Shows
KuroNosuke sound ch くろのすけ音鐵ch第N41回(1041)！【走行音(Sound journey)】2317,近鉄80000系 (10番台日立製)ひのとり3113レ 01/01:近鉄名古屋～五十鈴川【作品概要•YouTubeURL】
【日本語】近鉄の新たな看板特急となった80000系”ひのとり”、2022年現在では貴重な名伊乙特急運用となる3113レを収録したものです。
10番台の車両は制御装置・主電動機に日立製の機器が搭載されています。便宜上形式に番台区分を付けましたが、公式には80000系で統一してるそうです。
【EN】-The 80000 series "Hinotori", which has become a new signboard express of Kintetsu, and the 3113 train, which will be a valuable Mei Otsu limited express operation as of 2023.
Vehicles in the 10th series are equipped with Hitachi equipment in the control device and traction motor. For the sake of convenience, I added a number division to the model, but it seems that it is officially unified with the 80000 series.
収録年月:2023,01
次回配信は11月18日(土)20:00です。
2023-11-111h 29
KuroNosuke sound ch くろのすけ音鐵ch第N４０回(1040)！【音の旅(Sound journey)】2301,近鉄80000系50番台 ひのとり58レ 01/01:近鉄名古屋～大阪難波
【作品概要・YouTubeURL】
【日本語】近鉄の新たな看板特急となる80000系＂ひのとり＂です。大和八木駅にも停車する58レの列車走行音(静止画)です。
50番台の車両は8両固定編成で制御装置・主電動機に三菱製の機器が搭載されています。便宜上形式に番台区分を付けましたが、公式には80000系で統一してるそうです。
【EN】This is the 80000 series "Hinotori", which will be the new signboard limited express of Kintetsu. It is a running sound (still image) of the 58th train that stops at Yamato Yagi Station.
Vehicles in the 50 series are 8-car fixed formations, and Mitsubishi equipment is installed in the control device and traction motor. For the sake of convenience, I added a number division to the model, but it seems that it is officially unified with the 80000 series.
【音の旅(Sound journey)】2301,近鉄80000系50番台 ひのとり58レ
01/01:近鉄名古屋～大阪難波 https://youtu.be/sLHAg-ba7zU
収録年月:2023,06
次回配信は11月11日(土)20:00です。
2023-11-042h 09
Michael und JohannesDie 80000€ DonationWie würdest Du reagieren, wenn Du im Reality-TV auftreten, oder Du von Fremden 80000€ gespendet bekommen würdest? In dieser Folge philosophieren Michael und Johannes über das Bekanntwerden über die socialen Medien und über enorm hohe Spenden über Streamingplatformen; und das auf ihrer ganz persönlichen Art und Weise.
#Donation #80000€ #top #michaelundjohannes #humor #RTL
2023-02-1045 min
Germany, what goes?Radio 80000 in München
Dana Newman besucht heute „Radio 80000“ in München. Das unabhängige Online-Radio spielt täglich von 8 bis 24 Uhr eine bunte Mischung aus Jazz, Hip Hop oder Techno und lässt verschiedene DJs aus unterschiedlichen europäischen Städten auflegen.
Weitere Informationen zum Podcast findest du auf dem Alumniportal Deutschland!
Update: Radio 80000 ist mittlerweile in die Münchner Favorit Bar umgezogen.
2021-01-0610 min
80,000 Hours PodcastGlobal issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities (Article)Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.
In this one, we go through 30 global issues beyond the ones we usually prioritize most highly in our work, and that you might consider focusing your career on tackling.
Although we spend the majority of our time at 80,000 Hours on our highest priority problem areas, and we recommend working on them to many of our readers, these are just the most promising issues among those we’ve spent time investigating. There are many other global issues that we haven’t properly investigated, and wh...
2020-08-2832 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#85 - Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energyA golf-ball sized lump of uranium can deliver more than enough power to cover all of your lifetime energy use. To get the same energy from coal, you’d need 3,200 tonnes of black rock — a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants, which would produce more than 11,000 tonnes of CO2. That’s about 11,000 tonnes more than the uranium.
Many people aren’t comfortable with the danger posed by nuclear power. But given the climatic stakes, it’s worth asking: Just how much more dangerous is it compared to fossil fuels?
According to today’s guest, Mark Lynas — author of Six Degrees...
2020-08-202h 08
80,000 Hours Podcast#84 – Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it workedWhen COVID-19 struck the US, everyone was told that hand sanitizer needed to be saved for healthcare professionals, so they should just wash their hands instead. But in India, many homes lack reliable piped water, so they had to do the opposite: distribute hand sanitizer as widely as possible. American advocates for banning single-use plastic straws might be outraged at the widespread adoption of single-use hand sanitizer sachets in India. But the US and India are very different places, and it might be the only way out when you're facing a pandemic without running water. Ac...
2020-08-132h 58
80,000 Hours Podcast#83 - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisonsThe killing of George Floyd has prompted a great deal of debate over whether the US should reduce the size of its police departments. The research literature suggests that the presence of police officers does reduce crime, though they're expensive and as is increasingly recognised, impose substantial harms on the populations they are meant to be protecting, especially communities of colour. So maybe we ought to shift our focus to effective but unconventional approaches to crime prevention, approaches that don't require police or prisons and the human toll they bring with them. Today’s guest, Jenn...
2020-07-312h 23
80,000 Hours Podcast#82 – James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal systemNo democracy has ever incarcerated as many people as the United States. To get its incarceration rate down to the global average, the US would have to release 3 in 4 people in its prisons today. The effects on Black Americans have been especially severe — Black people make up 12% of the US population but 33% of its prison population. In the early 2000's when incarceration reached its peak, the US government estimated that 32% of Black boys would go to prison at some point in their lives, 5.5 times the figure for whites. Contrary to popular understanding, nonviolent drug offenders make...
2020-07-281h 28
80,000 Hours Podcast#81 - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments.
Today’s guest, Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, supports the continued expansion of AI safety as a field and believes working on AI is among the very best ways to have a posi...
2020-07-092h 38
80,000 Hours PodcastAdvice on how to read our advice (Article)This is the fourth release in our new series of audio articles. If you want to read the original article or check out the links within it, you can find them here.
