New releases - Page 23 of 45 - 80,000 Hours

Guide to effective holiday giving in 2017

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published December 22nd, 2017

It’s that wonderful time of year again – the time I have to rush out a blog post about effective holiday giving before heading off for the Christmas break.

Here’s our article on how to find the best charity to give to.

In short we now recommend giving to the Effective Altruism Funds – this allows you to delegate the decision to world experts who research the most effective places to give full time. It’s fast and really hard to do better.

Alternatively, if you’d like to try something new, check out donor lotteries. They’re a great innovation for small to medium sized donors, though take a minute to fully understand.

If you want to do your own research, my holiday giving guide from last year is still a good starting point, as are the recent posts by the researchers at GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy on where they’re giving.

A possible new year’s resolution

Thinking longer term, this is the time of year that many people take the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of their income to the most impactful organisations than can find. Last year 318 people did so over the holidays, and Giving What We Can is running a pledge drive again this year.

Donating 10% is one of the more straightforward ways you can have more social impact.

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Earning to Give

#16 – Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals

Podcast by Robert Wiblin, Michelle Hutchinson and Keiran Harris · Published December 22nd, 2017

In the 40s and 50s neoliberalism was a fringe movement within economics. But by the 80s it had become a dominant school of thought in public policy, and achieved major policy changes across the English speaking world. How did this happen?

In part because its leaders invested heavily in training academics to study and develop their ideas. Whether you think neoliberalism was good or bad, its history demonstrates the impact building a strong intellectual base within universities can have.

Dr Michelle Hutchinson is working to get a different set of ideas a hearing in academia by setting up the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at Oxford University. The Institute, which is currently hiring for three roles, aims to bring together outstanding philosophers and economists to research how to most improve the world. The hope is that it will spark widespread academic engagement with effective altruist thinking, which will hone the ideas and help them gradually percolate into society more broadly.

Its research agenda includes questions like:

How do we compare the good done by focussing on really different types of causes?
How does saving lives actually affect the world relative to other things we could do?
What are the biggest wins governments should be focussed on getting?

Before moving to GPI, Michelle was the Executive Director of Giving What We Can and a founding figure of the effective altruism movement. She has a PhD in Applied Ethics from Oxford on prioritization and global health.

We discuss:

What is global priorities research and why does it matter?
How is effective altruism seen in academia? Is it important to convince academics of the value of your work, or is it OK to ignore them?
Operating inside a university is quite expensive, so is it even worth doing? Who can pay for this kind of thing?
How hard is it to do something innovative inside a university? How serious are the administrative and other barriers?
Is it harder to fundraise for a new institute, or hire the right people?
Have other social movements benefitted from having a prominent academic arm?
How can people prepare themselves to get research roles at a place like GPI?
Many people want to have roles doing this kind of research. How many are actually cut out for it? What should those who aren’t do instead?
What are the odds of the Institute’s work having an effect on the real world?

If you’re interesting in donating to or working at GPI, you can email Michelle at [email protected].

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#15 – Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it's wise to defer to the wise

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published November 20th, 2017

Prof Philip Tetlock is a social science legend. Over forty years he has researched whose forecasts we can trust, whose we can’t and why – and developed methods that allow all of us to be better at predicting the future.

After the Iraq WMDs fiasco, the US intelligence services hired him to figure out how to ensure they’d never screw up that badly again. The result of that work – Superforecasting – was a media sensation in 2015.

It described Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project, which found forecasting methods so accurate they beat everyone else in open competition, including thousands of people in the intelligence services with access to classified information.

Today he’s working to develop the best forecasting process ever by combining the best of human and machine intelligence in the Hybrid Forecasting Competition, which you can start participating in now to sharpen your own judgement.

In this interview we describe his key findings and then push to the edge of what’s known about how to foresee the unforeseeable:

Should people who want to be right just adopt the views of experts rather than apply their own judgement?
Why are Berkeley undergrads worse forecasters than dart-throwing chimps?
Should I keep my political views secret, so it will be easier to change them later?
How can listeners contribute to his latest cutting-edge research?
What do we know about our accuracy at predicting low-probability high-impact disasters?
Does his research provide an intellectual basis for populist political movements?
Was the Iraq War caused by bad politics, or bad intelligence methods?
What can we learn about forecasting from the 2016 election?
Can experience help people avoid overconfidence and underconfidence?
When does an AI easily beat human judgement?
Could more accurate forecasting methods make the world more dangerous?
How much does demographic diversity line up with cognitive diversity?
What are the odds we’ll go to war with China?
Should we let prediction tournaments run most of the government?

