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Hi all,
Please can you upvote this to 5 karma to meet the requirement to post? Thank you!
Here's a place for discussing topics of interest to effective altruists but not relevant to any of the other posts.
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Here's a place for discussing topics of interest to effective altruists but not relevant to any of the other posts.
Hi all,
Please can you upvote this to 5 karma to meet the requirement to post? Thank you!
I'm here to vouch for Rochelle. She's been part of the network that is effective altruism on Facebook and in other spaces for multiple years now, and has consistently made thoughtful comments in conversations I've participated in with her for that duration of time.
Hi all, I would like to share a post from the Facebook group for general discussion and Evan asked me to just post for jumping the 5 karma requirement here - thanks for your help! :)
I am here to vouch for Konstantin. He posted in the main EA Facebook group about a potential cause: decreasing a sense of national identity, or increasing global sense of identity, among persons, particularly in developed nations. It seems a potentially important cause, as there are many ways reducing barriers to global empathy would increase the effectiveness of altruism. For example, more donations to global development rather than local charity, easing tensions around migration, making polities more likely to warmly receive immigrants, and other corollaries to Peter Singer's Drowning Child in the Pond argument.
How to go about pursuing such a case, whether various interventions are either neglected or tractable, and how it compares in explicit and/or quantitative estimates to other ways of doing good is a discussion I think better suited for this platform than Facebook. I am pleased to see Konstantin has received a warm reception here.
Hi all, this is Peter Hurford. I'm testing the 5 karma requirement to post for the forum. Can y'all upvote this to precisely 5 karma?
Thanks everyone. I've confirmed it only takes 5 karma to post.
How "effective" is our forum? I apologise for the critical tone of this post. I know a lot of people are working very hard to do their best. I am very excited to see EA be the best it can be.
I imagine EA being a great gathering of ideas; the opportunity to learn and be part of important conversations; people coming together in an organised way.
EA should have an excellent website and a well structured forum. This is a very important foundation to generate sharing ideas and discussion. It also reflects on our image as an organisation. If we are to convince skeptics that we are "effective" at altruism, then we must be effective at running this movement.
The main website:
Even upon inspection, I'm still unclear which is the primary EA website:
centreforeffectivealtruism.org
or
www.effectivealtruism.org/
The forum: I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I'm yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group
If this is the central forum, there should be: an easy to find link from the website (whichever one), and multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely).
This is a conversation about having better conversations.
How "effective" is our forum?
How "effective" is our forum?
Do you mean how much good does it do? I suppose the key questions there are how many people new to EA read it, how many of those "get into" EA partly as a result of this, and to what extent it strengthens the commitment of people who read it and are already somewhat into EA.
EA should have an excellent website and a well structured forum. This is a very important foundation to generate sharing ideas and discussion. It also reflects on our image as an organisation. If we are to convince skeptics that we are "effective" at altruism, then we must be effective at running this movement.
The main website: Even upon inspection, I'm still unclear which is the primary EA website: centreforeffectivealtruism.org or www.effectivealtruism.org
As a broad social movement constituted by thousands of people around the world, effective altruism isn't the sort of thing which would (or should!) have a "main website". Both of the websites you mentioned belong to a particular organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism, which shouldn't be seen as constituting or "owning" effective altruism.
What's more, I don't know quite what it would mean for something to be the main EA website. There are many different EA introductions, articles, websites and discussion venues, serving many different functions. Insofar as it makes sense for them to direct people to the EA Forum, they can do so on a case-by-case basis, and insofar as it makes sense for the EA Forum to direct people elsewhere, it can also do so. For example, I help run the Effective Altruism Hub community website, and that points people looking to discuss EA to this Forum, the main Facebook group, and the full list of discussion venues on the EA Wiki.
The forum: I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I'm yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group.
De facto, I'd say that the two most prominent places for EA discussion are this Forum and the main Facebook group, though both are run independently so they're not official central forums. As I mentioned there's a full list of discussion venues on the EA Wiki.
Hi Tom, Thanks for the reply. What you say makes sense, but I still have the same concerns.
What's more, I don't know quite what it would mean for something to be the main EA website.
