Kelsey Piper is an American journalist, currently a Staff Writer for Future Perfect.

Background

Piper studied symbolic systems at Stanford University. During her studies, she joined Giving What We Can and founded Stanford Effective Altruism.^[1] After graduation, Piper worked as lead of the writing team at Triplebyte, a recruiting and technical screening platform for tech companies.

Journalism career

Piper joined Vox in September 2018.^[2] As of August 2022, she has published over 300 articles on an extensive range of topics related to effective altruism, including animal product alternatives,^[3]^[4] cash transfers,^[5] climate change,^[6] COVID-19 pandemic,^[7]^[8] cultured meat,^[9] deworming,^[10]^[11] the Doomsday Clock,^[12]^[13] electoral reform,^[14]^[15] farmed animal welfare,^[16] forecasting,^[17]^[18] foreign aid,^[19]^[20] global catastrophic biological risk,^[21]^[22] global catastrophic risk,^[23]^[24] the hinge of history hypothesis,^[25] human extinction,^[26] information hazards,^[27] malaria,^[28]^[29] nuclear winter,^[30]^[31] pandemic preparedness, ^[32]prediction markets,^[33] space colonization,^[34] the timing of philanthropy,^[35]^[36] universal basic income,^[37]^[38] and the vulnerable world hypothesis,^[39] among many others.^[40]

Piper's article outlining the case for taking artificial intelligence as an existential risk seriously has been praised by many as a rigorous yet accessible introduction to the topic.^[41]

In early February 2020, when less than a dozen COVID-19 cases had been confirmed in the United States and many media outlets and health authorities were dismissive of the risks posed by SARS-CoV-2,^[42]^[43]^[44] Piper wrote about the possibility that it might become a global pandemic and emphasized the importance of an early response.^[7]^[45]

Further reading

Galef, Julia (2019) Big picture journalism: Covering the topics that matter in the long run (Kelsey Piper), Rationally Speaking, April 2.

Galef, Julia (2021) How to reason about COVID, and other hard things (Kelsey Piper), Rationally Speaking, September 13.

Lindmark, Rhys (2019) Kelsey Piper, Vox: Effective altruist news, memetic immunity, questions social justice can answer, Grey Mirror, July 8.

Wiblin, Robert & Keiran Harris (2019) Can journalists still write about important ...

The 2020 Review