r/EffectiveAltruism

This is meant for a general audience. I point out that EA contains people of different beliefs, is far less demanding, and has a higher pluralism of values than utilitarianism.

It's Cluelessness Critiques Week on the EA Forum

We are offering $100 prizes, up to 20 of them, for the best comments during the week that advance the conversation on cluelessness. 

If you want to prepare, read Anthony DiGiovanni’s sequence on the problem of unawareness, or his summary. 

Visit the Forum during the week to take part.

• Reason #1: Our confidence about future affairs should reduce over time
• Reason #2: We’re bad at making predictions about the future
• Reason #3: Even if humanity persists, it may not create a world we would approve of

"Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it. You can tell people that global life expectancy has doubled in a century and watch it fail to register – it just sounds like an abstract number, and numbers don’t convey how different life used to be. So let me describe it another way.

If you collapsed with a heart attack in 1950, hardly anyone around you would know how to help. CPR wouldn’t be invented for another decade. If you reached a hospital, a doctor would likely give you morphine, tell you to lie still and hope for the best: the prevailing view was that once the heart stopped pumping, nothing could be done.

That changed in the 1970s. Cardiologists began to understand that with each passing minute, more heart muscle would be starved of oxygen, and once dead, it wouldn’t be able to recover. But doctors could limit that damage by swiftly restoring oxygen supply with a clot-busting drug or a balloon catheter, opening blocked blood vessels and rescuing heart muscle.

In other words, the idea that a heart attack is something you could actively treat is only about fifty years old. Since then, the share of patients who have died within a month of having the most severe type of heart attack has fallen by two thirds.

Zoom out to cardiovascular diseases overall, and the trend is even more dramatic. People in rich countries today have roughly a quarter the chance of dying from cardiovascular diseases as they did in the 1950s at the same ages. Back then, there were no statins, no cholesterol testing, no bans on trans-fats, no anti-smoking campaigns, no bypass surgery, and no implanted pacemakers.

Diabetes, certain cancers, infectious diseases and other conditions have also become far more treatable than they used to be. A century ago, if you were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, your remaining life expectancy would be a few months, and a ‘starvation diet’ would be one of your few options. Today, you’d simply need to wear a small device on your arm to track your blood sugar level and release insulin to stabilize it in real time. A century ago, it was unheard of for anyone to be cured of cancer, except, in rare cases, by a surgeon’s knife. Penicillin hadn’t been discovered, and a simple wound infection could result in sepsis and death. Smallpox still existed. It swept across the world and killed millions globally, year after year.

I think we underestimate how much medicine has progressed because we rarely experience life without it anymore. But it has added years, sometimes decades, to people’s lives. Maybe surprisingly, it’s also reduced inequality in life expectancy: we’ve seen greater gains at the bottom of the distribution, among those who would have died as children or young adults. At the same time, life expectancy has risen at every age.

The statistics go like this. In 1950, the shortest-lived 1 percent of babies born in France lived less than three months. But for babies born after that, that 1 percent started surviving longer and longer: up to six months for those born in 1960, three years in 1970, 18 years in 1980, and 25 years in 1990. Alternatively, you can think about the cohort you went to school with. If you were born in France in 1900, only two thirds of your cohort would still be alive with you when you reached the age of sixty. But if you were born in 1960, 90 percent of them would.

So here’s another way to think about the rise in life expectancy. It means that far fewer parents lose their children, fewer children lose their siblings, and we grow old with more of our friends and family still alive."

Hi everyone,

I'd like to get some outside perspectives on a financial/EA question I've been mulling over.

I already donate more than 10% of my gross monthly income and I plan to keep doing that indefinitely. On top of that, I've been running a broadly diversified ETF savings plan (think MSCI World / FTSE All-World style, low-cost, passive).

My reasoning for the ETF plan is twofold:

1. Personal risk buffer: Life happens — job loss, health issues, unexpected expenses. I live in a wealthy country with a pretty good social system that worst case scenarios are not even that bad but still would feel kinda frightened not saving up some money.

2. Compounding for future donations: I'm not trying to get rich off this. The plan is to donate a large portion of it later in life (e.g., in my will, or once I've hit certain life milestones and know my own financial needs are secure). My hope is that market growth over decades will let me donate more in inflation-adjusted terms than I could by just giving away smaller amounts today.

So my questions to this community are:

- Does this approach make sense from an EA perspective, or am I rationalizing wealth accumulation with EA language?

- Given the time-value of money and discounting arguments in EA (e.g., "give now vs. give later" debates, existential risk considerations, etc.), would you say it's smarter to just increase my current donation percentage instead of banking on future compounding?

I know this subreddit is probably not the best place to post this, but I don't think I know of a better fitting subreddit. If this is unfit for the sub please tell me where else to post this.

I am going into 11th grade and need help picking my career path. I'll try to keep this post short. Basically, I realized that I'd feel bad about myself if I ended up working in your average business, or really most jobs. This is because I want to maximize the amount of good I do and I think the average job would actually be closer to the opposite. Of course, I have some selfish desires, like being able to live comfortably and eventually retire, see the world, etc. I know to some it may seem early to think about this stuff, but I need to get my classes in order now to help make my goals more achievable. The next bit will be me explaining more about myself so that recommendations can be more accurately targeted.

Besides your average "core" classes, I've been taking computer science classes and will in 11th too. I realized recently that actually, as much as I'd like the lifestyle of a programmer, most programming jobs go towards the consumption of media, business, and communication. Don't get me wrong, I mean no disrespect to these fields. I just realized that they are not for me. Oh, and I kind of like the idea of cyber security as a field, but I can't really place why.

