EARadio

Juan presents the latest research on industrial food solutions for feeding everyone in the case of food-related global catastrophic risks. He focuses on sun-blocking global food catastrophes such as large asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions and nuclear winter. The solutions presented include single-cell protein (SCP) from natural gas or from hydrogen and CO2, sugar from lignocellulosic biomass, and synthetic margarine from petroleum.

Juan García Martínez is a Research Assistant at Alliance to Feed the Earth In Disasters. Juan obtained his master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Twente and went on to join ALLFED as a research associate, where he had volunteered prior to finishing his studies. He has done research on carbon dioxide capture and utilization with his MSc thesis and his internship at the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, and is eager to apply his energy and knowledge to new research on making humanity’s food system more resilient.

This talk was taken from EA Global Asia and Pacific 2020. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.

Rossa gives a high-level introduction to global priorities research (GPR). He discusses GPI's research plans, and which other organisations are doing GPR. He also offers some thoughts about what students could do to find out more about GPR.

Rossa O'Keeffe-O'Donovan is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Economics at Nuffield College and the Assistant Director of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford. He completed my PhD in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2017. Before Penn, Rossa completed the M.Sc. in Economics for Development at the University of Oxford.

His main research interests are in empirical microeconomics:

• Development economics
• Networks and peer effects
• Public goods
• Structural estimation

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. 

Growing meat directly from plants, microbes, and animal cells will allow us to build a food system that is better for human, animal, and planetary health. However, catalyzing this paradigm shift is a vast, multidisciplinary effort that requires scientists and engineers from disciplines ranging from tissue engineering and synthetic biology to computational science and chemical engineering. This workshop explored the state of plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation-derived meat research with a focus on illuminating the white spaces in alternative protein science that need to be filled if we're to feasibly feed the world with these novel food technologies and power a transition away from industrial animal agriculture.

 Amy helps lead GFI’s efforts to transform universities into engines for alternative protein research and education. She supports students and researchers in developing research clusters, addressing key technological bottlenecks, and building the academic ecosystems needed to power the future of food. Amy has a background in global health, education, effective altruism, and design thinking. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University and is thrilled to be devoting her career to accelerating alternative proteins in the service of human, animal, and planetary health. 

How can we build (super) intelligent machines that are robustly aligned with human values? AI alignment researchers strive to meet this challenge, but currently draw upon a relatively narrow set of philosophical perspectives common in effective altruism and computer science. This could pose risks in a world where human values are complex, plural, and fragile. Xuan discusses how these risks might be mitigated by greater philosophical pluralism, describing several problems in AI alignment where non-Western philosophies might provide insight.

Tan Zhi Xuan is a multi-disciplinary researcher broadly interested in cognitive approaches to building AI, so as to better understand and conform to human preferences, intentions, norms, and values. Current projects include developing probabilistic programming frameworks for Bayesian inverse planning and goal inference.

This talk was taken from EA Global Asia and Pacific 2020. Click here to watch the talk with the PowerPoint presentation.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.