E29: Effective Altruism and Longtermism

Statistically Insignificant

We dive deep into the bat shit insane proposed predictions of these ideologies and why they don't understand what would be involved in the calculations they are trying to do.

Support the pod on Patreon for bonus episodes, early access, and additional material: https://www.patreon.com/statisticallyinsignificant

References

Hoel, E. (2022). 'Why I am not an effective altruist', The Intrinsic Perspective, https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-altruist

Cremer, C. Z., & Kemp, L. (2021). Democratising Risk: In Search of a Methodology to Study Existential Risk. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.11214.

Robinson, N.J. (2022) 'Defective Altruism', Current Affairs, 19th September, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/defective-altruism

Torres, E.P. (2022). 'Understanding "longtermism": Why this sudden influential philosophy is so toxic', Salon, 20th August, https://www.salon.com/2022/08/20/understanding-longtermism-why-this-suddenly-influential-philosophy-is-so/

Torres, E.P. (2022). 'Selling "longtermism": How PR and marketing drive a controvertial new movement', Salon, 10th September, https://www.salon.com/2022/09/10/selling-longtermism-how-pr-and-marketing-drive-a-controversial-new-movement/

Beckstead, N. (2013). 'On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future', PhD thesis, The State University of New Jersey https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/

Setiya, K. (2022). 'The New Moral Mathematics' Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-moral-mathematics/

MacAskill, W. (2017). Effective altruism: introduction. Essays in Philosophy, 18(1), 1-5.

Gabriel, I. (2017). Effective altruism and its critics. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 34(4), 457-473.

Dietz, A. (2019). Effective altruism and collective obligations. Utilitas, 31(1), 106-115.

Video version of this episode is at https://youtu.be/nUJ9-_tPxw4

If you have a statistic or a chart you'd like us to talk about contact us.

Email: [e-mail]

Twitter: @StatInsigPod

Bart can be found @SnitchinOrwell on Twitter