<aside> 🔍 “It is one of the unfortunate truisms of the human condition that there is hardly a good idea, noble impulse, or sound suggestion that can't be (and isn't eventually) adopted and bastardized by zealots… One iteration of this tendency is in the idea of “effective altruism.” - [K. Berger & R. M. Penna](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism#:~:text=By contrast%2C defective altruism is,and beneficiaries against one another.)
Independent impressions:
Recent critique of effective altruism. Read articles in More to Explore for others:
While we’ve covered some of the most popular EA causes above, there are many other causes that we haven’t had space to cover. Please skim over this list of other causes to get a sense of other ideas that people in EA have discussed. (Note, you don’t need to read this whole post in detail!)
Exercise, which includes reading and reflecting on criticisms of ideas covered in previous sessions (see below).
For the exercise this session, we will take some time to reflect on the ideas we’ve engaged with over the past sessions. Our goal is to take stock and to identify our concerns and uncertainties about EA ideas.
We’ve covered a lot: the philosophical foundations of effective altruism, how to compare causes and allocate resources, and a look at some top priority causes using the EA framework.
What are your biggest questions, concerns, and criticisms based on what we’ve discussed so far? These can be about the EA framework/community, specific ideas or causes, or anything you’d like!
Please raise and discuss them at your next meeting!
Write your answer here (In your own copy of the document)
You’ve covered a lot over the past sessions! We hope you found it an interesting and enjoyable experience. There are lots of major considerations to take into account when trying to do the most good you can, and lots of ideas may have been new and unfamiliar to you. This session we’d like you to reflect back on the program with a skeptical and curious mindset.
To recapitulate what we’ve covered:
Over the course of sessions 1 and 2, we aim to introduce you to the core principles of effective altruism. We use global health interventions, which has been a key focus area for effective altruism, to illustrate these principles, partly because we have unusually good data for this cause area.
We continue to explore the core principles of effective altruism, particularly through the lens of global health interventions because they are especially concrete and well-studied. We focus on giving you tools to quantify and evaluate how much good an intervention can achieve; introduce expected value reasoning; and investigate differences in expected cost-effectiveness between interventions.
Radical empathy
The next section focuses on your own values and their practical implications. We explore who our moral consideration should include. We focus especially on farmed animals as an important example of this question this session.
Our final century?
This session we’ll focus on existential risks: risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential. We’ll examine why existential risks might be a moral priority, and explore why existential risks are so neglected by society. We’ll also look into one of the major risks that we might face: a human-made pandemic, worse than COVID-19.
What could the future hold? And why care?
This session we explore what the future might be like, and why it might matter. We’ll explore arguments for “longtermism” - the view that improving the long term future is a key moral priority. This can bolster arguments for working on reducing some of the extinction risks that we covered in the last two sessions. We’ll also explore some views on what our future could look like, and why it might be pretty different from the present.
Risks from artificial intelligence
Transformative artificial intelligence may well be developed this century. If it is, it may begin to make many significant decisions for us, and rapidly accelerate changes like economic growth. Are we set up to deal with this new technology safely?
What topics or ideas from the program do you most feel like you don’t understand?
Go back to that topic/idea and see if there are any further readings you can do that would help you address your uncertainties and explore any concerns. Do those readings. Consider writing notes on your confusion, stream-of-consciousness style.
List one idea from the program that you found surprising at first, and which you now think more or less makes sense and is important?
How could this idea be wrong? What’s the strongest case against it?
List one idea from the program that you found surprising at first, and think probably isn’t right, or have reservations about.
What’s the strongest case for this idea?
What are your key hesitations about that case?
Effectiveness is a conjunction of multipliers (5 mins.) - one take on why it matters so much to think carefully and critically about which of the above perspectives is right.
This session, we’ll give you time to reflect on what you think of effective altruism, and of the specific potential priorities you’ve heard about so far.
We are dedicating a session to this because, to whatever extent we are wrong, realizing and correcting our mistakes will allow us to do more good. Honestly reckoning with strong counterarguments (from both within and outside of the EA community) can help us avoid [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/confirmation-bias#:~:text=Confirmation bias (also known as,beliefs or hypotheses [1].) and groupthink, and get us a little closer to identifying the most effective ways to do good.
Such critiques have led to important changes in what many EAs do: for example, GiveWell polled a sample of people demographically similar to recipients of programs it supports on how they would make moral tradeoffs in response to criticisms that it shouldn’t make moral tradeoffs on behalf of the people its recommended charities benefit.
A key concept for this session is the importance of forming independent impressions. In the long run, you’re likely to gain a deeper understanding of important issues if you think through the arguments for yourself. But (since you can’t reason through everything) it can still sometimes make sense to defer to others when you’re making decisions.
</aside>
Independent impressions:
Recent critique of effective altruism. Read articles in More to Explore for others:
While we’ve covered some of the most popular EA causes above, there are many other causes that we haven’t had space to cover. Please skim over this list of other causes to get a sense of other ideas that people in EA have discussed. (Note, you don’t need to read this whole post in detail!)
Exercise, which includes reading and reflecting on criticisms of ideas covered in previous sessions (see below).
For the exercise this session, we will take some time to reflect on the ideas we’ve engaged with over the past sessions. Our goal is to take stock and to identify our concerns and uncertainties about EA ideas.
We’ve covered a lot: the philosophical foundations of effective altruism, how to compare causes and allocate resources, and a look at some top priority causes using the EA framework.
What are your biggest questions, concerns, and criticisms based on what we’ve discussed so far? These can be about the EA framework/community, specific ideas or causes, or anything you’d like!
Please raise and discuss them at your next meeting!
Write your answer here (In your own copy of the document)
You’ve covered a lot over the past sessions! We hope you found it an interesting and enjoyable experience. There are lots of major considerations to take into account when trying to do the most good you can, and lots of ideas may have been new and unfamiliar to you. This session we’d like you to reflect back on the program with a skeptical and curious mindset.
To recapitulate what we’ve covered: