Reflective Altruism

Since 2023 David Thorstad, a past fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, has been writing a regular blog called Reflective Altruism that critiques the views and approaches often taken on key issues by the EA community (primarily existential risk). Its stated purpose is “to use academic research to drive positive change within and around the effective altruism movement”.

Despite raising a range of strong arguments not seen elsewhere, it has received very little attention from most prominent EA platforms including 80,000 Hours. This reading group is intended to address this by providing an opportunity to work through the blog together. Topics covered will be Thorstad’s arguments that existential risk mitigation efforts do not produce high expected value (even if we have a ‘total view’ of population ethics), and that AI and engineered pandemics are not significant existential risks. In the final week there will be a taster session of other critiques that have not been well-platformed, such as those made by Carla Zoe Cremer and Luke Kemp, and Ben Chugg and Vaden Masrani. If there is appetite for it, we will discuss these more deeply in future terms alongside other topics covered on the Reflective Altruism blog.

Note: This group may require slightly higher amounts of reading than others (2-2.5 hours per week usually) and those who have engaged in more depth with EA ideas will be more likely to find it useful, but all are still welcome.

You can read the full syllabus here.