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Why you should consider applying for grad school (but make sure you’re aware of the potential drawbacks of attending!)

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published November 17th, 2017

Last updated: Aug 2018.

Application deadlines for US PhD programs are coming up over the next month (as of Nov 2017). We think many of our readers who are considering grad school at some point in the next few years should apply this year.

We’re writing this informal list of pros and cons now because a number of people we’ve recently given career coaching to have been much more reluctant to apply for grad school than we think is justified.

Why should they take the option seriously?

You have to plan far ahead of time. If you apply now you will only begin the program late next year. Even if you don’t feel ready to start a PhD today, you should consider whether you will be in a year’s time. If you aren’t sure, applying keeps that option open. We’ve spoken to many people considering grad school who intended to work for a few years first, but then had their situation change and grad school suddenly seem like a much better option. Early in your career, your plans can change more often than you expect.
An increasing number of the paths we recommend, especially in research and policy, are much easier to pursue with a PhD. For example, if you want to work on improving our ability to control pandemics, the best options appear to be research (most likely in academia but perhaps also foundations or the private sector),

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#14 – Sharon Nuñez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published November 13th, 2017

What if you knew that ducks were being killed with pitchforks? Rabbits dumped alive into containers? Or pigs being strangled with forklifts? Would you be willing to go undercover to expose the crime?

That’s a real question that confronts volunteers at Animal Equality (AE). In this episode we speak to Sharon Nunez and Jose Valle, who founded AE in 2006 and then grew it into a multi-million dollar international animal rights organisation. They’ve been chosen as one of the most effective animal protection orgs in the world by Animal Charity Evaluators for the last 3 consecutive years.

In addition to undercover investigations AE has also designed a 3D virtual-reality farm experience called iAnimal360. People get to experience being trapped in a cage – in a room designed to kill then – and can’t just look away. How big an impact is this having on users?

In this interview I’m joined by my colleague Natalie Cargill – Sharon Nuñez and Jose Valle also tackle:

How do they track their goals and metrics week to week?
How much does an undercover investigation cost?
Why don’t people donate more to factory farmed animals, given that they’re the vast majority of animals harmed directly by humans?
How risky is it to attempt to build a career in animal advocacy?
What led to a change in their focus from bullfighting in Spain to animal farming?
How does working with governments or corporate campaigns compare with early strategies like creating new vegans/vegetarians?
Has their very rapid growth been difficult to handle?
What should our listeners study or do if they want to work in this area?
How can we get across the message that horrific cases are a feature – not a bug – of factory farming?
Do the owners or workers of factory farms ever express shame at what they do?

If you’re interested in this episode you’ll also want to hear our comprehensive review of ways to help animals with Lewis Bollard.

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What are the most important talent gaps in the effective altruism community?

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published November 3rd, 2017

Note that this article is from 2017. For more up-to-date findings, see our new 2018 survey, which asked most of the same questions and some additional ones.

Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term ‘talent gaps’ in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We’ve written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it’s much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about ‘talent constraints’ in general terms. This page may be misleading if it’s not read in conjunction with our clarifications.

What are the highest-impact opportunities in the effective altruism community right now? We surveyed leaders at 17 key organisations to learn more about what skills they need and how they would trade-off receiving donations against hiring good staff. It’s a more extensive and up-to-date version of the survey we did last year.

Below is a summary of the key numbers, a link to a presentation with all the results, a discussion of what these numbers mean, and at the bottom an appendix on how the survey was conducted and analysed.

We also report on two additional surveys about the key bottlenecks in the community, and the amount of donations expected to these organisations.

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#13 – Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published October 31st, 2017

In both rich and poor countries, government policy is often based on no evidence at all and many programs don’t work. This has particularly harsh effects on the global poor – in some countries governments only spend $100 on each citizen a year so they can’t afford to waste a single dollar.

Enter MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Since 2003 they’ve conducted experiments to figure out what policies actually help recipients, and then try to get them implemented by governments and nonprofits.

Claire Walsh leads J-PAL’s Government Partnership Initiative, which works to evaluate policies and programs in collaboration with developing world governments, scale policies that have been shown to work, and generally promote a culture of evidence-based policymaking.

