EA Talks

Baobao Zhang explains how social science research can help those in governments, tech companies, and advocacy organizations make decisions regarding AI governance. After explaining her research on public attitudes toward AI and automation, she explores other important topics of research. She also reflects on how researchers could make broad impacts outside of academia.

Recommended reading:

https://governanceai.github.io/US-Public-Opinion-Report-Jan-2019

Public opinion lessons for AI regulation

Click to access GovAI-Agenda.pdf

Original 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 this talk, Jamie Harris introduces some key concepts involved in planning your career so that you can maximize your impact for animals.

Original 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 this talk, which is based on a collaboration with John Halstead, Hauke makes the case against randomista development, a form of development economics which evaluates and promotes interventions that can be tested by randomised controlled trials. He argues that research on and advocacy for economic growth in low-income countries is more effective than randomista development interventions, and that assessing the soundness of these arguments should be a key focus for current generation-focused EAs over the next few years.

Hauke and John’s Forum post:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bsE5t6qhGC65fEpzN/growth-and-the-case-against-randomista-development

Original 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.

Why is EA not more demographically diverse? Why does it matter? What can we do?

Original 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.

Political institutions, such as governments and international organizations, are instrumental in designing large-scale coordination mechanisms and collective action. However, political decision-making is difficult to both achieve and optimise for many reasons. Examples include their collective nature, their high stakes, the complexity of policy problems and slow feedback loops to learn from implementation. The support and improvement of political decision-making could, therefore, be highly impactful. The ultimate question is: what works? This talk delves into the impact, evidence and implementability of four popular strategies to strengthen political decision-making and delineates recommendations for further work.

Original 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.

Following a rigorous selection process, we’re pleased to present the following five-minute lightning talks.

Cecilia Tilli
Antimicrobial resistance: A cause that joins global health and development with longtermism and biosecurity?

Noga Aharony
Aiming towards a biosecurity career from grad school

Jennifer-Justine Kirsch
The next frontier: Lessons learned from an EA fish startup

Sid Efromovich
Introducing Generation Pledge

Michael Aird
Why we need a database of existential risk estimates

Jessica McCurdy
The case for virtual cross-university fellowships

Roy Head
Development Media International and COVID-19

Juan Bartolomé García Martínez
Microbial protein as food for the apocalypse

Jack Lewars
Open a ‘One for the World’ chapter and change the world

Frankie Andersen-Wood
I’m not qualified to give this talk

James Fodor
Pitfalls of Bayesian reasoning

Chloe Dempsey
Cultivated meat: Does the Chinese consumer have an appetite?

Original 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.

This session opens up a conversation about the strengths and limitations of the use of data and evidence for allocating resources to and across priorities within the field of global health and development. Caitlin and Ruth highlight examples where rigorous evidence contributed to high-impact decisions, yielding large benefits. They also address key critiques of the use of evidence, as it has been promoted in the past 15 years, and suggest ways in which the evidence-informed policymaking agenda could evolve.

Original 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 this talk, Johannes presents Founders Pledge’s thinking on effective climate solutions including insights from their latest research. This includes a novel framing of the issue, key conclusions from their recent report on climate and lifestyle, updates on their research on high-impact charities, and more.

https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-and-lifestyle-report

Original 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.

When we try to improve wild animal welfare, we want the effects of our efforts to persist long into the future, rather than to wash out. However, we also want to maintain the ability to undo our actions if they turn out to be harmful. In this talk, Simon outlines how we can optimise these two objectives, and apply the framework to some specific examples.

https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org

Original 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.

If we knew that human-level AI was implausible within the next 20 years, we would take different actions to improve the long-term future. Asya talks about her investigations into reasons people say we won’t have human-level AI soon, including survey data, trends in compute, and arguments that current machine learning techniques are insufficient.

AI Impacts

Original 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.