Something like this: https://www.unrealengine.com/ This is the Unreal Engine website. Similar to EA, it's a global community of creative people coming together to work on projects and share ideas. It has a useful FAQ, a learning section, a link to the wiki, a community section with a well structured forum and links to associated websites and groups. You can find everything you need to learn more and get involved. It's not fancy, it just works.
EA falls short of this standard. We have websites but they don't effectively get the job done. The info is generally available, but not well consolidated/organised. And there's no decent forum that I can find. Even on your list (thanks for posting it).
I have recently been fairly critical of EA's internal workings. I apologise if this is causing upset. I have no intention to cause ill-will. I believe that, at this early stage, there should be a lot of work (and review) of how the whole movement is set up and working. I would really like to see EA working really well and my scrutiny is with the best of intentions.
Thanks again
Unreal Engine is a professional industry tool that's obviously able to have a more polished website than that of a fledgling social movement. It's fine to have aspirations to match them, and to want to pursue these with a sense of urgency, but people are only going to be able to recieve criticism in a positive spirit if you give them something concrete and constructive to work with - (more specific than 'well consolidated/organised'). What do you want?
If this is the central forum, there should be: an easy to find link from the website (whichever one), and multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely)"
This website has links to others at the very top on the right. It's also linked from the Facebook group, and when the landing page (effectivealtruism.org) is redesigned, it'll be linked more prominently from there also.
It was discussed that (at least) the landing page and the forum should have matching layout and links right across a top banner - it just didn't pan out, but probably it should be made that way later.
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed. Nonetheless, people can comment straight away and only need five karma to post a new thread.
Bottom line is: there are people who are thinking hard about how to connect these sites. The forum has good usage, and steadily growing readership. If we have new ideas for how to improve this further and speed things up, let's assess them and implement them.
I apologise if my posts sound like demands. It's not intended. At the least, I guess I have had trouble learning what I need to know, and finding the best way to get involved. I hope this can be seen as feedback worthy of discussion. Cheers
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed. Nonetheless, people can comment straight away and only need five karma to post a new thread.
I think having a feed where it can all be seen is valuable, but I'm getting increasingly worried about the lack of ability to find old posts in the forum because there aren't categories. (This wasn't a problem in the first few months while there was little enough material.) I expect this will lead to me using the forum less than I might have done in the future.
[This is also my main problem with LessWrong.]
One can add tags to one's posts.
We're planning to make them more visible, when it works its way up the priority queue: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dotimpact/permalink/489215301246125/
Thanks, that's good news.
What about having someone curate old posts to keep tags consistent? (many posts aren't tagged)
Sounds like something we could maybe get a volunteer to do, though I don't think it would be high priority. What do you think?
Nice idea, I think that's exactly right. Low priority but clearly-defined and net beneficial task.
Yeah, this could work well if used more thoroughly.
You can search posts (upper right corner of screen) and can view posts from a given user by clicking their name then 'submitted'
Search is pretty helpful. I have two issues with it (neither huge):
1) For some reason it seems to work inconsistently for me. Sometimes it doesn't load the search results. (I haven't been able to identify enough of a pattern that reporting a bug seems useful)
2) It's not always clear what to search for, or what material is out there. A small set of tags, consistently used, would help with this.
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed.
My understanding was that the LessWrong split between Main and Discussion led to some undesirable effects, no? I recall hearing someone (maybe Peter Hurford and Tom Ash?) suggest that the Forum is to the FB group as LW Main is to LW Discussion.
Oh, seems it was David Barry, I should read the whole thread before commenting!
Hey Russ, as David Barry has mentioned regarding the division of labor between different discussion spots: "The rough sort of organisation that's emerged is:
Main EA Facebook group for free-wheeling discussion and links. I go through phases where I'll keep up with everything that happens there, but it's a busy busy place.
Local EA Facebook groups serve a similar purpose (and are the natural home for locally-relevant news) but the number of people and posts is less intimidating than in the worldwide group.
effective-altruism.com forum has more detailed posts.
r/SmartGiving doesn't really have much discussion but can be a decent curation of links."
