This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th and 21st century Utilitarian and Effective Altruist philosopher, Peter Singer's book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically 

Specifically it focuses on chapter 8, where he considers whether and how reason can be a sufficient motivation for effective altruism, and how that could have come about.

You can get the book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically here - https://amzn.to/3qr1buq

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 1500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do - Effective Altruism, Reason And Motivation

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th and 21st century Utilitarian and Effective Altruist philosopher, Peter Singer's book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically 

Specifically it focuses on chapter 9, in which he discusses whether effective altruists are sacrificing their own happiness for the happiness of others, or not.  He also discusses whether effective altruists ought to be considered to be egoists of some sort or not

You can get the book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically here - https://amzn.to/3qr1buq

To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler

If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

You can find over 1500 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler

Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do - Effective Altruism And Personal Happiness

Three thousand souls in agony right now,
While we debate which problems to allow.
The math is clear - five million days of hell,
Each year persist, though costs to solve are small.
Neglected suffering hides behind the name
Of "headache" while it burns through mind and brain.
The scale is vast but tractable to right,
Just pennies worth of compounds hold this might.
Our metrics fail to capture orders ten,
Of difference between these peaks of pain.
WELLBY, DALY, cannot tell the tale
Of heavy tails where standard measures fail.
Three million cursed, yet intervention's clear,
The research done, the molecules are here.
Compare the cost to other paths we fund,
To save these peaks of suffering we've found.

Five million days of hell we could prevent,
Five million days of hell we could prevent,
Five million days of hell we could prevent each year,

If only now our hearts would just relent.
Rise up, rise up - we'll drive this darkness out,
Rise up, rise up - and let our love shine out.

Based on Alfredo Parra's writeup Quantifying the Global Burden of Extreme Pain from Cluster Headaches -> https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/geh2g2nKb7Kkp26ze/quantifying-the-global-burden-of-extreme-pain-from-cluster

Five Million Days of Hell (EA version)

If you want to improve the world as much as possible, what should you do with your career? Should you become a doctor, an engineer or a politician? Should you try to end global poverty, climate change, or international conflict? These are the questions that the research group, 80,000 Hours tries to answer. They try to figure out how individuals can set themselves up to help as many people as possible in as big a way as possible.

To learn more about their research, Ariel invited Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer of 80,000 Hours to the FLI podcast. In this podcast we discuss "earning to give", building career capital, the most effective ways for individuals to help solve the world's most pressing problems -- including artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and climate change. If you're interested in tackling these problems, or simply want to learn more about them, this podcast is the perfect place to start.

80,000 Hours with Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer

Almost 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 extra donations, as his salary is already easily covered. But with her superior abilities as an Executive Assistant, Tanya frees up hours of his time every week, essentially ‘buying’ more Bostrom in a way nobody else can. She also help manage FHI more generally, in so doing freeing up more than an hour of other staff time for each hour she works. This gives her the leverage to do more good than other people or other positions. 

In our <a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-mac-aulay-operations-mindset/?utm_campaign=podcast__tanya-singh&utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&utm_medium=podcast">previous episode</a>, Tara Mac Aulay objected to viewing operations work as predominately a way of freeing up other people's time: 

“A good ops person doesn’t just allow you to scale linearly, but also can help figure out bottlenecks and solve problems such that the organization is able to do qualitatively different work, rather than just increase the total quantity”, Tara said. 

<a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tanya-singh-operations-bottleneck/?utm_campaign=podcast__tanya-singh&utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&utm_medium=podcast">Full transcript, summary and links to learn more.</a> 

Tara’s right that buying time for people at the top of their field is just one path to impact, though it’s one Tanya says she finds highly motivating. Other paths include enabling complex projects that would otherwise be impossible, allowing you to hire and grow much faster, and preventing disasters that could bring down a whole organisation - all things that Tanya does at FHI as well. 

