This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism m...
TL;DR: I'm releasing a website that ranks philanthropists according to EA principles and research, and allows users to re-rank the list using their own assumptions. I'd like feedback and help making it better. I'd especially like ideas for how to make the results more trustworthy. Funding may be available.
Crossposted to LessWrong.
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Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement by CEA.
Agency - the realisation that you really can just do things.
TL;DR
Biosecurity needs people (of any background) who are agentic and have a high execution velocity and track record....
If a Super-Intelligence, or superior beings do already exist and seek to maximize human flourishing, a lack of intervention may very well be the path that is taken. In which case maximizing for eternal beings who gratify themselves through purposefully pushing forward the greatest fight in history would be a means of getting there. If reality is in fact fractal, then the idea of a multi-celled organism competing for birthing rights could be a means of deciding who is birthed from here. While at first glance this idea may seem self-serving it proposes a game to the ego and survival mechanisms of the brain of selflessness maxing. That is to say, when coming across anything in life where one could do the good themselves or help someone do that good before them, the act of selflessness and maximizing for the organism would be the route which gains the most points on the good karma leaderboard. Thus this brain worms has great power in converting someone to a race of altruism to the scale of eternal fulfillment or eternal regret that is the same proposed matrix that held together society prior to modern surveillance systems existing.