We discussed (her views only, not J-PAL’s):

How can they get evidence backed policies adopted? Do politicians in the developing world even care whether their programs actually work? Is the norm evidence-based policy, or policy-based evidence?
Is evidence-based policy an evidence-based strategy itself?
Which policies does she think would have a particularly large impact on human welfare relative to their cost?
How did she come to lead one of J-PAL’s departments at 29?
How do you evaluate the effectiveness of energy and environment programs (Walsh’s area of expertise), and what are the standout approaches in that area?
80,000 Hours has warned people about the downsides of starting your career in a nonprofit. Walsh started her career in a nonprofit and has thrived, so are we making a mistake?
Other than J-PAL, what are the best places to work in development? What are the best subjects to study? Where can you go network to break into the sector?
Is living in poverty as bad as we think?

And plenty of other things besides.

We haven’t run an RCT to test whether this episode will actually help your career, but I suggest you listen anyway. Trust my intuition on this one.

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#12 – Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here's what keeps her up at night.

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published October 25th, 2017

When you’re in the middle of a crisis and you have to ask for money, you’re already too late.

That’s Dr. Beth Cameron, and she’s someone who should know. Beth runs Global Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

She has years of experience preparing for and fighting the diseases of our nightmares, on the White House Ebola Taskforce, in the National Security Council staff, and as the senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.

Unfortunately, the nations of the world aren’t prepared for a crisis – and like children crowded into daycare, there’s a real danger that something nasty will come along and make us all sick at once.

During previous pandemics, countries have dragged their feet over who will pay to contain them, or struggled to move people and supplies to where they needed to be. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think that the same wouldn’t happen again today. And at the same time, advances in biotechnology may make it possible for terrorists to bring back smallpox – or create something even worse.

In this interview we look at the current state of play in disease control, what needs to change, and how you can work towards a job where you can help make those changes yourself. Topics covered include:

The best strategies for containing pandemics.
Why we lurch from panic, to neglect, to panic again when it comes to protecting ourselves from contagious diseases.
Current reform efforts within the World Health Organization, and attempts to prepare partial vaccines ahead of time.
How the Nuclear Threat Initiative, with just 50 people, collaborates with governments around the world to reduce the risk of nuclear or biological catastrophes (also, whether they might want to hire you).
Which global health security groups most impress Beth, and what they’re doing.
What new technologies could be invented to make us safer.
Whether it’s possible to help solve the problem through mass advocacy.
What and where to study, and how to begin a career in pandemic preparedness (below you’ll find a lengthy list of people and places mentioned in the interview, and others we’ve had recommended to us).
Much more besides.

Below you’ll find a coaching application form, three key points from the interview, extra resources to learn more, and dozens of people and places you can contact to begin a career in this field.

If you know nothing about this topic, it is recommended that you listen to the first hour or two of the episode with Howie Lempel first, as it lays out the problem more gradually.

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Our 20 most popular pieces of research

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published October 23rd, 2017

I recently wanted to see what content we’ve written in the past are still popular with readers. Our most visited pages are articles in our career guide, or tools like our career quiz, problem quiz and career decision tool, around which the site is designed. And of course anything that was released recently tends to attract a lot of readers. So let’s look at the others.

These are the pieces we’ve written that i) were most visited over the last three months, and ii) were written more than six months ago, iii) not a tool or part of our career guide. Enjoy!

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#11 – Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published October 17th, 2017

What is the best, state-of-the-art therapy for depression? Do most meat eaters think it’s wrong to hurt animals? How likely do Americans think climate change is to cause human extinction? How do we make academics more intellectually honest, so we can actually trust their findings? How can we speed up social science research 10-fold? Do most startups improve the world, or make it worse? Why is research in top journals less reliable?

If you’re interested in these questions, this interview is for you.

A scientist, entrepreneur, writer and mathematician, Spencer Greenberg is constantly working to create tools to speed up and improve research and critical thinking. These include:

Rapid public opinion surveys – which he has used to learn public opinion on animal consciousness, farm animal welfare, the impact of developing world charities and the likelihood of extinction by various different means;
Tools to enable social science research to be run en masse very cheaply by anyone;
ClearerThinking.org, a highly popular site for improving people’s judgement and decision-making;
Ways to transform data analysis methods to ensure that papers only show true findings;
Ways to decide which research projects are actually worth pursuing.

