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Curated and popular this week
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Summary: The actions taken this decade may be exceptionally important for the future of civilization, but we should be unusually hesitant to proclaim that any course of action is “best.” Still, we should try to think carefully about how we'll influence the future.
This post was written as part of an introduction to a new reading group I’m starting called “Doing Good in the Age of AGI.” If you want to follow along, the full curriculum can be found ...
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I have not thought this out very well, but I am wondering if we should rethink the 'earning to give' advice, 'giving what you earn' is great but the first really incentivizes people to make as much money in possible which can incentivize people to engage in useless, harmful, extractive or even fraudulent/illegal behaviour. This has a very 'ends justify the means' logic, which does not have the best historical track record, and I already see it turning me off from EA a little bit so I worry it will make it a lot harder to get many people into EA. At the very least we should talk more about how to make sure you do not do a lot of harm (a realistic concern when trying to do the most good, and being wrong about something), especially when earning to give.