Zach Freitas-Groff

For my readers who are particularly interested in effective altruism and longtermism , Vaden Masrani makes "A Case Against Strong Longtermism" : Mathematicians tend to think of expected values the way they think of the pythagorean theorem - i.e. as a mathematical identity which can be useful in some circumstances. But within the EA community, expected values are taken very seriously indeed. 4 One reason for this is the link between expected values and decision making, namely that “under some assumptions about rational decision making, people should always pick the project with the highest expected value”. Now, if my assumptions about rational decision making lead to fanaticism , paradoxes , and cluelessness , I might revisit the assumptions. and Near the end of Conjectures and Refutations, Popper criticizes the Utopianist attitude of those who claim to be able to see far into future, who claim to see distant far away evils and ideals, and who claim to have knowledge that ca

Effective altruism is now spending a great deal of time on improving prospects for the future. This is chiefly by avoiding extinction risks , but there are other strategies as well, e.g. moral circle expansion . In any case changing institutions looks like a promising way to improve the world. What are the longest-lasting institutions in the world? Certainly high among them is religion.  For this reason, it seems to me that expanding religions' moral circles (especially old religions with a tendency to grow) is a highly-neglected strategy for improving the world. I've seen posts in effective altruism (e.g. this one ) about outreach to religious groups, but I always saw them as a sort of diversity and inclusivity message: to grow a movement, you need to welcome all sorts of people. It's important to welcome and include people, of course, but this seems to be dramatically underselling the prominence of religion in virtually every society. The Catholic Church is around