Podcast

#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

By , and · Published December 16th, 2019

What is it like to be you right now? You’re seeing this text on the screen, you smell the coffee next to you, feel the warmth of the cup, and hear your housemates arguing about whether Home Alone was better than Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experiences.

Now imagine beings that are identical to humans, except for one thing: they lack conscious experience. If you spill that coffee on them, they’ll jump like anyone else, but inside they’ll feel no pain and have no thoughts: the lights are off.

The concept of these so-called ‘philosophical zombies’ was popularised by today’s guest — celebrated philosophy professor David Chalmers — in order to explore the nature of consciousness. In a forthcoming book he poses a classic ‘trolley problem’:

Many people think you should divert the trolley, precisely because the lack of conscious experience means the moral status of the zombies is greatly reduced, or absent entirely.

So, which features of consciousness qualify someone for moral consideration? One view is that the only conscious states that matter are those that have a positive or negative quality, like pleasure and suffering. But Dave’s intuitions are quite different.

He asks us to consider the ‘Vulcans’. If you’ve never seen Star Trek, Vulcans experience rich forms of cognitive and sensory consciousness; they see and hear and reflect on the world around them. But they’re incapable of experiencing pleasure or pain.

Does such a being lack moral status?

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#66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, EA, how his moral views have changed, & rescuing children drowning in ponds

By , and · Published December 5th, 2019

In 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory opinions about abortion. But the controversy stemmed from Practical Ethics — a book he’d actually released way back in 1979. It took a German translation ten years on for protests to kick off.

According to Singer, he honestly didn’t expect this view to be as provocative as it became, and he certainly wasn’t aiming to stir up trouble and get attention.

But after the protests and the increasing coverage of his work in German media, the previously flat sales of Practical Ethics shot up. And the negative attention he received ultimately led him to a weekly opinion column in The New York Times.

Singer points out that as a result of this increased attention, many more people also read the rest of the book — which includes chapters with a real ability to do good, covering global poverty, animal ethics, and other important topics. So should people actively try to court controversy with one view, in order to gain attention for another more important one?

Perhaps sometimes, but controversy can also just have bad consequences. His critics may view him as someone who says whatever he thinks, hang the consequences. But as Singer tells it, he gives public relations considerations plenty of thought.

One example is that Singer opposes efforts to advocate for open borders. Not because he thinks a world with freedom of movement is a bad idea per se, but rather because it may help elect leaders like Mr Trump.

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#65 – Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years of combating WMD terrorism

By and · Published November 19th, 2019

Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins has had an incredible career in diplomacy and global security.

Today she’s a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of Global Connections Empowering Global Change, where she works on global health, infectious disease and defence innovation. And in 2017 she founded her own nonprofit, the Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS).

But in this interview we focus on her time as Ambassador at the U.S. Department of State under the Obama administration, where she worked for eight years as Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.

In that role, Bonnie coordinated the Department of State’s work to prevent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism with programmes funded by other U.S. departments and agencies, and as well as other countries.

What was it like to be an ambassador focusing on an issue, rather than an ambassador of a country? Bonnie says the travel was exhausting. She could find herself in Africa one week, and Indonesia the next. She’d meet with folks going to New York for meetings at the UN one day, then hold her own meetings at the White House the next.

Each event would have a distinct purpose. For one, she’d travel to Germany as a US Representative, talking about why the two countries should extend their partnership. For another, she could visit the Food and Agriculture Organization to talk about why they need to think more about biosecurity issues. No day was like the last.

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#64 – Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyranny

By and · Published October 25th, 2019

November 3 2020, 10:32PM: CNN, NBC, and FOX report that Donald Trump has narrowly won Florida, and with it, re-election.

November 3 2020, 11:46PM: The NY Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal report that some group has successfully hacked electronic voting systems across the country, including Florida. The malware has spread to tens of thousands of machines and deletes any record of its activity, so the returning officer of Florida concedes they actually have no idea who won the state — and don’t see how they can figure it out.

What on Earth happens next?

Today’s guest — world-renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier — thinks this scenario is plausible, and the ensuing chaos would sow so much distrust that half the country would never accept the election result.

Unfortunately the US has no recovery system for a situation like this, unlike Parliamentary democracies, which can just rerun the election a few weeks later.

The constitution says the state legislature decides, and they can do so however they like; one tied local election in Texas was settled by playing a hand of poker.

