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EAG London 2019: Charity Entrepreneurship–graduate lightning talks Jan 05, 2020

Show notes

The graduates of Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program introduce their new organizations in a series of lightning talks.

The speakers, organizations, and topics are:

Haven King-Nobles of the Fish Welfare Initiative, on reducing the suffering of billions of fish through researching and executing targeted, highly-scalable welfare interventions
Lauren Mee of Animal Advocacy Careers, on finding the most effective ways to encourage skilled individuals into high-impact animal organizations
Caleb Parikh of Good Policies, on improving public health policy in low- and middle-income countries to bring impact at scale
Michael Plant and Clare Donaldson of the Happier Lives Institute, on researching the most cost-effective interventions to increase happiness and subjective well-being
Joel Burke of Policy Entrepreneurship Network, on figuring out which policies can do the most good and ensuring that they’re implemented, starting with tobacco taxes
Fiona Conlon and Varsha Venugopal of Suvita, on increasing healthcare utilization by focusing on vaccination rates in India

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: London. Find out how to attend a future EA Global conference: https://www.eaglobal.org/.

Learn more about effective altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/.

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EAG 2019 London: Ingredients for building disruptive research teams (Stefan Torges) Jan 04, 2020

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Research has always been an important part of the effective altruism community. What can we learn from successful research teams outside of EA about setting up organizations capable of making important breakthroughs and profoundly shaping society? Stefan Torges, a co-executive director of the Effective Altruism Foundation, summarizes the academic literature on this question and presents case studies of specific teams.

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: London. Find out how to attend a future EA Global conference: https://www.eaglobal.org/.

Learn more about effective altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/.

Original Video

EAG London 2019: The Precipice—Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord) Jan 03, 2020

Show notes

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years, reaching heights of flourishing unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. We have gained the power to destroy ourselves, and all our potential, forever, and we haven’t yet gained the wisdom to ensure that we don’t. Toby Ord, an Oxford moral philosopher and research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, expands on these ideas and discusses adopting the perspective of humanity — one of the major themes of his forthcoming book.

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: London. Find out how to attend a future EA Global conference: https://www.eaglobal.org/.

Learn more about effective altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/.

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EAG London 2019: How the Open Wing Alliance is driving progress worldwide (Alexandria Beck) Jan 02, 2020

Show notes

The Open Wing Alliance (OWA) is a global coalition of 70+ organizations that are working to change the way the world’s biggest companies treat animals. Alexandria Beck, director of the OWA, explains how the coalition is spreading its ideas across cultures in its quest to set a new standard for corporate animal welfare policies in every major market.

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: London. Find out how to attend a future EA Global conference: https://www.eaglobal.org/.

Learn more about effective altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/.

Original Video

EAG 2019 SF: Doing good in an infinite chaotic world (Hayden Wilkinson) Oct 25, 2019

Show notes

Many people in the EA community hope to make the world better by influencing events in the far future. But if the future can potentially contain an infinite number of lives, and infinite total moral value, we face major challenges in understanding the impact of our actions and justifying any particular strategy. In this academic session, Hayden Wilkinson discusses how we might be able to face these challenges — even if it means abandoning some of our moral principles in the process.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org

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EAG 2019 SF: Climate change deaths increase the social cost of carbon (R. Daniel Bressler) Oct 24, 2019

Show notes

Popular models for the effects of climate change human welfare usually focus on its long-term economic impacts — but often leave out its impact on human mortality.

R. Daniel Bressler, a PhD candidate in Columbia University’s Sustainable Development program, extended one such model to include mortality costs, and found that this significantly increased the model’s estimate for the welfare consequences of climate change. In this academic session, he discusses this work, and explains how a similar approach could help us model welfare costs for global catastrophic risks like nuclear war and pandemics.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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EAG 2019 SF: Cooperating with future generations: An experimental investigation (Ben Grodeck) Oct 23, 2019

Show notes

If you take actions that affect the future, you don’t just change the eventual welfare of people who have yet to exist — you actually influence which people exist in the first place. Typical moral principles, when applied to such actions, yield paradoxical results.

In this academic session, Ben Grodeck, a PhD candidate in economics at Monash University, discusses the results of an experiment where individuals came face-to-face with this moral puzzle — and how an “identity-affecting” task led them to be less generous.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

Original Video

EAG 2019 SF: Fireside Chat with Philip Tetlock Oct 21, 2019

Show notes

Philip Tetlock is an expert on forecasting; he’s spent decades studying how people make predictions — from political pundits to CIA analysts. In this conversation, he discusses a wide range of topics, including prediction algorithms, the long-term future, and his Good Judgment Project (which identified common traits of the most skilled forecasters). To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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EAG 2019 SF: Current Work in AI Alignment (Paul Christiano) Oct 20, 2019

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Paul Christiano, a researcher at OpenAI, discusses the current state of research on aligning AI with human values: what’s happening now, what needs to happen, and how people can help. This talk covers a broad set of subgoals within alignment research, from inferring human preferences to verifying the properties of advanced systems. To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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EAG 2019 SF: Forecasting research results (Eva Vivalt) Oct 19, 2019

Show notes

People know a lot of things about the world. Collectively, they can often make good predictions about the results of social science research before it even happens. Eva Vivalt, a researcher at the Australian National University, is building a platform to collect these predictions. In this talk, she discusses what social science stands to gain through the use of forecasting, from better research design to improvements in public policy.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

Original Video