In this episode of the show, Spencer discusses all of these and more. If you don’t feel like listening, that just shows that you have poor judgement and need to benefit from his wisdom even more!

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#10 – Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published October 11th, 2017

What if you were in a position to give away billions of dollars to improve the world? What would you do with it? This is the problem facing Program Officers at Open Philanthropy – people like Dr Nick Beckstead.

Following a PhD in philosophy, Nick works to figure out where money can do the most good. He’s been involved in major grants in a wide range of areas, including ending factory farming through technological innovation, safeguarding the world from advances in biotechnology and artificial intelligence, and spreading rational compassion.

This episode is a tour through some of the toughest questions ‘effective altruists’ face when figuring out how to best improve the world, including:

Should we mostly try to help people currently alive, or future generations? Nick studied this question for years in his PhD thesis, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future. (The first 31 minutes is a snappier version of my conversation with Toby Ord.)
Is clean meat (aka in vitro meat) technologically feasible any time soon, or should we be looking for plant-based alternatives?
To stop malaria is it more cost-effective to use technology to eliminate mosquitos than to distribute bed nets?
What are the greatest risks to human civilisation continuing?
Should people who want to improve the future work for changes that will be very useful in a specific scenario, or just generally try to improve how well humanity makes decisions?
What specific jobs should our listeners take in order for Nick to be able to spend more money in useful ways to improve the world?
Should we expect the future to be better if the economy grows more quickly – or more slowly?

We also cover some more personal issues like:

Nick’s top book recommendations.
How he developed (what is in my view) exceptional judgement.
How he made his toughest career decisions.
Why he wants to see less dilettantism and more expertise in the effective altruism community.

Don’t miss it.

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New problem profile: Improving institutional decision-making

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published October 7th, 2017

A few weeks ago we released a new problem profile focussed on improving decision-making in major societal institutions:

When powerful people make dumb choices it hurts us all. Here’s how to fix it.

In 2003, the United States chose to invade Iraq. Most now agree this decision was deeply flawed, costing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

Exactly what went wrong here is a contested and controversial issue. At best, the decision-making process severely lacked rigour, and at worst, it was heavily biased.

The government justified the invasion thanks to the intelligence community’s claim that it was “highly probable” that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) – but this statement was ambiguous. Policymakers took that to indicate near-100% certainty, and made decisions accordingly.1 But “highly probable” could easily also be interpreted as 80% certainty, or 70% – carrying very different practical implications. Those involved didn’t really think through the relevant probabilities, or consider how likely the estimates were to be wrong, or the implications if they were.

Others have suggested that the US had already decided to invade Iraq, and that this decision influenced intelligence collection – not the other way around. This a particularly extreme example of what’s known as motivated reasoning – a tendency to reason in ways that support whatever conclusion one wants to be true.

The call to invade hinged on the subjective impressions of a few key people – subjective impressions that later turned out to be wrong,

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Government & policy

New career review: Policy-oriented civil service (with a UK focus)

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published October 7th, 2017

We have a new career review focussed on government jobs developing policy, with a focus on the UK:

Working in the government you can have a big impact on pressing global problems. Here’s how to get started.

On the Sunday after Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, Tony Blair rang Alan Milburn to tell him he was going to be a minister in the Department of Health. Blair said: ‘We haven’t got a health policy. Your job is to get us one.’1

Milburn ‘was hungry for ideas’1 and met with a civil servant: Graham Winyard, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer. According to Winyard, this meeting was where the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was born.1 NICE helps the National Health Service decide which treatments are evidence-based and cost-effective.

Although its approach is controversial,2 NICE is seen internationally as a role model for how to make evidence-based decisions about health spending.3 The editor of the British Medical Journal described it as ‘conquering the world’ and thought it might ‘prove to be one of Britain’s greatest cultural exports’.4

What if you could have this kind of impact?

There are civil servants working on some of the world’s most urgent problems, from how to prevent nuclear proliferation to encouraging economic growth in the developing world. Like Winyard, they often have opportunities to play a central role in solving these problems.

In this profile we cover why it’s possible to have a significant impact as a civil servant,

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Government & policy

#9 – Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published October 4th, 2017

Take a trip to Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, when going to space sounded like a good way to get around environmental limits, people started cryogenically freezing themselves, and nanotechnology looked like it might revolutionise industry – or turn us all into grey goo.

