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 ...
Some hope for you if you're an EA with a chronic illness.
I’ve been reading the biographies of moral heroes, and I’d guess ~50% of them struggled with ongoing health issues.
Being sick sucks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to do a ton of good
It’s not everybody, but it’s a surprising percentage of them.
I myself struggle with a chronic mystery ailment and I find it inspiring to hear about all of these people who still managed to do great things, even though their bodies were not always so cooperative.
(Also, just as an aside, the book Stop Being Your Symptoms, Start Being Yourself didn’t cure my illness, but it did reduce its effects on my life by about 85%, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically CBT/psychology stuff applied to chronic illness)
Was there anything in the book that you found especially helpful?
Another example is Lincoln, who suffered severe depression throughout his life. Lincoln's Melancholy is a good book about it.