Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
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...
Survey on Suffering Focused Ethics:
A short survey on how people come to suffering-focused views, or run into them and don't.
Arguments that appear in print are selected for being defensible rather than persuasive, and there is no particular reason those two should coincide. The survey separates four things that usually get run together. What moved you, what was decisive, what you encountered and found unpersuasive, and what you now consider the strongest justification.
If you are not suffering-focused, this is aimed at you as much as at anyone. Half of what makes a survey about persuasion worth running is the people who met the arguments and were not persuaded, and that half is normally missing: these things get posted where the converted are, and come back reporting that the arguments work. There is a shorter branch for you, and answering it does not require holding any view you don't hold or having read anything in particular.
The same goes if you used to hold the view and no longer do; that branch asks what changed.
Seven or eight minutes, anonymous, every question skippable except the first. Aggregate results will be posted, along with the anonymised data
https://forms.gle/vZJhQGLB7wbdsTVg8