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Hey all, thank you so much for your time. I think the implications of psychedelic research could revolutionize mental health care.

My question for you involves the use of psychedelic therapy for prisoners and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Our current system of punishment and incarceration does very little to help actually rehabilitate those who commit crimes, which creates a vicious cycle of recidivism. I am wondering if the three of you share similar hopes as me for the creation of a more compassionate form of law enforcement which incorporates psychedelic therapies to help treat the traumas that underlie most criminal activity. Maybe this would change how we view deviance in general and foster a more expansive view of what constitutes a human being, and show that everyone has the potential to do the good if only they could have their mind repaired.

Very small note: I'd recommend explaining your abbreviations at least once in the post (i.e., do the typical "full form (abbrev)"). I was already familiar with AGI, but it took me a few minutes of searches to figure out that TAI referred to transformative AI (no thanks to Tay, the bot).

a really great book for learning practical bayesian statistics is richard mcelreath's statistical rethinking. there is also a series of lectures on youtube.

Yeah, I think these are good points. I also suspect that many deontologists and virtue ethicists would be extremely annoyed at my claim that they aren't alternative theories to consequentialism. 

(Though I also suspect that many are somewhat annoyed at the typical way the distinctions between these types of theories are described by philosophers in a broadly consequentialist tradition. My limited experience debating with committed Kantians suggests that disagreements seem much more fundamental than "I think the right action is the one with the best consequences, and you think there are additional determinants of rightness beyond axiology", or anything like that.)

Fortunately, if I remember correctly, something like the distinction between the true criterion of rightness and the best practical decision procedure actually is a major theme in the Kagan book. (Although I think the distinction probably often is underemphasized.)

It is therefore kind of misleading to think of consequentialism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics as alternative theories, which however is the way normative ethics is typically presented in the analytic tradition.

I agree there is something to this concern. But I still wouldn't go so far as to say that it's misleading to think of them as alternative theories. I do think they count as conceptually distinct (even if the boundaries are sometimes a bit muddy), and I think they do sometimes have different implications for how you should in fact make moral decisions.

Beyond the deontology/consequentialism debate, I think there are also relevant questions around demandingness (how strong are our moral obligations, if any?), on the nature of well-being (e.g. hedonistic vs. preference-based vs. objective list theories), on the set of things that count as morally relevant consequences (e.g. do things beyond well-being matter? should we care more about totals or averages?), and so on.

Thanks! I suspect I might enjoy Martha Nussbaum, but Sex and Social Justice never made it from my reading list into my actual bookshelf.

I think the only autobiography I ever read is Emma Goldman's Living My Life. It was at a time not too long ago when I had felt particularly fed up with the EA community, and so was motivated by a peculiar kind of escapism. It did its job, but I feel like leaves me in a poor position to compare biographies to autobiographies more generally. :)

I remember that reading up on normative ethics was one of the first things I focused on after I had encountered EA. I'm sure it was useful in many ways. For some reason, however, I feel surprisingly lukewarm about recommending that people read about normative ethics. 

It could be because my view these days is roughly: "Once you realize that consequentialism is great as a 'criterion of rightness' but doesn't work as 'decision procedure' for boundedly rational agents, a lot of the themes from deontology, virtue ethics, moral particularism, and moral pluralism become relevant again - through a backdoor as it were. It is therefore kind of misleading to think of consequentialism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics as alternative theories, which however is the way normative ethics is typically presented in the analytic tradition."

This was a fascinating read.

"The outside view forecasts I chose: I included almost exclusively “community” forecasts in my outside view."

Why did you choose to almost exclusively refer to EAs for your "outside view"? Is that a typical use of the term outside view?

A slightly boring answer: I think most people should at least partly read something that overviews common theories and frameworks in normative ethics (and the arguments for and against them) and something that overviews core concepts and principles in economics (e.g. the idea of expected utility, the idea of an externality, supply/demand, the basics of economic growth, the basics of public choice).

In my view, normative ethics and economics together make up a really large portion of the intellectual foundation that EA is built on.

One good book that overviews normative ethics is Shelly Kagan's Normative Ethics, although I haven't read it since college (and I think it has only a tiny amount of coverage of population ethics and animal ethics). One thing I like about it is it focuses on laying out the space of possible ethical views in a sensible way, rather than tracing the history of the field. If I remember correctly, names like Aristotle, Kant, etc. never show up. It's also written in a very conversational style.

One good introductory economics textbook is Tyler Cowen's and Alex Tabarrok's Modern Principles of Economics. I don't know how it stacks up to other intro textbooks, since it's the only one that I've read more than a little of, but it's very readable, has very little math, and emphasizes key concepts and principles. Reading just the foundational chapters in an intro textbook, then the chapters whose topics sound important, can probably get most people a decent portion of the value of reading a full textbook.