My Answers for HWproj3

Q1. Provide an update on your plans regarding how or whether to use ChatGPT or other AI tools. Explain and justify. Recall  the 1,390 word short story the instructor produced in about 20 minutes using ChatGPT. Recall the information we provide about using these tools.

Answer: 

I plan on using ChatGPT for editing my writing and improving the style. I will not be using it to generate content. Since LLM's like ChatGPT have an issue with lying I don't totally trust it to do an assignment like this. Also, I know the material well enough that I don't really need it to help with that. 


Q2. For your ethics-related term project (see “Course Information” tab for details): Let us continue to develop it step by step over the semester so that it will be manageable rather than a crunch at the end, as follows. Write up another 350 words or more (per person if a group project) of new content if your project is a paper that must be written from scratch (for example if it is about yourself). If you are using an automatic text generator to help write it it would probably be quite a bit more than that amount of words. If the progress was code development or website creation, give the new code. If slides, paste the new text from the new slides into your blog and describe any images or graphics. If something else, explain specifically what you did, being sure to give examples if that makes sense. Label this HW consistently as in this example. IMPORTANT: No credit on this HW if you copy-paste material from an earlier HW. List any sources you used, such as websites or pages, ChatGPT or other tools, books, or whatever it might be. This takes some effort and it counts as part of your work.

Answer:

Introduction

Effective altruism (EA) is a growing intellectual and charitable movement which tries to use reason and evidence to determine what are the best ways to have a positive impact upon society. This essay aims to explore this movement as well as provide an overview of the issues related to it.

We live in a world with many worthwhile causes but our resources for addressing them are very limited. Therefore, EA argues that we should rationally determine which of these causes has the largest positive impact and direct our resources to those. The nature of the provided resources varies but can include money, career choices, or political activism.

There have been many thinkers who have influenced the movement but the most influential by far has been the philosopher, Peter Singer. Singer’s work has a utilitarian perspective and is particularly concerned about global poverty. He has argued that since those in rich countries can positively affect the lives of those in poor countries by donating relatively small amounts of money they are morally obligated to do so. There have also been a number of organizations founded to support EA. One of the earliest was the Center for Effective Altruism (CEA) which was founded in Oxford in 2009. The CEA was founded to support organizations within the EA community. There is also GiveWell, founded in 2007, which evaluates charities based on EA ideas and provides recommendations for donors. 80,000 hours is another organization which focuses more on the ethical impact of various career choices and makes recommendations for which careers have the biggest positive ethical impact.

Since EA is concerned with measuring ethical impact, it is naturally heavily influenced by the utilitarian tradition in ethics. Decision theory is also another field which is important to EA. Decision theory seeks to maximize utility given a particular set of likely outcomes with associated probabilities. Finally, EA is also influenced by the heuristics and biases theory in cognitive science which shows the limitations of human reasoning and provides a justification for a reliance on more evidence based approaches.

One final concern of EA has been Existential Risks. Existential Risks are events that threaten the existence or long-term potential of humanity. Some examples include nuclear war, asteroid impacts, or renegade Artificial Intelligence. Effective Altruists argue that these events have been neglected and deserve special consideration due to their potentially high impact even if their likelihood may be low.

 

Sources:

·        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

·        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

·        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Effective_Altruism

·        https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/decision-theory

existential risks: threats to humanity's survival (existential-risk.org)

Q3. Explain what needs to be done next on the project. Put this in your blog, labeling it consistently as in this example.

Answer: 

The next step is to work on the "Main Ideas" section of my paper.