Elections serve two purposes. The first is the obvious one: to pick a winner. The second, but equally important, is to convince the loser to go along with it — which is why hacks often focus on convincing the losing side that the election wasn’t fair.

Schneier thinks there’s a need to agree how this situation should be handled before something like it happens, and America falls into severe infighting as everyone tries to turn the situation to their political advantage.

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Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long term is really possible

By and · Published September 25th, 2019

Today on our podcast feed, we’re releasing some interviews I recently recorded for two other shows, Love Your Work and The Neoliberal Podcast. 

To listen, subscribe to the 80,000 Hours Podcast by searching for 80,000 Hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or SoundCloud.

If you’ve listened to absolutely everything on our podcast feed, you’ll have heard four interviews with me already, but fortunately I think these two don’t include too much repetition, and I’ve gotten a decent amount of positive feedback on both. 

First up, I speak with David Kadavy on Love Your Work. 

This is a particularly personal and relaxed interview. We talk about all sorts of things, including nicotine gum, plastic straw bans, whether recycling is important, how many lives a doctor saves, why interviews should go for at least 2 hours, how athletes doping could be good for the world, and many other fun topics. 

At some points we even actually discuss effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, but you can easily skip through those bits if they feel too familiar. 

The second interview is with Jeremiah Johnson on the Neoliberal Podcast. It starts at 2 hours and 15 minutes into this recording. 

Neoliberalism in the sense used by this show is not the free market fundamentalism you might associate with that term. Rather it’s a centrist or even centre-left view that supports things like social liberalism, multilateral international institutions, trade, high rates of migration, racial justice, inclusive institutions, financial redistribution, prioritising the global poor, market urbanism, and environmental sustainability. 

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#63 – Vitalik Buterin on effective altruism, better ways to fund public goods, the blockchain’s problems so far, and how it could yet change the world

By and · Published September 3rd, 2019

Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has had major consequences. It has changed the course of major wars, made it possible to do business on the internet, and enabled private communication between both law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Could it have similarly significant consequences in future?

Today’s guest — Vitalik Buterin — is world-famous as the lead developer of Ethereum, a successor to the cryptographic-currency Bitcoin, which added the capacity for smart contracts and decentralised organisations. Buterin first proposed Ethereum at the age of 20, and by the age of 23 its success had likely made him a billionaire.

At the same time, far from indulging hype about these so-called ‘blockchain’ technologies, he has been candid about the limited good accomplished by Bitcoin and other currencies developed using cryptographic tools — and the breakthroughs that will be needed before they can have a meaningful social impact. In his own words, “blockchains as they currently exist are in many ways a joke, right?”

But Buterin is not just a realist. He’s also an idealist, who has been helping to advance big ideas for new social institutions that might help people better coordinate to pursue their shared goals.

By combining theories in economics and mechanism design with advances in cryptography, he has been pioneering the new interdiscriplinary field of ‘cryptoeconomics’. Economist Tyler Cowen has observed that, “at 25, Vitalik appears to repeatedly rediscover important economics results from famous papers — without knowing about the papers at all.”

Though its applications have faced major social and technical problems, Ethereum has been used to crowdsource investment for projects and enforce contracts without the need for a central authority. But the proposals for new ways of coordinating people are far more ambitious than that.

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#62 – Paul Christiano on whether we should leave a helpful message for future civilisations — just in case humanity dies out

By and · Published August 5th, 2019

Imagine that, one day, humanity dies out. At some point, many millions of years later, intelligent life might well evolve again. Is there any message we could leave that would reliably help them out?

In his second appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, machine learning researcher and polymath Paul Christiano suggests we try to answer this question with a related thought experiment: are there any messages we might want to send back to our ancestors in the year 1700 that would have made history likely to go in a better direction than it did? It seems there probably is.

We could tell them hard-won lessons from history; mention some research questions we wish we’d started addressing earlier; hand over all the social science we have that fosters peace and cooperation; and at the same time steer clear of engineering hints that would speed up the development of dangerous weapons.

But, as Christiano points out, even if we could satisfactorily figure out what we’d like to be able to tell our ancestors, that’s just the first challenge. We’d need to leave the message somewhere that they could identify and dig up. While there are some promising options, this turns out to be remarkably hard to do, as anything we put on the Earth’s surface quickly gets buried far underground.

