Effective altruism links

Although I haven’t spent too much time investigating all resources on effective altruism (EA), it seems that right now, discussions are occurring in disparate places, and that coordination between these places is lacking. It is difficult, for instance, to find all EA discussions that have taken place on giving now or later, or to find all discussions on going into finance. The goal of this page is to slowly compile all discussions that have taken place about EA on particular topics. I have also recently started the Cause Prioritization Wiki, which also focuses on information-gathering, but the wiki has the goal of comparing different causes, not just amassing EA discussions of them.

The list is alphabetized except for the very first item (“General/introductory discussions”).

I’m uncertain of the utility of this list. In a sense, it is just a collection of the “effective altruism versions” of various topics that are already discussed elsewhere (though I also think that EAs have probably added a lot to some discussions, like those on animal suffering and existential risks).

General/introductory discussions

• Introduction to Effective Altruism on the new EA forum.
• Effective altruism learning resources on the Cognito Mentoring wiki.
• On Caring
• Effective Altruism is a Question (not an ideology)
• Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…

Animal suffering

[to be added]

Anti-aging

[to be added]

Cause prioritization

I’m currently working on cause prioritization research through the cause prioritization wiki, though the project is still at a very early stage. You can find my original public announcement about doing cause prioritization research (“cause prioritization prioritization”) here.

Criticisms of effective altruism

This has moved to the EA Wiki

• Effective Altruism Complaints

• RationalWiki’s article on EA

• David Brooks’s “The Way to Produce a Person”

  • followup on LW
  • GiveWell has also mentioned Brooks’s article somewhere

• Ben Kuhn’s “A critique of effective altruism”

  • LW version

• “The Elitist Philanthropy of So-Called Effective Altruism” by Charity Navigator people

• The Outside Critics of Effective Altruism

  • Lila comments on The Outside Critics of Effective Altruism

• Boston Globe: “The Logic of Effective Altruism” (this one has several responses in one)

  • Overcoming Bias’s response (by Robin Hanson): “Effective Altruism Complaints”
  • reddit thread

• Some discussion at this post by Eliezer

• A Note on Framing Criticisms of Effective Altruism and Facebook post

• Another Critique of Effective Altruism

• Youth Movements

• I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried.

• Against Charity:

  The core problem is the bourgeois moral philosophy that the movement rests upon. Effective Altruists abstract from — and thereby exonerate — the social dynamics constitutive of capitalism. The result is a simultaneously flawed moral and structural analysis that aspires to fix the world’s most pressing problems on capital’s terms.

  The piece also links to So You Want to be a “Radical” Philanthropist? and The fallacy of philanthropy (by Paul Gomberg)

• “Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians” by Amia Srinivasan

• “EA’s Image Problem”

Depression

[to be added]

Digital preservation

See Digital preservation and the digital preservation article on the CP wiki. (I’m still not entirely sure how I should try to split content between the two. I suppose the latter will only contain information about how important it is to do this, how much cost is involved in large-scale efforts, etc., i.e. more “impersonal” stuff, while the former will be more of a “do it yourself” type page.)

Donating now versus later

• Reasons for donating now rather than later

EA in different languages

• The most obvious step is to look at all the meetups here and talk to the people that go to them.

Earning-to-give

• Talent or Money?
• Earning to Give vs. Altruistic Career Choice Revisited (see also Eliezer’s comment)
• Peter Hurford thinks that a large proportion of people should earn to give long term

Education

[to be added]

Efficiency

• Broad Market Efficiency by Holden Karnofsky
• Discussion of efficiency in “Why Charities Don’t Differ Astronomically in Cost-Effectiveness” by Brian Tomasik
• It’s harder to favor a specific cause in more efficient charitable markets by Carl Shulman

Environmental change

[to be added]

Existential risks

• The Seattle group recently had a meetup discussion here (event page) and here (afterthoughts)

• I also asked how people have gotten started discussing EA in different languages, on the EA Facebook group

Influencing rich people

[to be added]

Local groups

EA in universities

• There is Harvard EA, started by Ben Kuhn.

• Some other universities have a Giving What We Can chapter instead.

• If you’re interested in connecting with student EA leaders, see the Google group here.

• I’m trying to see if one can be started at the University of Washington; see this Quora question and this (private) Facebook post.

• Post about Stanford EA that has some helpful information.

Meta

• Supportive Scepticism discusses how to strike a balance between not caring about doing the most effective thing (and thus not being an “effective” altruist) and caring too much about doing the most effective thing (and thus getting stuck in “analysis paralysis”).

Organizations

There are quite a few organizations that are at least peripherally associated with the effective altruism movement:

• GiveWell
• The Center for Effective Altruism
  • Giving What We Can
• THINK (The High Impact NetworK)
• The life you can save
• [note: add more]

Outreach

• Potential online course?

• Post by Roxanne Heston on turning down requests that are “not effective enough”. This is related to the problem of trying to attract people who are interested in altruism to become effective altruists. Related discussion, though it’s not public.

Potentially risky acts

• How can effective altruists effectively use their own deaths if they are old and have little they can do in life?

• Lila Rieber on paying people to participate in dangerous human trials

Romance

• Vipul Naik asks, “What are some pros and cons, from the EA perspective, of an EA giving preference to EAs in the dating market?” on the EA Facebook group

• This one isn’t public, but EA sugar babies.

Social movements

• Discussion here about historical social movement leaders like King, Gandhi, and Mandela.

Supererogation

• Views on supererogatory acts seems to indicate that people like Peter Singer don’t view EA as supererogatory.

• From experience though, at least some EAs take the view that “yes, we recognize that we’re not perfect people, but at least in the possibly small ways that we want to do good in the world, we’re willing to do the things that make the most difference”.