EA - Tyler Cowen on effective altruism (December 2022) by peterhartree

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tyler Cowen on effective altruism (December 2022), published by peterhartree on January 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.In December 2022, Tyler Cowen gave a talk on effective altruism. It was hosted by Luca Stroppa and Theron Pummer at the University of St Andrews.You can watch the talk on YouTube, listen to the podcast version, or read the transcript below.TranscriptThe transcript was generated by OpenAI Whisper. I made a couple of minor edits and corrections for clarity.Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to this talk. Thank you Theron for the introduction.I find effective altruism is what people actually want to talk about, which is a good thing. So I thought I would talk about it as well. And I'll start by giving two big reasons why I'm favorably inclined, but then work through a number of details where I might differ from effective altruism.So let me give you what I think are the two big pluses. They're not the only pluses. But to me, they're the two reasons why in the net ledger, it's strongly positive.The first is that simply as a youth movement, effective altruism seems to attract more talented young people than anything else I know of right now by a considerable margin. And I've observed this by running my own project, Emergent Ventures for Talented Young People. And I just see time and again, the smartest and most successful people who apply get grants. They turn out to have connections to the EA movement. And that's very much to the credit of effective altruism. Whether or not you agree with everything there, that to me is a more important fact about the movement than anything else you might say about it. Unlike some philosophers, I do not draw a totally rigorous and clear distinction between what you might call the conceptual side of effective altruism and the more sociological side. They're somewhat intertwined and best thought of as such.The second positive point that I like about effective altruism is simply that what you might call traditional charity is so terrible, such a train wreck, so poorly conceived and ill thought out and badly managed and run that anything that waves its arms and says, hey, we should do better than this, again, whether or not you agree with all of the points, that has to be a big positive. So whether or not you think we should send more money to anti-malaria bed nets, the point is effective altruism is forcing us all to rethink what philanthropy should be. And again, that for me is really a very significant positive.Now before I get to some of the more arcane points of difference or at least different emphasis, let me try to outline some core propositions of effective altruism, noting I don't think there's a single dominant or correct definition. It's a pretty diverse movement. I learned recently there's like a sub movement, effective altruism for Christians. I also learned there's a sub sub movement, effective altruism for Quakers. So I don't think there's any one way to sum it all up, but I think you'll recognize these themes as things you see appearing repeatedly.So my first group of themes will be those where contemporary effective altruism differs a bit from classic utilitarianism. And then I'll give two ways in which effective altruism is fairly similar to classical utilitarianism.So here are three ways I think current effective altruism has evolved from classical utilitarianism and is different:The first is simply an emphasis on existential risk, the notion that the entire world could end, world of humans at least, and this would be a very terrible thing. I don't recall having read that, say, in Bentham or in John Stuart Mill. It might be in there somewhere, but it certainly receives far, far more emphasis today than it did in the 19th century.The second point, which I think is somewhat in c...