The Progress Open Thread is a place to share good news, big or small.
See this post for an explanation of why we have these threads.
What goes in a progress thread comment?
Think of this as an org update thread for individuals. You might talk about...
- Securing a new job, internship, grant, or scholarship
- Starting or making progress on a personal project
- Helping someone else get involved in EA
- Making a donation you feel really excited about
- Taking the Giving What We Can pledge or signing up for Try Giving
- Writing something you liked outside the Forum (whether it's a paper you've submitted to a journal or just an insightful Facebook comment)
- Any of the above happening to someone else, if you think they'd be happy for you to share the news
- Other EA-related progress in the world (disease eradication, cage-free laws, cool new research papers, etc.)
Toby Ord contributed 7 pages to the latest UN Human Development Report. The material won't be new to anyone who's read The Precipice, but it's heartening to see this kind of thing matter-of-factly added to such a major document.
I like that Ord explicitly tied x-risk management to the concept of sustainability. I've noticed that sustainability is a longtermist concept because it considers the needs of future generations, but I don't think there's been much crosstalk between advocates of sustainability and EA-style longtermism.
At the end of each year, I like to check in on Future Crunch's annual "99 Good News Stories" post. I don't necessarily see every inclusion as good ("China's birthrate fell again!"), but they nicely aggregate a lot of global health and development stories.
Some of my favorite inclusions from this year (note: haven't closely filtered to detect possible exaggerations or cloudy data, would appreciate knowing if anything sounds fishy):
Caution - negative outlook!
The IEA's annual report on access to electricity highlights that the pandemic had a huge negative impact on progress, and raise concerns about the potential for recovery. Furthermore, if the relevant SDG policies would continue as they are then they predict about 62% of people in sub-saharan africa with electricity (today we are at 48%). They suggest that further $35 billion per year is needed to get global worldwide access to electricity by 2030.
Thanks for providing the additional context! Progress Thread or no, it's still useful to hear when we've gone off-track from a progress goal, or seen a trend get worse.
I started a new "What I believe" series on my Sunyshore blog about my ethical beliefs. The first post in the series is about why I believe total utilitarianism is closest to the correct ethical theory and its implications for society. I'm also working on a post about privacy and civil liberties. In the future, I might write a post for the "What I believe" series about effective altruism.
I've already gotten valuable feedback from members of the EA community who've critiqued my use of the Harsanyi original-position thought experiment. The goal of this post wasn't to present a bulletproof argument for utilitarianism but to explain my personal reasons for supporting it. Still, I appreciate all constructive feedback.
I like it, and look forward to see what you write on privacy (I'm feeling somewhat conflicted on this subject, and I'm curious as to how much gains we can have from privacy-preserving computation technologies). I want to encourage you to linkpost these to the forum! Is there a particular reason you aren't doing so?
Yeah, I didn't really linkpost this because I didn't think that a basic introduction to utilitarianism would fit in with the kinds of stuff that people usually post, which deals with philosophical topics at a more sophisticated level. But I can post it and the rest of the series!