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...
Summary: The actions taken this decade may be exceptionally important for the future of civilization, but we should be unusually hesitant to proclaim that any course of action is “best.” Still, we should try to think carefully about how we'll influence the future.
This post was written as part of an introduction to a new reading group I’m starting called “Doing Good in the Age of AGI.” If you want to follow along, the full curriculum can be found ...
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.