EA Talks

If you take actions that affect the future, you don’t just change the eventual welfare of people who have yet to exist — you actually influence which people exist in the first place. Typical moral principles, when applied to such actions, yield paradoxical results.In this academic session, Ben Grodeck, a PhD candidate in economics at Monash University, discusses the results of an experiment where individuals came face-to-face with this moral puzzle — and how an “identity-affecting” task led them to be less generous.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

Philip Tetlock is an expert on forecasting; he’s spent decades studying how people make predictions — from political pundits to CIA analysts. In this conversation, he discusses a wide range of topics, including prediction algorithms, the long-term future, and his Good Judgment Project (which identified common traits of the most skilled forecasters). To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

Paul Christiano, a researcher at OpenAI, discusses the current state of research on aligning AI with human values: what’s happening now, what needs to happen, and how people can help. This talk covers a broad set of subgoals within alignment research, from inferring human preferences to verifying the properties of advanced systems. To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

People know a lot of things about the world. Collectively, they can often make good predictions about the results of social science research before it even happens. Eva Vivalt, a researcher at the Australian National University, is building a platform to collect these predictions. In this talk, she discusses what social science stands to gain through the use of forecasting, from better research design to improvements in public policy.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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 single law or social program in a single country can affect the well-being of tens or hundreds of millions of people. Policy change represents a massive opportunity for impact — but may require different tactics and types of organizations than the EA community usually supports. In this talk, the Hewlett Foundation’s Norma Altshuler describes promising strategies for policy work in low and middle-income countries, as well as practical and moral considerations for people who want to pursue this kind of work.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

Despite recent advancements, research on animal welfare is still underdeveloped compared to that in fields like medicine or development economics. In this talk, Neil Buddy Shah, the co-founder and CEO of IDinsight, draws on lessons from those fields to argue that a coordinated, multi-year research agenda can accelerate improvements in animal welfare.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

When competition intensifies between powerful countries, peace and security are threatened in many ways — proxy wars break out, and global cooperation breaks down (including agreements on nuclear weapons). In this talk, Dani Nedal, who teaches “Global Nuclear Politics” at Carnegie Mellon University, offers thoughts on these risks, and how countries and individuals can work to reduce them.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

International cooperation is essential if we want to capture the benefits of advanced AI while minimizing risk. Brian Tse, a policy affiliate at the Future of Humanity Institute, discusses concrete opportunities for coordination between China and the West, as well as how China’s government and technology industry think about different forms of AI risk.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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 academic session, Zach Groff, a PhD student at Stanford University whose research areas include welfare economics, discusses a 1995 paper which argued that nature contains more suffering than enjoyment. After analyzing the model used in that paper, Groff found that an error negated its original conclusion, and that evolutionary dynamics imply that enjoyment may predominate for some species. In addition to this result, Groff also discusses suggestions for empirical study of wild animal welfare.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.

The United States is underprepared for a catastrophic pandemic. A recent simulation conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security found that an engineered pathogen could overwhelm U.S. and global response capacity, killing more than 150 million people within 20 months. One important reason: The U.S. lacks the capacity to manufacture medical countermeasures (MCMs) fast enough to contain a global outbreak.In this academic session, Daniel Gastfriend, a recent visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, discusses three categories of emerging technologies that could improve our MCM production capabilities: flexible manufacturing, platform technologies, and localized distributed manufacturing.To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.orgThis talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.Original VideoEffective 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.