Beyond all the research and analysis that’s been written since 80,000 Hours was created, part of its activities consist in directly advising individuals who would like to make their careers more useful, or change path. If you live in a rich country and pledge to give 10% of your earnings, you’re still living a better life than almost everyone who’s ever lived. to arrive at these conclusions had been available for a long time already. Parfit raised those questions, without claiming to have an answer. Benjamin Todd and I gave a lecture on the topic of the best career choices to pursue, which turned into several lectures, which turned into a website, and finally an organization of its own, called 80,000 Hours. One thing we found when looking at charities is that it can be incredibly hard to know even the basics of what a charity actually does—not in the sense of what they focus on, such as malaria, but what is actually their intervention and what is the evidence base for this intervention. William MacAskill (Author) 4.5 out of 5 stars 192 ratings. Sophie Roell, editor of Five Books, takes us through her personal choice of the best nonfiction books of 2020. If you like doing online courses, try Peter Singer’s Coursera course on effective altruism. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? Book Review: Radical Abundance I. What we do is skip to the chase and tell those people: ‘look, these are the options available to you, and you can truly have a transformative impact on the world. And if so, how should you use your time, money, and career to have the biggest possible impact? Doing Good Better is the definitive guide to this exciting new movement." If we get very low-cost, tasty and healthy lab-grown meat, that might be a solution. I think of Peter as the ‘grandfather’ of effective altruism. Read 466 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Certainly, for the issue of climate change, people are very onboard with the idea that we should be safeguarding the planet now in order to provide a good planet for our children, their children, and so on. First, the success of the effective altruism movement means that more people are taking these issues seriously, and are trying to think about how to deal with them—and key researchers like Nick Bostrom are doing very good work on this. Your two last choices are quite different, as they focus on specific contemporary issues. Why is this book important to you? Why did you pick it? He is a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, the co-founder of 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. 568 people like this. See actions taken by the … I certainly was in that category as an undergraduate. I think it’s possible to achieve this, but I would expect that getting there requires removing a huge self-interested bias that people have to not care about animals. Do you also agree that this is a pressing matter that’s not receiving enough attention? Within those cause areas, such as global health and development or existential risks, what are the highest priority careers? The book is about assessing the chance of the United States going to war with China in the future. For the first time, you can now read the best new ideas on LessWrong in a physical book set: A Map that Reflects the Territory: Essays by the LessWrong Community It is available for pre-order here. Is this an issue that is still neglected today, both financially and in terms of public discourse? Request a free copy Most of us want to do good. But it’s not an argument I use very much in public, partly because I think it’s not the most persuasive one, and it’s not always necessary to use it. A second reason is a change of messaging. It’s up to you to pursue that life or not.’ I doubt that those who decide not to pursue it, even in the face of such opportunities, would get convinced by additional moral arguments. If so, then do you think that there will be a lot more people in the future than today? The key issue is really whether you think that people in the future matter as much as people living today. Most of us want to make a difference. — Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard … It’s possible that it’s a result of contingent facts about technology, namely nuclear weapons. These are often people in the early stage of their career, in their twenties. The Effective Altruism Handbook Notice: We recently drafted a new collection of introductory material, as an update to the current EA Handbook. The argument is that when you’ve got a ‘hegemon’, a country that has power over an area or the world, and there is a rising power that grows, strengthens and threatens to take over the hegemon, that generally leads to war. (And for those of you who are into that, the ProductHunt launch page.) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies Second is trying to mitigate the worst horrors of factory farming, whereby 60 billion animals are killed each year after being kept in horrific conditions their entire life. 80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good About See All (650) 284-6611. ea.stanford.edu. Why has effective altruism been met with so much passion and enthusiasm in the last decade or so? This must-read book will lead people to change their careers, their lives, and the world, for the better. See search results for this author. That’s also one of the philosophical pillars of effective altruism and the organizations you co-created: Giving What We Can is trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems, and 80,000 Hours to make sure that young, ethically-minded graduates work on what will most benefit humanity in the long run. How successful has this initiative been so far? But it really did, so in 2011, we formed the Centre for Effective Altruism to manage this burgeoning effective altruism community. It cost several thousands of dollars, and will get completely ruined in order to save the child. I was also there to speak at the same conference, to find out more about this new and growing movement, and to talk to Peter Singer, its founder. Join our newsletter to hear from us when we publish new reading lists, book reviews, post tips on how to read more, or when we give away free books: Brief news notice only; I haven't read this book or any of its constituent essays, save for those that have been published/shared in other formats. Ruairí Donnelly set up th… One is global health and development, to improve the lives of the poorest people in the world. There is already a very large number of people who want to do good, and the reason that’s stopping them from doing good is that it’s confusing and scary, and they’re afraid of not having an impact. The aim of this organization is to provide advice and coaching for people who want to use their career to do as much good as possible. 80,000 Hours is named after the number of hours we spend working in our life. Read. But then, the killer twist is that we’re in that situation all the time. It’s very clear morally that if there’s a child drowning in front of you, you’re required to save them, even if it costs you a few thousand dollars. This could all change in the 21st century. The EA handbook is an introduction to some of the core concepts in effective altruism. What’s your view on this question? I luckily met another philosophy graduate student, Toby Ord, who had developed Giving What We Can, encouraging people to give at least 10% of their income to the charities that are most effective, and giving recommendations for those most effective charities. Almost everyone in society, if they really understood what those conditions are, would vote against them. He is the author of the book Doing Good Better. The Life You Can Save, written in 2009, is arguably the first book about written about Effective Altruism. They go away from this coaching with a long list of things to look into, jobs to apply for, etc. But Singer’s Practical Ethics also focuses on another issue: animal rights. Both Destined for War and Superintelligence argue that we should take a much larger (in scale) and longer (in time) view on important topics like geopolitics and artificial intelligence. In moral philosophy, we have a technical term for someone who does that: they’re called an asshole. Nowadays we have identified many of those risks: war, nuclear weapons, climate change, man-made pandemic, artificial intelligence, etc. That’s a perfectly reasonable position, but I’m optimistic that the arguments in favour of effective altruism are so compelling that the public will learn to see longtermism as a very important issue. If you have already engaged with effective altruism, there should be some new insights amongst the familiar ideas. To what extent should you focus on what you’re personally passionate about, good at, or excited about? How hard have you found it to convince the public to embrace this large-scale, long-term approach to life and ethics? The mass attention we’re trying to give to this, such as with my TED Talk, has been very well-received so far. 4 Read Since these long-term ideas have become more influential in effective altruism, we’ve also done less mass media outreach, so I don’t actually have a perfect sense of how compelling the public finds them. The reason for this renewed attention is twofold. The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, Eat Like You Care: An Examination of the Morality of Eating Animals, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays, Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time, Valuing the Future: Economic Theory and Sustainability, Awake: Doing a World of Good One Person at a Time, Hillary Rodham Clinton: Do All the Good You Can, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for The Animals We Love, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, Introduction to Econometrics (Addison-Wesley Series in Economics), Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson Shares His Reading Recommendations. The world would be a lot better if charities were very honest and open about what they do, including their mistakes. The last 70 years are a fairly unusual state. We’re still in the early days, and some people do think that we should only focus on the more easily measurable and quantifiable bets. The EA Handbook is an introduction to some of the core concepts in effective altruism. That’s a huge departure from common sense ethics, and it’s extremely important from a moral standpoint. Parfit passed away in 2017, but his work was also fundamental to the philosophical basis of effective altruism. I was always motivated to do good with my own life. Do you just try to maximize the average well-being? One of its leading figures, Will MacAskill, recommends the best books to answer them. Any quantitative argument about the chances of war in the 21st century will be very subjective—I certainly wouldn’t want to say that it’s 75% just because of this twelve-out-of-sixteen idea. 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