Ineffective altruism: Some doubts about effective altruism
I’m a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, Oxford. There are many things I like about effective altruism. The purpose of this blog is to discuss what I don’t like about effective altruism in order to drive positive change within and outside of the movement. Discussions are long-form, structured into series, and informed by academic research.
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Belonging (Part 1: That Bostrom email)
In a break from our scheduled programming, I take a look at an email that broke the internet. Warning: contains redacted slurs, unrepentant racism, sexism and profanity.
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Academics review What we owe the future (Part 2: Chappell liked the book)
Continuing our focus on academic reviews of MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future, let’s look at a review by Richard Chappell. Chappell liked the book.
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Billionaire philanthropy (Part 2: Philanthropy and democracy)
Many of us believe that public goods should be allocated through democratic decisionmaking. Philanthropists supply badly needed public goods, but do so by circumventing the usual process of democratic decisionmaking. This gives wealthy philanthropists an outsized voice in how public goods are allocated.
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Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils (Part 6: Wisdom)
So far, we considered two arguments for the Time of Perils Hypothesis: an appeal to space settlement and an existential risk Kuznets curve. In this post, I look at a third argument, which appeals to wisdom.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 3: Climate change, lessons from Halstead)
I continue to make the case that estimates of existential risk from climate change have been exaggerated, drawing on a new report about climate risk by John Halstead.
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Academics review What we owe the future (Part 1: Setiya on moral mathematics)
In this series, I look at academic reactions to MacAskill’s book What we owe the future. Let’s start off by looking at Kieran Setiya’s review, focusing on Setiya’s discussion of the intuition of neutrality in population ethics.
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Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils (Part 5: An existential risk Kuznets curve?)
A second argument for the Time of Perils Hypothesis, due to Leopold Aschenbrenner, draws on the idea of an existential risk Kuznets curve. Could this argument vindicate the Time of Perils Hypothesis?
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Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils (Part 4: Space)
Parts 1-3 of this series suggested that the best way to reconcile Existential Risk Pessimism with the Astronomical Value Thesis is through the Time of Perils Hypothesis. But should we believe the Time of Perils Hypothesis? One argument that is often made for the Time of Perils Hypothesis appeals to space settlement. Let’s look more carefully at that argument.
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Billionaire philanthropy (Part 1: Introduction)
What is the role of billionaire philanthropists within effective altruism and within society? What should that role be? In this series, I ask what drives billionaire philanthropists, how they are taxed and regulated, and what sorts of influence they should be allowed to wield within a democratic society.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 2: Ord on climate risk)
Toby Ord predicts a one in a thousand chance that climate change will lead by 2100 to irreversible existential catastrophe. But what does the evidence say? Here we begin to get a different story.