reasons to suspect that existential biorisk may be lower than many claim it to be.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The good it promises (Part 7: Crary continued)
This post continues my discussion of Alice Crary’s essay, “Against `effective altruism’,” focusing on Crary’s composite critique of effective altruism.
-
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.
-
Meta: Posting less frequently
I’ll be reducing my posting frequency to biweekly rather than weekly, at least for the time being. Sorry.