The main website: Even upon inspection, I'm still unclear which is the primary EA website: centreforeffectivealtruism.org or www.effectivealtruism.org/
The name of this social movement, "effective altruism" actually came out of the name Centre for Effective Altruism, which was meant to be the name of one non-profit, not the title which carried much weight for an entire social movement. At least, as far as I know, that was the original intent. As a shorthand for people outside of Oxford all around the world interetsed in the idea of applying effectiveness to doing good and philanthrophy, the shorthand for this nascent global community of however many few dozen or hundred people constituting effective altruism when it started (five years ago?) was called "effective altruism". However, the name 'effective altruism' was sticky, and now it's stuck. A couple years ago, in retrospect, there was a couple conversation not just within the Centre for Effective Altruism, but publicly across the whole movement, about whether effective altruism was good name. Everyone agreed the movement and its ideas needed a name, and "effective altruism" is as good as any and in some ways didn't cause problems other names, e.g., "optimal altruism", wouldn't. That's some long context for where the words "effective altruism" came from, and why we slap them on different websites.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and its website, just represent the organization out of Oxford itself. "www.effectivealtruism.org" is a website meant as a global landing page for anyone who heard about effective altruism. It was built on behalf of the CEA by their outreach team "EA Outreach", which also organized the EA Global conferences this last summer. It's meant to be a first stop for someone who encounters effective altruism online for the first time, and they can sign up for an email newsletterfrom the Centre for Effective Altruism, but not much else. It's meant to be an intro and PR page, and redirects people to all manner of effective altruism websites which better serve the specific purpose or need of anyone with more specific questions of effective altruism.
The forum: I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I'm yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group
Dovetailing what Ryan and Tom already said, The Facebook group and this Forum are the main discussion sites for effective altruism. In this, they're central for "discussion". Effective altruism may not need only one online nexus. While I haven't talked about this much with others, I'm guessing the people who build these sites think effective altruism is better served by having multiple websites in that regard.
Effective altruism is becoming a community with so many people working on so many different types of projects, topics, and organizations, it's impossible for maybe even the majority of effective altruists anymore to keep up to date on all the developments coming out of any and all arms of the movement. I'm assuming that's some value you would see in a single central forum for effective altruism. However, that coordination would be difficult enough as is. There are folks from, e.g., the CEA whose full time job is more or less to keep abreast of everything going on, and if there is a new development from one organization or cause so critical everyone should know about it, those folks will go through the most well-read channels to inform everyone as thoroughly as possible.
The various channels for discussion for .impact don't reflect all of effective altruism. .impact is effective altruism's decentralized volunteer task force working on EA projects, mostly software ones right now. Don't worry about anyone mistaking .impact as being the main forum for effective altruism, supplanting another, as that has never been a purpose of .impact.
If this is the central forum, there should be: an easy to find link from the website (whichever one)
I agree there should be more links from central EA websites to one another, or at least links on easier to find pages, such as the splash page of any given website.
multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely).
This would be ideal, but this would be the equivalent of running multiple subreddits, making this Forum an "EA Reddit". This would be the natural site for such a thing. However, I expect running such a site would be hard. There are only a couple of volunteers who run this website, if I recall correctly. Also, there isn't a consensus on what those multiple categories would or should be. In the meantime, I believe this forum serves quite well.
William MacAskill and his ex-wife recently published a high profile article on wild animal suffering, using Cecil the Lion as a hook to argue that (given he was a predator) his death may have been a good thing, and that we should perhaps kill all lions: http://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-animal-suffering-the-most-ethical-choice-is-to-kill-all-predators-especially-cecil-the-lion/
What did people think of this? I fear it may have done more harm than good, and I don't understand the choice to publish something so controversial now, with a book to promote and a chance to get EA more into the mainstream.
My comment from Facebook: "It was an ill-advised piece. We should explore general solutions to make sure EAs can get a second opinion on whether or not to publish wacky ideas, starting straight from the top with Will and Amanda!"
Possible solutions:
Start a new EA Article Feedback group for people to post articles, presentations, etc. that are relevant to EA and get feedback on them.
I was thinking of doing this. I'll do this right now.
I don't know if this is a violation of EA Club rules, but I heard there was an 'EA Private' group on FB for this exact purpose
The group I started on Facebook is called "effective altruism editing and review". It's closed, and it will stay that way. I don't want to make it secret. I don't want the role of any secret or utterly private groups to expand. The fewer things effective altruism feels the need to keep secret, the better. The new group I maintain shall remain closed so others will remain publicly aware of its existence and can request to join if they like. Ideally, I'd like a diversity of thoughtful people who are experienced in a variety of writing, fields, and causes. That way, if anyone has a piece they want reviewed before publication, they can field particular expertise from within that group. Right now the group only has nine members, so that doesn't cover the full spread of people I'd like to have in the group. However, right now, there are folks like Carl Shulman, David Moss, and Ben Henry, who are think are some of the most critical thinkers in the community, so they're a good start for people who are great for catching mistakes, errors, or misfires in written pieces from effective altruism.
