EA Talks

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.

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.

Joan explains why university groups are a focus area for CEA and gives some suggested goals for university groups to produce value.Joan Gass is the Managing Director for Centre for Effective Altruism. Joan works with Max on the executive team. Her roles include overseeing the Groups team, leading CEA’s work on the growth and onboarding of new community members, and providing input on organization-wide strategy. She has an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and an MPA in International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She previously worked at the strategy consulting firm Bain & Company, where she was a founding member of their Nigeria office. She also co-founded and directed a nonprofit in Uganda, and launched a fellowship related to catastrophic risks and emerging technology policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.This talk was taken from EA Global 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.

Karolina introduces Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), an organization dedicated to helping found and mentor new effective charities. Learn about the nonprofits CE has launched through its annual Incubation Program, and about the process of starting up and growing. Hear stories about the challenges and successes that a typical charity entrepreneur could face. Finally, discover how you can start your own career as a charity entrepreneur through the 2021 Program. Karolina is co-founder and Director of Research at Charity Entrepreneurship. There, she creates a research agenda and processes and leads the research team, aiming to find and compare the most evidence-based, cost-effective and neglected interventions in multiple cause areas. She also serves as a Fund Manager at the EA Animal Welfare Fund, and as a board member and consultant for various nonprofits and think tanks. Before Charity Entrepreneurship, she co-founded an organization to improve the impact of nonprofits and social enterprises; worked on measurement and evaluation; and was a researcher for IBM and the Jagiellonian University (JU). At the age of 22, she became a university teaching fellow, lecturing at JU’s Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.Nikita discusses the reasons she and her co-founder decided to start a flour fortification charity in India. She describes an ‘average’ day in a charity start-up and explains some of the highlights and challenges she has faced personally, as well as organisationally, during her time starting a charity.Nikita is the CEO and co-founder of Fortify Health. She previously worked in global health communications at Malaria Consortium.  She’s also worked as Research & Outreach Intern at the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Project Manager at Voenna Rampa Refugee Camp in Bulgaria. She graduated from University of Oxford with a BA in French and German, and is interested in animal welfare, mental health and tackling modern slavery. She enjoys cooking, language-learning, hiking and cycling.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.

Nick Beckstead oversees a substantial part of Open Philanthropy’s research and grantmaking related to global catastrophic risk reduction. Previously, Nick led the creation of their grantmaking programs in scientific research and effective altruism. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.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.

Amanda shares reasons to be excited about forecasting, walks through a process to forecast questions you care about, and shows how Ought’s tool, Elicit, can be helpful for this.From Amanda’s Website: Amanda Ngo works at Ought, a startup building tools to automate complex reasoning. Check out their forecasting product, Elicit! She love co-opting friends into social experiments, understanding how brains work, and figuring out what it means to live a good life.”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.

We have an amazing opportunity to significantly improve the world with the resources we have, if we use them effectively. Giving What We Can is a community of people committed to giving more, and giving more effectively.Luke Freeman manages Giving What We Can. He is also an active volunteer with various social impact focused projects (EAGxAustralia, Effective Altruism Australia, EA Sydney, Global Shapers Community). He has a background in marketing with a focus on growing early-stage technology startups (Positly, Sendle, TuShare, Coviu). He holds degrees and diplomas in media and communications from Macquarie University and Simon Fraser University.This talk was taken from EA Global 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.

Huw and Alex talk about some of the resources and events they’ve found most useful for helping group members with career planning. The workshop aims to be a broad overview, particularly for group leaders without much previous experience of guiding group members through career decisions.Huw Thomas develops resources for EA university groups, and assists them with strategy and planning. Before joining CEA, he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has been funded by a CEA community building grant to work on various projects, including leading the EA Oxford student group and launching the Student Career Mentoring Program.Alex studied Physics at Oxford University before working in operations at the Global Priorities Institute. He is particularly interested in opportunities for broad longtermism work and patient philanthropy and is planning on doing graduate study in Economics.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.

Talk of decoupling, an AI arms race, and a tech Cold War abounds. These prominent narratives are rooted in the core assumption of techno-nationalism – that the nation-state is the key unit of analysis for understanding the global technology landscape. Yet, technology advances in a globalizing world. Jeffrey Ding outlines the case for bringing techno-globalism back – not the “end of geography” version, which is an easy target, but a romantically realist version – into debates about the US-China tech relationship.As the China lead for the Centre for the Governance of AI, Jeffrey Ding researches China’s development of AI at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford. His work has been cited in the Washington Post, South China Morning Post, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg News, Quartz, and other outlets. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has worked at the U.S. Department of State and the Hong Kong Legislative Council. He is also reading for a D.Phil. in International Relations as a Rhodes Scholar 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.