"We’ve found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t exactly recommend. That’s hard to avoid when you’re writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial views.
To help get on the same page, here’s some advice about our advice, for those about to launch into reading o...
2020-06-2915 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#80 – Stuart Russell on why our approach to AI is broken and how to fix itStuart Russell, Professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the most popular AI textbook, thinks the way we approach machine learning today is fundamentally flawed. In his new book, Human Compatible, he outlines the 'standard model' of AI development, in which intelligence is measured as the ability to achieve some definite, completely-known objective that we've stated explicitly. This is so obvious it almost doesn't even seem like a design choice, but it is. Unfortunately there's a big problem with this approach: it's incredibly hard to say exactly what you want. AI today lacks common sense...
2020-06-232h 13
80,000 Hours PodcastWhat anonymous contributors think about important life and career questions (Article)Today we’re launching the final entry of our ‘anonymous answers' series on the website.
It features answers to 23 different questions including “How have you seen talented people fail in their work?” and “What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?”, from anonymous people whose work we admire.
We thought a lot of the responses were really interesting; some were provocative, others just surprising. And as intended, they span a very wide range of opinions.
So we decided to share some highlights here with you podcast subscribers. This is only a sample...
2020-06-0537 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#79 – A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzlesToday’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what? She's not so bad." Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history. He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind, tried to become the healthiest person in the world, read 33,000 pages of facts, spent a year following the Bible literally, thanked everyone involved in m...
2020-06-022h 38
80,000 Hours Podcast#78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progressCompanies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks.These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today's episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy. Danny and I talk about how to understand his team's results and what they mean (and don't mean...
2020-05-222h 11
80,000 Hours Podcast#77 – Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — Director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics — abruptly found himself a global celebrity, his social media following growing 40-fold and journalists knocking down his door, as everyone turned to him for information they could trust. Here he lays out where the fight against COVID-19 stands today, why he's open to deliberately giving people COVID-19 to speed up vaccine development, and how we could do better next time. As Marc tells us, island nations like Taiwan and New Zealand are successfully suppressing SARS-COV-2. But everyone else is struggling. Link...
2020-05-191h 37
80,000 Hours PodcastArticle: Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid themToday’s release is the second experiment in making audio versions of our articles.
The first was a narration of Greg Lewis’ terrific problem profile on ‘Reducing global catastrophic biological risks’, which you can find on the podcast feed just before episode #74 - that is, our interview with Greg about the piece.
If you want to check out the links in today’s article, you can find those here.
And if you have feedback on these, positive or negative, it’d be great if you could email us at podcast@80000hours.org.
2020-05-1226 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#76 – Tara Kirk Sell on misinformation, who's done well and badly, & what to reopen firstAmid a rising COVID-19 death toll, and looming economic disaster, we’ve been looking for good news — and one thing we're especially thankful for is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS). CHS focuses on protecting us from major biological, chemical or nuclear disasters, through research that informs governments around the world. While this pandemic surprised many, just last October the Center ran a simulation of a 'new coronavirus' scenario to identify weaknesses in our ability to quickly respond. Their expertise has given them a key role in figuring out how to fight COVID-19. Toda...
2020-05-091h 53
80,000 Hours Podcast#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 HoursSince it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths. I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, and these days I'm 80,000 Hours' Head of Advising. Since then, chatting to hundreds of people about their career plans has given me some idea of the kinds o...
2020-04-282h 13
80,000 Hours Podcast#74 – Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 & catastrophic biological risksOur lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this while confined to your house, as the death toll from the worst pandemic since 1918 continues to rise. The question of how to tackle COVID-19 has been foremost in the minds of many, including here at 80,000 Hours. Today's guest, Dr Gregory Lewis, acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, puts the crisis in context, explaining how COVID-19 compares to other diseases, pandemics of the past, and possible worse crises in the future. COV...
2020-04-172h 37
80,000 Hours PodcastArticle: Reducing global catastrophic biological risksIn a few days we'll be putting out a conversation with Dr Greg Lewis, who studies how to prevent global catastrophic biological risks at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.
Greg also wrote a new problem profile on that topic for our website, and reading that is a good lead-in to our interview with him. So in a bit of an experiment we decided to make this audio version of that article, narrated by the producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Keiran Harris.
We’re thinking about having audio versions of other important articles we wr...
2020-04-161h 04
80,000 Hours PodcastEmergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might do to helpFrom home isolation Rob and Howie just recorded an episode on: 1. How many could die in the crisis, and the risk to your health personally. 2. What individuals might be able to do help tackle the coronavirus crisis. 3. What we suspect governments should do in response to the coronavirus crisis. 4. The importance of personally not spreading the virus, the properties of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and how you can personally avoid it. 5. The many places society screwed up, how we can avoid this happening again, and why be optimistic.
We have rushed this e...
2020-03-201h 52
80,000 Hours Podcast#73 – Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do goodTo do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that's all wrong. If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you'd have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you'd have $17 million. This astonishing fact has driven today's guest, economics researcher Philip Trammell at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, to investigate the case for and against so-called 'patient philanthropy' in depth. If the case for patient phil...
2020-03-172h 35
80,000 Hours Podcast#72 - Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futuresThis week Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. It's about how our long-term future could be better than almost anyone believes, but also how humanity's recklessness is putting that future at grave risk — in Toby's reckoning, a 1 in 6 chance of being extinguished this century.
I loved the book and learned a great deal from it (buy it here, US and audiobook release March 24). While preparing for this interview I copied out 87 facts that were surprising, shocking or important. Here's a sample of 16: ...
2020-03-073h 14
80,000 Hours Podcast#71 - Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 HoursThe 80,000 Hours Podcast is about “the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them”, and in this episode we tackle that question in the most direct way possible.
Last year we published a summary of all our key ideas, which links to many of our other articles, and which we are aiming to keep updated as our opinions shift.
All of us added something to it, but the single biggest contributor was our CEO and today's guest, Ben Todd, who founded 80,000 Hours along with Will MacAskill back in 2012.
...
2020-03-032h 57
80,000 Hours PodcastArden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance & injustice (80k team chat #1)Today's bonus episode of the podcast is a quick conversation between me and my fellow 80,000 Hours researcher Arden Koehler about a few topics, including the demandingness of morality, work-life balance, and emotional reactions to injustice.
