Session 01 - Part 1
The Effectiveness Mindset
“We are always in triage. I fervently hope that one day we will be able to save everyone. In the meantime, it is irresponsible to pretend that we aren’t making life and death decisions with the allocation of our resources. Pretending there is no choice only makes our decisions worse."
Required materials
9
We are in triage every second of every day (5mins)
​Triage is a process used in medical emergencies and disasters to determine the priority of patients' treatments based on the severity of their condition. It involves sorting and prioritizing injured or sick individuals, as well as disaster survivors, according to their need for emergency care.
More to explore
1
Further introductions to EA
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Introduction to EA | Ajeya Cotra | EAGxBerkeley 2016 (Video - 30 mins.)
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Doing Good Better - Introduction through to the end of Chapter 3 (50 mins.)
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Effective Altruism: An Introduction - 80,000 Hours - Ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast. (Ten 1.5 hour - 4 hour podcasts)
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Effective altruism as I see it (7 mins.)
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No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact - 80,000 Hours (20 mins.)
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Other-centered ethics and Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem (107 min)
2
Essays on caring
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The value of a life - Minding Our Own Way - Disentangling the difference between the value of a life and what it costs to save a life in our broken world. (15 mins.)
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Excited altruism - GiveWell - Where does our own passion and excitement fit in? (10 mins.)
3
Trade offs
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Tradeoffs - How can we balance our own needs with the needs of others? (5 mins.)
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Famine, affluence, and morality (15 mins.) Note that many people in effective altruism disagree about exactly how demanding these ideas are.
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Sustainable motivation - How can we stay motivated when facing massive problems (24 min talk)?
4
Thinking carefully
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Minimal trust investigations (18 mins.)
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Outline of Julia Galef’s “Scout Mindset” (20 mins.)
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Humans are not automatically strategic (5 mins.)
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Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy (25 mins) - talk by Nick Bostrom on the almost overwhelming difficulty of knowing what kind of impacts actions have.