EAG Talks

EAG Talks

By Aaron BergmanSociety & CulturePhilosophy
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EAG Talks episodes

  • How EA can impactfully engage in climate | Johannes Ackva & Armond Cohen | EAG Bay Area 23

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    This session is exploring how effective altruism can uncover high impact but neglected solutions and organizations, using the case study of the Clean Air Task Force (CATF), a global climate organization.

    Prior to 2018, CATF was effective but small, relatively unnoticed and underfunded. Founders Pledge scrutinized and validated CATF's work ithrough EA methodology and recommended it as a worthy charity; this endorsement and FP networking has allowed CATF to scale rapidly to global impact.
    This talk is exploring what we can learn from this, for climate and beyond, about impactfully engaging in causes that are not meeting typical neglectedness criteria.

    56 min
  • Safety evaluations and standards for AI | Beth Barnes | EAG Bay Area 23

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    Beth is describing the work of the Evaluations team at the Alignment Research Center (ARC) on developing evaluations of safety for cutting edge models, and on developing standards for scaling or deploying models conditional on the results of those evaluations.

    Beth got into EA via Givewell and Giving What We Can around 2014. After realizing AI might be a big deal she studied computer science, and worked on AI safety at DeepMind and OpenAI. She now leads the Evaluations team at the Alignment Research Center under Paul Christiano.

    33 min
  • Potential pitfalls in university EA community building | Jessica McCurdy | EAG Bay Area 23

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    In this talk, Jessica is dicussing some of the pitfalls and risks associated with community building at universities. She is discussing how some community building might be net negative and why she doesn't think community building should be the default option for university students interested in EA. While she claims that university groups can be highly impactful, she also claims that it should be done carefully. This talk is focusing on universities but contains some points that may generalize to other types of community building.

    Jessica graduated from Yale in 2021 with a BS in Cognitive Science. There, she helped organize Yale EA for over four years including a gap semester where she worked on it full-time. She had been volunteering with CEA since 2018 and started working full time in December 2021 on increasing broad support for uni groups. She created and scaled the university group accelerator program which has helped around 75 groups. She is now leading the uni groups team at CEA and is setting the strategy and plans for the coming year.

    55 min
  • The current alignment plan, and how we might improve it | Buck Shlegeris | EAG Bay Area 23

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    In this session, Buck is discussing how he thinks we should try to align artificial general intelligence (AGI) if we made no more fundamental progress on alignment, and then talks about how he thinks alignment researchers should try to improve this plan and ensure that whatever plans are available are executed competently.

    Buck is the CTO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit based in Berkeley which does technical alignment research. He spent most of the last year researching mechanistic interpretability and related alignment techniques. He previously worked at MIRI and was a fund manager for the EA Infrastructure Fund.

    51 min
  • Beyond the bednets: Vida Plena and MHI | Joy Bittner & Ben Williamson | EAG Bay Area 23

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    Neartermist EA has historically focused on a fairly narrow range of interventions, evaluating causes solely on their effects on physical health or income. However, this risks excluding a broad range of interventions that improve lives through other avenues.

    In this talk, Joy Bittner (Vida Plena) and Ben Williamson (Maternal Health Initiative) are situating their work in broader conversations about the direction of the movement more broadly and are sharing lessons they’ve learned from launching evidence-based organizations.
    Maternal Health Initiative is an evidence-based organization committed to expanding access to family planning. Vida Plena is a non-profit which provides evidence-based depression treatment to local communities and refugees. Both organisations are former Charity Entrepreneurship incubatees.

    53 min
  • An overview of EA funding opportunities | Caleb Parikh | EAG Bay Area 23

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    In this talk, Caleb is giving an overview of funding opportunities for projects within global health and wellbeing, animal welfare, EA infrastructure and existential security. He then talks about projects that he and other grantmakers are particularly excited about funding and what he looks for when assessing applications.

    Caleb Parikh is the interim project lead at EA Funds. Caleb previously worked on epistemic community health at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He also worked on EA community building and global health policy and occasionally assists researchers and the Global Priorities Institute with mathematical modelling.

    55 min
  • How to compare welfare across species | Bob Fischer | EAG Bay Area 23

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    People farm a lot of pigs. They farm even more chickens. And if they don’t already, they’re soon to farm even more black soldier flies. How should EAs distribute their resources to address these problems? And how should EAs compare benefits to animals with benefits to humans?

    This talk outlines a framework for answering these questions. Bob Fischer argues that we should use estimates of animals’ welfare ranges to compare how much good different interventions can accomplish. He also suggests some tentative welfare range estimates for several farmed species.

    52 min

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