Arden is about to graduate with a philosophy PhD from New York University, so naturally we dive right into some challenging implications of utilitarian philosophy and how it might be applied to real life. Issues we talk about include:
• If you’re not going to be completely moral, should you try being a bit more ethical, or give up?
• Should you feel a...
2020-02-2544 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#70 - Dr Cassidy Nelson on the 12 best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit nCoV)nCoV is alarming governments and citizens around the world. It has killed more than 1,000 people, brought the Chinese economy to a standstill, and continues to show up in more and more places. But bad though it is, it's much closer to a warning shot than a worst case scenario. The next emerging infectious disease could easily be more contagious, more fatal, or both. Despite improvements in the last few decades, humanity is still not nearly prepared enough to contain new diseases. We identify them too slowly. We can't do enough to reduce their spread. And we lack v...
2020-02-142h 26
80,000 Hours Podcast#69 – Jeffrey Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about bothThe State Council of China's 2017 AI plan was the starting point of China’s AI planning; China’s approach to AI is defined by its top-down and monolithic nature; China is winning the AI arms race; and there is little to no discussion of issues of AI ethics and safety in China. How many of these ideas have you heard? In his paper Deciphering China's AI Dream, today's guest, PhD student Jeff Ding, outlines why he believes none of these claims are true. • Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. • What’s the best c...
2020-02-071h 37
80,000 Hours PodcastRob & Howie on what we do and don't know about 2019-nCoVTwo 80,000 Hours researchers, Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel, record an experimental bonus episode about the new 2019-nCoV virus.See this list of resources, including many discussed in the episode, to learn more.In the 1h15m conversation we cover:• What is it? • How many people have it? • How contagious is it? • What fraction of people who contract it die?• How likely is it to spread out of control?• What's the range of plausible fatalities worldwide?• How does it compare to other epidemics?• What don't we know and why? • What a...
2020-02-031h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#68 - Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new prioritiesYou’re given a box with a set of dice in it. If you roll an even number, a person's life is saved. If you roll an odd number, someone else will die. Each time you shake the box you get $10. Should you do it? A committed consequentialist might say, "Sure! Free money!" But most will think it obvious that you should say no. You've only gotten a tiny benefit, in exchange for moral responsibility over whether other people live or die. And yet, according to today’s return guest, philosophy Prof Will MacAskill, in a rea...
2020-01-243h 25
80,000 Hours Podcast#44 Classic episode - Paul Christiano on finding real solutions to the AI alignment problemRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2018.
Paul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great material, we decided to do a second recording, resulting in our longest interview so far. While challenging at times I can strongly recommend listening — Paul works on AI himself and has a very unusually thought through view of how it will change the world. This is now the top resource I'm going to refer people to if they're interested in positively shaping the development of AI, and want to understand th...
2020-01-153h 51
80,000 Hours Podcast#33 Classic episode - Anders Sandberg on cryonics, solar flares, and the annual odds of nuclear warRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2018.
Joseph Stalin had a life-extension program dedicated to making himself immortal. What if he had succeeded?
According to Bryan Caplan in episode #32, there’s an 80% chance that Stalin would still be ruling Russia today. Today’s guest disagrees.
Like Stalin he has eyes for his own immortality - including an insurance plan that will cover the cost of cryogenically freezing himself after he dies - and thinks the technology to achieve it might be around the corner.
Fortunately for humanity though, that guest is pro...
2020-01-081h 25
80,000 Hours Podcast#17 Classic episode - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monsterRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2018. Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races. Throughout history we’ve consistently believed, as common sense, truly horrifying things by today’s standards. According to University of Oxford Professor Will MacAskill, it’s extremely likely that we’re in the same...
2019-12-311h 52
80,000 Hours Podcast#46 Classic episode - Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academiaRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2018.
The barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly realise she gave you $1 less than she should have. Do you brush your way past the people now waiting, or just accept this as a dollar you’re never getting back? According to philosophy Professor Hilary Greaves - Director of Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute, which is hiring - this simple decision will completely change the long-term future by altering the identities of almost all future generations.
2019-12-2300 min
恋する！たび鉄部#15 新京成電鉄80000形報道公開を真澄部長がレポート！ from Radiotalk新京成が、京成電鉄と共同で開発した14年ぶりの新型車両、80000形の報道公開に豊岡真澄部長が参加！ ピンクとホワイトのかわいい電車をレポートします！
#豊岡真澄 #オオゼキタク #栗原景 #新京成電鉄 #鉄道 #80000形
2019-12-1804 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousnessWhat is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smelling the coffee next to you, and feeling the warmth of the cup. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experience. Now imagine beings that are identical to humans, but for one thing: they lack this conscious experience. If you spill your coffee on them, they’ll jump like anyone else, but inside they'll feel no pain and have no thoughts: the lights are off. The concept of these so-called 'philosophical zombies' was popularised by today’...
2019-12-164h 41
80,000 Hours Podcast#66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, effective altruism, & how his moral views have changedIn 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory opinions about abortion. But the controversy stemmed from Practical Ethics — a book he’d actually released way back in 1979. It took a German translation ten years on for protests to kick off. According to Singer, he honestly didn’t expect this view to be as provocative as it became, and he certainly wasn’t aiming to stir up trouble and get attention. But after the protests and the increasing coverage of his work in German media, the previously flat sales of...
2019-12-052h 01
80,000 Hours Podcast#65 – Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years pursuing WMD arms control, & diversity in diplomacy"…it started when the Soviet Union fell apart and there was a real desire to ensure security of nuclear materials and pathogens, and that scientists with [WMD-related] knowledge could get paid so that they wouldn't go to countries and sell that knowledge." Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins has had an incredible career in diplomacy and global security. Today she’s a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of Global Connections Empowering Global Change, where she works on global health, infectious disease and defence innovation. In 2017 she founded her own nonprofit, the Women of Color Advanc...
2019-11-201h 40
80,000 Hours Podcast#64 – Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyrannyNovember 3 2020, 10:32PM: CNN, NBC, and FOX report that Donald Trump has narrowly won Florida, and with it, re-election. November 3 2020, 11:46PM: The NY Times and Wall Street Journal report that some group has successfully hacked electronic voting systems across the country, including Florida. The malware has spread to tens of thousands of machines and deletes any record of its activity, so the returning officer of Florida concedes they actually have no idea who won the state — and don't see how they can figure it out. What on Earth happens next? Today’s guest — world-renowned computer...
