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Welcome 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: What are the key claims of EA?, published by RobertHarling on April 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. [This is rough write-up mainly based on my experiences in EA and previous reading (I didn't do specific reading/research for this post)- I think it’s possible there are important points I’m missing or explaining poorly. I’m posting this still in the spirit of trying to overcome perfectionism, and because I mentioned it to a couple of people who were interested in it] I think that EA as a worldview contains many different claims and views, and sometimes we may not realise all these distinct claims are combined in our normal view of “an EA” and instead might think EA is just “maximise positive impact”. I initially brainstormed a list of various claims I think could be important parts of the EA worldview and then tried to categorise them into themes. What I present below is the arrangement that feels most intuitive to me, although I list multiple complexities/issues with it below. I tried to use an overall typology of claims on morality, claims about empirical facts about the world, and claims about how to reason. Again this is just based on some short intuitions I have, and is not a well defined typology. I think this is an interesting exercise for a couple of reasons: It helps us consider what are the most core ideas of EA, which inform how we pitch it and how we define the community. E.g. which claims do we focus on when first explaining EA? It demonstrates the wide variety of reasons people might disagree with the common “EA worldview” It demonstrates how there are some empirical claims EAs tend to believe that most people outside the community don’t, and that aren’t direct implications of the moral claims (e.g. AI poses a large threat, there’s a large variation in the impact of different charities). We might expect EA to be defined by a single key insight, not several unrelated ones (it’s one thing to notice the world is getting something wrong in one way, but feels more unlikely that we’d be the only ones to notice several independent flaws). However I do think these independent empirical claims can be explained through how EA values draw the community’s attention to specific areas, and gives it incentive to try to reason accurately about them. (I’ve bolded the specific claims, and the other bullet points are my thoughts on these) I’d be interested if there are important claims I’ve missed, if some of the claims below could be separated out, or if there’s a clearer path through the different claims. A lot my thinking on this was informed by Will MacAskill’s paper and Ben Todd’s podcast. Moral Claims Claims about what is good and what we ought to do. Defining good People in EA often have very similar definitions of what good means: The impact of our actions are an important factor in what makes them good or not. We should define good in a roughly impartial, welfarist view. I roughly understand this as the defintion of good is not too dependent on who you are, and roughly depends on the impact of your actions on the net value of relevant lives in the world. This definition of good then helps lead us to thinking in a scope sensitive way. When considering the relevant lives, this includes all humans, animals and future people. We generally do not discount the lives of future people intrinsically at all. This longtermist claim is common but not absolute in EA, and I’m brushing over mutliple population ethics questions here. (e.g. severals EA might hold person-affecting views) Moral obligations We should devote a large amount of our resources to trying to do good in the world I think this is often missed and is not really included in common definitions of EA, which instead focus on maximising impartial impact with whatever resources you choose to do good with. B...