Effective Altruism Handbook
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BMGF Malaria 2-10-14 (Public)
A conversation with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation malaria team on December 9, 2013 Participants • Alan Magill — Director, Malaria program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • David Brandling-Bennett — Senior Advisor, Malaria program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • Bruno Moonen - Deputy Director, Malaria program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • Alexandra Farnum — Program Officer, Global Program Advocacy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • Meg Halverson — Consultant, Global Program Advocacy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • Adrienne DiCasparro — Associate Program Officer, Giving Partnerships, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation • Cari Tuna — Co-Founder, Good Ventures • Holden Karnofsky — Co-Founder, GiveWell Note: This set of conversation notes was compiled by GiveWell and gives an overview of the major points made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation malaria team. Summary GiveWell and Good Ventures spoke with members of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) malaria team about gaps in global malaria funding, BMGF’s strategy and projected timeline for malaria eradication, and other BMGF malaria activities. Gaps in global malaria funding GiveWell and Good Ventures asked the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) malaria team whether there is a need for funding of better data on bed net durability and bed net usage. There is not as much knowledge and data about bed net usage and bed net durability as there should be. A potential source of variability in bed net durability is that, currently, there are no globally established criteria for measuring the durability of bed nets, so it is possible that net durability standards differ between producers. The Results for Development Institute (R4D) is doing very good work on studying bed net durability. -
Effective Altruism William Macaskill and Theron Pummer
1 Effective Altruism William MacAskill and Theron Pummer Climate change is on course to cause millions of deaths and cost the world economy trillions of dollars. Nearly a billion people live in extreme poverty, millions of them dying each year of easily preventable diseases. Just a small fraction of the thousands of nuclear weapons on hair‐trigger alert could easily bring about global catastrophe. New technologies like synthetic biology and artificial intelligence bring unprece dented risks. Meanwhile, year after year billions and billions of factory‐farmed ani mals live and die in misery. Given the number of severe problems facing the world today, and the resources required to solve them, we may feel at a loss as to where to even begin. The good news is that we can improve things with the right use of money, time, talent, and effort. These resources can bring about a great deal of improvement, or very little, depending on how they are allocated. The effective altruism movement consists of a growing global community of peo ple who use reason and evidence to assess how to do as much good as possible, and who take action on this basis. Launched in 2011, the movement now has thousands of members, as well as influence over billions of dollars. The movement has substan tially increased awareness of the fact that some altruistic activities are much more cost‐effective than others, in the sense that they do much more good than others per unit of resource expended. According to the nonprofit organization GiveWell, it costs around $3,500 to prevent someone from dying of malaria by distributing bed nets. -
Infinite Ethics
INFINITE ETHICS Nick Bostrom Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University [Published in Analysis and Metaphysics, Vol. 10 (2011): pp. 9-59] [This is the final version. Earlier versions: 2003, 2005, 2008, 2009] www.nickbostrom.com ABSTRACT Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? 1. The challenge 1.1. The threat of infinitarian paralysis When we gaze at the starry sky at night and try to think of humanity from a “cosmic point of view”, we feel small. Human history, with all its earnest strivings, triumphs, and tragedies can remind us of a colony of ants, laboring frantically to rearrange the needles of their little ephemeral stack. We brush such late-night rumination aside in our daily life and analytic 1 philosophy. -
Apocalypse Now? Initial Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic for the Governance of Existential and Global Catastrophic Risks
