EA Talks

Max Tegmark on Effective altruism, existential risk, and existential hope.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

EAs can substantially improve the world by taking Government roles that direct funding or set policy. This talk will describe several such roles and will provide some advice on how to pursue them.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Many of the catastrophic risks about which effective altruists concern themselves are likely to result from the failure to control much smaller events, which then grow so large that they do become catastrophic. I will describe examples from infectious diseases – a paradigm case of a growing risk – and describe implications for the allocation of our attention, effort and funds.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Closing remarks by Will MacAskill.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Effective altruists focussed on shaping the far future face a choice between different types of interventions. Of these, efforts to reduce the risk of human extinction have received the most attention so far. In this talk, Max Daniel will make the case that we may want to complement such work with interventions aimed at preventing very undesirable futures (“s-risks”), and that this provides a reason for, among the sources of existential risk identified so far, focussing on AI risk.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Stefan Schubert talks about moral cooperation: how people with diverging moral goals can cooperate to realize those goals.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Approximately 95% of the 100 billion animals being raised for food right now suffer in “factory farm” conditions. There are at least a thousand times more wild animals, many of them in dire circumstances, and vastly more beings might exist in the distant future as humanity’s technological capabilities grow. All of these individuals lie outside humanity’s current moral circle, so substantial progress could be made by helping society account for their interests. Sentience Institute will research and promote the most effective strategies to expand humanity’s moral circle to include all sentient beings, meaning those beings who experience happiness and suffering, regardless of their sex, race, species, substrate, location, or any other characteristic. This talk will discuss Sentience Institute’s plans and introduce its first publication, a Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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 the last few years farm animal advocates have secured major corporate policy wins, a few state policy wins, and almost no federal policy wins. Why? And what lessons does this experience hold for future farm animal advocacy and other EA policy work?Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Today there is an unprecedented opportunity to do good using public data. The main bottleneck is that we can’t direct enough statisticians to work on humanitarian projects. At MIT we’ve been developing BayesDB, an open-source platform that addresses some of the these problems. Novice BayesDB users can answer data analysis questions in seconds or minutes with a level of rigor that otherwise requires hours or days of work by someone with advanced training in statistics plus good statistical judgment. This talk will focus on what and why BayesDB is, not how it works. It will use examples from collaborations with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Boston Children’s Hospital, showing how BayesDB can jointly analyze neuroimaging data and survey data collected from kids in slums in India. It will also discuss new initiatives aimed at using BayesDB to build empirical maps of poverty, inequality, and psychological suffering. Examples include data on PTSD vulnerability and resilience in US Army Veterans, including data on adverse events caused by psychotropic medication, and on electronic health record data for members of poor, rural US populations. It will also include a brief review of other AI technology being developed by my lab, the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.

Clean and Plant-Based Meat fireside chat with Bruce Friedrich, interviewed by by Brian Kateman.Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).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.