In this episode of the 80,000 Hours Podcast Christine Peterson takes us back to her youth in the Bay Area, the ideas she encountered there, and what the dreamers she met did as they grew up. We also discuss how she came up with the term ‘open source software’ (and how she had to get someone else to propose it).

Today Christine helps runs the Foresight Institute, which fills a gap left by for-profit technology companies – predicting how new revolutionary technologies could go wrong, and ensuring we steer clear of the downsides.

We dive into:

Can technology ‘move fast and break things’ without eventually breaking the world? Would it be better for technology to advance more quickly, or more slowly?
Whether the poor security of computer systems poses a catastrophic risk for the world.
Could all our essential services be taken down at once? And if so, what can be done about it? Christine makes a radical proposal for solving the problem.
Will AIs designed for wide-scale automated hacking make computers more or less secure?
Would it be good to radically extend human lifespan? Is it sensible to cryogenically freeze yourself in the hope of being resurrected in the future?
Could atomically precise manufacturing (nanotechnology) really work? Why was it initially so controversial and why did people stop worrying about it?
Should people who try to do good in their careers work long hours and take low salaries? Or should they take care of themselves first of all?
How she thinks the the effective altruism community resembles the scene she was involved with when she was young, and where it might be going wrong.

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#8 – Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published September 27th, 2017

Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before being killed for human consumption. Despite the enormous scale of suffering this causes, the issue is largely neglected, with only about $50 million dollars spent each year tackling the problem globally.

Over the last two years Lewis Bollard – Project Officer for Farm Animal Welfare at Open Philanthropy – has conducted extensive research into the best ways to eliminate animal suffering in farms as soon as possible.

This has resulted in $30 million in grants, making Open Philanthropy one of the largest funders in the area.

Our conversation covers almost every approach being taken, which ones work, how individuals can best contribute through their careers, as well as:

How young people can set themselves up to contribute to scientific research into meat alternatives
How genetic manipulation of chickens has caused them to suffer much more than their ancestors, but could also be used to make them better off
Why Lewis is skeptical of vegan advocacy
Open Phil’s grants to improve animal welfare in China, India and South America
Why Lewis thinks insect farming would be worse than the status quo, and whether we should look for ‘humane’ insecticides
Why Lewis doubts that much can be done to tackle factory farming through legal advocacy or electoral politics
Which species of farm animals is best to focus on first
Whether fish and crustaceans are conscious, and if so what can be done for them
Many other issues

Listening to this episode is among the fastest ways to get up to speed on how animals are mistreated and the best ways to help them.

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#7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn't all bad

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published September 13th, 2017

The scientific revolution in the 16th century was one of the biggest societal shifts in human history, driven by the discovery of new and better methods of figuring out who was right and who was wrong.

Julia Galef – a well-known writer and researcher focused on improving human judgment, especially about high stakes questions – believes that if we could develop new techniques to resolve disagreements, predict the future and make sound decisions together, we could again dramatically improve the world. We brought her in to talk about her ideas.

Julia has hosted the Rationally Speaking podcast since 2010, co-founded the Center for Applied Rationality in 2012, and is currently working for Open Philanthropy on an investigation of expert disagreements.

This interview complements a new detailed review of whether and how to follow Julia’s career path

We ended up speaking about a wide range of topics, including:

Her research on how people can have productive intellectual disagreements.
Why she once planned on becoming an urban designer.
Why she doubts people are more rational than 200 years ago.
What the effective altruism community is doing wrong.
What makes her a fan of Twitter (while I think it’s dystopian).
Whether more people should write books.
Whether it’s a good idea to run a podcast, and how she grew her audience.
Why saying you don’t believe X often won’t convince people you don’t.
Why she started a PhD in economics but then quit.
Whether she would recommend an unconventional ‘public intellectual’ career like her own.
Whether the incentives in the intelligence community actually support sound thinking.
Whether big institutions will actually pick up new tools for improving decision-making if they are developed.
How to start out pursuing a career in which you also try to enhance human judgement and foresight.

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#6 – Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published September 6th, 2017

Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world that is flourishing or disintegrating – and indeed, whether they will ever be born at all – is in large part up to us. As such, the welfare of future generations should be our number one moral concern.

This conclusion holds true regardless of whether your moral framework is based on common sense, consequences, rules of ethical conduct, cooperating with others, virtuousness, keeping options open – or just a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in.