The group need not be secret, because requests for editing and review can be fielded, editors and reviewers can respond, and then the writer can give those people private access to the document. This isn't a failure to be transparent either. I wouldn't even call it a secret. If not totally after, then definitely before it's published, a piece of writing is the sole property of its writers, and they have every right to keep private their ideas before publication. Nobody would hold any other type of writer to that standard. The articles of any self-identified effective altruist don't represent the views of the whole of effective altruism. Some pieces will be interpreted that way, and the writer may draft a piece with that in mind. However, a piece of writing from a single (set of) author(s) isn't the collective intellectual property of effective altruism, so it isn't our collective responsibility for the consequences of the piece either. It is merely supererogatory conscientiousness to be praised when an author from within effective altrusm has the humility and patience to run their pieces by their peers first.
At the EA Global, and elsewhere online, I've read suggestions about there being some "Journal of Effective Altruism", which would be like a peer-reviewed journal. I think it would be more like an online peer-review journal, at least at first, and not carry all the norms and prestige of an institutional academic journal. Submissions to such a journal would likely be the more scholarly submissions to this Forum itself, submissions from individual scholars from both within and outside of this social community, and cross-publications from social science or philosophy journals the editors of an EA peer-review journal would find especially relevant and high-quality. As far as I know, nobody is working on this yet. I think there is enough will someone can or will start working on it. I imagine it's something we could see before the end of 2015.
This would solve a lot of the problems not even a Facebook group for editing could deal with, though such a journal may not be sufficient for popular journalism such as that from Will MacAskill, or dylan Matthews in Vox.
Thanks Evan!
Will's comment from Facebook: "Hi all,
Thanks Darren and commentators for bringing this up.
I now think that it was a mistake to publish that article, and I’m sorry that I did. I didn’t appreciate how the piece would be presented by Quartz (the framing given by the Quartz headline and quotes (neither of which I got to choose) is quite different than the content), nor how it would then be responded to by others. Unlike with the ice bucket piece and earning to give, which I think were reasonable things to do ex ante (though still learning experiences in different ways), I think I ought to have seen ex ante that this was a mistake.
I think that wild animal suffering is an important moral issue, but sufficiently hard to make progress on, and sufficiently out-there as an idea, that it’s not something that the EA community should push on. So I’d encourage people not to follow in my footsteps with this one!"
Has anyone here seen any good analyses of helping Syrian refugees as a cause area, or the most effective ways to do it? I've seen some commentary on opening borders and some general tips on disaster relief from GiveWell, but not much beyond that. Thanks!
There is a blog post by one EA with some suggestions and rough calculations
Thanks Alasdair!
Update from GiveWell here, with comments: Donating to help with the Syrian refugee crisis
Hi Daniel, there is already discussion on this topic on the Facebook group.
Hi everyone! This is my point about us needing a better forum... Am I alone in this belief? Cheers
I recall Ben Kuhn wishing a couple months ago there was a greater diversity of posts on the EA Forum. He said it seemed most posts were about keeping the movement from falling apart or whatever by all us learning to communicate better. Not that this is not an important issue, but I sympathize with Ben's point that if this is all their is to read as content coming out of the EA Forum, we may be overfocusing on the topic, especially if we're not making live traction on it anyway, and it makes things boring, less interesting, and less engaging.
I'm not sure why this is the case. Perhaps it's because the idea effective altruism is a community in which everyone is important and talking about that is merely the most accessible possible issue. That is, it's something literally everyone here can relate to. Anyone who in some sense identifies with effective altruism can appreciate that, and thus reads the post. On the other hand, other posts will be by definition constrained to a more narrow topic, and thus won't be read by everyone. If not everyone reads other posts, they won't know to or bother to upvote them. This may explain why all the top posts are the just discussing the idea of the effective altruism community in the abstract. The most recent top posts have been those from Peter Hurford, on why the thinks there ought to still be a high proportion of earning to give within the movement, and why he believe effective altruism risks falling into "meta traps". That might be a counter to my hypothesis, as those topics are of more niche interest rather than being generally relatable to people who don't keep up with all effective altruism news.
