Astral Codex Ten

effective altruist movement

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effective altruist movement

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effective altruist movement is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between March 13, 2022 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The effective altruist movement is offering $100,000 prizes”; “the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized”; “The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario”. It most often appears alongside US, CRISPR, Derek Parfit.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: March 13, 2022
  • Last seen: May 15, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Open Thread 215
March 13, 2022 · Original source
1: The effective altruist movement is offering $100,000 prizes to each of the top five new EA-aligned blogs this year. If you were thinking of writing a blog that touches on EA topics (x-risk, progress, global development, moral philosophy, AI, etc) now’s a pretty good time.
Inline links: is offering
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future, New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, Boston Review, Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Matt Yglesias
The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario: suppose while walking to work you see a child drowning in the river. You are a good swimmer and could easily save them. But the muddy water would ruin your expensive suit. Do you have an obligation to jump in and help? If yes, it sounds like you think you have a moral obligation to save a child’s life even if it costs you money. But giving money to charity could save the life of a child in the developing world. So maybe you should donate to charity instead of buying fancy things in the first place.
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
Conflict of interest notices: I was friends with an FTX/Alameda employee a few years ago. I support the effective altruist movement, which FTX donated money to. I briefly worked at the same San Francisco clinic as Dr. Lerner, a psychiatrist mentioned in this piece - but I’m so introverted at work that I never actually met him.
Against Learning From Dramatic Events
January 16, 2024 · Original source
I’m part of the effective altruist movement. The biggest disaster we ever faced was the Sam Bankman-Fried thing. Some lessons people suggested to us then were:
Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).
This is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.