Hello! I am a postdoctoral researcher in behavioral science at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and have a visiting scholar appointment at UCLA Anderson. I received my PhD in Management & Organizations from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in June of 2024. My work focuses on moral psychology, charitable giving, and charitable receiving. I investigate (i) the process of moralization, (ii) the impediments and antecedents to effective, long-term prosociality, and (iii) recipients psychological experiences when receiving aid.
Great post, thanks for sharing! I think you might find Igor Grossmann's work on the psychology of wisdom particularly interesting (https://igorgrossmann.com/projects/wisdom/), if you haven't already been exposed to it :)
Very exciting! Is this funding specifically targeting the development of new organizations or would this also fund new academic research on this topic (e.g., antecedents and impediments to the shifting of moral values across cultures; the psychological process of moralization (as applied to EA-relevant ideas and values); barriers to longtermism thinking and interventions amongst laypeople, organizational leaders, and policymakers; etc.)?
Why would we have to choose between EA research being in vs. out of academia--why not both (which is kind of what we do now, right)?
I like this! However, in a perfect world, rather than there being one university (or one institute at one university) that studies global priories, wouldn't all top research universities across the world have global priorities schools (like business or policy schools are prevalent at most research universities)? With philosophers and scientists working together in one school on having the most impact on humanity, and coordinating with one another on how to do so—where students can get PhDs in Global Priorities Research (with specialization in one of the sub-fields, like business schools offer), and undergraduates at all universities around the world can major in global priorities, with paths towards academia and industry. Students majoring in GPR all take classes in the topics (e.g., longtermism, global health and development, animal rights) and can create joint-majors with philosophy or one of the (social) sciences.
Business schools were only popularized about 100 years ago, and look at how much their proliferation has incentivized study and work in this space. Also, once the top universities create these GPR schools, many other universities not funded by EA would likely follow (esp. if it’s a profitable, self-sustaining business model). This might cost more than 100 million thought...there's probably data out there on how much it cost initially to start b-schools and policy schools.
Love this! We could also use prisons as a place where social scientists could study how to optimize ethical development amongst criminals. These samples are so hard to access, but could produce so much impactful insight on when and why ethical decision-making fails, and how to improve ethical decision-making under conflict. This could also be coupled this with a grant competition that would fund the best ideas on how to rehabilitate inmates and improve their ethical decision-making both while in prison and after being reintegrated back into society.
How can we foster longterm global trust and status as a social movement? In order to foster global backing for some of the movement's non-normative or 'creative' ideas (e.g., build post-apocalyptic bunkers to help re-build society in case of nuclear war) that may actually be highly impactful in the longterm future, we likely need to first prove ourselves as a movement that can actually create large-scale global impact.
Here's one idea for a megaproject that could help to foster global trust/status by proving our ability to use evidence and reason to make a positive impact on the world: