How to Get Out of the Moral Dilemma

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think it's useful to have a thought experiment here, which is that imagine that you literally could save someone's life instead of buying yourself some ice cream. There's something horrifying about that, that choice to buy ice cream rather than saving someone's life. And I think what can happen to some of the fact of Altra is that they start seeing that as a genuine trade-off. They start saying, well, you know what? If I took this money and I went and helped people, maybe I could save a life. Okay, maybe not for the price of ice cream, but, you know, maybe for a few thousand dollars I could savea life.

Read the full transcript here.

What is Effective Altruism? Which parts of the Effective Altruism movement are good and not so good? Who outside of the EA movement are doing lots of good in the world? What are the psychological effects of thinking constantly about the trade-offs of spending resources on ourselves versus on others? To what degree is the EA movement centralized intellectually, financially, etc.? Does the EA movement's tendency to quantify everything, to make everything legible to itself, cause it to miss important features of the world? To what extent do EA people rationalize spending resources on inefficient or selfish projects by reframing them in terms of EA values? Is a feeling of tension about how to allocate our resources actually a good thing?

Ajeya Cotra is a Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy, a grantmaking organization that aims to do as much good as possible with its resources (broadly following effective altruist methodology); she mainly does research relevant to Open Phil's work on reducing existential risks from AI. Ajeya discovered effective altruism in high school through the book The Life You Can Save, and quickly became a major fan of GiveWell. As a student at UC Berkeley, she co-founded and co-ran the Effective Altruists of Berkeley student group, and taught a student-led course on EA. Listen to her 80,000 Hours podcast episode or visit her LessWrong author page for more info.

Michael Nielsen was on the podcast back in episode 016. You can read more about him there!

Staff