We usually act as though the future matters less than today. Many institutions apply "discount rates" to the future as a way to formalize that view. But strange things happen if we assume even a 1% annual discount rate for social benefits. This would mean that saving a life this year is as valuable as saving roughly two lives in the year 2100 — and is also as valuable as saving more than one million lives in the year 3400.
This paper examines the arguments for applying social discount rates, argues that none of them work, and calls for treating the future as though it matters as much as the present. (35 mins.)
Political institutions generally operate on 2-to-4-year timescales, which aren’t long enough to address global issues (as the issue of climate change has shown). This talk analyzes sources of political short-termism and describes institutional reforms to align government incentives with the interests of all generations. (Video - 30 mins.)
A researcher from the Global Priorities Institute explains how investing resources, instead of spending them immediately, can allow us to do much more good. (Podcast - 2.5 hours)
Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...