Shows
80,000 Hours Podcast#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if we continue doing research, both at the theoretical level — How do ecosystems work? What sorts of things are likely to have what sorts of indirect effects? — and then also at the practical level...2024-11-293h 21
80,000 Hours Podcast#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think stories are the best way to bring them in." — Elizabeth CoxIn today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent production company Should We Studio — about the case that storytelli...2024-11-212h 22
80,000 Hours Podcast#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going on in some way out there in the world. And that’s the claim that I’ve taken on board as a general hypothesis for consciousness: that all our perceptual experiences are inferences abo...2024-11-012h 33
80,000 Hours Podcast#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the other tank as well. If the fish takes the blue triangle, this fish will receive food, but nothing will be delivered in the other tank. So we have a prosocial choice and antisocial choice. When there is no one in the other part of the tank, the male is choosing randomly. If there is a male, a possible rival: antisocial — almost 100% of the time. Now, if there is his wi...2024-10-233h 11
80k After HoursHighlights: Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shameThis is a selection of highlights from our April 2023 episode with host Luisa Rodriguez and producer Keiran Harris on 80k After Hours. These aren't necessarily the most important, or even most entertaining parts of the interview — and if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode:Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shameAnd if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing podcast@80000hours.org.Highlights:Keiran’s intro (00:00:00)Jerk Syndrome (00:00:53)The basic case for free...2024-10-2113 min
80,000 Hours Podcast#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1' — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total… And I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well… There are achievements, there are experiences, there are things that can be done in the face of difficulty that might be seen as having the same kind of redemp...2024-10-031h 25
80,000 Hours PodcastLuisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shameIn this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, shame, anger, and pride.Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.They cover:Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold themWhat it’s like not experiencing sustained guilt, shame, and angerWhether Luisa would become a worse person if she felt less guilt and shame — specifically whether she’d work fewer hours, or donate less money, or become a worse friendWhether giving up guilt and sham...2024-09-271h 36
80,000 Hours Podcast#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply crackpot ideas. In general, [science] advances building on the knowledge we have, and seeing what the next questions are, and then getting to the next stage and the next stage and so on. And occasionally there’ll be revolutionary ideas which will really completely change your view of science. And it is possible that some revolutionary breakthrough in our understanding will come about and we might crack this problem, but there’s no evidence for that. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t...2024-09-192h 20
80,000 Hours Podcast#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. It’s just very difficult. And I know that sounds surprising, because humans are very good at this. In fact, even with one eye, we can navigate and we can clear the dinner table. But it seems that we’re building in a lot of understanding and intuition about what’s happening in the world and where objects are and how they behave. For robots, it’s very difficult to get a perfectly...2024-09-132h 01
80,000 Hours Podcast#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting from this belief.' So we wanted to make that very legible to people. We wanted to say, 'Experts think this; accurate forecasters think this.' They might both be wrong, but we can at least start from here and figure out where we’re coming into a discussion and say, 'I am much less concerned than the people in this report; or I am much more concerned, and I think people in this report were missing major things.' But if y...2024-09-042h 49
80k After HoursChristian Ruhl on why we're entering a new nuclear age — and how to reduce the risks"We really, really want to make sure that nuclear war never breaks out. But we also know — from all of the examples of the Cold War, all these close calls — that it very well could, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world. So if it does, we want to have some ways of preventing that from turning into a civilisation-threatening, cataclysmic kind of war. And those kinds of interventions — war limitation, intrawar escalation management, civil defence — those are kind of the seatbelts and airbags of the nuclear world. So to borrow a phrase from one of my colle...2024-03-211h 12
80,000 Hours Podcast#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndromeToday’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!).The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it’s rare for people to offer detailed insight into their thoughts and struggles — and even rarer for someone as perceptive as Howie to do so.Rebroadc...2023-12-272h 51
80k After HoursHannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impactIn this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Hannah Boettcher discuss various approaches to therapy, and how to use them in practice — focusing specifically on people trying to have a big impact.Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript.They cover:The effectiveness of therapy, and tips for finding a therapistMoral demandingnessInternal family systems-style therapyMotivation and burnoutExposure therapyGrappling with world problems and x-riskPerfectionism and imposter syndromeAnd the risk of over-intellectualisingWho this episode is for:High-impact focused people who struggle with moral demandingness, perfectionism, or imposter syndromePeople who fee...2023-07-192h 07
