Reflective altruism
I’m a philosopher at Vanderbilt University (views my own). The purpose of this blog is to use academic research to drive positive change within and around the effective altruism movement. Discussions are long-form and structured around thematic series. Subscribe below for biweekly posts.
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Meta (Migration complete)
This website is now fully migrated to its new domain, reflectvealtruism.com.
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Harms (Part 2: Surveillance)
Achieving existential risk mitigation targets may require substantial use of surveillance and preventive policing. This post looks at what might be required.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 16: Biorisk from LLMs, continued)
This post continues my investigation of biorisk from LLMs by looking at a recent redteaming study from the RAND Corporation.
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Papers I learned from (Part 3: Risk, non-identity, and extinction)
Richard Pettigrew has argued that some versions of risk-averse longtermism may recommend hastening human extinction. Nikhil Venkatesh and Kacper Kowalczyk reply to Pettigrew.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 4: Chalmers on the singularity)
This post reviews a leading argument for the singularity hypothesis due to David Chalmers. I argue that the argument does not succeed.
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Harms (Part 1: Distraction)
Calculations of the value of existential risk mitigation efforts should not neglect the harms done by those efforts. This post focuses on one such harm: distraction from near-term risks.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 15: Biorisk from LLMs)
This post begins a two-part investigation into biorisk from LLMs. I argue that a recent GovAI report provides limited support for existential biorisk from LLMs.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 3: Further doubts)
This post gives three further reasons for skepticism about the singularity hypothesis.
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Meta (Whoops)
I accidentally emailed out a draft post today. Nothing embarrassing there, but it’s clearly not ready. Please ignore this.
