The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.
Today’s guest, Alexander Berger, leads Open Philanthropy’s ‘Global Health and Wellbeing’ programme, where he oversees around $175 million in grants each year, and ultimately aspires to disburse billions in the most impactful ways he and his team can identify.
In this conversation from 2021, Alexander explains the case in favour of adopting the ‘global health and wellbeing’ mindset, while going through the arguments for the longtermist approach that he finds most and least convincing.
This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on July 12, 2021. Some related episodes include:
Series produced by Keiran Harris.
Imagine that humanity has two possible futures ahead of it: Either we’re going to have a huge future like that, in which trillions of people ultimately exist, or we’re going to wipe ourselves out quite soon, thereby ensuring that only around 100 billion people ever get to live.
If there are eventually going to be 1,000 trillion humans, what should we think of the fact that we seemingly find ourselves so early in history? If the future will have many trillions of people, the odds of us appearing so strangely early are very low indeed.
If we accept the analogy, maybe we can be confident that humanity is at a high risk of extinction based on this so-called ‘doomsday argument‘ alone.
There are many critics of this theoretical ‘doomsday argument’, and it may be the case that it logically doesn’t work. This is why Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — spent time investigating it, with the goal of ultimately making better philanthropic grants.
In this conversation from 2021, Ajeya and Rob discuss both the doomsday argument and the challenge Open Phil faces striking a balance between taking big ideas seriously, and not going all in on philosophical arguments that may turn out to be barking up the wrong tree entirely.
This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on January 19, 2021. Some related episodes include:
Series produced by Keiran Harris.
