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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Papers I learned from (Part 2: Effective altruism, risk, and human extinction)
What effect does risk aversion have on the case for existential risk mitigation? Surprisingly, Richard Pettigrew argues that risk aversion may recommend working to hasten rather than avoid human extinction.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 14: MacAskill on biorisk)
I review Wlil MacAskill’s arguments in What we owe the future for high levels of existential biorisk. I argue that they are insufficient.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 2: Preliminary doubts)
This post gives two preliminary reasons for skepticism about the singularity hypothesis.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 13: Ord on Biorisk)
Toby Ord suggests that humanity faces a 3% risk of existential catastrophe from biological causes in the next 100 years. I review Ord’s arguments and argue that they are insufficient to ground this estimate.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 1: Introduction)
The singularity hypothesis holds that the intelligence of artificial agents will grow at a rapidly accelerating rate, producing an intelligence explosion. This post introduces a new paper criticizing the singularity hypothesis.
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Papers I learned from (Part 1: Time discounting, consistency and special obligations)
Is there anything that can be said in favor of pure temporal discounting? A recent paper by Harry Lloyd shows one way that the case might be made.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 12: Millett and Snyder-Beattie on biorisk)
Can existing arguments by effective altruists ground high estimates of existential biorisk? I consider three estimates provided by Piers Millett and Andrew Snyder-Beattie.
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Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (Part 5: Implications)
I draw five implications from my discussion of mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 11: Biorisk: Still more grounds for doubt)
Rounding out the initial case for skepticism about existential biorisk, I give four final reasons to suspect that existential biorisk may be lower than many claim it to be.
