Comments
Curated and popular this week
80
Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Has the past two months seen more harm done (edit: by the new administration) than the totality of good EA has done since it's existence?
I don't really get the framing of this question.
I suspect, for any increment of time one could take through EAs existence, then there would have been more 'harm' done in the total rest of world during that time. EA simply isn't big enough to counteract the moral actions of the rest of the world. Wild animals suffer horribly, people die of preventable diseases etc constantly, formal wars and violent struggles occur affecting the lives of millions. There sheer scale of the world outweighs EA many, many times over.
So I suspect you're making a more direct comparison to Musk/DOGE/PEPFAR? But again, I feel like anyone wielding using the awesome executive power of the United States Government should expect to have larger impacts on the world than EA.
True, I was vague and should have specified the new administration.
If people do think that this is true, as it seems obvious to you, then perhaps EA should have allocated resources differently?