Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours – Details, episodes & analysis

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Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours

The 80000 Hours team

Education

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/0d. Total Eps: 12

A collection of ten top episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, specifically selected to help listeners get up to speed on effective altruism as quickly as possible.

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Effective altruism in a nutshell

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 09:35

'Effective Altruism: An Introduction' is a collection of ten top episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast specifically selected to help listeners quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.

Here the host of the show — Rob Wiblin — briefly explains what effective altruism is all about, and what to expect from the rest of this series.

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Two: Dr Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 02:10:32

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 conversation from 2017, Toby makes the case that aiming for a positive long-term future is likely the best way to improve the world.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on September 6, 2017. Some related episodes include:

• #10 – Dr Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction
• #45 – stubborn attachments to maximising economic growth, making civilization more stable & respecting human rights• #68 – on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new priorities• #72 – on the precipice and humanity's potential futures• #73 – on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good• #86 – on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us

Three: Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 02:53:44

The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.

Today’s guest, Alexander Berger, leads Open Philanthropy’s ‘Global Health and Wellbeing’ programme, where he oversees around $175 million in grants each year, and ultimately aspires to disburse billions in the most impactful ways he and his team can identify.

In this conversation from 2021, Alexander explains the case in favour of adopting the ‘global health and wellbeing’ mindset, while going through the arguments for the longtermist approach that he finds most and least convincing.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on July 12, 2021. Some related episodes include:

#22 – Dr Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates
#37 – GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.
#83 – on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons

Four: Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 02:17:12

Will SpaceX land people on Mars in the next decade? Will North Korea give up their nuclear weapons? Will your friend turn up to dinner?

Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org has a process for working out such real life problems.

In this conversation from 2018, Spencer walks us through how to reason through difficult questions more accurately, and when we should expect to be overconfident or underconfident.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on August 7, 2018. Some related episodes include:

• #7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
• #11 – Dr Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm.
• #15 – Prof Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise• #30 – on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another• #40 – on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions.• #48 – on better living through the wisdom of computer science• #78 – on forecasting and measuring some of the most important drivers of AI progress

Five: Prof Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 01:52:46

Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races.

Throughout history we’ve consistently believed, as common sense, truly horrifying things by today’s standards. According to University of Oxford Professor Will MacAskill, it’s extremely likely that we’re in the same boat today. If we accept that we’re probably making major moral errors, how should we proceed?

In this conversation from 2018, Will makes the case that we need to develop a moral view that criticises common sense intuitions, and gives us a chance to move beyond them.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on January 19, 2018. Some related episodes include:

• #16 – Dr Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
• #42 – Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
• #67 – on the nature and ethics of consciousness• #68 – on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new priorities• #72 – on the precipice and humanity's potential futures• #73 – on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good• #86 – on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us

Six: Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 02:56:27

Imagine that humanity has two possible futures ahead of it: Either we’re going to have a huge future like that, in which trillions of people ultimately exist, or we’re going to wipe ourselves out quite soon, thereby ensuring that only around 100 billion people ever get to live.

If there are eventually going to be 1,000 trillion humans, what should we think of the fact that we seemingly find ourselves so early in history? If the future will have many trillions of people, the odds of us appearing so strangely early are very low indeed.

If we accept the analogy, maybe we can be confident that humanity is at a high risk of extinction based on this so-called ‘doomsday argument‘ alone.

There are many critics of this theoretical ‘doomsday argument’, and it may be the case that it logically doesn’t work. This is why Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — spent time investigating it, with the goal of ultimately making better philanthropic grants.

In this conversation from 2021, Ajeya and Rob discuss both the doomsday argument and the challenge Open Phil faces striking a balance between taking big ideas seriously, and not going all in on philosophical arguments that may turn out to be barking up the wrong tree entirely.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on January 19, 2021. Some related episodes include:

#45 – Prof Tyler Cowen's stubborn attachments to maximising economic growth, making civilization more stable & respecting human rights

Seven: Prof Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it better

Monday, April 12, 2021 • Duration 02:17:25

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.

In this conversation from 2019, we discuss how his work can be applied to your personal life to answer high-stakes questions, like how likely you are to thrive in a given career path, or whether your business idea will be a billion-dollar unicorn — or fall apart catastrophically.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on June 28, 2019. Some related episodes include:

• #7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
• #11 – Dr Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm. • #15 – on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise• #30 – on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another• #40 – on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions.• #48 – on better living through the wisdom of computer science• #78 – on forecasting and measuring some of the most important drivers of AI progress

Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours – Details, episodes & analysis

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Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other71

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other71

Apple Podcasts

Spotify