Interview, Fireside Chat
Being provocative, advocacy, & the life you can save | Peter Singer (2019)
- Singer anticipates a net positive sales impact for Practical Ethics and increased engagement from German students regarding global poverty and animal rights due to controversy over 1979 views on newborn euthanasia.
- Releasing the 10th anniversary edition of The Life You Can Save as a free ebook and audiobook with celebrity narration is expected to generate a "big impact" and broaden the audience reach.
- Singer predicts the Effective Altruism movement has potential to "really transform philanthropy" by attracting modest donors if it maintains a broad focus, whereas a narrow focus on long-termism could limit growth.
- A broad EA movement is viewed as strategically beneficial for long-termists, as individuals initially attracted by global poverty or animal welfare may later transition to existential risk research.
- Predictions regarding Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) arrival times vary from 10 to 50 years among researchers, leading to a recommendation for "modest kind of investment" in AGI safety as an insurance policy.
- The EA community is suggested to allocate a "very significant proportion" of resources to concrete existential risks including asteroid collisions, nuclear weapons, pandemics, and climate change mitigation.
- During a semester off from Princeton, original research is planned in Australia focusing on global population ethics, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa, with input from a Nigerian co-author to avoid a "western" perspective.
- Singer expects his shift toward moral realism and hedonistic utilitarianism to make the view that value lies in "pleasure or states of consciousness" more defensible, though he does not claim absolute conviction.
- Kaler forecasts that maintaining movement unity is superior to splitting it, as fragmentation could lead to intellectual blindness or insularity seen in other charitable groups.
- Separating EA conferences by cause area is acknowledged as potentially logistically beneficial, but separating the movement itself is predicted to cause "much bigger" downsides than any resulting confusion.
- If EA expands into a "very broad movement" encompassing general future-shaping improvements, it could potentially engage a "very large fraction of the population."
- Significant movement growth is expected to initially cause resources and people to "clump" around a few major problems due to increasing returns before expanding to new issues once critical mass is reached.
- Kaler warns that if the movement's public face is exclusively global poverty, outsiders may struggle to understand its broader scope, causing confusion when encountering work on AI risk or biosecurity.
- A "cynical explanation" for the lack of internal conflict is that the movement has not yet faced significant resource scarcity, suggesting conflict could arise if a major funder dropped out.
- Singer characterizes the political backlash against immigration advocacy as a "disaster" for climate change and democracy, making it "extremely naive" to ignore these political effects when advocating for open borders.
- Advocating for open borders is predicted to potentially lead to the election of right-wing leaders like Donald Trump or Brexit, which Singer deems "catastrophic" for climate change efforts.
- The primary driver of political backlash is identified as the perception of "losing control of the borders" rather than actual migration numbers, rendering open border advocacy politically unfeasible currently.
- Singer anticipates a "huge backlash" if abolishing animal agriculture becomes a semi-mainstream political issue, potentially triggering a "Trump phenomenon" similar to the immigration reaction.
- Kaler suggests the movement's strategy of not being overly demanding, such as allowing for "pet projects," is designed to prevent burnout, attract participants, and fit into "ordinary" lives.
- Adopting a stance of violating rights for good consequences is predicted to result in the movement being "shut down very quickly" by society and finding it personally difficult for people to join due to disgust.