Shortform Content [Beta]

How bad is it to exploit bees?

I agree that taking action to improve the welfare of farmed bees is positive.

But with other farmed animals such as chickens/pigs/cows, a significant goal to aim for is to ultimately bring fewer of those animals into existence in order to reduce overall suffering. 

But is that also the case for bee farming? Or do we instead want to increase the number of bees we farm because we need to increase commercial pollination services for a greater good? And if so, even if we weren't to intervene in bee welfare in any way, would we ... (read more)

How bad is Amazon?

So there are a lot of reasons people don't like Amazon. It exploits its workers, it fights tax laws, it has a significant environmental impact etc.

But is Amazon net-negative from a consequentialist point of view, or is there a net-positive impact of Amazon? My rough thinking is:

• Jeff Bezos has projects such as Blue Origin which might be positive for longtermism.
• He recently donated $10billion to Climate Change with the Bezos Earth Fund (and this may continue?).
• He has been interested in some other short term philanthropy in the past. His ex-

Offer of help with hands-free input

If you're experiencing wrist pain, you might want to take a break from typing. But the prospect of not been able to interact with the world might be holding you back. I want to help you try voice input. It's been helpful for me to go from being scared about my career and impact to being confident that I can still be productive without my hands. (In fact this post is brought to you by nothing but my voice.) Right now I think you're the best fit if you:

• Use a mac
• Have ever written code, even a small amount, or otherwise feel

At what size of the EA movement should there be an independent EA whistleblowing organisation, which investigates allegations of corruption?

Question: Imagine we could quantify the amount of suffering the average person does by eating meat and the amount of environmental damage that comes from eating this meat. How much would they need to donate to the most effective charities (climate change and animal suffering) in order to off-set their meat-eating habit?

Though betting money is a useful way to make epistemics concrete, sometimes it introduces considerations that tease apart the bet from the outcome and probabilities you actually wanted to discuss. Here's some circumstances when it can be a lot more difficult to get the outcomes you want from a bet:

• When the value of money changes depending on the different outcomes,
• When the likelihood of people being able or willing to pay out on bets changes under the different outcomes.

As an example, I saw someone claim that the US was facing civil war. Someone else ... (read more)

I've never seen anyone explain EA using the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule). The cause prioritisation / effectiveness part of EA is basically the Pareto principle applied to doing good. I'd guess 25-50% of the public knows of the Pareto principle. So, I think this might be a good approach. Thoughts?

Are there GiveWell-style estimates of the cost-effectiveness of the world's most popular charities (say UNICEF), preferably by independent sources and/or based on past results? I want to be able to talk to quantitatively-minded people and have more data than just saying some interventions are 1000x more effective.

The procreation asymmetry can be formulated this way (due to Jeff McMahan):

while the fact that a person's life would be worse than no life at all ... constitutes a strong moral reason for not bringing him into existence, the fact that a person's life would be worth living provides no (or only a relatively weak) moral reason for bringing him into existence.

This is a summary of the argument for the procreation asymmetry here and in the comments, especially this comment, which also looks further at the case of bringing someone into existence with a good life.... (read more)

Buying a house will probably save you lots of money, which you can later donate, but it might not make much difference (and may work out as negative) in terms of your ability to do good.

It seems like common sense that buying a house saves you from wasting money on rent and works out better, financially, in the long term. But earlier this year, John Halstead wrote a blogpost providing a bunch of reasons not to buy a house.

I had another look at John's calculations. I kept the basic calculations the same, but added a few considerations and re-checked the... (read more)

So far, the effective altruist strategy for global poverty has followed a high-certainty, low-reward approach. GiveWell only looks at charities with a strong evidence base, such as bednets and cash transfers. But there's also a low certainty, high reward approach: promote catch-up economic growth. Poverty is strongly correlated with economic development (urbanization, industrialization, etc), so encouraging development would have large effects on poverty. Whereas cash transfers have a large probability of a small effect, economic growth is a small probabil... (read more)

I’ve recently been thinking about medieval alchemy as a metaphor for longtermist EA.

I think there’s a sense in which it was an extremely reasonable choice to study alchemy. The basic hope of alchemy was that by fiddling around in various ways with substances you had, you’d be able to turn them into other things which had various helpful properties. It would be a really big deal if humans were able to do this.

And it seems a priori pretty reasonable to expect that humanity could get way better at manipulating substances, because there was an established hist... (read more)

Ted Kaczynski as a relatively apolitical test case for cancellation norms (x-posted from LW, I'd link but the shortform post editor won't really let me):

Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics professor who decided that industrial society was terrible, and waged a terroristic bombing campaign to foment a revolution against technology. As part of this campaign, he wrote a manifesto titled "Industrial Society and Its Future" and said that if a major newspaper printed it verbatim he would desist from terrorism. He is currently serving eight life s... (read more)

Will says:

in order to assess the value (or normative status) of a particular action we can in the first instance just look at the long-run effects of that action (that is, those after 1000 years), and then look at the short-run effects just to decide among those actions whose long-run effects are among the very best.

Is this not laughable? How could anyone think that "looking at the 1000+ year effects of an action" is workable?