But even if we figure out a satisfactory message, and a ways to ensure it’s found, a civilization this far in the future won’t speak any language like our own. And being another species, they presumably won’t share as many fundamental concepts with us as humans from 1700. If we knew a way to leave them thousands of books and pictures in a material that wouldn’t break down, would they be able to decipher what we meant to tell them, or would it simply remain a mystery?

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#61 – Helen Toner on the new 30-person research group in DC investigating how emerging technologies could affect national security

By and · Published July 17th, 2019

From 1870 to 1950, the introduction of electricity transformed life in the US and UK, as people gained access to lighting, radio and a wide range of household appliances for the first time. Electricity turned out to be a general purpose technology that could help with almost everything people did.

Some think machine learning could alter 21st century life in a similar way.

In addition to massively changing everyday life, past general purpose technologies have also changed the nature of war. For example, when electricity was introduced to the battlefield, commanders gained the ability to quickly communicate with units far away in the field.

How might international security be altered if the impact of machine learning is similar in scope to that of electricity? Today’s guest — Helen Toner — recently helped found the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University to help policymakers prepare for any such disruptive technical changes that might threaten international peace.

Their first focus is machine learning (ML), a technology which allows computers to recognise patterns, learn from them, and develop ‘intuitions’ that inform their judgement about future cases. This is something humans do constantly, whether we’re playing tennis, reading someone’s face, diagnosing a patient, or figuring out which business ideas are likely to succeed.

Sometimes these ML algorithms can seem uncannily insightful, and they’re only getting better over time. Ultimately a wide range of different ML algorithms could end up helping us with all kinds of decisions, just as electricity wakes us up, makes us coffee, and brushes our teeth — all in the first five minutes of our day.

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#60 – Accurately predicting the future is central to absolutely everything. Phil Tetlock has spent 40 years studying how to do it better.

By and · Published June 28th, 2019

Have you ever been infuriated by a doctor’s unwillingness to give you an honest, probabilistic estimate about what to expect? Or a lawyer who won’t tell you the chances you’ll win your case?

Their behaviour is so frustrating because accurately predicting the future is central to every action we take. If we can’t assess the likelihood of different outcomes we’re in a complete bind, whether the decision concerns war and peace, work and study, or Black Mirror and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Which is why the research of Professor Philip Tetlock is relevant for all of us each and every day.

He has spent 40 years as a meticulous social scientist, collecting millions of predictions from tens of thousands of people, in order to figure out how good humans really are at foreseeing the future, and what habits of thought allow us to do better.

Along with other psychologists, he identified that many ordinary people are attracted to a ‘folk probability’ that draws just three distinctions — ‘impossible’, ‘possible’ and ‘certain’ — and which leads to major systemic mistakes. But with the right mindset and training we can become capable of accurately discriminating between differences as fine as 56% versus 57% likely.

In the aftermath of Iraq and WMDs the US intelligence community hired him to prevent the same ever happening again, and his guide — Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction — became a bestseller back in 2014.

That was five years ago. In today’s interview, Tetlock explains how his research agenda continues to advance, today using the game Civilization 5 to see how well we can predict what would have happened in elusive counterfactual worlds we never get to see, and discovering how simple algorithms can complement or substitute for human judgement.

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#59 – Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it’s so often abrupt & unpredictable

By and · Published June 17th, 2019

It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn’t despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition.

The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably.

In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism.

How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?

Sunstein — co-author of Nudge, Obama White House official, and by far the most cited legal scholar of the late 2000s — aims to unravel the mystery and figure out the implications in his new book How Change Happens.

He pulls together three phenomena which social scientists have studied in recent decades: preference falsification, variable thresholds for action, and group polarisation. If Sunstein is to be believed, together these are a cocktail for social shifts that are chaotic and fundamentally unpredictable.

In brief, people constantly misrepresent their true views, even to close friends and family. They themselves aren’t quite sure how socially acceptable their feelings would have to become before they revealed them or joined a campaign for change. And a chance meeting between a few strangers can be the spark that radicalises a handful of people who then find a message that can spread their beliefs to millions.

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#58 – Pushmeet Kohli on DeepMind’s plan to make AI systems robust & reliable, why it’s a core issue in AI design, and how to succeed at AI research

By and · Published June 3rd, 2019

When you’re building a bridge, responsibility for making sure it won’t fall over isn’t handed over to a few ‘bridge not falling down engineers’. Making sure a bridge is safe to use and remains standing in a storm is completely central to the design, and indeed the entire project.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, commentators often distinguish between enhancing the capabilities of machine learning systems and enhancing their safety. But to Pushmeet Kohli, principal scientist and research team leader at DeepMind, research to make AI robust and reliable is no more a side-project in AI design than keeping a bridge standing is a side-project in bridge design.

