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...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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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...
I have found it useful and interesting to build a habit of noticing an intuition and then thinking of arguments for why that intuition is worth listening to. It has caused me to find some pretty interesting dynamics that it seems like naive consequentialists/utilitarians aren't aware of.
One concern about this is that you might be able to find arguments for any conclusion that you seek out arguments for; the counter to this is that your intuition doesn't give random answers, and is actually fairly reliably correct, hence explicit arguments that explain your intuition are some amount more likely than random to correspond reality, making these arguments useful to discover.
This definitely goes better if you are aware of the systematic errors your intuition can make (i.e. cognitive biases).
Is there a context for the type of things you are using your intuition for?