journal of international humanitarian legal studies 11 (2020) 295-310 brill.com/ihls Apocalypse Now? Initial Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic for the Governance of Existential and Global Catastrophic Risks Hin-Yan Liu, Kristian Lauta and Matthijs Maas Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract This paper explores the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic through the framework of exis- tential risks – a class of extreme risks that threaten the entire future of humanity. In doing so, we tease out three lessons: (1) possible reasons underlying the limits and shortfalls of international law, international institutions and other actors which Covid-19 has revealed, and what they reveal about the resilience or fragility of institu- tional frameworks in the face of existential risks; (2) using Covid-19 to test and refine our prior ‘Boring Apocalypses’ model for understanding the interplay of hazards, vul- nerabilities and exposures in facilitating a particular disaster, or magnifying its effects; and (3) to extrapolate some possible futures for existential risk scholarship and governance. Keywords Covid-19 – pandemics – existential risks – global catastrophic risks – boring apocalypses 1 Introduction: Our First ‘Brush’ with Existential Risk? All too suddenly, yesterday’s ‘impossibilities’ have turned into today’s ‘condi- tions’. The impossible has already happened, and quickly. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, both directly and as manifested through the far-reaching global societal responses to it, signal a jarring departure away from even the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/18781527-01102004Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:13:00AM via free access <UN> 296 Liu, Lauta and Maas recent past, and suggest that our futures will be profoundly different in its af- termath. -
Givedirectly
GiveDirectly GiveDirectly provides unconditional cash transfers using cell phone technology to some of the world’s poorest people, as well as refugees, urban youth, and disaster victims. They also are currently running a historic Universal Basic Income initiative, delivering a basic income to 20,000+ people in Kenya in a 12-year study. United States (USD) Donate to GiveDirectly Please select your country & currency. Donations are tax-deductible in the country selected. Founded in Moved Delivered cash to 88% of donations sent to families 2009 US$140M 130K in poverty families Other ways to donate We recommend that gifts up to $1,000 be made online by credit card. If you are giving more than $1,000, please consider one of these alternatives. Check Bank Transfer Donor Advised Fund Cryptocurrencies Stocks or Shares Bequests Corporate Matching Program The problem: traditional methods of international giving are complex — and often inefficient Often, donors give money to a charity, which then passes along the funds to partners at the local level. This makes it difficult for donors to determine how their money will be used and whether it will reach its intended recipients. Additionally, charities often provide interventions that may not be what the recipients actually need to improve their lives. Such an approach can treat recipients as passive beneficiaries rather than knowledgeable and empowered shapers of their own lives. The solution: unconditional cash transfers Most poverty relief initiatives require complicated infrastructure, and alleviate the symptoms of poverty rather than striking at the source. By contrast, unconditional cash transfers are straightforward, providing funds to some of the poorest people in the world so that they can buy the essentials they need to set themselves up for future success. -
Pod of Jake #67 – Julia Galef Ai-Generated Transcript 1
POD OF JAKE #67 – JULIA GALEF AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Jake 00:59 Thank you so much, Julia, for taking the time and joining me on the show today. I really appreciate it and looking forward to this conversation for some time. And I've actually listened to your podcast a bunch in the past. Most recently. Yeah, your episode with metallic. So funny must be funny to be on the other side of the microphone. Yeah. But thank you for coming on, I think the best place to get started would be for those who don't know you to tell your story a little bit. And then we'll spend a lot of time talking about your book, which recently came out. Julia Galef 01:29 Sounds good. Thanks, Jake. Yes, it's good to be on the show. My story. Basically, for the last 10 years, I've just been devoted to this question of how do we improve human reasoning and decision making? And really interest in this question, both from a theoretical level? Like how do we think about what would ideal reasoning look like? Just almost philosophically, and also, just from a practical level? Like, what are the kinds of mistakes that the human brain tends to make and what kinds of situations and getting really into a lot of the cognitive science literature and kind of experimenting on real people like trying out techniques and seeing how well they work and, you know, talking to people about their experiences, noticing their own biases and things like that. -
October 26, 2014
