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Systematically picking the high-hanging fruit
The greatest concentration of concern about issue X is usually found where the best performance on issue X has already been achieved. For a variety of reasons, most people focus on improving things...
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Why existential risk is the most important thing part I
Anna Salamon, Research Fellow with the Singularity Institute, does a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much impact a single person could have by contributing to a good Singularity (or reducing...
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Do humans make better predictions than computer models, and other stories
This is one of the most interesting presentations I’ve ever found online. That is has only 17,000 views is a disgrace, so go watch it now! Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs – Phillip...
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Why present the gender ‘pay gap’ as a moral issue rather than a profit...
TLDR: It is commonly alleged that there is a persistent gender pay gap which is unjustified by the productivity of male and female employees. If this is true, businesses should be able to make lots of...
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Steven Pinker on the motivations behind violence
A quote from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (pdf): “This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture socializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis...
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Can we develop a theory of ‘discrimination’?
‘Discrimination’ against certain groups supposedly remains a big problem in the modern world. But I have never found a theory that can sensibly explain what this bad ‘discrimination’ is precisely and...
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Why doesn’t everyone use matching donations?
For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money – to VillageReach incidentlaly – I have offered to match donations made by my Facebook friends 1:1....
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Why local food is not effective altruism
I’m going to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on ‘local food’ and then later ‘fair trade’ to explain why I don’t think they are worth putting much effort into. I hope it will inspire you to do...
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The principle of ‘altruistic arbitrage’
There is a principle in finance that obvious and guaranteed ways to make a lot of money, so called ‘arbitrages’, should not exist. It has a simple rationale. If market prices made it possible to trade...
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Good relative to what?
People often say to me that certain actions, outcomes or policies are ‘good’. Something I usually try to establish right away is ‘compared to what?’ There are three common responses: relative to...
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Cowen and Singer on the marginal impact of eating a fish
jkaufman over at LessWrong has been good enough to post a transcript of an interview between Tyler Cowen and Peter Singer on ethics. It had a big influence on my thinking when I first heard it several...
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Are flow-on effects key to health interventions?
Last year I gave a few thousand dollars to the charity Village Reach, which performs vaccinations in rural Mozambique, on the recommendation of charity evaluator GiveWell. The bottom line of the...
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Beeminding your way to greatness
Ever had a long term goal you wanted to achieve, like publishing a paper, getting fit or maintaining a blog, that you always put off and never actually got done? You and me both! I’m not sure whether...
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The non-existent ‘lump of relationship’ fallacy
A very common mistake people commit when thinking about economics and the labour market is the ‘lump of labour’ or ‘lump of jobs‘ fallacy. It crops up in ideas like these: “We should cut immigration to...
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Invest now, give later?
The power of exponential growth seems to make a compelling case for effective altruists to delay their donations. An average 5% return on investment (ROI) would turn one dollar into ten in 50 years...
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Don’t waste time to save money
For many years during my undergraduate degree I was living on a scholarship alone and so learned to be a very frugal person. As computers and mobile phones got cheaper, I would always take advantage of...
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A colossal counterfactual screw up
A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of choosing the right counterfactual in policy analysis. I noted that quite often people choose ‘no change’ as their comparison for whatever they are...
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Trading on prediction markets
Last week I placed my first bets on the prediction market InTrade – the largest and most notable prediction market in the world. They were on behalf of a friend but I will soon start trading with my...
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