Effective Altruism IIITD
Effective Altruism IIITD, with Philosoc, aims to help students figure out how to use their careers and resources to best help others.
Effective Altruism IIITD (EA IIITD) is a group of students unified by a common desire to do the most we can to improve the world. Through our Study Programs, Discussion Meetups, Social Events, Global Networking Opportunities, and more, we help students gain the skills and knowledge and build the connections to do incredible amounts of good for the world.
Join us for the next Reading Hours session
A tranquil hour of shared immersive reading and thoughtful discussion
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The Effectiveness Mindset
For the first week, we’ll investigate what opportunities to do good we have available to us; come to terms with the tradeoffs we face in our altruistic efforts; and explore tools that can help us find unusually high impact opportunities.
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Differences in Impact
We focus on giving you tools to quantify and evaluate how much good an intervention can achieve; introduce expected value reasoning; and investigate differences in expected cost-effectiveness between interventions.
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Expanding Our Compassion
We focus on our own values and the practical implications that these views have. During this week we explore who our moral consideration should expand to, with a particular focus on farmed animals as a case example.
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Longtermism
Most cost-effectiveness analyses can only take into account the short-run effects of the interventions, and struggle to take into account long-run knock-on effects and side effects. This criticism has been made forcefully against early effective altruist attempts to evaluate interventions based on cost-effectiveness. We attempt to find interventions that beneficially influence the long-run course of humanity.
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Existential Risk
An existential risk is the risk of an existential catastrophe, i.e. one that threatens the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential. Existential risks include natural risks such as those posed by asteroids or supervolcanoes as well as anthropogenic risks like mishaps resulting from synthetic biology or artificial intelligence. We examine why existential risks might be a moral priority; and explore why existential risks are so neglected by society.
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Emerging Technologies
One way to look for opportunities to accomplish as much good as possible is to ask “which developments might have an extremely large or irreversible impact on human civilisation?” During this week, we’ll explore a few technological trends which might have relevance for existential risk. We aim to cover two key emerging technologies that might be less well known - transformative artificial intelligence and advances in biotechnology.
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Increasing the Accuracy of our Judgements
Trying to find interventions that accomplish the most good is extremely difficult. Sometimes we have to make uncertain and subjective judgement calls about the quality of some body of evidence, or make speculative forecasts about some unknown variable. It’s very important, therefore, to make sure that we use the best reasoning processes we can to try and improve the accuracy of our judgments. We focus on a range of different tools that we might be able to use to increase our good judgment and ability to forecast well. The readings for this week cover this broad topic from a few different angles.
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Putting it into Practice
One of the main ways in which we can affect the world for the better is through our careers. In our final week we hope to help you apply the principles of effective altruism to your own life and also critically reflect back on the rest of the fellowship.
