EA Talks

For many careers, individuals have to spend decades developing their expertise and influence. In this talk Joan claims that full time, post graduate opportunities in EA field building on university campuses may be an exception to this general principle. These opportunities provide outsized impact for individuals in their early twenties. In addition, she outlines career capital and personal development benefits of these roles and provides advice for how an individual might know if they are a good fit.This talk was taken from EA Global: London 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

A key concern of the effective altruism community is the risk that highly engaged community members lose interest in EA (value drift). This might be especially true for those who don’t work for EA-aligned organizations. EA workplace and professional groups might be a potential countermeasure. Promising paths for impact may be strategies to attract and retain highly engaged community members and to offer support for EA allies to continuously transition towards a high impact career. The panel will discuss key uncertainties, paths to impact and some early signs of success focusing on the examples of the EA finance and consulting networks. Panellists:Devon Fritz | Co-founder, High Impact ProfessionalsJoan Gass | Managing Director, Centre for Effective AltruismJona Glade | Founder, Effective Altruism and Consulting NetworkMeg Tong | Quantitative Strategist, Morgan StanleyThis talk was taken from EA Global London 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation. Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

If you are doing direct work - research, policy, operations - it’s easy to be focused on your day-to-day work. Max claims that you should also consider spending some time mentoring and advising younger people, building the field you want to be a part of in five years’ time. He also shares some prompts and ideas for how you can do this.This talk was taken from EA Global: London 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

What career strategy should you follow if you’re aiming for impact? Holden Karnofsky recently wrote up his perspective on career choice for longtermists on the EA forum - focusing on building aptitudes. Habiba will run through that framework and highlight some things she personally thinks are useful and some reservations she has.This talk was taken from EA Global: London 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation. Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

One of the most important parts of reasoning well involves understanding how to change your beliefs in response to new information. Unfortunately, this is something almost none of us does well without training. In this workshop, Anna will walk you through the odds formulation of Bayes’ Theorem in order to identify the three independent components we need to update properly. Since Bayesian updating on the fly can be hard, you’ll practice implementing a bundle of trigger-action plans that studies have shown to be successful in helping people respond more accurately to new evidence.This talk was taken from EA Global London 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation. Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

In this episode, Rob Wiblin interviews American journalist Ezra Klein on the 80,000 Hours Podcast. Ezra first rose to prominence in the mid-2000s for his individual blogging, before being picked up to blog for The American Prospect and then the Washington Post. In 2014, he co-founded the news website Vox.com, where he served as Executive Director and hosted the podcast The Ezra Klein Show. While at Vox, Ezra helped start the Future Perfect vertical, which runs evidence-driven stories about a variety of topics, many of which are related to focus areas in effective altruism.  In 2020 he published the book Why We're Polarized. In January, he left Vox to start a new column and host a revamped Ezra Klein Show at the New York Times.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

As Chief Executive Officer, Holden sets the strategy and oversees the work of Open Philanthropy, which identifies outstanding giving opportunities and grants hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Holden graduated from Harvard University in 2003 with a degree in social studies, and spent the next several years in the hedge fund industry before co-founding GiveWell in 2007. He began co-developing Open Philanthropy (initially called GiveWell Labs) in 2011.This talk was taken from EA Global: Reconnect 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

Julia Wise (Community Liaison at the Centre for Effective Altruism) hosts a series of four conversations exploring some of the common challenges faced by people in the effective altruism community.This talk was taken from EA Global: Reconnect 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

Toby Ord is a moral philosopher at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute and the author of The Precipice. His work focuses on the big-picture questions facing humanity. His current research is on avoiding the threat of human extinction, which he considers to be among the most pressing and neglected issues we face. His earlier work explored the ethics of global health and global poverty, which led him to create Giving What We Can, whose members have pledged hundreds of millions of pounds to the most effective charities helping to improve the world. He also co-founded the wider effective altruism movement. This talk was taken from EA Global: Reconnect 2021. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

Eva discusses the challenges to choosing the most cost-effective causes that are due to uncertainty or lack of knowledge. After describing the problem, Eva presents some possible ways forward. Eva Vivalt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Vivalt’s main research interests are in investigating stumbling blocks to evidence-based policy decisions, including methodological issues, how evidence is interpreted, and the use of forecasting. Dr. Vivalt is also a PI on Y Combinator Research’s basic income RCT and has other interests in labor economics, development, and global priorities research. Dr. Vivalt is the Founder of AidGrade, a research institute that generates and synthesizes evidence in international development, and Co-Founder of the Social Science Prediction Platform, a platform to coordinate the collection of forecasts of research results.Dr. Vivalt holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley and previously worked with the Development Economics Research Group at the World Bank. Prior to the Ph.D., Dr. Vivalt completed an M.Phil. in Development Studies at the University of Oxford on a Commonwealth Scholarship. Dr. Vivalt has visited the Department of Economics at Yale University and Stanford University and was previously a Senior Lecturer (Australian for Assistant Professor) at the Australian National University. Dr. Vivalt has also visited, and is a Research Collaborator at, the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.This talk was taken from EA Global Asia and Pacific 2020. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.