Animal Charity Evaluators Board of Directors Meeting Type of Meeting: Standard Monthly Meeting Date: October 26, 2014 In attendance: Chairperson: Simon Knutsson Treasurer: Brian Tomasik Secretary: Rob Wiblin Board Member: Sam BankmanFried Board Member: Peter Singer Board Member: S. Greenberg Executive Director: Jon Bockman Absent: Quorum established: Yes 1. Call to order: SK called the meeting to order at 9:05 am PST 2. Important questions document 1. In the philosophy document (and in the important questions document and the strategy plan, which refer to it): a. Edit the part about veganism, which can be seen as a method for benefiting animals rather than a vision or a philosophical position. b. Edit the part about wild animal suffering. The challenge is to balance bringing up an important idea with making a good impression on those who are not already aware of it or interested in it. Some board members think that we have been giving it too much space in these documents and others think it warrants that level of space because of the importance of the issue. i. Could interview others about wild animal suffering or invite them to guest blog about it. c. Improve general writing quality based on the comments from the board. 2. Consider writing a report that is as objective as possible on the important questions. 3. PS can help getting academics interested in effective animal activism. a. Has a contact at the Animal Studies Initiative at NYU – maybe this person could organize a conference b. Researchers studying persuasion might be interested (ACE or PS can encourage them) 4. -
Evidence-Based Policy Cause Area Report
Evidence-Based Policy Cause Area Report AUTHOR: 11/18 MARINELLA CAPRIATI, DPHIL 1 — Founders Pledge Animal Welfare Executive Summary By supporting increased use of evidence in the governments of low- and middle-income countries, donors can dramatically increase their impact on the lives of people living in poverty. This report explores how focusing on evidence-based policy provides an opportunity for leverage, and presents the most promising organisation we identified in this area. A high-risk/high-return opportunity for leverage In the 2013 report ‘The State of the Poor’, the World Bank reported that, as of 2010, roughly 83% of people in extreme poverty lived in countries classified as ‘lower-middle income’ or below. By far the most resources spent on tackling poverty come from local governments. American think tank the Brookings Institution found that, in 2011, $2.3 trillion of the $2.8 trillion spent on financing development came from domestic government revenues in the countries affected. There are often large differences in the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of social programs— the amount of good done per dollar spent can vary significantly across programs. Employing evidence allows us to identify the most cost-effective social programs. This is useful information for donors choosing which charity to support, but also for governments choosing which programs to implement, and how. This suggests that employing philanthropic funding to improve the effectiveness of policymaking in low- and middle-income countries is likely to constitute an exceptional opportunity for leverage: by supporting the production and use of evidence in low- and middle-income countries, donors can potentially enable policy makers to implement more effective policies, thereby reaching many more people than direct interventions. -
Charitable Infidelity: When Donors Lose Control of Donor-Advised Funds Page 32
CHARITABLE INFIDELITY: WHEN DONORS LOSE CONTROL OF DONOR-ADVISED FUNDS PAGE 32 ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: 3 Congress learns about the long history of Russian election meddling 7 How the name “hate crime” designation breeds even more hate 15 Do you know how millions in refugee resettlement funds are being spent? www.CapitalResearch.org The communist movement known as Antifa (short for Anti-Fascist Action) has sparked violence across the nation. In the wake of their battling white supremacist in Charlottesville, Antifa has begun to gain mainstream popularity. But unbeknownst to much of the public, the vast majority of Antifa violence isn’t targeted at genuine fascists, but mainstream conservatives and civilians. With help from those who have encountered Antifa, Trevor Loudon guides us through the history and ideas behind the Antifa movement, starting with Leon Trotsky and going all the way through the events in Berkeley, CA and Charlottesville, VA. WATCH AT: DangerousDocumentaries.com/film/America-Under-Siege-Antifa/ ISSUE 8, 2018 CONTENTS 3 ORGANIZATION TRENDS 7 Weaponizing “Hate” COMMENTARY By Renee Nal CRC’s Research into History of Russian Meddling Takes the House Floor SPECIAL REPORT By Christine Ravold Is the U.S. Refugee Resettlement 15 System Broken? By James Simpson Capital Research is a monthly publication of the Capital Research Center (CRC), a nonpartisan education and research organization, classified by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity. CRC is an independent, tax-exempt DECEPTION & MISDIRECTION TM institution governed by an independent The Politically Incorrect Guide board of trustees. We rely on private 25 to “21st Century Socialism” financial support from the general public—individuals, foundations, AKA communism and corporations—for our income. -
