EA - 'Psychology of Effective Altruism' course syllabus by Geoffrey Miller

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 'Psychology of Effective Altruism' course syllabus, published by Geoffrey Miller on September 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In case anyone's interested, here's a link to the syllabus for a course titled 'The Psychology of Effective Altruism' that I've taught 3 times at University of New Mexico (in 2018, 2019, and 2020): I'd posted an earlier version of this syllabus to EA Forum in 2018 (see ) Feel free to borrow any of this material if you teach a course on EA, X risk, longtermism, moral psychology, etc. This is an advanced undergraduate seminar with about 20-25 students, mostly psychology majors. It was designed to be suitable for diverse students at a large state university. Whereas some other EA courses have focused mostly on technical moral philosophy, this is pitched more towards the psychology of EA -- both why it's appealing, and why it's difficult. The course's main topics are EA principles, cause prioritization, utilitarian ethics, moral psychology, charity evaluation, global poverty and health, existential risks, AI safety, moral & cognitive enhancement, near-term technologies (robots, EMs, VR), animal sentience & welfare, and career choices. I'm currently updating this course to teach it again in spring 2023, so would welcome anybody else's syllabi that might be helpful, and any other suggestions of good readings, videos, exercises, etc. (I've already looked at the helpful course materials mentioned on this Open Philanthropy site:/ ) -- Geoffrey Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.