Givewell

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This episode is brought to you by givwell. It's that time of year, again, where people are starting to make donations. But how are you supposed to feel confident that your donations are improving or saving lives effectively? Givewell has spent 14 years researching charitable organizations and onlye mends a few of the highest impact backed charities they've found. Over 50 thousand donors have used givewell to donate more than 750 million dollars. And rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save ten thousands of lives and improve the lives of millions more.

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what’s in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?

Plus we ask the AI ethics program “Ask Delphi” some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we’re saving that argument for a future episode).