EA - AMA: Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team by Bob Fischer

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team, published by Bob Fischer on July 31, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team (WIT) will run an Ask Me Anything (AMA). We'll reply on the 7th and 8th of August. Please put your questions in the comments below! What's WIT? WIT is Hayley Clatterbuck, Bob Fischer, Arvo Munoz Moran, David Moss, and Derek Shiller. Our team exists to improve resource allocation within and beyond the effective altruism movement, focusing on tractable, high-impact questions that bear on strategic priorities. We try to take action-relevant philosophical, methodological, and strategic problems and turn them into manageable, modelable problems. Our projects have included: The Moral Weight Project. If we want to do as much good as possible, we have to compare all the ways of doing good - including ways that involve helping members of different species. This sequence collects Rethink Priorities' work on cause prioritization across different kinds of animals, human and nonhuman. (You can check out the book version here.) The CURVE Sequence. What are the alternatives to expected value maximization (EVM) for cause prioritization? And what are the practical implications of a commitment to expected value maximization? This series of posts - and an associated tool, the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectivesness Model - explores these questions. The CRAFT Sequence. This sequence introduces two tools: a Portfolio Builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a Moral Parliament Tool, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios. In the coming months, we'll be working on a model to assess the probability of digital consciousness. What should you ask us? Anything! Possible topics include: How we understand our place in the EA ecosystem. Why we're so into modeling. Our future plans and what we'd do with additional resources. What it's like doing "academic" work outside of academia. Biggest personal updates from the work we've done. Acknowledgments This post was written by the Worldview Investigation Team at Rethink Priorities. If you like our work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter. You can explore our completed public work here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org