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Non-existent people are people too
Perhaps the simplest argument for caring deeply about the future is this obvious one: if humanity doesn’t wipe itself out, by far more people will live there than here. If you’re concerned with morally...
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Why politics is inefficient compared to institutional and technological...
Michael Anissimov over at Accelerating Future has written a great post discussing how politics is often a near zero-sum competition between political groups with different and arbitrary moral values....
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Smart strange syndrome
Smart people are more likely to develop and hold new and unusual beliefs: More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are...
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Utilitarianism more popular than you think
Preference utilitarianism says roughly that we should seek to ‘satisfy preferences and value their satisfaction in proportion to their intensity rather than who they belong to.’ The Golden Rule says...
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Sam Harris surely wrong on morality
In this TED talk Sam Harris tries to show that there is no distinction between matters of scientific fact and matters of ‘right and wrong’. He is right that being able to understand how the universe...
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Why cut off a hydra’s head?
Near the end of the affecting documentary The Cove, the activists campaigning to stop the slaughter of dolphins and whales by the Japanese suggest that it is impossible to explain the ongoing slaughter...
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Spare thoughts, going cheap
I had some spare thoughts lying around. The quote sources you can find through Google: “Making yourself happy is not best achieved by having true beliefs, primarily because the contribution of true...
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Why stories celebrate conflict rather than compromise
I wrote this for the Alternative Law Journal some time ago: As I was watching the film Avatar and the cinemagoers around me were cheering on the Na’vi heroes in their fight against human invaders, I...
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Preventing open-ended tasks from consuming your life
I have spent almost all of my life in formal education. One of the most stressful things about high school and university, at least for a diligent (indeed perhaps, obsessive) student like me, is the...
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Building a community of ‘effective altruists’
One of the big challenges in life is finding friends and colleagues who support and bring out the best in you. This is especially the case when your goals are unusual and you are less likely to be...
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New existential risk links
Earlier today I had the pleasure of a long Skype with Seth Baum about existential risk and how I could best contribute to reducing it. Among other things, Seth studies climate change as a global...
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Education is not a zero sum game
Recently the Australian Government produced a large report into its school funding arrangements. William Isdale over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog has examined the review and argued that it...
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Why local food is not effective altruism
I’m going to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on ‘local food’ and then later ‘fair trade’ to explain why I don’t think they are worth putting much effort into. I hope it will inspire you to do...
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Education is not a zero-sum game part 2
Here I will unpack another common offered but dubious part of William Isdale’s argument that permitting families to spend extra on their children’s education is inefficient and immoral. Isdale asks us...
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Good relative to what?
People often say to me that certain actions, outcomes or policies are ‘good’. Something I usually try to establish right away is ‘compared to what?’ There are three common responses: relative to...
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Cowen and Singer on the marginal impact of eating a fish
jkaufman over at LessWrong has been good enough to post a transcript of an interview between Tyler Cowen and Peter Singer on ethics. It had a big influence on my thinking when I first heard it several...
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Wild animal suffering links
The current and potential future suffering of ‘wild’ animals is one of the most serious problems a utilitarian must confront. In spite of that it is basically ignored, even by most smart and...
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Is a life of poverty better than no life at all?
This is a question I repeatedly find myself asking especially in evaluating the desirability of Hanson’s Malthusian upload scenario, or increasing the number of wild animals. Here’s one piece of...
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The lives you could have saved
Below is a scene from the movie Schindler’s List. It is one of the most haunting exchanges I have ever seen on the screen. We all find ourselves in the same circumstance as Schindler: confronting...
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Is the future communist?
A common folk explanation for the triumph of capitalism over communism goes along these lines: Communism has some lovely notions about sharing wealth between people in proportion to their needs and...
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A better way of feeding the world than torturing chickens
John Quiggin suggests that we could feed everyone a high-meat diet and reduce climate change to boot by shifting from livestock to chickens: I’ve previously argued that we can feed the world if we make...
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