80k After HoursLuisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shameIn this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, shame, anger, and pride.Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript.They cover:Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold themWhat it’s like not experiencing sustained guilt, shame, and angerWhether Luisa would become a worse person if she felt less guilt and shame, specifically whether she’d work fewer hours, or donate less money, or become a worse friendWhether giving up guilt and shame also means...2023-04-221h 37
80k After HoursAlex Lawsen on his advice for studentsIn this episode of 80k After Hours, Keiran Harris interviews 80,000 Hours advisor (and former high school teacher) Alex Lawsen about his advice for students.Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript.They cover:When half-assing something is a good ideaWhen you should actually learn things vs. just trying to seem smartWhy you should shift your focus over the academic yearNovel tips for preparing for examsWhat to do if you struggle with motivationWhat to do when you have bad teachersHow students should think about exploring and experimentingBad approaches to learningHow to think about personal...2022-02-282h 24
80k After HoursRob and Keiran on the philosophy of The 80,000 Hours PodcastIn this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin and Keiran Harris are interviewed by Kearney Capuano and Aaron Bergman of the new podcast ‘All Good’ about what goes on behind-the-scenes at the 80,000 Hours Podcast.Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript.We cover:The history and philosophy of The 80,000 Hours PodcastThe nuts and bolts of how we make the showRob’s bad habits as an interviewerTopics we try to avoidCritiques of the showThe pros and cons of podcasting vs. other mediumsOur position in the effective altruism communityWhether there’s an optimism bias in the EA co...2022-02-281h 53
Safety And Risk Success2022 safety and risk predictions show - 30 safety and risk professionals predict the trends of 2022What’s going to happen in 2022 in the world of safety and risk? What do you need to be on the lookout for as the new year is now underway? Join Christian Harris and 29 other safety and risk professionals who’ve given their 2022 predictions in this week’s podcast episode. Who is a great prognosticator and can see the trends appearing before they are even visible on the horizon? Check out this week’s episode to find out. Giving their predictions from all over the world, in alphabetical order, are:...2022-01-2945 min
Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems – 80,000 Hours (October 2021)Seven: Ezra Klein on journalismHow many words in U.S. newspapers have been spilled on tax policy in the past five years? And how many words on CRISPR? Or meat alternatives? Or how AI may soon automate the majority of jobs?When people look back on this era, is the interesting thing going to have been fights over whether or not the top marginal tax rate was 39.5% or 35.4%, or is it going to be that human beings started to take control of human evolution; that we stood on the brink of eliminating immeasurable levels of suffering on factory farms; and...2021-10-031h 45
Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems – 80,000 Hours (October 2021)Nine: Dave Denkenberger on feeding the world through catastrophesIf a nuclear winter or asteroid impact blocked the sun for years, our inability to grow food would result in billions dying of starvation, right? According to Dr Dave 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, Dave 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 many more.Dr Denkenberger is an Assistant Professor at the Univ...2021-10-032h 56
80,000 Hours Podcast#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndromeToday's episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!).
The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it's rare for people to offer detailed insight into their thoughts and struggles — and even rarer for someone as perceptive as Howie to do so.
Links to learn more...2021-05-192h 51
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)One: 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.Holden Karnofsky has been studying philanthropy’s biggest success stories because he’s Executive Director of Open Philanthropy, a major foundation which gives away over $200 million a year — and he’s hungry for big wins.In this conversa...2021-04-132h 36
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)Two: Dr Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about itOf 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 sense, consequences, rules of ethical conduct, cooperating with others, virtuousness, keepin...2021-04-122h 10
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)Four: Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questionsWill SpaceX land people on Mars in the next decade? 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.In this conversation from 2018, Spencer walks us through how to reason through difficult questions more accurately, and when we should expect to be overconfident or underconfident. Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interviewThis episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on August 7, 2018. Some related episodes include:2021-04-122h 17
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)Five: Prof 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...2021-04-121h 52
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)Seven: Prof 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...2021-04-122h 17
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)Eight: Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questionsThe 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, this simple decision will completely change the long-term future by altering the identities of almost all future generations. This conversation from 2018 blends philosophy with an exploration of the mission and research ag...2021-04-122h 48
80,000 Hours PodcastBenjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (80k team chat #4)In the last '80k team chat' with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is and isn't, and how to argue for it. In this episode we turn now to what the effective altruism community most needs.
• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript
• The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey just opened. If you're involved with the effective altruism community, or sympathetic to its ideas, it's would be wonderful if you could fill it out: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/EAS80K2
According to Ben...2020-11-121h 25
80,000 Hours Podcast#87 – Russ Roberts on whether it's more effective to help strangers, or people you knowIf you want to make the world a better place, would it be better to help your niece with her SATs, or try to join the State Department to lower the risk that the US and China go to war? People involved in 80,000 Hours or the effective altruism community would be comfortable recommending the latter. This week's guest — Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast EconTalk, and author of a forthcoming book on decision-making under uncertainty and the limited ability of data to help — worries that might be a mistake. Links to learn more, summary and fu...2020-11-031h 49
80,000 Hours PodcastHow much does a vote matter? (Article)Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.In this one — How much does a vote matter? — I investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote:
• The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome
• How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others
I then discuss what I think are the best arguments against voting in important elections:
• If an election is competitive, that means other people disagree about which option i...2020-10-2931 min
80,000 Hours PodcastBenjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it (80k team chat #3)Today’s episode is the latest conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd.
Ben’s been thinking a lot about effective altruism recently, including what it really is, how it's framed, and how people misunderstand it.
We recently released an article on misconceptions about effective altruism – based on Will MacAskill’s recent paper The Definition of Effective Altruism – and this episode can act as a companion piece.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Arden and Ben cover a bunch of topics related to effective...2020-09-231h 24
80,000 Hours PodcastIdeas for high impact careers beyond our priority paths (Article)Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.
In this one, we go through some more career options beyond our priority paths that seem promising to us for positively influencing the long-term future.
Some of these are likely to be written up as priority paths in the future, or wrapped into existing ones, but we haven’t written full profiles for them yet—for example policy careers outside AI and biosecurity policy that seem promising from a longtermist perspective.
Others, like information security, we think might be as...2020-09-0727 min
80,000 Hours PodcastBenjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong (80k team chat #2)Today’s bonus episode is a conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd.
Ben’s been doing a bunch of research recently, and we thought it’d be interesting to hear about how he’s currently thinking about a couple of different topics – including different types of longtermism, and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
This is very off-the-cut compared to our regular episodes, and just 54 minutes long.
In the first half, Arden and Ben talk about varieties of longtermism:
• Pati...2020-09-0157 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#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#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 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: 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#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 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#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
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 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 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#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 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 farming2019-01-1600 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#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#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#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
Earth MattersVoices of the FutureOn this week's Earth Matters we look into the future and find out what kids are learning at school about sustainability. I spoke to Julie Harris who is the Executive Officer at Environment Education Victoria. I also spoke to Dominique Dybala who is one of the teachers implementing the program at St Mary's Primary School Williamstown and also works at Environment Education Victoria. And I spoke to some of her students, who are on the Student Sustainability Leadership Team. Their names are Imogen, Simone, Lily, Catherine, Jacqueline, Christian, Liam and Stella. I wanted to find out what the students were l...2017-09-1700 min
Earth MattersDitch Coal - Save BulgaOn this weeks show we are joined by Anne Harris to talk about the report 'Ditch Coal: The global impacts of the UK's addiction to coal' and how they are linking up those at the global mine sites for the UK's coal.The people of Bulga on Wonnarua country in the Hunter Valley, have been battling to stop an expansion of Rio Tinto's coal mine. After seven years of legal cases & several wins in the courts the NSW Government changed the law to facilitate the mine expansion. The community has turned to peaceful direct action and set up a roadside vi...2016-07-2400 min