A professor of economics is planning to give a course on effective altruism in the coming academic year, and he asked me and others for a brief list of relevant scholarly writings. Here’s what I suggested [I have since revised and updated the list—PS, April 2020]:
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Summary of Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a copy of Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner. The book was on top of one of the shelves of the Future of Humanity Institute, where I spend most of my working time these days. I have been meaning to take a look at this work since 2009, when I read an enthusiastic blog post about it by Robin Hanson (“the best book I’ve read in years”). Below is my summary of Part one of the book (the first 120 pages or so). Part two is a “museum” of classic texts and part three is a guide to further reading. The summary quotes liberally from the original; I restate a point made in the book with my own words only when I feel that this aids clarity or concision.
Update (September 14th, 2017): I just discovered that a second edition of this book was published in 2011. The summary below was made based on the first edition, published in 1994. The second edition includes an entire new section (“The studio”) with exercises for the reader. Continue reading
Resources on writing well
This list of resources revises and expands a document that my friend Aron Vallinder created a while ago. The hyperlinks go to the corresponding Amazon.com pages. The average Amazon customer review score appears in brackets, followed by the total number of reviews. If the book is available in electronic format for free, a separate link is provided. A few items are also accompanied by brief annotations. If you think I’m missing some good resource, please let me know.
California Proposition 2: a bibliography
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This bibliography was prepared for a research project on California Proposition 2 that I undertook a while ago, while volunteering for Effective Animal Activism. As I became increasingly busy with many other activities, the project was eventually put on hold. I hope to resume work at some point in the future; in the meantime, I thought I should at least make this material public, in the hope that it might inspire others to do research in this and related areas.
Wild animal welfare: a bibliography
This bibliography is primarily based on Oscar Horta’s Publications in English on wild animal suffering and intervention in nature (for and against), Daniel Dorado’s Ethical interventions in the wild: an annotated bibliography, and the research that Aron Vallinder and I did for a paper on wild animal welfare that we once planned to write. If you know of relevant material not included in the list below, please let me know.
Effective altruism blogs
Update April 2022: The list has now become ea.news. The post below is archived, and all future updates will be made on that site only.
What follows is a list of blogs of potential interest to effective altruists. I tried to include all blogs that either feature EA content on a regular basis or are officially linked to an existing EA organization. (Inactive blogs are listed in italics.) If you think I’m missing something, please let me know.
What to do if your Thinkpad T520 won’t power on
Recently, my Lenovo Thinkpad T520 died. Fixing this problem cost me two days of work, and much anxiety and frustration. Since not much information about this particular issue seems to be available online, I thought I should write a post detailing my solution, in the hope that it might help others solve it more quickly and with less stress. It is, of course, possible that the solution won’t work for you, since the problem might be caused by some other factor. It is also possible that the solution will work for you even if you have a different laptop model. Continue reading