Eight: Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours
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Is There a Difference Between Good and Bad in the Long Term?
In the short term, charity evaluations talk about how many lives are saved by in the short term. But when you take seriously the thought that what you're ultimately interested in is all the effects your actions will have, actually the total effect of your intervention will be massively dominated by the unforeseen ones. So i think really your properly considered behaviour should be almost entirely driven by what we haven't measured. You might try to rescue this life as a proxy for saving others' lives - but it's not going to work very well. And so there doesn't seem to be any place in the picture for the impact of valuations unless you think something like 'well, the vast majority of the expected value
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