2019-10-252h 11
80,000 Hours PodcastRob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long-term is really possibleToday's episode is a compilation of interviews I recently recorded for two other shows, Love Your Work and The Neoliberal Podcast.
If you've listened to absolutely everything on this podcast feed, you'll have heard four interviews with me already, but fortunately I don't think these two include much repetition, and I've gotten a decent amount of positive feedback on both.
First up, I speak with David Kadavy on his show, Love Your Work.
This is a particularly personal and relaxed interview. We talk about all sorts of things, including nicotine gum, plastic straw bans...
2019-09-263h 14
80,000 Hours PodcastHave we helped you have a bigger social impact? Our annual survey, plus other ways we can help you.1. Fill out our annual impact survey here. 2. Find a great vacancy on our job board. 3. Learn about our key ideas, and get links to our top articles. 4. Join our newsletter for an email about what's new, every 2 weeks or so. 5. Or follow our pages on Facebook and Twitter. —— Once a year 80,000 Hours runs a survey to find out whether we've helped our users have a larger social impact with their life and career. We and our donors ne...
2019-09-1603 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#63 – Vitalik Buterin on better ways to fund public goods, blockchain's failures, & effective givingHistorically, progress in the field of cryptography has had major consequences. It has changed the course of major wars, made it possible to do business on the internet, and enabled private communication between both law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Could it have similarly significant consequences in future? Today's guest — Vitalik Buterin — is world-famous as the lead developer of Ethereum, a successor to the cryptographic-currency Bitcoin, which added the capacity for smart contracts and decentralised organisations. Buterin first proposed Ethereum at the age of 20, and by the age of 23 its success had likely made him a billionaire. A...
2019-09-043h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#62 – Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brainImagine that – one day – humanity dies out. At some point, many millions of years later, intelligent life might well evolve again. Is there any message we could leave that would reliably help them out? In his second appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, machine learning researcher and polymath Paul Christiano suggests we try to answer this question with a related thought experiment: are there any messages we might want to send back to our ancestors in the year 1700 that would have made history likely to go in a better direction than it did? It seems there probably are....
2019-08-052h 11
80,000 Hours Podcast#61 - Helen Toner on emerging technology, national security, and ChinaFrom 1870 to 1950, the introduction of electricity transformed life in the US and UK, as people gained access to lighting, radio and a wide range of household appliances for the first time. Electricity turned out to be a general purpose technology that could help with almost everything people did.
Some think this is the best historical analogy we have for how machine learning could alter life in the 21st century.
In addition to massively changing everyday life, past general purpose technologies have also changed the nature of war. For example, when electricity was introduced to the...
2019-07-171h 54
80,000 Hours Podcast#60 - Phil Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it betterHave you ever been infuriated by a doctor's unwillingness to give you an honest, probabilistic estimate about what to expect? Or a lawyer who won't tell you the chances you'll win your case? Their behaviour is so frustrating because accurately predicting the future is central to every action we take. If we can't assess the likelihood of different outcomes we're in a complete bind, whether the decision concerns war and peace, work and study, or Black Mirror and RuPaul's Drag Race. Which is why the research of Professor Philip Tetlock is relevant for all of us...
2019-06-282h 11
80,000 Hours Podcast#59 – Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictableIt can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn't despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition.The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably.In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well...
2019-06-181h 43
80,000 Hours Podcast#58 – Pushmeet Kohli of DeepMind on designing robust & reliable AI systems and how to succeed in AIWhen you're building a bridge, responsibility for making sure it won't fall over isn't handed over to a few 'bridge not falling down engineers'. Making sure a bridge is safe to use and remains standing in a storm is completely central to the design, and indeed the entire project.When it comes to artificial intelligence, commentators often distinguish between enhancing the capabilities of machine learning systems and enhancing their safety. But to Pushmeet Kohli, principal scientist and research team leader at DeepMind, research to make AI robust and reliable is no more a side-project in AI design...
2019-06-031h 30
80,000 Hours PodcastRob Wiblin on human nature, new technology, and living a happy, healthy & ethical lifeThis is a cross-post of some interviews Rob did recently on two other podcasts — Mission Daily (from 2m) and The Good Life (from 1h13m).
Some of the content will be familiar to regular listeners — but if you’re at all interested in Rob’s personal thoughts, there should be quite a lot of new material to make listening worthwhile.
The first interview is with Chad Grills. They focused largely on new technologies and existential risks, but also discuss topics like:
• Why Rob is wary of fiction
• Egalitarianism in the evolution of hunter gatherers
• How to s...
2019-05-142h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#57 – Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in governmentYou’re 29 years old, and you’ve just been given a job in the White House. How do you quickly figure out how the US Executive Branch behemoth actually works, so that you can have as much impact as possible - before you quit or get kicked out?That was the challenge put in front of Tom Kalil in 1993.He had enough success to last a full 16 years inside the Clinton and Obama administrations, working to foster the development of the internet, then nanotechnology, and then cutting-edge brain modelling, among other things.But not...
2019-04-232h 50
80,000 Hours Podcast#56 - Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about itElephants in chains at travelling circuses; pregnant pigs trapped in coffin sized crates at factory farms; deers living in the wild. We should welcome the last as a pleasant break from the horror, right?
Maybe, but maybe not. While we tend to have a romanticised view of nature, life in the wild includes a range of extremely negative experiences.
Many animals are hunted by predators, and constantly have to remain vigilant about the risk of being killed, and perhaps experiencing the horror of being eaten alive. Resource competition often leads to chronic hunger or starvation. Their diseases...
2019-04-152h 57
80,000 Hours Podcast#55 – Lutter & Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end povertyGovernance matters. Policy change quickly took China from famine to fortune; Singapore from swamps to skyscrapers; and Hong Kong from fishing village to financial centre. Unfortunately, many governments are hard to reform and — to put it mildly — it's not easy to found a new country. This has prompted poverty-fighters and political dreamers to look for creative ways to get new and better 'pseudo-countries' off the ground. The poor could then voluntary migrate to in search of security and prosperity. And innovators would be free to experiment with new political and legal systems without having to impose their ideas...
