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 things?, 80,000 Hours, February 27.

External links

Kelsey Piper. Vox profile.

Kelsey Piper. Effective Altruism Forum account.

The Unit of Caring. Piper's blog.

Related entries

Dylan Matthews | Future Perfect | journalism

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Zabel, Claire (2015) A different take on giving back, The Stanford Daily, February 5.
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Piper, Kelsey (2018) This summer, Vox announced they’re going to launch a new department dedicated to writing about effective altruism, The Unit of Caring, September 15.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) The rise of meatless meat, explained, Vox, May 28.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) The next challenge for plant-based meat: Winning the price war against animal meat, Vox, August 18.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) This charity is giving cash directly to Americans suffering during the coronavirus crisis, Vox, March 20.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?, June 28.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Don’t scold people for worrying about the coronavirus, Vox, February 6.
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Piper, Kelsey (2021) How bad research clouded our understanding of Covid-19, Vox, December 17.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Singapore is the first country in the world to approve lab-grown chicken products, Vox, December 2.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) A new study finds that giving kids deworming treatment still benefits them 20 years later, Vox, August 6.
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Piper, Kelsey (2022) The return of the “worm wars”, Vox, July 19.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Doomsday clock creators: “We’re playing Russian roulette with humanity”, Vox, January 24.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) The Doomsday Clock is now at “100 seconds to midnight.” Here’s what that means., Vox, January 23.
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Piper, Kelsey (2018) This city just approved a new election system never tried before in America, Vox, November 15.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) California’s ballot initiative system isn’t working. How do we fix it?, Vox, November 6.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Farms have bred chickens so large that they’re in constant pain, Vox, September 23.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) How to get better at predicting the future, Vox, April 5.
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Matthews, Dylan, Kelsey Piper & Sigal Samuel (2022) 22 things we think will happen in 2022, Vox, January 1.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Why foreign aid is getting better at saving lives, Vox, May 7.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Some aid gets misdirected. Did the World Bank try to suppress a paper saying so?, Vox, February 21.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) The next deadly pathogen could come from a rogue scientist. Here’s how we can prevent that., Vox, February 11.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier — and why they should stop, Vox, May 1.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Why governments are bad at facing catastrophic risks — and how they could get better, Vox, August 23.
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Piper, Kelsey (2022) The most interesting thing Don’t Look Up has to say about the apocalypse, Vox, January 8.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Is this the most important century in human history?, Vox, September 26.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Human extinction would be a uniquely awful tragedy. Why don’t we act like it?, Vox, November 7.
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Piper, Kelsey (2022) When scientific information is dangerous, Vox, March 30.
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Piper, Kelsey (2021) The new malaria vaccine is a total game changer, Vox, April 28.
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Piper, Kelsey (2021) Why the WHO approval of the first malaria vaccine is a big deal, Vox, October 6.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) The man who wants to save humanity from nuclear winter, Vox, July 25.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter, Vox, October 9.
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Piper, Kelsey (2022) What the media needs to get right in the next pandemic, Vox, April 10.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Why prediction markets are bad at predicting who’ll be president, Vox, February 14.
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Piper, Kelsey (2018) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk want to colonize space to save humanity, Vox, October 22.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) Don’t wait: The case for giving sooner rather than later, Vox, November 30.
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Piper, Kelsey (2021) Should charities spend your money now — or save it to help people later?, Vox, December 10.
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Piper, Kelsey (2019) The important questions about universal basic income haven’t been answered yet, Vox, February 13.
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Piper, Kelsey (2020) How a basic income experiment helped these Kenyans weather the Covid-19 crisis, Vox, September 2.
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Piper, Kelsey (2018) How technological progress is making it likelier than ever that humans will destroy ourselves, Vox, November 19.
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Vox (2022) Kelsey Piper profile and activity, Vox.
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Piper, Kelsey (2018) The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity, Vox, December 21.
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Vox (2020) Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No, Twitter, January 31.
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Parmet, Wendy & Michael Sinha (2020) Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus, Washington Post, February 3.
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Scott Alexander lists many additional examples in Alexander, Scott (2020) A failure, but not of prediction, Slate Star Codex, April 15.
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In a piece published two years later, Piper says that she is "proud of [the article] overall", but regrets having dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory".^[32]