EA Talks

The EA Forum is the central place to discuss effective altruism. Many students worry that they don't have anything to contribute — but they probably do! In this talk, Aaron explains how you can use the Forum to share your views and get feedback from experts. He also leads a brainstorming session to help you think of ideas for new posts. Aaron runs the EA Newsletter and EA Forum, and helps with a wide range of other content projects. Before joining CEA, he worked in freelance positions throughout the EA community and spent a year earning-to-give at a software company. He holds a BA in cognitive science from Yale University, where he wrote a thesis on how charities can improve their communication with donors.  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.

Jonathan explores his experience organizing the graduate conference for his department (Ethics and Public Affairs, Carleton University). He outlines how he attempted to set a theme that would allow for effective altruism research topics, and what he would plan to do differently next time. Jon formerly served as the Director of Community, Director of Outreach, and Assistant Executive Director for Giving What We Can. In the past, he volunteered for a number of other poverty oriented non-profits, including a university chapter for the World Food Program he founded at his previous university. He holds a Master's degree in Philosophy from Oxford. This talk was taken from EA Student Summit 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.

Cullen discusses promising options for law students and lawyers to do good from an effective altruism perspective. His talk draws on experience from the AI policy field; the founding of the Legal Priorities Project; and informal discussions with other lawyers on how to do the most good.Cullen O'Keefe is a lawyer and policy researcher interested in improving the governance of artificial intelligence using the principles of Effective Altruism. In May 2019, he received a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. he currently works as Associate Counsel for Policy & Governance at OpenAI.Cullen is also a Research Affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI at the Future of Humanity Institute; Founding Advisor and Research Affiliate at the Legal Priorities Project; and a VP at the O’Keefe Family Foundation.His  research focuses on the law, policy, and governance of advanced artificial intelligence. To learn more, visit his personal website, cullenokeefe.com.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.

Juan presents the latest research on industrial food solutions for feeding everyone in the case of food-related global catastrophic risks. He focuses on sun-blocking global food catastrophes such as large asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions and nuclear winter. The solutions presented include single-cell protein (SCP) from natural gas or from hydrogen and CO2, sugar from lignocellulosic biomass, and synthetic margarine from petroleum.Juan García Martínez is a Research Assistant at Alliance to Feed the Earth In Disasters. Juan obtained his master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Twente and went on to join ALLFED as a research associate, where he had volunteered prior to finishing his studies. He has done research on carbon dioxide capture and utilization with his MSc thesis and his internship at the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, and is eager to apply his energy and knowledge to new research on making humanity’s food system more resilient. 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.

Rossa gives a high-level introduction to global priorities research (GPR). He discusses GPI's research plans, and which other organisations are doing GPR. He also offers some thoughts about what students could do to find out more about GPR.Rossa O'Keeffe-O'Donovan is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Economics at Nuffield College and the Assistant Director of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford. He completed my PhD in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2017. Before Penn, Rossa completed the M.Sc. in Economics for Development at the University of Oxford.His main research interests are in empirical microeconomics:Development economicsNetworks and peer effectsPublic goodsStructural estimationEffective 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.

Asia-Pacific is home to most of the world's farm animals, and some of the best opportunities to help them. Lewis outlines the current state of farm animal welfare and alternative protein opportunities across the region, including what's changed in 2020. Lewis Bollard leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farm Animal Welfare. Prior to joining Open Philanthropy, he worked as Policy Advisor & International Liaison to the CEO at The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Prior to that, he was a litigation fellow at HSUS, a law student, and an associate consultant at Bain & Company. He has a B.A. from Harvard University in Social Studies and a JD from Yale Law School. 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.

Growing meat directly from plants, microbes, and animal cells will allow us to build a food system that is better for human, animal, and planetary health. However, catalyzing this paradigm shift is a vast, multidisciplinary effort that requires scientists and engineers from disciplines ranging from tissue engineering and synthetic biology to computational science and chemical engineering. This workshop explored the state of plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation-derived meat research with a focus on illuminating the white spaces in alternative protein science that need to be filled if we're to feasibly feed the world with these novel food technologies and power a transition away from industrial animal agriculture. Amy helps lead GFI’s efforts to transform universities into engines for alternative protein research and education. She supports students and researchers in developing research clusters, addressing key technological bottlenecks, and building the academic ecosystems needed to power the future of food. Amy has a background in global health, education, effective altruism, and design thinking. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University and is thrilled to be devoting her career to accelerating alternative proteins in the service of human, animal, and planetary health. 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.

How can we build (super) intelligent machines that are robustly aligned with human values? AI alignment researchers strive to meet this challenge, but currently draw upon a relatively narrow set of philosophical perspectives common in effective altruism and computer science. This could pose risks in a world where human values are complex, plural, and fragile. Xuan discusses how these risks might be mitigated by greater philosophical pluralism, describing several problems in AI alignment where non-Western philosophies might provide insight. Tan Zhi Xuan is a multi-disciplinary researcher broadly interested in cognitive approaches to building AI, so as to better understand and conform to human preferences, intentions, norms, and values. Current projects include developing probabilistic programming frameworks for Bayesian inverse planning and goal inference.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.

Hauke reviews international agreements to spend a percentage of GDP on public goods such as aid (0.7%), defence (NATO’s 2% target), R&D, global governance, etc. He shows how these agreements interact with priorities in effective altruism because they are large in scale, solve (global) public good dilemmas, and relate to differential technological development. Finally, he argues that we should advocate for a new international agreement to spend 1% of GDP on global risk reduction. Hauke did a PhD in Neuroscience and was planning to go into academia. But after reading our research, he applied to all our top recommended careers: jobs in German politics, consulting, tech-startups and our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s now Director of Research at Giving What We Can, where he researches which charities most effectively alleviate extreme poverty. 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.

This talk is a friendly introduction to the formal model of learning from new evidence called "Bayesian updating". The Bayesian rule for updating is the most general account of how evidence works, encompassing and explaining the (limited) usefulness of statistical ideas like p-values and confidence intervals. This talk will show you how to do Bayesian updating in your head, using a simple formulation equivalent to the much more unwieldy equation known as 'Bayes' theorem.' David Manley is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research has been mainly about semantics, ontology, probability, and evidence. But lately He has been thinking about conditions for rationality and well-being—not just for individual people, but also for groups, animals, and other cognitive systems. This talk was taken from EA Student Summit 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.