2019-03-312h 31
80,000 Hours Podcast#54 – OpenAI on publication norms, malicious uses of AI, and general-purpose learning algorithmsOpenAI’s Dactyl is an AI system that can manipulate objects with a human-like robot hand. OpenAI Five is an AI system that can defeat humans at the video game Dota 2. The strange thing is they were both developed using the same general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm. How is this possible and what does it show? In today's interview Jack Clark, Policy Director at OpenAI, explains that from a computational perspective using a hand and playing Dota 2 are remarkably similar problems. A robot hand needs to hold an object, move its fingers, and rotate it...
2019-03-192h 53
80,000 Hours Podcast#53 - Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism“Politics. Business. Opinion. Science. Sports. Animal welfare. Existential risk.” Is this a plausible future lineup for major news outlets?
Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and given very little editorial direction, Vox's Future Perfect aspires to be more or less that.
Competition in the news business creates pressure to write quick pieces on topical political issues that can drive lots of clicks with just a few hours' work.
But according to Kelsey Piper, staff writer for this new section of Vox's website focused on effective altruist themes, Future Perfect's goal is to run in the opposite direct...
2019-02-272h 34
80,000 Hours PodcastJulia Galef and Rob Wiblin on an updated view of the best ways to help humanityThis is a cross-post of an interview Rob did with Julia Galef on her podcast Rationally Speaking. Rob and Julia discuss how the career advice 80,000 Hours gives has changed over the years, and the biggest misconceptions about our views.
The topics will be familiar to the most fervent fans of this show — but we think that if you’ve listened to less than about half of the episodes we've released so far, you’ll find something new to enjoy here. Julia may be familiar to you as the guest on episode 7 of the show, way back in...
2019-02-1756 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#52 - Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just societyPro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society about what people want and how to make it. But when it comes to politics and voting - which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals - the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs often turns to skepticism. Today's guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won't have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them. Just last year he wr...
2019-02-082h 44
80,000 Hours Podcast#10 Classic episode - Dr Nick Beckstead on spending billions of dollars preventing human extinctionRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2017.
What if you were in a position to give away billions of dollars to improve the world? What would you do with it? This is the problem facing Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project - people like Dr Nick Beckstead.
Following a PhD in philosophy, Nick works to figure out where money can do the most good. He’s been involved in major grants in a wide range of areas, including ending factory farming through technological innovation, safeguarding the world from advances in biotechnology and ar...
2019-02-0200 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#51 - Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information agePolitics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What's the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?
Martin Gurri spent decades as a CIA analyst and in his 2014 book The Revolt of The Public and Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, predicted political turbulence for an entirely different reason: new communication technologies were flipping the balance of power between the public and traditional authorities.
In 1959 the President could control the narrative by leaning on his friends at four TV stations, who felt it was proper to present the nation's leader in a...
2019-01-292h 31
80,000 Hours Podcast#8 Classic episode - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimesRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2017.
Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before being killed for human consumption. Over the last two years Lewis Bollard – Project Officer for Farm Animal Welfare at the Open Philanthropy Project – has conducted extensive research into the best ways to eliminate animal suffering in farms as soon as possible. This has resulted in $30 million in grants to farm animal advocacy.
Links to learn more, episode summary & full transcript
Jobs focussed on ending factory farming
2019-01-1600 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#9 Classic episode - Christine Peterson on the '80s futurist movement & its lessons for todayRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2017.
Take a trip to Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, when going to space sounded like a good way to get around environmental limits, people started cryogenically freezing themselves, and nanotechnology looked like it might revolutionise industry – or turn us all into grey goo.
In this episode of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Christine Peterson takes us back to her youth in the Bay Area, the ideas she encountered there, and what the dreamers she met did as they grew up.
Links to learn mo...
2019-01-0700 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#50 - David Denkenberger on how to feed all 8b people through an asteroid/nuclear winterIf an asteroid impact or nuclear winter blocked the sun for years, our inability to grow food would result in billions dying of starvation, right? According to Dr David Denkenberger, co-author of Feeding Everyone No Matter What: no. If he's to be believed, nobody need starve at all. Even without the sun, David sees the Earth as a bountiful food source. Mushrooms farmed on decaying wood. Bacteria fed with natural gas. Fish and mussels supported by sudden upwelling of ocean nutrients - and more. Dr Denkenberger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alaska...
2018-12-272h 57
80,000 Hours Podcast#49 - Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for 30c & other development 'best buys'If I told you it's possible to deliver an extra year of ideal primary-level education for under $1, would you believe me? Hopefully not - the claim is absurd on its face. But it may be true nonetheless. The very best education interventions are phenomenally cost-effective, and they're not the kinds of things you'd expect, says Dr Rachel Glennerster. She's Chief Economist at the UK's foreign aid agency DFID, and used to run J-PAL, the world-famous anti-poverty research centre based in MIT's Economics Department, where she studied the impact of a wide range of approaches to im...
2018-12-201h 35
80,000 Hours Podcast#6 Classic episode - Dr Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything elseRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2017.
Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world that is flourishing or disintegrating – and indeed, whether they will ever be born at all – is in large part up to us. As such, the welfare of future generations should be our number one moral concern.
This conclusion holds true regardless of whether your moral framework is based on common...
2018-12-1400 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#15 Classic episode - Prof Tetlock on chimps beating Berkeley undergrads & when to defer to the wiseRebroadcast: this episode was originally released in November 2017.
Prof Philip Tetlock is a social science legend. Over forty years he has researched whose predictions we can trust, whose we can’t and why - and developed methods that allow all of us to be better at predicting the future.
After the Iraq WMDs fiasco, the US intelligence services hired him to figure out how to ensure they’d never screw up that badly again. The result of that work – Superforecasting – was a media sensation in 2015.
Links to learn more, summary and full tra...
2018-12-0700 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#48 - Brian Christian on better living through the wisdom of computer sciencePlease let us know if we've helped you: Fill out our annual impact survey
Ever felt that you were so busy you spent all your time paralysed trying to figure out where to start, and couldn't get much done? Computer scientists have a term for this - thrashing - and it's a common reason our computers freeze up. The solution, for people as well as laptops, is to 'work dumber': pick something at random and finish it, without wasting time thinking about the bigger picture.
