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Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
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Has the past two months seen more harm done (edit: by the new administration) than the totality of good EA has done since it's existence?
I don't really get the framing of this question.
I suspect, for any increment of time one could take through EAs existence, then there would have been more 'harm' done in the total rest of world during that time. EA simply isn't big enough to counteract the moral actions of the rest of the world. Wild animals suffer horribly, people die of preventable diseases etc constantly, formal wars and violent struggles occur affecting the lives of millions. There sheer scale of the world outweighs EA many, many times over.
So I suspect you're making a more direct comparison to Musk/DOGE/PEPFAR? But again, I feel like anyone wielding using the awesome executive power of the United States Government should expect to have larger impacts on the world than EA.
True, I was vague and should have specified the new administration.
If people do think that this is true, as it seems obvious to you, then perhaps EA should have allocated resources differently?