In today’s episode we discuss all of those approaches, as we dive deeper into the broad class of roles we refer to as ‘operations management’. We cover the arguments we made in <a href="https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/?utm_campaign=podcast__tanya-singh&utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&utm_medium=podcast">‘Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism’</a>, as well as: 

* Does one really need to hire people aligned with an org’s mission to work in ops? 
* The most notable operations successes in the 20th Century. 
* What’s it like being the only operations person in an org? 
* The role of a COO as compared to a CEO, and the options for career progression. 
* How do good operation teams allow orgs to scale quickly? 
* How much do operations staff get to set their org’s strategy? 
* Which personal weaknesses aren’t a huge problem in operations? 
* How do you automate processes? Why don’t most people do this? 
* Cultural differences between Britain and India where Tanya grew up. 

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below. 

The 80,000 Hours podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

#36 - Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism

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 <a href="https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org">Global Priorities Institute</a>, which <a href="https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/opportunities/">is hiring</a> - 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 the timing of everything else people in line do during that day - including changing the timing of the interactions they have with everyone else. Eventually these causal links will reach someone who was going to conceive a child. 

By causing a child to be conceived a few fractions of a second earlier or later, you change the sperm that fertilizes their egg, resulting in a totally different person. So asking for that $1 has now made the difference between all the things that this actual child will do in their life, and all the things that the merely possible child - who didn't exist because of what you did - would have done if you decided not to worry about it. 

As that child's actions ripple out to everyone else who conceives down the generations, ultimately the entire human population will become different, all for the sake of your dollar. Will your choice cause a future Hitler to be born, or not to be born? Probably both! 

<a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/?utm_campaign=podcast__hilary-greaves&amp;utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&amp;utm_medium=podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.</a> 

Some find this concerning. The actual long term effects of your decisions are so unpredictable, it looks like you’re totally clueless about what's going to lead to the best outcomes. It might lead to decision paralysis - you won’t be able to take any action at all. 

Prof Greaves doesn’t share this concern for most real life decisions. If there’s no reasonable way to assign probabilities to far-future outcomes, then the possibility that you might make things better in completely unpredictable ways is more or less canceled out by equally likely opposite possibility. 

But, if instead we’re talking about a decision that involves highly-structured, systematic reasons for thinking there might be a general tendency of your action to make things better or worse -- for example if we increase economic growth -- Prof Greaves says that we don’t get to just ignore the unforeseeable effects. 

When there are complex arguments on both sides, it's unclear what probabilities you should assign to this or that claim. Yet, given its importance, whether you should take the action in question actually does depend on figuring out these numbers. So, what do we do? 

Today’s episode blends philosophy with an exploration of the mission and research agenda of the Global Priorities Institute: to develop the effective altruism movement within academia. We cover: 

* How controversial is the multiverse interpretation of quantum physics? 
* Given moral uncertainty, how should population ethics affect our real life decisions? 
* How should we think about archetypal decision theory problems? 
* What are the consequences of cluelessness for those who based their donation advice on GiveWell style recommendations? 
* How could reducing extinction risk be a good cause for risk-averse people? 

Get this episode by subscribing: type '80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app. 

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

#46 - Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia

Neither Yuval Noah Harari nor Max Tegmark need much in the way of introduction. Both are avant-garde thinkers at the forefront of 21st century discourse around science, technology, society and humanity’s future. This conversation represents a rare opportunity for two intellectual leaders to apply their combined expertise — in physics, artificial intelligence, history, philosophy and anthropology — to some of the most profound issues of our time. Max and Yuval bring their own macroscopic perspectives to this discussion of both cosmological and human history, exploring questions of consciousness, ethics, effective altruism, artificial intelligence, human extinction, emerging technologies and the role of myths and stories in fostering societal collaboration and meaning. We hope that you'll join the Future of Life Institute Podcast for our final conversation of 2019, as we look toward the future and the possibilities it holds for all of us.

