In general it doesn't seem logical to me to bucket cause areas as either "longtermist" or "neartermist".
I think this bucketing can paint an overly simplistic image of EA cause prioritization that is something like:
Are you longtermist?
But really the situation is way more complicated than this, and I don't think the simplification is ...
Agreed! And we should hardly be surprised to see such a founder effect, being that EA was started by philosophers and philosophy fans.
In talking to many Brown University students about EA (most of who are very progressive), I have noticed that longtermist-first and careers-first EA outreach does better and seems to be because of these objections that come up in response to 'GiveWell style EA'.
That is very helpful- thank you EdoArad!
(and I'll be sure to update you on how our program turns out)
Thank you so much!
I agree and am adding this to our list of types of projects to suggest to students :)
Thank you Brian!
We have considered this, and have it as part of our "funnel", but still think there is room for this kind of projects program in addition.
I also like the idea of EA Uni groups encouraging interested members to start these other (EA related) student groups you mention (Alt Protein group, OFTW and GRC). At Brown, we already have OFTW and GRC, and I'm in the process of getting some students from Brown EA to start an Alt Protein group as well :)
This is really cool! Thank you for doing this!
Also, I'm curious - to what extent is AI safety is discussed in your group?
I noticed the cover of Superintelligence has a quote of Bill Gates saying "I highly recommend this book" and I'm curious if AI safety is something Microsoft employees discuss often.
I do think there is a good case for interventions aimed at improving the existential risk profile of post-disaster civilization being competitive with interventions aimed at improving the existential risk profile of our current civilization.
I'd love to hear more about this and see any other places where this is discussed.
(I'm only addressing a small part of your question, not the main question)
When we are looking at the potential branches in the future, should you make the choice that will lead you to the cluster of outcomes with the highest average utility or to the cluster with the highest possible utility?
I'd say the one with the highest average utility if they are all equally likely. Basically, go with the one with the highest expected value.
What do you think are the most likely ways that plant based and cell based products might both fail to significantly replace factory farmed products?
Sounds very exciting!
And seems like there is some overlap with EA Uni group fellowships so I would be happy to talk to you about those if you want; although maybe better to talk to the community builders more involved in syllabus writing. ( this Intro Fellowship I'm running at Brown EA )
Hi Max,
I'm curious how big you are thinking this "EA curriculum" might be. Are you thinking of something similar to an EA Uni group fellowship (usually ~4 hours/ week for ~ 8 weeks) or are you thinking of something much larger?
I agree with Marisa
Rather than a single body of knowledge being a standard education for EAs, I like the fellowship structure that many EA Uni groups use.
For me, one of the main goals in running these fellowship to expose students to enough EA ideas and discussions to decide for themselves what knowledge and skills they want to build up in order to do good better. For some people, this will involve economics, statistics, and decision analysis knowledge, but for others, it will look totally different.
(For fellowship syllabus examples you can check out thi...
Thanks so much for your response Ross!
The values obtained for table 1 on reduction in far future potential were obtained from a survey of existential risk researchers at Ea global 2018 see methods:
Yeah that makes sense - I was just curious if the reasonings in the introduction were from the reasonings of those who filled out the survey. But thanks for clarifying!
Surviving the new environment might also favour the development of stable yet repressive social structures that would prevent rebuilding of civilization to previous levels. This could be facilitated by dominant groups having technology of the previous civilization.
Very interesting and makes sense - thank you!
I have two questions/clarifications:
(1) Regarding:
Reasons that civilization might not recover include: ...
Are the reasons mentioned in this section what leads to the estimated reduction in far future potential in Table 1? Or are there other reasons that play into those estimates as well?
(2) Regarding:
Another way to far future impact is the trauma associated with the catastrophe making future catastrophes more likely, e.g. global totalitarianism (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008)
Intuitively I feel that the trauma associated with the catastrophe would make peopl...
I am wondering why you say that "Human reconstruction will be beneficial to the next civilization."
I think it would be great if we could leave messages to a future non-human civilization to help them achieve a grand future and reduce their x-risk (by learning from our mistakes, for example). But I don't feel that human reconstruction is particularly important.
If anything, I worry that this future advanced civilization might reconstruct humans to enslave us. And if they are not the type to enslave us, then I feel pretty good about them existing and homo sapiens not existing.
Such a great book!
I am struggling to get my friends and family to read it though as they are put off by it being quite a sizeable hefty book (even when I tell them they can skip the footnotes).
Are there plans to make a short/abridged paperback version that might spread more widely outside of the EA community? I'd love to see the main ideas and thoughts become somewhat common knowledge. Or is it more important to have fewer people have a deep understanding then many people have a surface level understanding?
I agree with the previous answers- that is, I think the best argument here has to do with moral circle expansion affecting the long term future.
In addition, eating meat could increase existential risk through its effects on worsening climate change and the emergence of natural pandemics.
See this chart to compare greenhouse gas emissions per kg of different food products to see how much more animal products contribute to climate change. In total, animal agriculture contributes around 14% to 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Animal agricult...
This is a great idea! From starting a group at Brown University last year, I can say that it definitely would have been helpful to have a remote volunteer helping out.
It is very hard to start a well-run EA group at your university because it requires that you have a lot of time and a good idea of how to start and lead the group. Having volunteers help remotely would make the process a lot easier.
Here are some things that I think could be helpful for a remote volunteer to do for a small EA university group:
I only recently got around to reading this, but I'm very glad I did! I definitely recommend reading the full paper, but for those interested, there is also this TED talk where you can get the gist of it.
In any case, the paper made me wonder about the possibility of having a sort of 'worst case scenario bunker system' capable of rebuilding society. I imagine such discussion was not included in this paper because it isn't relevant to protecting against a "devastation of civilization" (death of at least 15% of world population) a...
I mostly want to +1 to Jonas’ comment and share my general sentiment here, which overall is that this whole situation makes me feel very sad. I feel sad for the distress and pain this has caused to everyone involved.
I’d also feel sad if people viewed Owen here as having anything like a stereotypical sexual predator personality.
My sense is that Owen cares extraordinarily about not hurting others.
It seems to me like this problematic behavior came from a very different source – basically problems with poor theory of mind and underestimat... (read more)