Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems – 80000 Hours (80000 Hours)

COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the damage biological threats can do. But the threat doesn’t come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have the potential to spread globally and kill just as many as an all-out nuclear war.

For five years, Andy Weber, was the US’ Assistant Secretary of Defense responsible for biological and other weapons of mass destruction. Andy’s current mission is to spread the word that while bioweapons are terrifying, scientific advances also leave them on the verge of becoming an outdated technology.

We chose Andy to introduce the problems of pandemics and nuclear wars. 

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on March 12, 2021. Some related episodes include:

• #4 – Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them
• #12 – Dr Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.
• #27 – Tom Inglesby on how to prevent global catastrophic biological risks.
• #65 – Amb. Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years pursuing WMD arms control, & diversity in diplomacy

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

If I told you it’s possible to deliver an extra year of ideal primary-level education for 30 cents, 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, but they’re not the kinds of things you’d expect, says Dr Rachel Glennerster — who we chose to introduce the problem of global poverty. 

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on December 20, 2018. Some related episodes include:

• #13 – Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results
• #18 – Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinction
• #22 – Dr Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates
• #30 – Dr Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another
• #37 – GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.
• #38 – Prof Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating EA decades ago & how to make a much happier world
• And #55 – Mark Lutter & Tamara Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end poverty

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

Now you've finished Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems, here's what we suggest you do next.

And if you’ve listened to this series and found the ideas resonated with you, our one-on-one team might be able to help you apply them to your career. We can talk to you about career options, make introductions in your chosen fields, and help you work out next steps on a free careers call. Apply now.

If 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 University of Alaska Fairbanks, and he’s out to spread the word that while a nuclear winter might be horrible, experts have been mistaken to assume that mass starvation is an inevitability. In fact, he says, the only thing that would prevent us from feeding the world is insufficient preparation.

Dave was the natural choice to introduce the problem of feeding the world through catastrophes. 

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on December 27, 2018. Some related episodes include:

• #97 – Mike Berkowitz on keeping the U.S. a liberal democratic country
• #96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media
• #88 – Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies
• #64 – Bruce Schneier on the big risks in computer security, secrets, and surveillance without tyranny

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

Most animals are hunted by predators, and constantly have to remain vigilant lest they be killed, and perhaps experience the terror of being eaten alive. Resource competition often leads to chronic hunger or starvation. Their diseases and injuries are never treated. In winter wild animals freeze to death and in droughts they die of heat or thirst.

There are fewer than 20 people in the world dedicating their lives to researching these problems.

But according to Persis Eskander, if we sum up the negative experiences of all wild animals, their sheer number – trillions to quintillions, depending on which you count – could make the scale of the problem larger than most other near-term concerns. 

We chose Persis to introduce the problem of wild animal suffering.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on April 15, 2019. Some related episodes include:

#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry
#26 – Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it in every supermarket
#20 – Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming
#14 – Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and computer science.

The 80,000 Hours team found his new book The Alignment Problem to be an insightful and comprehensive review of the state of the research into making advanced artificial intelligence useful and reliably safe, and we thought he'd be a great person to introduce the problem.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on March 5, 2021. Some related episodes include:

• #44 – Dr Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the 'AI alignment problem', and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems
• #3 – Dr Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
• #31 – Prof Allan Dafoe on defusing the political and economic risks posed by existing AI capabilities
• #47 – Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

In 2020, Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his 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.

Toby is a famously good explainer of complex issues — a bit of a modern Carl Sagan character — so we thought this would be a perfect introduction to the problem of existential risks.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on March 7, 2020. Some related episodes include:

• #81 – Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
• #70 – Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19)
• #43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, & how they could be dismantled

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before being killed for human consumption. Despite the enormous scale of suffering this causes, the issue is largely neglected: every year, only about $290 million is spent tackling the problem globally (for comparison, annual climate change philanthropy is estimated to be $8–12 billion).

Since 2015, Lewis Bollard has led Open Philanthropy’s programme on farmed animal welfare, where he has conducted extensive research into the best ways to end animal suffering in factory farms as soon as possible. 

He might be the single best person in the world to introduce the problem of factory farming.

This episode first broadcast on The 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on April 18, 2024. Some related episodes include:

• #91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
• #8 – Lewis Bollard on ending factory farming as soon as possible
• #167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
• #99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry
• #182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
• #26 – Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it in every supermarket
• #20 – Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming
• #14 – Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems is a collection of ten top episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, designed to bring you up to speed on ten pressing issues the effective altruism community is working to solve.

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.

How 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 that for the first time the average American might become financially comfortable and unemployed simultaneously?

Ezra Klein is one of the most prominent journalists in the world. Ezra thinks that pressing issues are neglected largely because there’s little pre-existing infrastructure to push them, and we chose him to introduce journalism.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on March 20, 2021. Some related episodes include:

• #53 – Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism
• #88 – Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies
• #59 – Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
• #57 – Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in government
• #51 – Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

A golf-ball sized lump of uranium can deliver more than enough power to cover all your lifetime energy use. To get the same energy from coal, you’d need 3,200 tonnes of the stuff — a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants, which would go on to 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: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (winner of the prestigious Royal Society Prizes for Science Books) and Nuclear 2.0. — it’s actually much, much safer.

We chose Mark to introduce the problem of climate change.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on August 20, 2020. 

If you want to hear more about climate change, head to the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed and check out our episode with Kelly Wanser. She founded SilverLining — a nonprofit organization that advocates research into climate interventions, such as seeding or brightening clouds, to ensure that we maintain a safe climate.

• #95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

The killing of George Floyd has prompted a great deal of debate over whether the US should shrink its police departments. The research literature suggests that the presence of police officers does reduce crime, though they’re not cheap, 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 unconventional but effective approaches to crime prevention — approaches that would shrink the need for police or prisons and the human toll they bring with them.

Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and incarceration, and we chose her to introduce the problem of criminal justice reform.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on July 31, 2020. Some related episodes include:

• #82 – James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system
• #41 – David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher

Series produced by Keiran Harris.