Topics discussed include:

-Max and Yuval's views and intuitions about consciousness
-How they ground and think about morality
-Effective altruism and its cause areas of global health/poverty, animal suffering, and existential risk
-The function of myths and stories in human society
-How emerging science, technology, and global paradigms challenge the foundations of many of our stories
-Technological risks of the 21st century

You can find the page and transcript for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2019/12/31/on-consciousness-morality-effective-altruism-myth-with-yuval-noah-harari-max-tegmark/

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
3:14 Grounding morality and the need for a science of consciousness
11:45 The effective altruism community and it's main cause areas
13:05 Global health
14:44 Animal suffering and factory farming
17:38 Existential risk and the ethics of the long-term future
23:07 Nuclear war as a neglected global risk
24:45 On the risks of near-term AI and of artificial general intelligence and superintelligence
28:37 On creating new stories for the challenges of the 21st century
32:33 The risks of big data and AI enabled human hacking and monitoring
47:40 What does it mean to be human and what should we want to want?
52:29 On positive global visions for the future
59:29 Goodbyes and appreciations
01:00:20 Outro and supporting the Future of Life Institute Podcast

This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.

On Consciousness, Morality, Effective Altruism & Myth with Yuval Noah Harari & Max Tegmark

You’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 real sense we’re shaking this box every time we leave the house, and those who think shaking the box is wrong should probably also be shutting themselves indoors and minimising their interactions with others. 

• <a href="https://80k.link/will2">Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.</a> 
• <a href="https://80k.link/gpio">Job opportunities at the Global Priorities Institute.</a> 

To see this, imagine you’re deciding whether to redeem a coupon for a free movie. If you go, you’ll need to drive to the cinema. By affecting traffic throughout the city, you’ll have slightly impacted the schedules of thousands or tens of thousands of people. The average life is about 30,000 days, and over the course of a life the average person will have about two children. So — if you’ve impacted at least 7,500 days — then, statistically speaking, you've probably influenced the exact timing of a conception event. With 200 million sperm in the running each time, changing the moment of copulation, even by a fraction of a second, will almost certainly mean you've changed the identity of a future person. 

That different child will now impact all sorts of things as they go about their life, including future conception events. And then those new people will impact further future conceptions events, and so on. After 100 or maybe 200 years, basically everybody alive will be a different person because you went to the movies. 

As a result, you’ll have changed when many people die. Take car crashes as one example: about 1.3% of people die in car crashes. Over that century, as the identities of everyone change as a result of your action, many of the 'new' people will cause car crashes that wouldn't have occurred in their absence, including crashes that prematurely kill people alive today. 

Of course, in expectation, exactly the same number of people will have been saved from car crashes, and will die later than they would have otherwise. 

So, if you go for this drive, you’ll save hundreds of people from premature death, and cause the early death of an equal number of others. But you’ll get to see a free movie, worth $10. Should you do it? 

This setup forms the basis of ‘the paralysis argument’, explored in one of Will’s <a href="https://80k.link/paral">recent papers</a>. 

Because most 'non-consequentialists' endorse an act/omission distinction… post truncated due to character limit, <a href="https://80k.link/will2">finish reading the full explanation here.</a> 

So what's the best way to fix this strange conclusion? We discuss a few options, but the most promising might bring people a lot closer to full consequentialism than is immediately apparent. In this episode Will and I also cover: 

• Are, or are we not, living in the most influential time in history? 
• The culture of the effective altruism community 
• Will's new lower estimate of the risk of human extinction 
• Why Will is now less focused on AI 
• The differences between Americans and Brits 
• Why feeling guilty about characteristics you were born with is crazy 
• And plenty more. 

Get this episode by subscribing: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. 


Producer: Keiran Harris. 
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. 
Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.

#68 – Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, and the Hinge of History

#68 – Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, the hinge of history debate, & his new priorities

The 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 <a href="https://80k.link/ki-bt">key ideas</a>, 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. 

This key ideas page is the most read on the site. By itself it can teach you a large fraction of the most important things we've discovered since we started investigating high impact careers. 

