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How to communicate EA to the commonsense Christian: has it been done before?
I'm considering writing a series of posts exploring the connection between EA and the common-sense Christianity one might encounter on the street if you were to ask someone about their 'faith.'
I've looked into EA for Christians a bit, and haven't done a deep dive into their articles yet. I'm wondering what the consensus is on this group, and if anyone involved can give me a synopsis on how that's been going. Has it been effective?
I'm posting this quick take as a means of feeling out this idea.
This mini-series would probably consist of exploring EA from a commonsense place, considering how the use of Church-language can allow one to communicate more effectively and bypass being seen as a member of the out-group, and hopefully enable more Christians to see this movement as something they may want to be a part of even if they don't share the same first premises.
I don't want to put more time into work that has been deeply covered in the community but feel that this is an area I can provide some insight into, as I have my motivations for reconciliation beyond academic interest.
What are your thoughts?
I'm both a Christian and an EA and have been involved with EA for Christians (EACH) for several years now. There's a whole community around EACH, and we have a Facebook Group and weekly (Sunday afternoon) Zoom call discussions on a different topic each week.
We also have their own conference separate from EA Global, that this year was hosted in Washington DC. I've gone to previous conferences that were virtual before, and also actually met some people in person at EA Global Washington DC 2022, where among other things I actually had a one-on-one with one of the organizers that included a fold your hands and close your eyes kind of prayer (while seated at a table in the midst of one of the large conference one-on-one meeting rooms, visible to anyone paying attention).
Generally, most of the people in EACH are both Christians (from a wide variety of denominations) and also EAs. We tend to have somewhat less orthodox views than the typical EA, such as being more skeptical of AI risk and Longtermism generally, as well as putting some value on Christian centric cause areas like missions alongside things like global poverty.
The EACH blog has a lot of posts that sound like essentially what you're looking for. I'd suggest giving it a read. There are actually a lot of Bible verses that can be interpreted to support EA ideas, so taking a Christian approach to EA is very much doable, even if the larger movement is mostly secular.
Hi Joseph,
I'm very glad to hear that. How might one go about bringing that movement into their local church?
I've encountered many Christians who use the second-coming as a reason not to care too much about the long-term future and I don't know how to reconcile this. I consider myself Agnostic, but some of my Baptist friends have become convinced that since their faith is, well, faith-based, they don't feel like the moral imperative to do acts beyond tithing.
What're your thoughts on this?
If there's any advice or resources you could point me to, that would be excellent.
Thank you very much
Hi Aaron,
I think how to bring EA ideas into our local church has been a topic of discussion in the past. Although, it seems up to individual Christian EAs how to go about it, some ideas we had included things like bringing up charities like the Against Malaria Foundation as possible causes for our churches to consider donating to, and speaking individually with church leaders and people we know at the church about concepts like the importance, neglectedness, and tractability framework.
Also, emphasizing Jesus' teachings, like how "when you give to the least of these, you give to me" (demandingness), or the parable of the talents (effectiveness), or speaking of "you will know them by their fruits" (consequences), can be helpful to encourage a stronger moral imperative.
Regarding the second-coming, EACH has diverse views on eschatology, and some of us tend to focus on present issues like global poverty more than far distant future considerations. Many of us think that God would not allow humanity to go extinct, so Existential Risks are much less of a concern than Suffering Risks, although prudence suggests we should still act to mitigate any kind of risk, existential or not, in the same way we still go to a doctor when we are sick, even though getting sick seems like the Will of God. Also, even from the most fundamentalist perspective, the day and the hour of the second-coming are unknown, and so it is prudent to still make future plans and act with wisdom and consideration.
There are also scriptural passages about descendents being like the stars and grains of sand on the beach, which suggest that the future will be filled with flourishing humans, and it follows that we have a certain degree of responsibility towards them, which can be considered support for a kind of soft Longtermism.
We're somewhat skeptical of hard Longtermism though, as it seems like the far future is ultimately in the hands of God, and not something we can plan about with much certainty. As Christians, we choose to be particularly humble about what we're capable of influencing, which is admittedly somewhat different from regular EA thinking.
As for resources, you could join the EACH Facebook Group, and for a bunch of potentially relevant articles there's the Christ and Counterfactuals substack blog (which is written by a number of EACH members).
As a Christian, I'd add that lots of really bad stuff has happened over the course of human history, like the Black Death. It's true that longtermists focus more on of value of X-risk reduction in avoiding human extinction, but there's still considerable value if the worst-case scenario is "only" the death of one-third of the world's current population.
Depending on the specific congregation, more of an AI ethics approach could also be helpful -- I think there's much in Catholic moral theology in particular that relates to this, although the basic ideas should be present ~everywhere.
Hi Joseph,
Thank you for your thorough and thoughtful responses. This has helped me gain an understanding of your perspective. I'm now considering speaking to the head pastor this Sunday about EACH, with what you've said in mind. I find that this point in particular stood out to me as reasonable and important.
Also, emphasizing Jesus' teachings, like how "when you give to the least of these, you give to me" (demandingness), or the parable of the talents (effectiveness), or speaking of "you will know them by their fruits" (consequences), can be helpful to encourage a stronger moral imperative.
