Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Episode #228)
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Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Episode #228)
One other oddly big thing happened to Sam at the beginning of his junior year. Completely out of the blue, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University named Will Crouch* reached out and asked to meet with him. Sam never learned how the guy had found him—probably from the writing Sam had been doing on various utilitarian messa
... See moreMichael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
sari added
"The movement, known as E.A. to its practitioners, who themselves are known as E.A.s, takes as its premise that people ought to do good in the most clear-sighted, ambitious, and unsentimental way possible. Among other back-of-the-envelope estimates, E.A.s believe that a life in the developing world can be saved for about four thousand dollars. Effe... See more
Gideon Lewis-Kraus • The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
Behruz Davletov added
The “drowning child” thought experiment involves seeing a child drowning in a pond on your way to work. Most people would jump in the pond to save the child, not thinking twice about the laundry bill from getting their clothes dirty. And yet, the amount of dollars spent on the dry cleaning bill could be spent on saving a child from starvation in a ... See more
Erik Hoel • EconTalk on Apple Podcasts
sari added
If you work on more neglected problems, you can make a bigger difference.
William MacAskill • What We Owe the Future
there are so many ethical questions to which we know we haven’t yet figured out the answer. Which beings have moral status: just Homo sapiens, or all primates, or all conscious creatures, including artificial beings that we might create in the future? How should we weigh the promotion of happiness against the alleviation of suffering? How should we
... See moreWilliam MacAskill • What We Owe the Future
One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to futur
... See more