•&nbsp;<a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-key-ideas-of-80000hours/?utm_campaign=podcast__ben-todd&amp;utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&amp;utm_medium=podcast">Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.</a> 

But it's perhaps more accurate to think of it as a mini-book, as it weighs in at over 20,000 words. 

Fortunately it's designed to be highly modular and it's easy to work through it over multiple sessions, scanning over the articles it links to on each topic. 

Perhaps though, you'd prefer to absorb our most essential ideas in conversation form, in which case this episode is for you. 

If you want to have a big impact with your career, and you say you're only going to read one article from us, we recommend you read our <a href="https://80k.link/ki-bt">key ideas</a> page. 

And likewise, if you're only going to listen to one of our podcast episodes, it should be this one. We have fun and set a strong pace, running through: 

• Common misunderstandings of our advice 
• A high level overview of what 80,000 Hours generally recommends 
• Our key moral positions 
• What are the most pressing problems to work on and why? 
• Which careers effectively contribute to solving those problems? 
• Central aspects of career strategy like how to weigh up career capital, personal fit, and exploration 
• As well as plenty more. 

One benefit of this podcast over the article is that we can more easily communicate uncertainty, and dive into the things we're least sure about, or didn’t yet cover within the article. 

Note though that our what’s in the article is more precisely stated, our advice is going to keep shifting, and we're aiming to keep the key ideas page current as our thinking evolves over time. This episode was recorded in November 2019, so if you notice a conflict between the page and this episode in the future, go with the page! 

Get the episode by subscribing: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. 


Producer: Keiran Harris. 
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. 
Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast

#71 – Ben Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours

Human civilization increasingly has the potential both to improve the lives of everyone and to completely destroy everything. The proliferation of emerging technologies calls our attention to this never-before-seen power — and the need to cultivate the wisdom with which to steer it towards beneficial outcomes. If we're serious both as individuals and as a species about improving the world, it's crucial that we converge around the reality of our situation and what matters most. What are the most important problems in the world today and why? In this episode of the Future of Life Institute Podcast, Sam Harris joins us to discuss some of these global priorities, the ethics surrounding them, and what we can do to address them.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The problem of communication 
-Global priorities 
-Existential risk 
-Animal suffering in both wild animals and factory farmed animals 
-Global poverty 
-Artificial general intelligence risk and AI alignment 
-Ethics
-Sam’s book, The Moral Landscape

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/06/01/on-global-priorities-existential-risk-and-what-matters-most-with-sam-harris/

You can take a survey about the podcast here: www.surveymonkey.com/r/W8YLYD3

You can submit a nominee for the Future of Life Award here: https://futureoflife.org/future-of-life-award-unsung-hero-search/

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
3:52 What are the most important problems in the world?
13:14 Global priorities: existential risk
20:15 Why global catastrophic risks are more likely than existential risks
25:09 Longtermist philosophy
31:36 Making existential and global catastrophic risk more emotionally salient
34:41 How analyzing the self makes longtermism more attractive
40:28 Global priorities & effective altruism: animal suffering and global poverty
56:03 Is machine suffering the next global moral catastrophe?
59:36 AI alignment and artificial general intelligence/superintelligence risk
01:11:25 Expanding our moral circle of compassion
01:13:00 The Moral Landscape, consciousness, and moral realism
01:30:14 Can bliss and wellbeing be mathematically defined?
01:31:03 Where to follow Sam and concluding thoughts

Photo by Christopher Michel: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/ 

This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.

Sam Harris on Global Priorities, Existential Risk, and What Matters Most

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit working to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. In particular, FLI focuses on risks from artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, nuclear weapons and climate change.

The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions.

FLI has become one of the world's leading voices on the governance of AI having created one of the earliest and most influential sets of governance principles: the Asilomar AI Principles.

New episodes no longer on SoundCloud, please go subscribe on a podcast app or here: https://80000hours.org/podcast/

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