Download or read book Doing Good Better written by William MacAskill and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us want to make a difference. We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. How can we do better? While a researcher at Oxford, trying to figure out which career would allow him to have the greatest impact, William MacAskill confronted this problem head on. He discovered that much of the potential for change was being squandered by lack of information, bad data, and our own prejudice. As an antidote, he and his colleagues developed effective altruism, a practical, data-driven approach that allows each of us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists believe that it’s not enough to simply do good; we must do good better. At the core of this philosophy are five key questions that help guide our altruistic decisions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing I can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? By applying these questions to real-life scenarios, MacAskill shows how many of our assumptions about doing good are misguided. For instance, he argues one can potentially save more lives by becoming a plastic surgeon rather than a heart surgeon; measuring overhead costs is an inaccurate gauge of a charity’s effectiveness; and, it generally doesn’t make sense for individuals to donate to disaster relief. MacAskill urges us to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. When we do this—when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors—we find that each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.

Download or read book The Most Good You Can Do written by Peter Singer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument for putting sentiment aside and maximizing the practical impact of our donated dollars: “Powerful, provocative” (Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times). Peter Singer’s books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency ever since the appearance of Animal Liberation. Now he directs our attention to a challenging new movement in which his own ideas have played a crucial role: effective altruism. Effective altruism is built upon the simple but profoundly unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the “most good you can do.” Such a life requires a rigorously unsentimental view of charitable giving: to be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas, and shows how, paradoxically, living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment than living for oneself. Doing the Most Good develops the challenges Singer has made, in the New York Times and Washington Post, to those who donate to the arts, and to charities focused on helping our fellow citizens, rather than those for whom we can do the most good. Effective altruists are extending our knowledge of the possibilities of living less selfishly, and of allowing reason, rather than emotion, to determine how we live. Doing the Most Good offers new hope for our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Download or read book Effective Altruism written by Hilary Greaves and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume of its kind, Effective Altruism brings together contributions from internationally recognised philosophers, economists, and political theorists, who introduce the effective altruism movement and explore in detail issues which arise once one takes seriously the twin ideas of altruistic commitment and effectiveness.

Download or read book The Life You Can Save written by Peter Singer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2010 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that for the first time in history we're in a position to end extreme poverty throughout the world, both because of our unprecedented wealth and advances in technology, therefore we can no longer consider ourselves good people unless we give more to the poor. Reprint.

Download or read book Strangers Drowning written by Larissa MacFarquhar and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn't? How would their parents' risk have been judged? A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she's responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential? We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture. Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.

Download or read book The Effective Altruism Handbook written by Ryan Carey and published by . This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Effective Altruism Handbook is a compilation of essays about how do more good with limited resources. It presents much of the intellectual progress of the effective altruism movement, a group dedicated to discovering and carrying out the most effective philanthropic interventions.It features a range of problems that we ask when considering how to have an impact, and many that we don't think to ask at all, across areas such as charity evaluation, career choice and cause selection.Its contributors include Professors Peter Singer and William MacAskill, who provide the introduction, and the leaders of a wide range of organisations, who discuss how they seek to put this movement's ideas into practice.

Download or read book What We Owe the Future written by William MacAskill and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Instant New York Times Bestseller “This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.” —Ezra Klein An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today. In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human. If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.

Download or read book The Scout Mindset written by Julia Galef and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...an engaging and enlightening account from which we all can benefit."—The Wall Street Journal A better way to combat knee-jerk biases and make smarter decisions, from Julia Galef, the acclaimed expert on rational decision-making. When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world—which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

Download or read book Human Compatible written by Stuart Jonathan Russell and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable people to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines.

Download or read book The Good Life Method written by Meghan Sullivan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Philosophers Ask and Answer the Big Questions About the Search for Faith and Happiness For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others—as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God. Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human—and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.