Anyway, I'm glad to notice it seems there is a greater diversity of potss on the Forum lately. Right now, on the page of the newest posts on the forum, I'm seeing:
Some of these things might seem weird. Some of these topics strike me as weird. However, I think they're all intersting, and I intend to read each of these posts. Other users might think some of those posts are so weird or are taking effective altruism into such long-shot territory they don't belong on the EA Forum. However, they're definitely not boring. They're not dominating the top posts, and I'm not saying they should, but at least there's a sufficient volume of diversity we can say effective altruists are less afraid not to speak up thoughtfully on what they bleieve are important considerations just because they're not shared by everyone.
In the last month, I'm glad to notice, there is a greater diversity of posts on the EA
I haven't been sure how to balance niche vs. broad posts. I have written a couple of fairly niche essays recently, and I considered publishing them here but decided not to. My essay On Values Spreading was fairly niche, and originally I wasn't going to publish it until a friend suggested I should. It hasn't gotten as many upvotes as most of my other posts, which suggests to me that not as many people are interested. This might not be a bad thing though.
If I'm remembering verbal conversations correctly (always tricky to do), Ryan's original vision was for people to consolidate much of their EA blogging on the Forum. I agreed that that was a good thing and do generally try to encourage it (though Peter Hurford and I were perhaps overly sceptical about it actually happening). The only exception would be if something is of extremely limited interest or clearly bad PR, and I'm with those people who find EAs over-worry about these things. Hell, even your exploration of prioritising funding rat farms might make the cut. ;)
Hmm. I'd expect that only maybe 10% of EAs would seriously consider rat farms as an effective charity so that post seemed pretty niche, and my post on whether preventing human extinction is good seems like it could be bad PR (I have no problem posting on my blog but I'm not sure what the standards should be for a shared forum). I could be wrong about those though, and I would be willing to consider posting all my EA-related writings to the forum.
I agree with Tom. I think the core values of EA have to include:
In particular exploring new interventions and causes should always be in the EA spotlight. When you think something is an effective charity but most EAs wouldn't agree with you, in my book it's a reason to state your case loud and clear rather than self-censor.
How does posting on the EA Facebook group work? I posted a link there to a (somewhat negative) review of Doing Good Better and after a few days it still shows up as "pending approval".
Does this mean a mod has decided that my link should not be posted? that it is stuck in some spam queue / bit of the page someone never visits for whatever reason?
Ahh is now obvious they were just holding it because they knew there was going to be the much more detailed post about it. Which is obviously fine and makes a lot of sense :)
Sometimes it takes a couple days for a post of mine to get approved, even in a smaller EA Facebook group, never mind the big one. If it's still pending approval in a couple days, I reckon messaging a mod to find out what happened, or resubmitting the link with your accompanying discussion.
How does X on the EA Facebook group work?
A few good places to ask:
I don't know where to report technical issues with the site, so I'll just post this here for now. (Please let me know if there's a particular procedure.)
Under 'Nearest Meetups' (I'm in London), there are two events listed, one Super fun EA London Pub Social Meetup on 19 April 2016 and one Petrov Day Meetup on 26 September 2015. The first is presumably a mistake; it doesn't make much sense to include meetups that far into the future, and the second has a broken link. (Incidentally, the error page for the second links to Less Wrong rather than the Effective Altruism Forum.)
I don't know where to report technical issues with the site, so I'll just post this here for now. (Please let me know if there's a particular procedure.)
You can report issues at the community repository (listed on the EA Forum project page - it's soon to move, but currently at https://github.com/tog22/eaforum/issues )
Under 'Nearest Meetups' (I'm in London), there are two events listed, one Super fun EA London Pub Social Meetup on 19 April 2016 and one Petrov Day Meetup on 26 September 2015. The first is presumably a mistake; it doesn't make much sense to include meetups that far into the future, and the second has a broken link. (Incidentally, the error page for the second links to Less Wrong rather than the Effective Altruism Forum.)