Bestselling author Brian Christian studied computer science, and in the...
2018-11-223h 15
80,000 Hours Podcast#47 - Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering rolesAfter dropping out of a machine learning PhD at Stanford, Daniel Ziegler needed to decide what to do next. He’d always enjoyed building stuff and wanted to shape the development of AI, so he thought a research engineering position at an org dedicated to aligning AI with human interests could be his best option.
He decided to apply to OpenAI, and spent about 6 weeks preparing for the interview before landing the job. His PhD, by contrast, might have taken 6 years. Daniel thinks this highly accelerated career path may be possible for many others.
On today’s epis...
2018-11-022h 04
80,000 Hours Podcast#46 - Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academiaThe barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly realise she gave you $1 less than she should have. Do you brush your way past the people now waiting, or just accept this as a dollar you’re never getting back? According to philosophy Professor Hilary Greaves - Director of Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute, which is hiring - this simple decision will completely change the long-term future by altering the identities of almost all future generations. How? Because by rushing back to the counter, you slightly change th...
2018-10-232h 49
80,000 Hours Podcast#45 - Tyler Cowen's case for maximising econ growth, stabilising civilization & thinking long-termI've probably spent more time reading Tyler Cowen - Professor of Economics at George Mason University - than any other author. Indeed it's his incredibly popular blog Marginal Revolution that prompted me to study economics in the first place. Having spent thousands of hours absorbing Tyler's work, it was a pleasure to be able to question him about his latest book and personal manifesto: Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
Tyler makes the case that, despite what you may have heard, we *can* make rational judgments about what is best for society...
2018-10-172h 30
80,000 Hours Podcast#44 - Paul Christiano on how we'll hand the future off to AI, & solving the alignment problemPaul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great material, we decided to do a second recording, resulting in our longest interview so far. While challenging at times I can strongly recommend listening - Paul works on AI himself and has a very unusually thought through view of how it will change the world. This is now the top resource I'm going to refer people to if they're interested in positively shaping the development of AI, and want to understand the problem better. Even though I'm familiar with Paul's writing I...
2018-10-023h 51
80,000 Hours Podcast#43 - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machinesIn Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is informed that the Soviet Union has created a secret deterrence system which will automatically wipe out humanity upon detection of a single nuclear explosion in Russia. With US bombs heading towards the USSR and unable to be recalled, Dr Strangelove points out that “the whole point of this Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret – why didn’t you tell the world, eh?” The Soviet ambassador replies that it was to be announced at the Party Congress the following Monday: “The Premier loves surprises”.
Daniel Ellsber...
2018-09-252h 44
80,000 Hours Podcast#42 - Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinityConsider two familiar moments at a family reunion. Our host, Uncle Bill, takes pride in his barbecuing skills. But his niece Becky says that she now refuses to eat meat. A groan goes round the table; the family mostly think of this as an annoying picky preference. But if seriously considered as a moral position, as they might if instead Becky were avoiding meat on religious grounds, it would usually receive a very different reaction. An hour later Bill expresses a strong objection to abortion. Again, a groan goes round the table; the family mostly th...
2018-09-112h 46
80,000 Hours Podcast#41 - David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcherWith 698 inmates per 100,000 citizens, the U.S. is by far the leader among large wealthy nations in incarceration. But what effect does imprisonment actually have on crime?
According to David Roodman, Senior Advisor to the Open Philanthropy Project, the marginal effect is zero.
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This stunning rebuke to the American criminal justice system comes from the man Holden Karnofsky’s called "the gold standard for in-depth quantitative research", whose other investigations include th...
2018-08-282h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#40 - Katja Grace on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictionsExperts believe that artificial intelligence will be better than humans at driving trucks by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing bestselling books by 2049, and working as surgeons by 2053. But how seriously should we take these predictions?
Katja Grace, lead author of ‘When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?’, thinks we should treat such guesses as only weak evidence. But she also says there might be much better ways to forecast transformative technology, and that anticipating such advances could be one of our most important projects.
Note: Katja's organisation AI Impacts is currently hiring part- and full-time researchers.
2018-08-212h 11
80,000 Hours Podcast#39 - Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questionsWill Trump be re-elected? Will North Korea give up their nuclear weapons? Will your friend turn up to dinner?
Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org has a process for working out such real life problems.
Let’s work through one here: how likely is it that you’ll enjoy listening to this episode?
The first step is to figure out your ‘prior probability’; what’s your estimate of how likely you are to enjoy the interview before getting any further evidence?
Other than applying common sense, one way to figure this out is called...
2018-08-072h 17
80,000 Hours Podcast#38 - Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier worldWill people who think carefully about how to maximize welfare eventually converge on the same views? The effective altruism community has spent a lot of time over the past 10 years debating how best to increase happiness and reduce suffering, and gradually narrowed in on the world’s poorest people, all animals capable of suffering, and future generations. Yew-Kwang Ng, Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, was independently working on this exact question since the 70s. Many of his conclusions have ended up foreshadowing what is now conventional wisdom within effective altruism - thou...
2018-07-261h 59
80,000 Hours Podcast#37 - GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.What’s the value of preventing the death of a 5-year-old child, compared to a 20-year-old, or an 80-year-old?
The global health community has generally regarded the value as proportional to the number of health-adjusted life-years the person has remaining - but GiveWell, one of the world’s foremost charity evaluators, no longer uses that approach.
They found that contrary to the years-remaining’ method, many of their staff actually value preventing the death of an adult more than preventing the death of a young child. However there’s plenty of disagreement: the team’s estimates of the relative v...
2018-07-161h 44
80,000 Hours Podcast#36 - Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruismAlmost nobody is able to do groundbreaking physics research themselves, and by the time his brilliance was appreciated, Einstein was hardly limited by funding. But what if you could find a way to unlock the secrets of the universe like Einstein nonetheless?
Today’s guest, Tanya Singh, sees herself as doing something like that every day. She’s Executive Assistant to one of her intellectual heroes who she believes is making a huge contribution to improving the world: Professor Bostrom at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI).
She couldn’t get more work out of Bostrom with e...
