Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet) (original) (raw)
This is a sorted list of pages — known as “Topics” — in the EA Forum Wiki, which collects and explains topics relevant to discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum (this platform).[1] You can find out more about the Wiki and “Topics” in the Wiki FAQ.[2]
Table of contents
- Core topics
- Key concepts
- Types of work in effective altruism
- A list of all the topics on the EA Forum
You can also find lists of:
- Key concepts and tools
- Categories of post by type, not content
- People relevant to conversations about effective altruism
- Organizations and projects in effective altruism
- Alphabetized lists of topics by category
Core topics
We’ve highlighted some “core” topics around which people are forming sub-communities and discussions. This is a beta version of the list of core topics; we’ll probably modify its composition. If you have specific feedback, we encourage you to get in touch.
Areas of work
- Cause prioritization
- Cause-neutral prioritization research seeks to identify new promising focus areas and to compare their relative value.
- Global health and development
- Improving public health, reducing poverty, increasing economic growth, or finding new interventions to help the developing world.
- Farmed animal welfare
- Factory farming likely produces a lot of suffering; discussions around this topic explore the most promising interventions for helping farmed animals, different ways to study the problem, and more.
- Wild animal welfare
- Most animals are not domesticated; this topic explores their welfare and how we might be able to improve it.
- AI risk
- How dangerous we should expect advanced artificial intelligence to be, and possible paths for making it safer.
- Biosecurity
- How we can mitigate risks from viruses and bacteria, and avoid or relieve future pandemics.
- Existential risk
- Everything from discussions of specific risks, like those posed by new technologies or natural catastrophic events, to analyses of the impact of different approaches and interventions.
- Building effective altruism
- Making sure “effective altruism” actually does good.
- Moral philosophy
- A wide range of discussion topics around moral philosophy covers questions like “what is social impact?” and “How can we act when we’re uncertain about the consequences of our actions?”
- Take action
- Specific ways to take action based on the principles of effective altruism.
- Career choice
- Everything from overviews of the most important skills to develop to in-depth profiles or specific jobs.
- Community
- Posts about the EA community and applying EA in one's personal life.
Key concepts
For a longer list of key concepts in effective altruism, you can visit the Key concepts page. You might also be interested in visiting effectivealtruism.org or looking at the EA Handbook.
- Expected value
- Cause prioritization
- ITN framework
- Moral circle expansion
- Distribution of cost-effectiveness
See all the key concepts and tools.
Types of work in effective altruism
At its core, effective altruism is about finding the best ways to do good and putting them into practice, but this motivates people to work on a wide variety of projects, for different reasons.
We’ve organized different projects and areas of work by the answer to the following question: “**How does your work help the world?**” We’ve also noted some potential (non-exhaustive!) cruxes for prioritizing each kind of work.
At a high level, the types of work fall into the following categories:
- Global health and development
- Animal welfare
- Mitigation of global risk factors
- Shaping the future
- Broad epistemics and coordination
- Philosophy, global priorities research, and how to do good better
- Building effective altruism
There are also some topics that are relevant to the categorization of work that we’ve chosen here:
- Cause prioritization
- Cause neutrality
- Less-discussed causes and cause x
- Definition of effective altruism
1. Global health and development
The overall topic page: Global health and development
- Health
- Air pollution
- Burden of disease
- Malaria and Mass distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets
- Deworming
- Tobacco control
- COVID-19 pandemic
- Mental health
- Cluster headache
- Aging research
- Research into neglected tropical diseases
- Specific interventions
* Smallpox Eradication Programme
* Micronutrient programs
- Legal interventions
- Economic and societal issues and interventions
- General topics in global health and development
- Global health and wellbeing
- Aid and paternalism
- Systemic change
- Foreign aid and Foreign aid skepticism
- 🖇️ See also — The “Broad epistemics and coordination” category has some related topics, like Electoral reform and Metascience
2. Animal welfare
The overall topic page: animal welfare
- Farmed animal welfare, and possible interventions
- Wild animal welfare
- Other groups of animals
- Important concepts:
3. Mitigation of global risk factors
Pages about the overall topic: Existential risk factor, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk
| How does this kind of work help? | Risks are mitigated, which decreases the chances of near-term catastrophe and/or increases the probability of a (decent) future. |
|---|---|
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Future beings matter morally, or some of these risks affect existing beings. (Only one of these has to be true.) |
| Topic highlights | AI risk, Biosecurity, Great power conflict, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk |
Sources of risk
- AI risk
- Biosecurity, Global catastrophic biological risk
- War and Great power conflict
- Nuclear warfare
* Nuclear security
* Nuclear winter
* Nuclear disarmament movement
* History of nuclear risks
* Cuban Missile Crisis
* Manhattan Project
* Russell–Einstein Manifesto
* Trinity - Weapons of mass destruction
- Armed conflict
- Nuclear warfare
- Earth/planet-related risks
- Other risks
- Types of bad states of the world (what the risk can bring about)
- Types of risk (other groupings):
- Broadly making the world or civilization more resilient
- Philosophical topics
- Related concepts
- Longtermism
- Potential strategies for mitigating these risks
* Broad vs. narrow interventions
* Differential progress
* Emergency response
* Defense in depth
* Resilient food - Vulnerable world hypothesis and Hinge of history
- Warning shot
- Compound existential risk
- Unilateralist's Curse
- Information hazard
- Criticisms of longtermism and existential risk studies
- Space colonization
4. Shaping the future
| How does this kind of work help? | The future is better than it would have been. |
|---|---|
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Future beings matter, and it is in fact possible to shape the future in some predictable way. |
| Topic highlights | Longtermism, Value lock-in, existential risk |
- Hinge of history
- S-risk
- Non-humans and the long-term future
- Value lock-in
- Patient altruism
- Long-range forecasting
- Indirect long-term effects
- Trajectory change
- Speeding up development
- Flourishing futures
- Long reflection
- Longtermist institutional reform
- Transhumanism
- Space colonization
- Space governance
- 🖇️ See also: the “Mitigation of global risk factors” category
5. Broad epistemics and coordination
| How does this kind of work help? | The world (or, the global population) has better epistemics and a greater ability to coordinate, which means that it is broadly more robust and capable of responding to new problems. |
|---|---|
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Epistemics can be improved, and more coordination is good; people make good decisions, given the chance. |
| Topic highlights | Institutional decision-making, Forecasting, Metascience |
Note: epistemics and coordination work sometimes seems similar to philosophy and building effective altruism, or takes similar forms (see below), but should generally be distinguished from that.
- Improving institutional decision-making
- Raising the sanity waterline
- Coordination efforts
- Metascience and truthful information
- 🖇️ See also: Key concepts and tools
6. Philosophy, cause prioritization, and methods for assessing effectiveness
| How does this kind of work help? | We identify important issues and develop tools for deciding what to do, which helps us do more good. |
|---|---|
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | This sort of research can discover important things and will actually be used. |
| Topic highlights | Moral philosophy, Cause prioritization, Global priorities research |
- Cause prioritization
- Global priorities research
- Moral philosophy
- Research
- Moral advocacy
- Effective giving and funding
- History of altruism
- 🖇️ See also: Key concepts and tools
7. Building effective altruism
The overall topic page: Building effective altruism
| How does this kind of work help? | We improve the effective altruism philosophy, network, and movement — by growing or otherwise making it better — and this allows EA to do more good. |
|---|---|
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Effective altruism is a helpful phenomenon that leads to good things in the world. |
| Topic highlights | Building effective altruism, Community, Career choice, Moral advocacy |
- EA community infrastructure and networks
- Broad EA outreach
- Movement strategy
- Tools for people in effective altruism
- Effective altruism culture
- Community experiences
- Discussion norms
- Diversity and inclusion
- EA philosophy
- Effective altruism lifestyle
- Criticism of effective altruism and red teaming
- Related movements and communities
- ^⚠️ Please note that we will be improving this page. If you have feedback on the page, please contact us. You can find the old version of this page here.
- ^The pages are also tags that can be added to posts so that people can find posts on certain topics. You can upvote or downvote a tag for a given post to move it higher or lower in the list of posts on the corresponding topic's page. Refer to this quick take for tagging instructions and guidelines. Topics were announced in this post — they were then known as “tags.” Discussions on proposals for new topics are found here.
As mentioned above, you can find instructions on how to tag a post with a relevant topic.