We're aware of this, see the post The 'meetups' sidebar is temporarily broken and the associated issue in the github repository linked above. Peter Hurford is making sure it gets fixed and we're almost there.
Thanks, Tom!
Matching donations supposedly generate more charitable giving. That raises the question whether EAs should give matching donations to non-EA donations, instead of giving direct donations themselves. The matching donation could be both above or below 1:1.
There is one problem, though, which has to do with counterfactual trust (see Ord's Moral Trade paper). Lots of the time, EAs will have a certain amount that they will want to donate. Therefore, if the donation drive generates less non-EA donations than expected - so that some of the matching funds aren't used - the EAs will be inclined to donate the rest of the matching funds anyway. But that will mean that they donate the same amount regardless of how much was given to the charity in question by non-EAs. If this gets known, it will of course destroy the incentive to give more that matching is supposed to create.
One solution is this. Suppose that this group of EA donors value radically different charities C1,...,Cn roughly equally - X-risk charities, animal charities, AMF, etc. (They might not do that individually, but as a group they value them equally.) Then they could match donations to all of these charities, setting the ratio so high so that all of the money would certainly be spent. This would create a sort of competitive situation, where donors would compete to give as soon as possible to their favourite charity, before the matching funds ran out.
Here it is of course important that these non-EA donors don't value C1,...,Cn equally, but I believe that would normally be the case.
I'm not sure I follow your solution. If I do, here's a possible worry:
Suppose that the group of EA donors agree to match donations to all the n charities at m :1 (up to some limit). Given your setup, many individual members of the group may end up donating their $X to charity B instead of their preferred charity A. For this to be worth it for them, they must presumably think that a donation of $(1+1/m)X to B is better than a donation of $X to charity A, but I suspect that this would often not be the case.
Is that right, or did I misunderstand your proposal?
Thanks for this very good comment. You're right. You could adjust the ratio differently to C1,...,Cn, to make sure that all EA contributors to the matching fund have reason to expect more than one dollar in total going to their top charity for every dollar they contribute to the matching fund. E.g., the fund would match donations to charities that non-EAs find less attractive 3:1, whereas charities that non-EAs find attractive could be funded 1:3.
I should have been clearer in my comment about this.
Regarding illusory matching, my hope is that the idea in the OP could solve the problem of illusory matching.
This GiveWell blog post by Holden Karnofsky is critical of donation matching, for the same reason that you mention:
We’ve discussed whether we might be able to provide “true” donation matching – finding a donor who would give to our top charities only on condition that others did – but not surprisingly, everyone we could think of who would be open to making a large gift to our top charities would be open to this whether or not we could match them up with smaller donors. Ultimately, the only match we can offer is illusory matching.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/effective-altruism-in-1400.html
Anyone have a comment on this post?
Can anyone point me towards the video of the Superintelligence panel at EA Global with Musk, Soares, Russell, and Bostrom?
A realist Millennial’s view of nuclear weapons by Matthew R. Costlow is a recent, interesting, and problematic short essay which more asserts than argues that the US would be more secure maintaining a large stockpile of nuclear weapons.
More interesting, I think, is the author's assertion that current young activists have a weak understanding of the relevant policy, security and history issues. Costlow doesn't mention Effective Altruism by name, but I suspect that within the movement we probably could stand to level-up our expertise on the area. Nuclear risks are easily existential level and complex problems, yet also potentially tractable over time, given focused attention and advocacy, both of which dropped off considerably after the end of the Cold War. Perhaps Effective Altruism should begin focusing a significant amount of energy on nuclear proliferation and deterrence theory, as well as the associated political, diplomatic, military, economic and historic concerns? The goal would be to find policy proposals and solutions intended to decrease the risk of large-scale nuclear exchanges.
I need Karma to post :) Please gimme.
I'm here to vouch for Lucas. I've seen him around Facebook lots. He has been a helpful member of the EA self-help group, among other networks, for at least the last several months. He's been making great contributions for long enough that honestly I don't recall how long it's been. Anyway, I'm glad to see his article is up(?). I was thinking of talking to Kate Donovan or Julia Wise about how anything they've learned about conflict resolution strategies might be helpful for bridging gaps between moral values or perceptions of the state of a cause within effective altruism. So, I'm pleased Lucas has gone forward himself with introducing such ideas into effective altruism with his post on communication.