2018-07-112h 04
80,000 Hours Podcast#35 - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission"You don't need permission. You don't need to be allowed to do something that's not in your job description. If you think that it's gonna make your company or your organization more successful and more efficient, you can often just go and do it."
How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s life, the answer seems to be ‘very’.
At 15 she took her first job - an entry-level position at a chain restaurant. Rather than accept her place, Tara took it on herself to massively improve the store’s shambo...
2018-06-221h 22
80,000 Hours PodcastRob Wiblin on the art/science of a high impact careerToday's episode is a cross-post of an interview I did with The Jolly Swagmen Podcast which came out this week. I recommend regular listeners skip to 24 minutes in to avoid hearing things they already know. Later in the episode I talk about my contrarian views, utilitarianism, how 80,000 Hours has changed and will change in the future, where I think EA is performing worst, how to use social media most effectively, and whether or not effective altruism is any sacrifice.
Subscribe and get the episode by searching for '80,000 Hours' in your podcasting app.
Blog post of the...
2018-06-081h 31
80,000 Hours Podcast#34 - We use the worst voting system that exists. Here's how Aaron Hamlin is going to fix it.In 1991 Edwin Edwards won the Louisiana gubernatorial election. In 2001, he was found guilty of racketeering and received a 10 year invitation to Federal prison. The strange thing about that election? By 1991 Edwards was already notorious for his corruption. Actually, that’s not it.
The truly strange thing is that Edwards was clearly the good guy in the race. How is that possible?
His opponent was former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
How could Louisiana end up having to choose between a criminal and a Nazi sympathiser?
It’s not like they lacked othe...
2018-06-012h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#33 - Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear warJoseph Stalin had a life-extension program dedicated to making himself immortal. What if he had succeeded? According to our last guest, Bryan Caplan, there’s an 80% chance that Stalin would still be ruling Russia today. Today’s guest disagrees. Like Stalin he has eyes for his own immortality - including an insurance plan that will cover the cost of cryogenically freezing himself after he dies - and thinks the technology to achieve it might be around the corner. Fortunately for humanity though, that guest is probably one of the nicest people on the plane...
2018-05-291h 24
80,000 Hours Podcast#32 - Bryan Caplan on whether his Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open bordersBryan Caplan’s claim in *The Case Against Education* is striking: education doesn’t teach people much, we use little of what we learn, and college is mostly about trying to seem smarter than other people - so the government should slash education funding.
It’s a dismaying - almost profane - idea, and one people are inclined to dismiss out of hand. But having read the book, I have to admit that Bryan can point to a surprising amount of evidence in his favour.
After all, imagine this dilemma: you can have either a Princeton education withou...
2018-05-222h 25
80,000 Hours Podcast#31 - Allan Dafoe on defusing the political & economic risks posed by existing AI capabilitiesThe debate around the impacts of artificial intelligence often centres on ‘superintelligence’ - a general intellect that is much smarter than the best humans, in practically every field. But according to Allan Dafoe - Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University - even if we stopped at today's AI technology and simply collected more data, built more sensors, and added more computing capacity, extreme systemic risks could emerge, including: * Mass labor displacement, unemployment, and inequality; * The rise of a more oligopolistic global market structure, potentially moving us away from our liberal economic world order;
2018-05-1848 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#30 - Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to anotherIf we have a study on the impact of a social program in a particular place and time, how confident can we be that we’ll get a similar result if we study the same program again somewhere else? Dr Eva Vivalt is a lecturer in the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University. She compiled a huge database of impact evaluations in global development - including 15,024 estimates from 635 papers across 20 types of intervention - to help answer this question. Her finding: not confident at all. The typical study result differs from...
2018-05-152h 01
80,000 Hours Podcast#29 - Anders Sandberg on 3 new resolutions for the Fermi paradox & how to colonise the universePart 2 out now: #33 - Dr Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear war The universe is so vast, yet we don’t see any alien civilizations. If they exist, where are they? Oxford University’s Anders Sandberg has an original answer: they’re ‘sleeping’, and for a very compelling reason. Because of the thermodynamics of computation, the colder it gets, the more computations you can do. The universe is getting exponentially colder as it expands, and as the universe cools, one Joule of energy gets worth more and more...
2018-05-081h 21
80,000 Hours Podcast#28 - Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & fast AI progressesA researcher is working on creating a new virus – one more dangerous than any that exist naturally. They believe they’re being as careful as possible. After all, if things go wrong, their own life and that of their colleagues will be in danger. But if an accident is capable of triggering a global pandemic – hundreds of millions of lives might be at risk. How much additional care will the researcher actually take in the face of such a staggering death toll? In a new paper Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt, a Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humani...
2018-04-281h 03
80,000 Hours Podcast#27 - Dr Tom Inglesby on careers and policies that reduce global catastrophic biological risksHow about this for a movie idea: a main character has to prevent a new contagious strain of Ebola spreading around the world. She’s the best of the best. So good in fact, that her work on early detection systems contains the strain at its source. Ten minutes into the movie, we see the results of her work – nothing happens. Life goes on as usual. She continues to be amazingly competent, and nothing continues to go wrong. Fade to black. Roll credits.
If your job is to prevent catastrophes, success is when nobody has to pay attention to you...
2018-04-182h 16
80,000 Hours Podcast#26 - Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is made & what's needed to get it in every supermarketFirst, decide on the type of animal. Next, pick the cell type. Then take a small, painless biopsy, and put the cells in a solution that makes them feel like they’re still in the body. Once the cells are in this comfortable state, they'll proliferate. One cell becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight, and so on. Continue until you have enough cells to make a burger, a nugget, a sausage, or a piece of bacon, then concentrate them until they bind into solid meat.
It's all surprisingly straightforward in principle according to Marie Gibbons, a research fell...
2018-04-101h 44
80,000 Hours Podcast#25 - Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we doOn February 2, 1685, England’s King Charles II was struck by a sudden illness. Fortunately his physicians were the best of the best. To reassure the public they kept them abreast of the King’s treatment regimen. King Charles was made to swallow a toxic metal; had blistering agents applied to his scalp; had pigeon droppings attached to his feet; was prodded with a red-hot poker; given forty drops of ooze from “the skull of a man that was never buried”; and, finally, had crushed stones from the intestines of an East Indian goat forced down his throat. Sadly, despite these he...