Download or read book Delusional Altruism written by Kris Putnam-Walkerly and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How you give matters. Discover philanthropic strategies for creating transformational change. Whether you regularly donate to charity, run a small family foundation, or are responsible for millions of dollars in grants, you are a philanthropist. Delusional Altruism: Why Philanthropists Fail To Achieve Change and What They Can Do To Transform Giving looks at how you can create transformational change. It reminds us that how we give is as important as the amount we give. The author describes common practices that hinder transformational change and explains how to avoid them, ensuring that your gifts help create the impact you seek. Delusional Altruism—a set of all-too-common errors in philanthropic strategy—can derail a program of giving and result in a loss of efficiency and effectiveness. This book asks philanthropists and charitable organizations to consider whether they have fallen under the spell of Delusional Altruism. Are you cutting out impactful giving in order to save money or avoid uncertainty? Is your philanthropic approach unnecessarily restricted by traditional thinking? This book will help you answer these questions and determine how you can achieve better outcomes through the process of Transformational Giving. Ask questions that spur learning and fuel innovation Believe that investment in yourself and your operation is important Increase the speed of your actions to increase the impact of your giving Give in ways that create lasting, sustainable change Follow strategies to make your philanthropy unstoppable Although enhanced opportunities for philanthropic giving are on the horizon, changes to philanthropic practice are needed to prevent this philanthropy boom from becoming under-leveraged. Implementing updated approaches now can lead to positive change for the future. Read Delusional Altruism to learn how you can transform reality with strategic giving.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism written by Douglas W. Portmore and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of consequentialism today, Includes a brief summary of the anthology's four parts and a concise primer on the nature and importance of the consequentialism/nonconsequentialism distinction, Relates consequentialism to the significant reform movements calling for environmentalism, effective altruism, animal liberation, and women's liberation Book jacket.

Download or read book Pathological Altruism written by Barbara Oakley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-19 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The benefits of altruism and empathy are obvious. These qualities are so highly regarded and embedded in both secular and religious societies that it seems almost heretical to suggest they can cause harm. Like most good things, however, altruism can be distorted or taken to an unhealthy extreme. Pathological Altruism presents a number of new, thought-provoking theses that explore a range of hurtful effects of altruism and empathy. Pathologies of empathy, for example, may trigger depression as well as the burnout seen in healthcare professionals. The selflessness of patients with eating abnormalities forms an important aspect of those disorders. Hyperempathy - an excess of concern for what others think and how they feel - helps explain popular but poorly defined concepts such as codependency. In fact, pathological altruism, in the form of an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one's own needs, may underpin some personality disorders. Pathologies of altruism and empathy not only underlie health issues, but also a disparate slew of humankind's most troubled features, including genocide, suicide bombing, self-righteous political partisanship, and ineffective philanthropic and social programs that ultimately worsen the situations they are meant to aid. Pathological Altruism is a groundbreaking new book - the first to explore the negative aspects of altruism and empathy, seemingly uniformly positive traits. The contributing authors provide a scientific, social, and cultural foundation for the subject of pathological altruism, creating a new field of inquiry. Each author's approach points to one disturbing truth: what we value so much, the altruistic "good" side of human nature, can also have a dark side that we ignore at our peril.

Download or read book The Alignment Problem Machine Learning and Human Values written by Brian Christian and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us—and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole—and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called “artificial intelligence.” They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian’s riveting account, we meet the alignment problem’s “first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they—and we—succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity’s biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture—and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.

Download or read book Moral Uncertainty written by William MacAskill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About the bookToby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions and defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions. They do so by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, noting that different moral views provide different amounts of information regarding our reasons for action, and arguing that the correct account of decision-making under moral uncertainty must be sensitive to that. Moral Uncertainty also tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, and addresses the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics. Very often we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We do not know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected. In Moral Uncertainty, philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions and defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions. They do so by developing an analogy between moral uncertainty and social choice, noting that different moral views provide different amounts of information regarding our reasons for action, and arguing that the correct account of decision-making under moral uncertainty must be sensitive to that. Moral Uncertainty also tackles the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, and addresses the implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics.

Download or read book Waking Up written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirituality.The search for happiness --Religion, East and West --Mindfulness --The truth of suffering --Enlightenment --The mystery of consciousness.The mind divided --Structure and function --Are our minds already split? --Conscious and unconscious processing in the brain --Consciousness is what matters --The riddle of the self.What are we calling "I"? --Consciousness without self --Lost in thought --The challenge of studying the self --Penetrating the illusion --Meditation.Gradual versus sudden realization --Dzogchen: taking the goal as the path --Having no head --The paradox of acceptance --Gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles.Mind on the brink of death --The spiritual uses of pharmacology.

Download or read book The Precipice written by Toby Ord and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker