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rational altruist adventures of a would be do gooder rational altruist about favorites adventures of a would be do gooder november 15 2014 certificates of impact 0 introduction in this post post i describe a simple institution for altruistic funding and decision making characterized by the creation and exchange of certificates of impact typically an effectiveness minded altruist would try to do as much good as possible instead users of the certificates system try to collect certificates for as much good as possible whenever anyone does anything they can declare themselves to own an associated certificate of impact users of the system treat owning a certificate for x as equivalent to doing x themselves in the case where certificates never change hands this reduces precisely to the status quo the primary difference is that certificates can also be bought sold or bartered an altruist can acquire certificates through any combination of doing good themselves and purchasing certificates from others read the rest of this entry 9 comments august 23 2014 the golden rule most of my moral intuitions are well encapsulated by the maxim do unto others as you would have them do unto you this is a principle which has extremely broad intuitive appeal and so it seems worth exploring how i end up with a relatively unusual ethical perspective read the rest of this entry 34 comments august 23 2014 three impacts of machine intelligence i think that the development of human level ai in my lifetime is quite plausible i would give it more than a 1 in 5 chance in this post i want to briefly discuss what i see as the most important impacts of ai i think these impacts are the heavy hitters by a solid margin each of them seems like a big deal and i think there is a big gap to 4 read the rest of this entry 15 comments may 14 2014 machine intelligence and capital accumulation the distribution of wealth in the world 1000 years ago appears to have had a relatively small effect or more precisely an unpredictable effect whose expected value was small ex ante on the world of today i think there is a good chance that ai will fundamentally change this dynamic and that the distribution of resources shortly after the arrival of human level ai may have very long lasting consequences read the rest of this entry 24 comments may 4 2014 we can probably influence the far future i believe that the very far future is likely to be very important and that my decisions today probably have very long lasting effects this suggests that i ought to be mindful of the effects of my actions on the very far future and indeed i am most interested in activities that i think will have positive long term effects in contrast many or most thoughtful people consider it unproductive to think more than a few decades ahead to say nothing of millions of years when i express this view i often encounter intense skepticism about the possibility of having any predictable influence on the far future even if our decisions have some effect can we reason about it any useful way i believe that the answer is yes and that we can in fact have a fairly detailed and specific effect on the very far future in this post i want to make a very simple argument for this conclusion if we think there is a good chance that we will ever have an opportunity to have a predictable long term influence as i suspect we should then interventions which improve our own capacity such as investment will have an indirect significant and predictable long term effect read the rest of this entry 23 comments july 11 2013 altruism and profit when i suggest that supporting technological development may be an efficient way to improve the world i often encounter the reaction markets already incentivize technological development why would we expect altruists to have much impact working on it when i talk about more extreme cases like subsidizing corporate r d or tech startups i seem to get this reaction even more strongly and with striking regularity but that s a for profit enterprise right if it were worthwhile to spend any more money on r d then they d do it recently i ve encountered this argument again in the context of working to improve governance broadly i sympathize with the sentiment but the actual arguments don t seem strong enough to carry the conclusion ultimately this is an empirical question about which i m uncertain but at this point it seems very unwise to take profitable opportunities off the table read the rest of this entry 5 comments june 13 2013 against moral advocacy sometimes people talk about changing long term social values as an altruistic intervention for example trying to make people care more about animals or god or other people or ancestors etc in the hopes that these changes might propagate forward say because altruistic people work to create a more altruistic world and eventually have a direct effect on how society uses available resources i think this is unlikely to be a reasonable goal not necessarily because it is not possible though it does seem far fetched but because even if it were possible it would not be particularly desirable i wanted to spend a post outlining my reasoning disclaimer this is a bit of an odd post the impatient reader is recommended to skip it read the rest of this entry 14 comments june 10 2013 the best reason to give later i ve written about saving vs giving before focusing on the issue of interest rates vs returns on good deeds but for now i think there is a much more compelling reason to save there is a very good chance that the best giving opportunities we can identify in the near future will be better than the best giving opportunities we can identify this year read the rest of this entry 12 comments june 3 2013 my outlook this will be a relatively short post sketching my overall view of valuable altruistic endeavors read the rest of this entry 13 comments may 26 2013 contributing to tech progress i think that contributing to technological progress may be one of the most efficient ways to make the world richer i don t yet know much quantitative justification so this impression could easily be wrong in any case it seems to be worth asking how effectively can we increase the pace of tech progress read the rest of this entry 2 comments older rss rss posts rss comments archives november 2014 1 august 2014 2 may 2014 2 july 2013 1 june 2013 3 may 2013 7 april 2013 2 march 2013 3 february 2013 5 january 2013 4 december 2012 1 november 2012 1 create a free website or blog at wordpress com subscribe subscribed rational altruist join 44 other subscribers sign me up already have a wordpress com account log in now privacy rational altruist subscribe subscribed sign up log in report this content view site in reader manage subscriptions collapse this bar loading comments write a comment email required name required website