2018-03-282h 39
80,000 Hours Podcast#24 - Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good causeHow honest should we be? How helpful? How friendly? If our society claims to value honesty, for instance, but in reality accepts an awful lot of lying – should we go along with those lax standards? Or, should we attempt to set a new norm for ourselves?
Dr Stefan Schubert, a researcher at the Social Behaviour and Ethics Lab at Oxford University, has been modelling this in the context of the effective altruism community. He thinks people trying to improve the world should hold themselves to very high standards of integrity, because their minor sins can impose major costs on th...
2018-03-2055 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#23 - How to actually become an AI alignment researcher, according to Dr Jan LeikeWant to help steer the 21st century’s most transformative technology? First complete an undergrad degree in computer science and mathematics. Prioritize harder courses over easier ones. Publish at least one paper before you apply for a PhD. Find a supervisor who’ll have a lot of time for you. Go to the top conferences and meet your future colleagues. And finally, get yourself hired.
That’s Dr Jan Leike’s advice on how to join him as a Research Scientist at DeepMind, the world’s leading AI team.
Jan is also a Research Associate at the Future...
2018-03-1645 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#22 - Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide ratesHow people kill themselves varies enormously depending on which means are most easily available. In the United States, suicide by firearm stands out. In Hong Kong, where most people live in high rise buildings, jumping from a height is more common. And in some countries in Asia and Africa with many poor agricultural communities, the leading means is drinking pesticide. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of this issue before. And yet, of the 800,000 people who kill themselves globally each year 20% die from pesticide self-poisoning. Full transcript, summary and links to articles discus...
2018-03-071h 08
80,000 Hours Podcast#21 - Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil’s plan to do the sameThe Green Revolution averted mass famine during the 20th century. The contraceptive pill gave women unprecedented freedom in planning their own lives. Both are widely recognised as scientific breakthroughs that transformed the world. But few know that those breakthroughs only happened when they did because of a philanthropist willing to take a risky bet on a new idea.
Today’s guest, Holden Karnofsky, has been looking for philanthropy’s biggest success stories because he’s Executive Director of the Open Philanthropy Project, which gives away over $100 million per year - and he’s hungry for big wins.
Full t...
2018-02-272h 35
80,000 Hours Podcast#20 - Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farmingBefore the US Civil War, it was easier for the North to morally oppose slavery. Why? Because unlike the South they weren’t profiting much from its existence. The fight for abolition was partly won because many no longer saw themselves as having a selfish stake in its continuation.
Bruce Friedrich, executive director of The Good Food Institute (GFI), thinks the same may be true in the fight against speciesism. 98% of people currently eat meat. But if eating meat stops being part of most people’s daily lives -- it should be a lot easier to convince them that farm...
2018-02-191h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#19 - Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on working next to the White House trying to prevent nuclear warRogue elements within a state’s security forces enrich dozens of kilograms of uranium. It’s then assembled into a crude nuclear bomb. The bomb is transported on a civilian aircraft to Washington D.C, and loaded onto a delivery truck. The truck is driven by an American citizen midway between the White House and the Capitol Building. The driver casually steps out of the vehicle, and detonates the weapon. There are more than 80,000 instant deaths. There are also at least 100,000 seriously wounded, with nowhere left to treat them.
Full blog post about this episode, including a transcript, summ...
2018-02-141h 04
80,000 Hours Podcast#18 - Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinctionOfir Reich started out doing math in the military, before spending 8 years in tech startups - but then made a sharp turn to become a data scientist focussed on helping the global poor.
At UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action he helps prevent tax evasion by identifying fake companies in India, enable Afghanistan to pay its teachers electronically, and raise yields for Ethiopian farmers by messaging them when local conditions make it ideal to apply fertiliser. Or at least that’s the hope - he’s also working on ways to test whether those interventions actually work.
...
2018-01-311h 18
80,000 Hours Podcast#17 - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monsterImmanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races. Throughout history we’ve consistently believed, as common sense, truly horrifying things by today’s standards. According to University of Oxford Professor Will MacAskill, it’s extremely likely that we’re in the same boat today. If we accept that we’re probably m...
2018-01-191h 52
80,000 Hours Podcast#16 - Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectualsIn the 40s and 50s neoliberalism was a fringe movement within economics. But by the 80s it had become a dominant school of thought in public policy, and achieved major policy changes across the English speaking world. How did this happen? In part because its leaders invested heavily in training academics to study and develop their ideas. Whether you think neoliberalism was good or bad, its history demonstrates the impact building a strong intellectual base within universities can have. Michelle Hutchinson is working to get a different set of ideas a hearing in academia by se...
2017-12-2255 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#15 - Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wiseProf Philip Tetlock is a social science legend. Over forty years he has researched whose predictions we can trust, whose we can’t and why - and developed methods that allow all of us to be better at predicting the future. After the Iraq WMDs fiasco, the US intelligence services hired him to figure out how to ensure they’d never screw up that badly again. The result of that work – Superforecasting – was a media sensation in 2015. Full transcript, brief summary, apply for coaching and links to learn more. It described Tetlock’s Good Judgem...
2017-11-201h 24
80,000 Hours Podcast#14 - Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuseWhat if you knew that ducks were being killed with pitchforks? Rabbits dumped alive into containers? Or pigs being strangled with forklifts? Would you be willing to go undercover to expose the crime?
That’s a real question that confronts volunteers at Animal Equality (AE). In this episode we speak to Sharon Nunez and Jose Valle, who founded AE in 2006 and then grew it into a multi-million dollar international animal rights organisation. They’ve been chosen as one of the most effective animal protection orgs in the world by Animal Charity Evaluators for the last 3 consecutive years.
Blog...
2017-11-131h 25
80,000 Hours Podcast#13 - Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the resultsIn both rich and poor countries, government policy is often based on no evidence at all and many programs don’t work. This has particularly harsh effects on the global poor - in some countries governments only spend $100 on each citizen a year so they can’t afford to waste a single dollar.
Enter MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Since 2003 they’ve conducted experiments to figure out what policies actually help recipients, and then tried to get them implemented by governments and non-profits.
Claire Walsh leads J-PAL’s Government Partnership Initiative, which works to evaluate policies and progra...
2017-10-3152 min