That’s the view of Dr Toby Ord, a philosophy Fellow at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the effective altruism community. In this episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast Dr Ord makes the case that aiming for a positive long-term future is likely the best way to improve the world.

We then discuss common objections to long-termism, such as the idea that benefits to future generations are less valuable than those to people alive now, or that we can’t meaningfully benefit future generations beyond taking the usual steps to improve the present.

Later the conversation turns to how individuals can and have changed the course of history, what could go wrong and why, and whether plans to colonise Mars would actually put humanity in a safer position than it is today.

This episode goes deep into one of the most distinctive features of 80,000 Hours’ advice on doing good. It’s likely the most in-depth discussion of how we and the effective altruism community think about the long term future, and why we so often give it top priority.

If you prefer a book, Dr Toby Ord, an Oxford philosopher and advisor to 80,000 Hours, has recently published The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity which gives an overview of the moral importance of future generations, and what we can do to help them today.

We’ll mail you the book, for free

Join the 80,000 Hours newsletter and we’ll send you a free copy of the book.

We’ll also send you updates on our latest research, opportunities to work on existential risk, and news from the author.

If you’re already on our newsletter, email us at [email protected] to get a copy.

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#5 – Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published August 28th, 2017

Quantitative financial trading is one of the highest paying parts of the world’s highest paying industry. 25 to 30 year olds with outstanding maths skills can earn millions a year in an obscure set of ‘quant trading’ firms, where they program computers with predefined algorithms to trade very quickly and effectively.

This makes it an attractive workplace for people who want to ‘earn to give’, and we know several people who are able to donate over a million dollars a year to effective charities by working in quant trading. Who are these people? What is the job like? And is there a risk that their trading work directly harms the world?

To learn about all this I spoke at length with Alexander Gordon-Brown, a Giving What We Can member who has worked as a quant trader in London for the last three and a half years and donated hundreds of thousands of pounds. We covered:

What quant traders do and how much they earn;
Whether their work is beneficial or harmful for the world;
How to figure out if you’re a good fit for quant trading, and if so how to break into the industry;
Whether Alex enjoys the work and finds it motivating, as well as what alternatives careers he considered;
What variety of positions are on offer in quant trading, and what the culture is like in the various firms;
How he decides where to donate, and whether he has persuaded his colleagues to join him in becoming major philanthropists.

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#4 – Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them

Podcast by Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel · Published August 23rd, 2017

What natural disaster is most likely to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years?

Terrorism? Famine? An asteroid?

Actually it’s probably a pandemic: a deadly new disease that spreads out of control. We’ve recently seen the risks with Ebola and swine flu, but they pale in comparison to the Spanish flu which killed 3% of the world’s population in 1918 to 1920. If a pandemic of that scale happened again today, 200 million would die.

Looking back further, the Black Death killed 30 to 60% of Europe’s population, which would today be two to four billion globally.

The world is woefully unprepared to deal with new diseases. Many countries have weak or non-existent health services. Diseases can spread worldwide in days due to air travel. And international efforts to limit the spread of new diseases are slow, if they happen at all.

Even more worryingly, scientific advances are making it easier to create diseases much worse than anything nature could throw at us – whether by accident or deliberately.

In this in-depth interview I speak to Howie Lempel, who spent years studying pandemic preparedness for Open Philanthropy. We spend the first 20 minutes covering his work as a foundation grant-maker, then discuss how bad the pandemic problem is, why it’s probably getting worse, and what can be done about it. In the second half of the interview we go through what you personally could study and where you could work to tackle one of the worst threats facing humanity.

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#3 – Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published July 21st, 2017

Just two years ago OpenAI didn’t exist. It’s now among the most elite groups of machine learning researchers. They’re trying to make an AI that’s smarter than humans and have $1b at their disposal.

Even stranger for a Silicon Valley start-up, it’s not a business, but rather a nonprofit founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman among others, to ensure the benefits of AI are distributed broadly to all of society.

I did a long interview with one of its first machine learning researchers, Dr Dario Amodei, to learn about:

OpenAI’s latest plans and research progress.
His paper Concrete Problems in AI Safety, which outlines five specific ways machine learning algorithms can act in dangerous ways their designers don’t intend – something OpenAI has to work to avoid.
How listeners can best go about pursuing a career in machine learning and AI development themselves.

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