Side note:
I followed the Christ and Counterfactuals blog and will read more of what they have on there. Philosophy of Religion is somewhat of a natural interest for me, as is the theology of Christianity, so if you know anyone who I should reach out to about potentially contributing to the blog, that would be wonderful. I would love to add to the discussion and body of work.
Thank you again,
Aaron
Hi Aaron,
I direct EACH. Thanks for your interest - I'd be happy to have a chat anytime.
For a bit about us and our impact, you can read here, or see here for a directory of our linktree.
For Christians who have no interaction with EA, the careers website is a much better entry point, as is this excellent blog article related to effective giving.
Hi @JDBauman,
Thank you for getting in touch with me. I shared that website with the local church.
I'm very happy to see that there is a thriving community of Christians involved with EA and effective charity.
- Aaron
Curated and popular this week
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Summary
Immediate skin-to-skin contact (SSC) between mothers and newborns and early initiation of breastfeeding (EIBF) may play a significant and underappreciated role in reducing neonatal mortality. These practices are distinct in important ways from more broadly recognized (and clearly impactful) interventions like kangaroo care and exclusive breastfeeding, and they are recommended for both preterm and full-term infants.
A large evidence base indicates that immediate SSC and EIBF substantially reduce neonatal mortality. Many randomized trials show that immediate SSC promotes EIBF, reduces episodes of low blood sugar, improves temperature regulation, and promotes cardiac and respiratory stability. All of these effects are linked to lower mortality, and the biological pathways between immediate SSC, EIBF, and reduced mortality are compelling. A meta-analysis of large observational studies found a 25% lower risk of mortality in infants who began breastfeeding within one hour of birth compared to initiation after one hour.
These practices are attractive targets for intervention, and promoting them is effective. Immediate SSC and EIBF require no commodities, are under the direct influence of birth attendants, are time-bound to the first hour after birth, are consistent with international guidelines, and are appropriate for universal promotion. Their adoption is often low, but ceilings are demonstrably high: many low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) have rates of EIBF less than 30%, yet several have rates over 70%. Multiple studies find that health worker training and quality improvement activities dramatically increase rates of immediate SSC and EIBF.
There do not appear to be any major actors focused specifically on promotion of universal immediate SSC and EIBF. By contrast, general breastfeeding promotion and essential newborn care training programs are relatively common.
More research on cost-effectiveness is needed, but it appears promising. Limited existing
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Summary: The NAO will increase our sequencing significantly over the next few months, funded by a $3M grant from Open Philanthropy. This will allow us to scale our pilot early-warning system to where we could flag many engineered pathogens early enough to mitigate their worst impacts, and also generate large amounts of data to develop, tune, and evaluate our detection systems.
One of the biological threats the NAO is most concerned with is a 'stealth' pathogen, such as a virus with the profile of a faster-spreading HIV. This could cause a devastating pandemic, and early detection would be critical to mitigate the worst impacts. If such a pathogen were to spread, however, we wouldn't be able to monitor it with traditional approaches because we wouldn't know what to look for. Instead, we have invested in metagenomic sequencing for pathogen-agnostic detection. This doesn't require deciding what sequences to look for up front: you sequence the nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) and analyze them computationally for signs of novel pathogens.
We've primarily focused on wastewater because it has such broad population coverage: a city in a cup of sewage. On the other hand, wastewater is difficult because the fraction of nucleic acids that come from any given virus is very low,[1] and so you need quite deep sequencing to find something. Fortunately, sequencing has continued to come down in price, to under $1k per billion read pairs. This is an impressive reduction, 1/8 of what we estimated two years ago when we first attempted to model the cost-effectiveness of detection, and it makes methods that rely on very deep sequencing practical.
Over the past year, in collaboration with our partners at the University of Missouri (MU) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), we started to sequence in earnest:
We believe this represents the majority of metagenomic wastewater sequencing produced in the world to date, and it's an incredibly rich dataset. It has allowed us to develop
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Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant.
Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredited so-called “journalist,” Kelsey Piper. She is not the first person to have been accidentally sent sensitive material from our group chat, however she is the first to have threatened to go public about the leak. Needless to say, mistakes were made.
We’re still trying to figure out the source of this compromise to our secure chat group, however we thought we should give the public a live update to get ahead of the story.
For some context the “infohazards small working group” is a casual discussion venue for the most important, sensitive, and confidential infohazards myself and other philanthropists, researchers, engineers, penetration testers, government employees, and bloggers have discovered over the course of our careers. It is inspired by taxonomies such as professor B******’s typology, and provides an applied lens that has proven helpful for researchers and practitioners the world over.
I am proud of my work in initiating the chat. However, we cannot deny that minor mistakes and setbacks may have been made over the course of attempting to make the infohazards widely accessible and useful to a broad community of people.
In particular, the deceitful and discredited journalist may have encountered several new infohazards previously confidential and unleaked:
* Mirror nematodes as a solution to mirror bacteria. "Mirror bacteria," synthetic organisms with mirror-image molecules, could pose a significant risk to human health and ecosystems by potentially evading immune defenses and causing untreatable infections. Our scientists have explored engineering mirror nematodes, a natural predator for mirror bacteria, to
Hi @JDBauman,
Thank you for getting in touch with me. I shared that website with the local church.
I'm very happy to see that there is a thriving community of Christians involved with EA and effective charity.
- Aaron