1% Initiative in the City of Zurich
Effective Altruism Foundation Using evidence to fight poverty The 1% initiative by the Effective Altruism Foundation The initiative Theory of change Effective T $90M per year C altruism Evidence-based A for effective P movement policy making M I charities How can we fight global poverty on a political level? A unique growth opportunity is offered by Switzerland's direct democracy, wherein anyone can ask for a legally binding vote on any topic – simply by Counterpropos Media reports collecting signatures on a popular initiative. al passes Initiative passes on the initiative and effective E altruism The Effective Altruism Foundation has just launched one such M O initiative in the city of Zurich, asking for 1% of the city's budget to be C T U donated to highly effective global health charities. The city's budget O Parliament Significant amounts to about USD 9 billion, which means the city would makes sociopolitical potentially donate USD 90 million per year to highly effective counterproposal support charities. Support from We believe the initiative presents an extraordinary funding T U Collect 3,000 charities, P Media relations opportunity for donors interested in meta-charities, due to its T signatures U politicians and fundraising and movement-building potential. O parties S E I T Propose Fundraising Position paper, I V I legislation > EUR 90’000 FAQ, etc $9 billion x 1% = $90 million per year $30 million T Zurich’s budget Annual funding for Adjustments Total expected C A effective charities value of initiative More likely Less likely Fundraising benefits The base rate for popular initiatives passing is about 11%. -
Whether and Where to Give1 (Forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs)
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Andrews Research Repository 1 Whether and Where to Give1 (Forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs) Theron Pummer University of St Andrews 1. The Ethics of Giving and Effective Altruism The ethics of giving has traditionally focused on whether, and how much, to give to charities helping people in extreme poverty.2 In more recent years, the discussion has increasingly focused on where to give, spurred by an appreciation of the substantial differences in cost- effectiveness between charities. According to a commonly cited example, $40,000 can be used either to help 1 blind person by training a seeing-eye dog in the United States or to help 2,000 blind people by providing surgeries reversing the effects of trachoma in Africa.3 Effective altruists recommend that we give large sums to charity, but by far their more central message is that we give effectively, i.e., to whatever charities would do the most good per dollar donated.4 In this paper, I’ll assume that it’s not wrong not to give bigger, but will explore to what extent it may well nonetheless be wrong not to give better. The main claim I’ll argue for here is that in many cases it would be wrong of you to give a sum of money to charities that do less good than others you could have given to instead, even if 1 I am extremely grateful to Derek Parfit, Roger Crisp, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer for extremely helpful feedback and encouragement. -
Non-Paywalled
Wringing the Most Good Out of a FACEBOOK FORTUNE SAN FRANCISCO itting behind a laptop affixed with a decal of a child reaching for an GIVING apple, an illustration from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Cari Tuna quips about endowing a Tuna Room in the Bass Library at Yale Univer- sity, her alma mater. But it’s unlikely any of the fortune that she and her husband, Face- By MEGAN O’NEIL Sbook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, command — estimated by Forbes at more than $9 billion — will ever be used to name a building. Five years after they signed the Giving Pledge, the youngest on the list of billionaires promising to donate half of their wealth, the couple is embarking on what will start at double-digit millions of dollars in giving to an eclectic range of causes, from overhauling the criminal-justice system to minimizing the potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. To figure out where to give, they created the Open Philanthropy Project, which uses academic research, among other things, to identify high-poten- tial, overlooked funding opportunities. Ms. Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, hopes the approach will influence other wealthy donors in Silicon The youngest Valley and beyond who, like her, seek the biggest possible returns for their philanthropic dollars. Already, a co-founder of Instagram and his spouse have made a $750,000 signers of the commitment to support the project. What’s more, Ms. Tuna and those working alongside her at the Open Philanthropy Project are documenting every step online — sometimes in Giving Pledge are eyebrow-raising detail — for the world to follow along.