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Tyler Alterman on Effective Altruism & Cause Prioritization (Tractability, Scale and Neglectedness)

630 views · Published 22 February 2016 · 1:20:10 · Indexed 27 October 2026

Channel: Science, Technology & the Future · 2016 · Entertainment

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Discussion about what EA is, morality (realism, relativism etc), reasons for moral progress, moral frameworks in EA and common sense metrics.  
Tyler further discusses Cause Prioritization as a key aspect of Effective Altruism - orgs include Give Well (givewell.org), Open Philanthropy Project (openphilanthropy.org) - which examines questions like - If we were able to achieve X, how much good would it actually do?  Might be able to estimate ruff orders of magnitude of how effective X would be.  Where Give Well is focused on easier to quantify outcomes. 
Tyler uses diagrams to discuss the Cause Prioritization exercise of keeping three metrics in mind: Tractability, Scale and Neglectedness.  Interestingly he uses diagrams to help illustrate this!

Quote from interview: "Effective altruism is unusual in terms of social and intellectual movements, in that it's much more like the Enlightenment or the scientific revolution rather than, say, the climate-change movement or the anti-HIV movement. And the reason is that it's much more based around a process.

So, science isn't actually just a bunch of facts and it's not an end. It's rather a process by which you continue improving your state of knowledge. And similarly effective altruism is this process of first trying to figure out how do I do the most good, and then doing it."
-- Tyler Alterman
*Thanks to Timo Timo for highlighting this quote

Tyler Alterman is the director of growth at the Centre for Effective Altruism - a think tank based at Oxford University:  https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org
Also he is President at Effective Altruism Global - a conference series (Also EAGx) : http://eaglobal.org

Resources:
'13 articles that will change your life' by Tyler Alterman: https://medium.com/@tyleralterman/the-full-crazy-these-13-articles-will-change-your-life-a5d736eca913#.h3cc6aamm
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
Give Well: http://www.givewell.org
Open Philanthropy Project: http://www.openphilanthropy.org/
Tyler discussed the flowchart on 'How can we help the world?': http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2015/09/flowhart/
Effective Career Choice - 80,000 Hours: https://80000hours.org/
Book: 'Stumbling upon happiness' by Daniel Gilbert : http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/1400077427  (in reference to the discussion about following one's passion)
The Pareto Fellowship: http://paretofellowship.org/

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