“for a community that purports to put stock in rationality and self-improvement, effective altruists have shown surprisingly little interest in self-modification to have more altruistic intentions. This seems obviously worthy of further work.” I would love to see more work done on this. However, I understand “wanting to have more altruistic intentions” as part of a broader class of “wanting to act according to my ultimate/rational/long-term desires rather than my immediate desires”, and this doesn’t seem niche enough for members of our community to make good progress on (I hope I am wrong), although CFAR’s work on Propagating Urges is a start (I just found that particular session relatively useless).
I’d also love to see more work done on historical analogues and more attention given to “Diffusion of Innovations” (h/t Jonas Muller).
On non-obviousness, the arc of history seems to me to bend somewhat towards EA, and it is unsurprising that a society’s moral circle would expand and allow more demanding obligations as their own circumstances become more cushy and their awareness of and power over the wider world increases. In other words, we’ve only just reached the point in history where a large group of people are sufficiently well-off, informed and powerful to be able to (perhaps even need to...think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) think about morality on such a massive scale, and EA is pretty superlative until we need to think about morality on such a huge scale. (I would love to hear some thoughts/research on this last paragraph as I was considering developing it into a blog post.)
“for a community that purports to put stock in rationality and self-improvement, effective altruists have shown surprisingly little interest in self-modification to have more altruistic intentions. This seems obviously worthy of further work.” I would love to see more work done on this. However, I understand “wanting to have more altruistic intentions” as part of a broader class of “wanting to act according to my ultimate/rational/long-term desires rather than my immediate desires”, and this doesn’t seem niche enough for members of our community to make good progress on (I hope I am wrong), although CFAR’s work on Propagating Urges is a start (I just found that particular session relatively useless).
I’d also love to see more work done on historical analogues and more attention given to “Diffusion of Innovations” (h/t Jonas Muller).
On non-obviousness, the arc of history seems to me to bend somewhat towards EA, and it is unsurprising that a society’s moral circle would expand and allow more demanding obligations as their own circumstances become more cushy and their awareness of and power over the wider world increases. In other words, we’ve only just reached the point in history where a large group of people are sufficiently well-off, informed and powerful to be able to (perhaps even need to...think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) think about morality on such a massive scale, and EA is pretty superlative until we need to think about morality on such a huge scale. (I would love to hear some thoughts/research on this last paragraph as I was considering developing it into a blog post.)