Far from being an overhead on the ‘real’ work, it’s an essential part of making AI systems work in any sense. We don’t want AI systems to be out of alignment with our intentions, and that consideration must arise throughout their development.

Professor Stuart Russell — co-author of the most popular AI textbook — has gone as far as to suggest that if this view is right, it may be time to retire the term ‘AI safety research’ altogether.

With the goal of designing systems that reliably do what we want, DeepMind have recently published work on important technical challenges for the ML community.

For instance, Pushmeet is looking for efficient ways to test whether a system conforms to the desired specifications, even in peculiar situations, by creating an ‘adversary’ that proactively seeks out the worst failures possible. If the adversary can efficiently identify the worst-case input for a given model, DeepMind can catch rare failure cases before deploying a model in the real world. In the future single mistakes by autonomous systems may have very large consequences, which will make even small failure probabilities unacceptable.

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#57 – Tom Kalil on how to have a big impact in government & huge organisations, based on 16 years’ experience in the White House

By and · Published April 23rd, 2019

You’re 29 years old, and you’ve just been given a job in the White House. How do you quickly figure out how the US Executive Branch behemoth actually works, so that you can have as much impact as possible – before you quit or get kicked out?

That was the challenge put in front of Tom Kalil in 1993.

He had enough success to last a full 16 years inside the Clinton and Obama administrations, working to foster the development of the internet, then nanotechnology, and then cutting-edge brain modelling, among other things.

But not everyone figures out how to move the needle. In today’s interview, Tom shares his experience with how to increase your chances of getting an influential role in government, and how to make the most of the opportunity if you get in.

He believes that Congressional gridlock leads people to greatly underestimate how much the Executive Branch can and does do on its own every day. Decisions by individuals change how billions of dollars are spent; regulations are enforced, and then suddenly they aren’t; and a single sentence in the State of the Union can get civil servants to pay attention to a topic that would otherwise go ignored.

Over years at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, ‘Team Kalil’ built up a white board of principles. For example, ‘the schedule is your friend’: setting a meeting date with the President can force people to finish something, where they otherwise might procrastinate.

Or ‘talk to who owns the paper’. People would wonder how Tom could get so many lines into the President’s speeches. The answer was “figure out who’s writing the speech, find them with the document, and tell them to add the line.” Obvious, but not something most were doing.

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#56 – Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. We ask Persis Eskander what — if anything — should we do about that

By and · Published April 15th, 2019

Elephants in chains at travelling circuses; pregnant pigs trapped in coffin-sized crates at factory farms; deers living in the wild. We should welcome the last as a pleasant break from the horror, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. While we tend to have a romanticised view of nature, life in the wild includes a range of extremely negative experiences.

Most animals are hunted by predators, and constantly have to remain vigilant lest they be killed, and perhaps experience the terror of being eaten alive. Resource competition often leads to chronic hunger or starvation. Their diseases and injuries are never treated. In winter wild animals freeze to death and in droughts they die of heat or thirst.

There are fewer than 20 people in the world dedicating their lives to researching these problems.

But according to Persis Eskander, researcher at Open Philanthropy, if we sum up the negative experiences of all wild animals, their sheer number – trillions to quintillions, depending on which you count – could make the scale of the problem larger than most other near-term concerns.

Persis urges us to recognise that nature isn’t inherently good or bad, but rather the result of an amoral evolutionary process. For those that can’t survive the brutal indifference of their environment, life is often a series of bad experiences, followed by an even worse death.

But should we actually intervene? How do we know what animals are sentient? How often do animals really feel hunger, cold, fear, happiness, satisfaction, boredom, and intense agony? Are there long-term technologies that could some day allow us to massively improve wild animal welfare?

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#55 – Mark Lutter on trying to end poverty by founding well-governed ‘charter’ cities, ft Tamara Winter

By and · Published March 31st, 2019

Governance matters. Policy change quickly took China from famine to fortune; Singapore from swamps to skyscrapers; and Hong Kong from fishing village to financial centre. Unfortunately, many governments are hard to reform and — to put it mildly — it’s not easy to found a new country.