I'm not really outdoorsy, but with hardly any research into the field, environmental scientist sounds like an alright job. Maybe some kind of biologist? I used to think I wanted to be a microbiologist and I haven't shot it down but after getting my request of a tour of a microbiology lab a few years ago, I felt like it might not be like how I'd imagined.

I'd probably do the most good as a politician, if I could get enough resources / support behind me. The problem is that I sort of really don't feel like that would be a job I'd like. Which I guess is kind of selfish. I sort of see it like a trolley problem where I'm sorta responsible for deaths I could've prevented had I been a politician, which I think there'd be at least one so the point stands.

I kind of like math, english, science, but not really social studies / history, or at least the bits I get taught in school. If we focused on more interesting or important things maybe I'd be more interested in the classes of that field.

I don't think I could be a doctor or veterinarian, I'm a little squeamish. Idk I'd probably get desensitized to biological stuff you have to see as a healthcare worker. But also the long working day, and long study period are factors. Also it seems like you don't get remembered on a large scale generally, unless you make some kind of huge development.

That's another thing, a small factor is that I kinda like the idea of being remembered, at least in a very tiny way, for a good long while in human history. But that feels like a cart in front of the horse thing to be worried about.

What else? I've sort of ruled out professional artist of some type. Although I am interested in music and visual art among others, and I know art can be widely influential and beneficial, I feel I could do more tangible good for the world. Also I've heard of the don't make your hobby your job thing so that too. If there's any kind of art I'd consider, it would probably be an author, since in my opinion writing has the most potent meaning and influence on average. And I'm somewhat interested in philosophy. But idk.

Stuff I've been considering / worrying about lately is overconsumption, under education, and algorithm influenced thinking (especially in AI). These worries are especially prominent since I live in America (if you couldn't tell already by the words I use) and see them prominently in my life, especially in my peers. Of course there are many things to worry about (wars, genocide, environmental degradation, poverty, wealth inequality, etc) but I think with the internet there’s no way to think about many of the worlds problems at once, there are tragedies every second of the day.

I think the average job relates to consumption of resources in one way or another, and I am against rapid consumption, urbanization, expansion etc.

I like to think of myself as logical, empathetic, etc, but in reality I am not perfect about these things of course.

The kinds of things I'm considering are politician, some kind of scientist / doctor, teacher, and engineer of some kind.

- Politician would be probably the biggest platform for good but I'd probably not enjoy it.

- Scientist / doctor is broad and I don't really know what fields I'm interested in, but I don't know if I'd enjoy it. But I think it'd be a pretty guaranteed way to do at least some amount of good.

- Teacher would be a lot of good done on a very small and distributed scale. For instance, my teachers collectively have been a factor in getting me where I am today as a person, but I can't really trace anything back to a specific teacher.

- Engineer seems like a good workplace. It seems like you get varied work material and get to problem solve as a job at least.

Is there a job out there for me? I'll supply more information if necessary.

Sorry for yapping and jumbled thoughts, I wrote this mostly at night with very little editing. I hope the sections on who I am and what I think help you to help me. And many thanks in advance!

If, for the sake of argument, one were to come into a truly life-changing amount of money, the kind that means you're set for life and then some, once all your people's basic needs are provided for, how would you use the rest to make the world a better place? My primary ideas:

1. Fund hospitals and grocery stores in underserved areas

2. Buy up medical and student debt to forgive

3. Build rent controlled/low cost housing

4. Fund renewable energy projects

5. Endow full scholarships meant for historically underserved populations

I am looking for a perpetual fund I could donate to that grows donations over time and donates a percentage of the annual growth.

For example (What I would ideally want): I put 100€ into the fund, they put it in the stockmarket or other (relatively) safe assets, it grows an average of 6% per year, 1-3% of which is donated to something like ACE recommended charities, 3-5% is reinvested. In the first year I effectively only donate 1-3€ instead of 100€, but over 30+ years my donation has overall more impact then donating now, and it continues to have an impact hopefully indefinitely.

Why I would be a fan of donating this way:
- I am rather pessimistic and think that animal exploitation will not end in my lifetime, so I think it is very likely the donation will have higher impact like this overall.
- I am a fan of compounding interest, expecially over durations longer than one human lifespan. (Such as Benjamin Franklins donation of 1000$ to Boston/Philadelphia which has paid out millions by now)
- I will most likely remain childless and would want to have my life savings also donated like this, so the positive impact of my money is my legacy so to speak.
- It eliminates a risk that I completely change as a person and no longer see Animal Liberation as my main goal down the line. (I hope this never happens of course, but the risk is there if I just put the money in the stockmarket and donate to ACE myself)

Potential risks I see:
- Its difficult to ensure that the money is well spent and fund well managed decades or centuries in the future, and that it keeps to its original goal. The fund would need incredibly good governance.
- Climate Change, Nuclear War, Asteroids, AI etc might end humanity on a shorter timeframe then the 30+ years this strategy would need to be more effecitve overall.

Anyone knows of any funds like this? Thanks!

Edit: spelling

Reason #1: If you know very little about something, your guesses are completely arbitrary.

Reason #2: We're bad at making guesses in general.

Reason #3: If your guesses are completely arbitrary, updating won’t bring you to the correct probability.

Reason #4: We should expect most guesses about the future to be wrong.

Reason #5: If your guesses are based on other people’s guesses, you might all be wrong.

Reason #6: People rarely offer extraordinarily low probabilities.