This talk will focus on the work GiveWell are doing to assess interventions aimed at achieving legislative change to improve public health. GiveWell have so far made one grant in this area, to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention. James will talk about what GiveWell learned assessing this opportunity, and how the process differed from assessing more direct interventions.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

Cause-neutrality is often seen as a key feature of effective altruism. In spite of that there is some unclarity over what it really means. In this talk, I will argue that they key sense of cause-neutrality is selecting causes based on impartial estimates of impact. This is distinct from cause-divergence – that effective altruists invest in several causes. Cause-neutrality does not entail cause-divergence, and it is confusing to use the term “cause-neutrality” for cause-divergence, as is sometimes done. Indeed cause-neutrality is compatible with effective altruism focusing solely on one cause. Similarly cause-neutrality does not entail cause-agnosticism – agnosticism over which cause is best – and it is confusing to use the term “cause-neutrality” for cause-agnosticism, as is sometimes done. Besides these conceptual clarifications, I will also discuss some considerations of relevance for whether we should be cause-divergent and cause-agnostic. Background: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/understanding-cause-neutrality/

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).

Dario Amodei, OpenAI Tasha McCauley, GeoSim Jan Leike, DeepMind Helen Toner, Open Philanthropy Project Owen Cotton-Barratt, Future of Humanity Institute.

Source: Effective Altruism Global (video).