On July 30th, Peter Singer will be answering your questions in a Forum AMA. He has agreed to answer questions for an hour in the evening (Melbourne time), so if your question hasn’t been answered by the 31st, it likely won’t be.
Singer needs little introduction for many people in the Forum. In fact, it is fairly likely that his work was the reason we first heard about effective altruism. However, I’ve included some information here to orient your questions, if you’d benefit from it.
What Singer has been up to recently
Singer retired from his Princeton professorship recently, ending with a conference celebrating his work (written about by Richard Chappell here— I also recommend this post as a place to start looking for questions to ask Singer).
Since, then, he has:
- Started a podcast, Lives Well Lived, along with his frequent collaborator Kasia de Lazari-Radek, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. They’ve released episodes with Jane Goodall, Yuval Harari, Ingrid Newkirk, Daniel Kahneman, Kate Grant, and more.
- Published a dialogue with the female Buddhist monastic and ethicist Shih Chao-Hwei, called The Buddhist and the Ethicist.
- Continued his work on the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
- Started a substack, and written on various topics for Project Syndicate.
EA-relevant moments in Singer’s career
For those who don’t know, here are some top EA-relevant moments in Singer’s career, which you might want to ask about:
- 1971- Singer wrote Famine, Affluence and Morality in response to the starving of Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, a moral philosophy paper which argued that we all have an obligation to help the people we can, whether they live near us, or far away. This paper is the origin of the drowning child argument.
- 1975- Singer published Animal Liberation, the book which arguably started the modern animal rights movement. Singer published a substantially updated version, Animal Liberation Now, in 2023.
- Singer has been an engaged supporter and critic of Effective Altruism since its inception, notably delivering a very popular TED talk about EA in 2013.
NB: I'm adding Peter Singer as a co-author for this post, but it was written by me, Toby. Errors are my own.
Do you know about your cameo in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong? What probability would you have placed on you shifting career paths from academia to more like your Unsong character if, in the 1970s, your younger self and everyone you knew witnessed the sky shattering?
John S Wentworth wrote a 1 minute post considering whether individual innovators cause major discoveries to happen many decades or even centuries earlier than they would have without that one person, or whether they only accelerate the discovery by a few months or years before someone else would have made the advancement. Based on your impact on the philosophy scene in the 1970s and EA's emergence decades later (the counterculture movement is considered by many to have died down during the mid-1970s which notably is around the time when some of your most famous works came out), what does your life indicate about Wentworth's models of innovation, particularly conceptual and philosophical innovation?
What do you think about the current state of introductory philosophy education, with the ancient texts (Greek, kant, etc) being Schelling points that work great in low-trust environments, but still follow the literary traditions of the times? Do you think undergrads and intellectuals outside contemporary philosophy culture (e.g. engineers, historians, anthropologists, etc) would prefer introductory philosophy classes be restructured to produce a more logical foundations to produce innovators and reductionists like your 1970s self and less literary-analysis-minded thinking?