Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #EffectiveAltruism

Most recents (12)

End-stage capitalism's defining characteristic is making money rather than making things. Think of how Jack Welch destroyed GE by transforming it from a manufacturing company to a financial engineering shop:

the.ink/p/like-capital… 1/ A gaudy casino floor. In the foreground is a figure in colle
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/11/21/rah… 2/
Hospitals are invoice-generating factories with a sideline in medicine. The electronic health record only incidentally records your health. Its primary purpose is to record your billing-codes:

beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/physician… 3/
Read 45 tweets
Re #FTX and #EffectiveAltruism:

After the business collapse of former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, I'm seeing lots of hot takes condemning the philosophy of effective altruism that he helped fund.

Don't throw the EA baby out with the billionaire bathwater. 1/
2/ I'm a newcomer to this moral philosophy and framework, with just 10 to 20 hours of EA readings, podcasts, and discussions under my belt.

It is clear to me that some criticisms of EA rely on very oversimplified descriptions of the subject. Other criticisms are valid.
3/ You can explore for yourself:

effectivealtruism.org/articles/intro…
Read 22 tweets
Effective altruism’s most controversial idea is called “longtermism.”

It says we should focus on protecting FUTURE people (potentially more than present people).

It’s a deeply political idea, so the main question is: Who gets the POWER to decide?

🧵
vox.com/future-perfect…
The first thing to realize is that there isn't 1 longtermism. There's longtermisms. Think of this worldview as a train that can drop you off at different stations.

Effective altruists sometimes talk about this by asking each other: “Where do you get off the train to Crazy Town?”
I like to picture a rail line with 3 stations:
🚂weak longtermism
🚂strong longtermism
🚂galaxy-brain longtermism

Weak longtermism = “the long-term future matters more than we’re giving it credit for & we should do more to help it.”

Care about climate? This one's probably you
Read 18 tweets
My best attempt to orange-pill an influential member of the #EffectiveAltruism movement who doesn't understand #bitcoin and is, unfortunately, heavily involved in shitcoins: 🧵
This is the key point about PoW and what distinguishes it from PoS. If you can do the research to understand why this statement in this tweet is true, you’ll understand PoW and why it's indispensable:
It’s the first time in history that you can look at information and verify, with certainty, a specific quantity of physical activity (work) that had to happen in the world to produce the specific information you’re looking at.
Read 8 tweets
"Good intentions and accurate data still aren’t enough. You also need to know that you’ve collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on." greeneracresvaluenetwork.wordpress.com/2022/05/28/dai…
Read 13 tweets
"We may need to develop techniques to ensure deep learning models won’t have dangerous goals, before they are powerful enough to be transformative." -- Ajeya Cotra greeneracresvaluenetwork.wordpress.com/2022/05/19/dai…
What COVID Hospitalization Numbers Are Missing - The Atlantic
theatlantic.com/health/archive…
#COVID19, #CaseCount, #HealthcareWorkers, #JobBurnout, #HospitalizationCount
Read 13 tweets
I'm glad to see leading voices in AI like @sama, @ylecun, and @ilyasut ponder the question of artificial consciousness. We research this @SentienceInst because it's one of the most important questions for the long-term future. I'd like to introduce the topic in a brief thread 1/n
First, the meaning of consciousness is deeply contested among philosophers and scientists. There are 3+ more precise terms:

- thought, typically a linguistic stream of words
- perception, either through the 5 senses or imagination
- sentience, positive and negative emotions 2/n
Even these are contested: Are they behaviors? Processes? Functions? Dualist/nonphysical)? Ineffable? Etc.

I take the eliminativist view that because our terms are so vague, consciousness doesn't exist objectively and we need specific measures instead: sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-is-s… 3/n
Read 10 tweets
1/n @ChrisStoecker schreibt oft tolle Kolumnen. Dabei bereitet er z.B. Diskussionen aus der amerikanischen Netzwelt für den deutschen Medienmainstream auf. Gelingt dies in der aktuellen Kolumne über die #longtermism-Denkweise? Ein Thread. spiegel.de/wissenschaft/l…
2/n Stöcker stellt einen Teil der #effectivealtruism-Bewegung dar, nämlich #longtermism. Bei "EA" geht es darum, möglichst viel Gutes zu tun. Dabei wird oft festgestellt, dass beispielsweise Spenden bei bestimmten Organisationen deutlich effektiver sind als bei anderen.
3/n Es ist dabei nicht unmöglich, dass Spenden bei manchen Organisationen 100x effektiver sind als bei anderen. Wer dazu mehr lesen möchte, kann z.B. bei effektiv-spenden.org anfangen. @effektivspenden #effektiveraltruismus
Read 42 tweets
Back of napkin math shows that funding oxygen intervention for India is currently more effective than even top rated interventions from @GiveWell

Thread below.

@Effect_Altruism @MedCrisis @GiveIndia @VitalikButerin @juliagalef @KellyBEworks @robertskmiles @JaEsf

1/X
Hat tip to Dr. Rohin Francis for identifying the specific opportunity in his excellent video on the crisis India is currently facing:

I've used numbers from covid.giveindia.org/healthcare-her… because they were very specific and can handle int'l donations easily.
2/X
They claim able to deploy funds within 1-2 weeks. Where details were lacking I checked with an MD I know who has been treating COVID in northern Canada to estimate the impact of various interventions, assuming effective triage and that each item is already a choke point.
3/X
Read 18 tweets
Much-tweeted paper "Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year". I'm a happiness researcher. I explain why the title should be "Money barely increases happiness (unless you really value money, and even then not by much)" pnas.org/content/118/4/… (1/15)
First, context. In 2010, two (now) Nobel Laureates @kahneman_daniel and @DeatonAngus publish "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being" using survey of 450,000 Americans. pnas.org/content/107/38…
Their main finding was that positive and negative 'affect' (aka 'mood' aka 'happiness') is basically flat after $75k household income even though overall life evaluation keep improving. Image
Read 16 tweets
In the face of the super-rich abdicating their responsibility towards the less-endowed, do we, common citizens, have any obligation to compensate for their callousness?

A thread 👇 1/
Portugal is one of EU's poorest countries, but is nevertheless rich enough to be classified as a developed nation.

If we take Portugal's average income as the standard of being "affluent" or "well-off", then there are at least, a *BILLION* affluent people in the world. 2/
A very liberal estimate of what will be required to eliminate extreme poverty from the world is 130 billion dollars per year, possibly as direct cash transfers. /3
Read 12 tweets
1/10 Sunday night musings on the efficacy of “graphic” images in advancing animal welfare
2/10 It seems like graphic images of animal suffering can be helpful for those already mitigating suffering; less helpful for those not currently open to considering the plight of other sentient beings’ suffering at all, which seems a proportionally small but crucial audience.
3/10 The extent to which different forms of animal suffering - whether thru words or images - move individuals to change wrt animals - and how it can most effectively be done, is worthy of its own elaborate analysis. Some great orgs like @Faunalytics working on this.
Read 10 tweets

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