WilliamMacAskill

There’s so much going on nowadays that it’s hard to keep on top of it all!
I’ve been a particular fan of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, which tried to get lead paint banned in poorer countries, as it has been in richer countries. They’ve already had success in Malawi.
Another great project is Alvea, a new EA biotech start-up. Alvea is creating a vaccine platform that will protect rich and poor people alike from evolving variants of COVID-19, and help protect us against even more devastating pandemics in the future.
I’m also excited about low-wave lighting, which can potentially sterilise a room while being completely safe for human beings. If we can get the costs down, and run full efficacy and safety trials, and then install these bulbs as part of building codes all around the world - potentially, we could prevent the next pandemic while eliminating most respiratory diseases along the way.

Yeah, it’s really tough. When I first started giving, I really stressed out over everyday purchases. But that’s not a healthy or effective way to live.
I’ve had interviewers criticise me for giving too little (giving more could save a life!) and for giving too much (you’ll turn people off!).
Ultimately, there will always be some amount of arbitrariness. I think a good strategy is to take some time to think about it, decide on a policy, then stick to that.

I don’t currently plan to have kids, although I’m not ruling it out, either. It’s not something that I particularly want for myself, personally, and I also just can’t really imagine, for my life, right now, how I’d fit it in alongside the work I do.
As for whether one in general should have kids - I talk about this more in What We Owe The Future. It’s obviously a deeply personal choice, but I do think that having a family and raising your children well is one way of making the world a better place. I think the common idea that it’s bad to have kids because of their climate impact isn’t right, for two reasons.
First, you can more than offset the carbon impact: suppose, if you have a child, you donate £1000 per year to the most effective climate mitigation non-profits. That would increase the cost of raising a child by about 10%, but would offset their carbon emissions 100 times over.
Second, looking only at the negative impacts of children is looking at just one side of the ledger. People have positive impacts on the world, too: they contribute to society through their work and taxes and their personal relationships; they innovate, helping drive forward technological progress; and they contribute to moral change, too. If we’d only ever had half as many people, we’d all still be farmers, with no anaesthetic or medical care.

1. Aw man, this is a bad state of affairs if it seems they’re used interchangeably!! EA is about trying to answer the question: “How can we do as much good as possible with our time and money?” and then taking action on that basis (e.g. giving 10%, or switching career). But the answer to that is hard, and I don’t think anyone knows the answer for certain. So, yes, some people in EA come to the conclusion that it’s about positively impacting the long-term future; but other people think the best way of doing good is improving global health and wellbeing; other people think it’s to end factory farming, and more. In fact, most funding in EA still goes to global health and development.

2. My inclination is to place equal moral value on all lives, whenever they occur. (Although I think we might have special additional reasons to help people in the present - like your family, because you have a special relationship with them, or someone who has benefitted you personally, because of reciprocity.)

I'd certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses.

It's hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creatures' experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day?

The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. There's just a lot more experiencing entities, and even if the horse-sized duck's experiences are a bit more valuable in light of greater computational resources powering them, it's not that much greater.

Moreover, horses live a little longer than ducks (25-30 years compared to about 20 years, according to a quick google). Insofar as I think we should care not about number of lives saved, but number of quality-adjusted life-years saved, then saving the duck-sized horses is clearly going to have the bigger impact.