Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours The 80000 Hours team

Effective Altruism: An Introduction is a collection of ten top episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast specifically selected to help listeners quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.

Here the host of the show — Rob Wiblin — briefly explains what effective altruism is all about, and what to expect from the rest of this series.

Both the Green Revolution and the contraceptive pill 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.

Toby Ord makes the case that 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 is in large part up to us.

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.
Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interviewThis episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on July 12, 2021. Some related episodes include:

#22 – Dr Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates#37 – GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.#83 – Jennifer Doleac on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisonsSeries produced by Keiran Harris.

Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org has a process for working out real life problems.

If we accept that we’re probably making major moral errors, how should we proceed?