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EARadio — Government
EARadio

Fill your ears with effective altrucasts!

Latest Episodes:

EAG 2017 Boston: The moral value of information (Amanda Askell) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

When faced with ethical decisions, we generally prefer to act on more evidence rather than less. If the expected value of two options available to us are similar but the expected value of one option is based on more evidence than the the other is, then we will generally prefer the option that has more evidential support. In this talk, Amanda Askell argues that although we are intuitively disinclined to favor interventions with poor evidential support, there are reasons for thinking that these are sometimes better than favoring interventions with a proven track record.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: Using Evidence to Inform Policy (Heidi McAnnally-Linz) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

As we reach more audiences with the message of the need for evidence, and as more rigorous evidence is produced, the question becomes how do we ensure that evidence is used and these investments are leveraged to impact the most lives? In this talk Heidi McAnnally-Linz shares examples of how Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is using rigorous evidence to inform policy conversations in national governments from Peru to Ghana and in sectors from education to social protection. She also highlights opportunities for EAs in this next frontier of the evidence movement to leverage investments in rigorous evidence and achieve more impact.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: Giving What We Can Update (Julia Wise) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

Short talk and updates on the work of Giving What We Can, a community of people who have pledged to donate 10% of their income to the most effective organizations they can find.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: Are we facing a reproducibility crisis, and what can we do about it? (James Turitto) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

Many in the social and health sciences claim their fields are facing reproducibility crises, in which researchers have failed to replicate many of the major experimental findings in their fields, and that much of the problem is due to bad research. What practices and incentives are driving the problem and how bad is it? What practical steps can we take to improve research practice, transparency, and reproducibility? Based at MIT, J-PAL is a network of economists who have run over 800 randomized controlled trials in over 80 countries to ensure that policy is informed by scientific evidence. James Turitto, head of J-PAL’s Research Transparency and Reproducibility Initiative, will tackle these questions and share how trial registries, pre-publication replications, and data publication can help address these challenges in social science.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: Is universal basic income a viable way to support humans in the face of technological change? (Alison Fahey) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

As technology advances, fewer jobs require human labor. Governments from Canada to Finland are experimenting with a universal basic income scheme as a way to ensure that their constituents maintain some level of economic security, even in the face of shrinking employment opportunities. Meanwhile, a pilot study in Kenya is testing whether universal basic income can be an effective way to lift citizens out of poverty. Can guaranteeing everyone a minimum amount of money reduce or prevent poverty? What effect will a universal basic income have on the overall economy? Based at MIT, J-PAL is a network of economists who have run over 800 randomized controlled trials in over 80 countries to ensure that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Alison Fahey, Senior Policy Manager at J-PAL Global, will share insights from some of these randomized controlled trials that can help shed light on the possible impacts of universal basic income schemes.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: Impact v. Principle at the American Civil Liberties Union (Brigid Slipka) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

The ACLU has a 97-year history of impact litigation, using singular lawsuits at specific points of injustice to impact broad populations. In recent years, lobbying and grassroots mobilization have amplified this targeted political pressure. It is this combination of tactics and decades of history that has put the ACLU at the forefront of the resistance in this era of Trump.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: How can we best work together as a community (Ben Todd) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

A common objection to effective altruism is that it encourages an overly “individual” way of thinking, which reduces our impact. Ben will argue that, at least in a sense, that’s true.

When you’re part of a community, which careers, charities and actions are highest-impact changes. An overly narrow, individual analysis, which doesn’t take account of how the rest of the community will respond to your actions, can lead you to have less impact than you could. Ben will suggest some better options and rules of thumb for working together.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: What sets the exponent of neuroscience progress (Adam Marblestone) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

Neuroscience needs to make a transition from small science to large scale systems engineering and analysis, analogous to the changes in 20thcentury physics that gave rise to particle accelerators, space telescopes, the Standard Model and the transistor. Yet the complexity and diversity of neuroscience has made it difficult to know how to proceed: a different kind of integration is needed in the science of complexity than in the science of simplicity. Using examples from brain mapping technology and from the neuroscience-AI theoretical interface, I will argue that the achievement of accelerated progress in the field is gated by support (organizational, cultural, financial) for truly unconventional integrations of otherwise disparate ideas and methods. Such approaches sometimes require us to deviate from familiar modes of hypothesis-driven science, as we search for integrative frameworks and build new kinds of observational tools, but there is a chance that they could finally allow us to explore the relevant regions of hypothesis space for understanding how the brain works.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 Boston: Harnessing the power of academia (Michelle Hutchinson) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

Although some of effective altruism’s founders are academics, EA has up to now mostly spread outside of academia. Michelle Hutchinson describes the possible power of academia and how important it might be for EA to engage with it, followed by plans to take advantage of that power and how those plans are progressing.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

EAG 2017 SF: Opening talk (Will MacAskill) Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

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