This has prompted poverty-fighters and political dreamers to look for creative ways to get new and better ‘pseudo-countries’ off the ground. The poor could then voluntarily migrate to in search of security and prosperity. And innovators would be free to experiment with new political and legal systems without having to impose their ideas on existing jurisdictions.

The ‘seasteading movement’ imagined founding new self-governing cities on the sea, but obvious challenges have kept that one on the drawing board. Nobel Prize winner and World Bank President Paul Romer suggested ‘charter cities’, where a host country would volunteer for another country with better legal institutions to effectively govern some of its territory. But that idea too ran aground for political, practical and personal reasons.

Now Dr Mark Lutter and Tamara Winter, of The Center for Innovative Governance Research (CIGR), are reviving the idea of ‘charter cities’, with some modifications. Gone is the idea of transferring sovereignty. Instead these cities would look more like the ‘special economic zones’ that worked miracles for Taiwan and China among others. But rather than keep the rest of the country’s rules with a few pieces removed, they hope to start from scratch, opting in to the laws they want to keep, in order to leap forward to “best practices in commercial law.”

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#54 – Askell, Brundage & Clark on whether policy has a hope of keeping up with AI advances

By and · Published March 19th, 2019

Dactyl is an AI system that can manipulate objects with a human-like robot hand. OpenAI Five is an AI system that can defeat humans at the video game Dota 2. The strange thing is they were both developed using the same general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm.

How is this possible and what does it show?

In today’s interview Jack Clark, Policy Director at OpenAI, explains that from a computational perspective using a hand and playing Dota 2 are remarkably similar problems.

A robot hand needs to hold an object, move its fingers, and rotate it to the desired position. In Dota 2 you control a team of several different people, moving them around a map to attack an enemy.

Your hand has 20 or 30 different joints to move. The number of main actions in Dota 2 is 10 to 20, as you move your characters around a map.

When you’re rotating an objecting in your hand, you sense its friction, but you don’t directly perceive the entire shape of the object. In Dota 2, you’re unable to see the entire map and perceive what’s there by moving around — metaphorically ‘touching’ the space.

Read our new in-depth article on becoming an AI policy specialist: The case for building expertise to work on US AI policy, and how to do it

This is true of many apparently distinct problems in life. Compressing different sensory inputs down to a fundamental computational problem which we know how to solve only requires the right general purpose software.

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#53 – Kelsey Piper on whether journalists have room to write about important things

By and · Published February 27th, 2019

“Politics. Business. Opinion. Science. Sports. Animal welfare. Existential risks.” Is this a plausible future lineup for major news outlets?

Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and given very little editorial direction, Vox’s Future Perfect aspires to be more or less that.

Competition in the news business creates pressure to write quick pieces on topical political issues that can drive lots of clicks with just a few hours’ work.

But according to Kelsey Piper, staff writer for this new section on Vox’s website focused on effective altruist themes, Future Perfect’s goal is to run in the opposite direction and make room for more substantive coverage that’s not tied to the news cycle.

They hope that in the long-term, talented writers from other outlets across the political spectrum, can also be attracted to tackle these topics.

Some skeptics of the project have questioned whether this general coverage of global catastrophic risks actually helps reduce them.

Kelsey responds: if you decide to dedicate your life to AI safety research, what’s the likely reaction from your family and friends? Do they think of you as someone about to join “that weird Silicon Valley apocalypse thing”? Or do they, having read about the issues widely, simply think “Oh, yeah. That seems important. I’m glad you’re working on it.”

Kelsey believes that really matters, and is determined by broader coverage of these kinds of topics.

If that’s right, is journalism a plausible pathway for doing the most good with your career, or did Kelsey just get particularly lucky? After all, journalism is a shrinking industry without an obvious revenue model to fund many writers looking into the world’s most pressing problems.

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#52 – Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better, and how to get them

By and · Published February 8th, 2019

Imagine you were put in charge of planning out a country’s economy – determining who should work where and what they should make – without prices. You would surely struggle to collect all the information you need about what people want and who can most efficiently make it from an office building in the capital city.

Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society and solve this so-called ‘knowledge problem’.

But when it comes to politics and voting – which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals – the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs turns to skepticism.

Today’s guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won’t have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them. Just last year he wrote Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society with Eric Posner, but he has already moved on, saying “in the 6 months since the book came out I’ve made more intellectual progress than in the whole 10 years before that.”

