Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Pain Relief and Psychedelics as Effective Altruism Priorities

This piece, Increasing Access to Pain Relief in Developing Countries - An EA Perspective, is long but important. As someone who has benefitted from pain treatment on many occasions, I can say from experience that EAs significantly overweight death and future pleasure and underweight current suffering. More importantly, though, society's Puritanical attitudes (especially in the U.S.) and racism / imperialism are causing loads of unnecessary suffering.

Relatedly, I think taking mental health seriously (another area seriously harmed by "toughen up / man up" attitudes) and funding promising research should absolutely be an EA priority. This is a great piece on the topic by Marc Gunther. Sam Harris has done some good podcasts on the topic as well (e.g., his podcast with Michael Pollan).

1 comment:

Brian said...

That first link was really good. Thanks for writing on this topic, Matt