The Importance of Altruism in EA

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I don't think it's fundamental to the intellectual project. And I have lots of friends who kind of are appreciative of the logic of EA and are just like, well, you know what, I don't really want to spend my life that way. They understand the intellectual arguments, but they aren't pulled to give a lot of themselves to it. But I think it is a pretty big strand of the community. It's extremely visible and feels morally horrifying to do things for themselves when that time or that money could have been used to help others who have far greater needs. The people who are most likely to call themselves EA are in fact devoting a lot of their lives to this

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