He believes we desperately need more efficient, equitable and decentralised ways to organise society that take advantage of what each person knows, and his research agenda has already made some breakthroughs.

Despite a background in the best economics departments in the world – Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago – he is too worried for the future to sit in his office writing papers. Instead he has left the academy to try to inspire a social movement, RadicalxChange, with a vision of social reform as expansive as his own. (You can sign up for their conference in March here.)

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#51 – Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age

By and · Published January 29th, 2019

Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What’s the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?

Martin Gurri spent decades as a CIA analyst and in his 2014 book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, predicted political turbulence for an entirely different reason: new communication technologies were flipping the balance of power between the public and traditional authorities.

In 1959 the President could control the narrative by leaning on his friends at four TV stations, who felt it was proper to present the nation’s leader in a positive light, no matter their flaws. Today, it’s impossible to prevent someone from broadcasting any grievance online, whether it’s a contrarian insight or an insane conspiracy theory.

According to Gurri, trust in society’s institutions – police, journalists, scientists and more – has been undermined by constant criticism from outsiders, and exposed to a cacophony of conflicting opinions on every issue the public takes fewer truths for granted. We are now free to see our leaders as the flawed human beings they always have been, and are not amused.

Suspicious they are being betrayed by elites, the public can also use technology to coordinate spontaneously and express its anger. Keen to ‘throw the bastards out’ – protesters take to the streets, united by what they don’t like, but without a shared agenda for how to move forward or the institutional infrastructure to figure out how to fix things. Some popular movements have come to view any attempt to exercise power over others as suspect.

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#50 – We could feed all eight billion people through a nuclear winter. David Denkenberger is working to make it practical.

By and · Published December 27th, 2018

If a nuclear winter or asteroid impact blocked the sun for years, our inability to grow food would result in billions dying of starvation, right? According to Dr David Denkenberger, co-author of Feeding Everyone No Matter What: no. If he’s to be believed, nobody need starve at all.

Even without the sun, David sees the Earth as a bountiful food source. Mushrooms farmed on decaying wood. Bacteria fed with natural gas. Fish and mussels supported by sudden upwelling of ocean nutrients – and many more.

Dr Denkenberger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and he’s out to spread the word that while a nuclear winter might be horrible, experts have been mistaken to assume that mass starvation is an inevitability. In fact, he says, the only thing that would prevent us from feeding the world is insufficient preparation.

Not content to just write a book pointing this out, David has gone on to found a growing nonprofit – the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters – to brace the world to feed everyone come what may. He expects that today 10% of people would find enough food to survive a massive disaster. In principle, if we did everything right, nobody need go hungry. But being more realistic about how much we’re likely to invest, David hopes a plan to inform people ahead of time would save 30%, and a decent research and development scheme 80%.

According to David’s published cost-benefit analyses, work on this problem may be able to save lives, in expectation, for under $100 each, making it an incredible investment.

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#49 – Rachel Glennerster on a year’s worth of education for under a dollar and other ‘best buys’ in development

By and · Published December 20th, 2018

If I told you it’s possible to deliver an extra year of ideal primary-level education for 30 cents, would you believe me? Hopefully not – the claim is absurd on its face.

But it may be true nonetheless. The very best education interventions are phenomenally cost-effective, but they’re not the kinds of things you’d expect, says this week’s guest, Dr Rachel Glennerster.

She’s Chief Economist at the UK’s foreign aid agency DFID, and used to run J-PAL, the world-famous anti-poverty research centre based at MIT’s Economics Department, where she studied the impact of a wide range of approaches to improving education, health, and political institutions. According to Glennerster:

“…when we looked at the cost effectiveness of education programs, there were a ton of zeros, and there were a ton of zeros on the things that we spend most of our money on. So more teachers, more books, more inputs, like smaller class sizes – at least in the developing world – seem to have no impact, and that’s where most government money gets spent.”

“But measurements for the top ones – the most cost effective programs – say they deliver 460 LAYS per £100 spent ($US130). LAYS are Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling. Each one is the equivalent of the best possible year of education you can have – Singapore-level.”

“…the two programs that come out as spectacularly effective… well, the first is just rearranging kids in a class.”

“You have to test the kids, so that you can put the kids who are performing at grade two level in the grade two class, and the kids who are performing at grade four level in the grade four class, even if they’re different ages – and they learn so much better. So that’s why it’s so phenomenally cost effective because, it really doesn’t cost anything.”

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