Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems – 80000 Hours 80000 Hours

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.

Toby Ord 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.

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.

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spread the word that while bioweapons are terrifying, scientific advances also leave them on the verge of becoming an outdated technology.

The 80,000 Hours team found Brian Christian's 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.

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, with only about $50 million dollars spent each year tackling the problem globally.
Since 2015, Lewis Bollard has led Open Philanthropy’s program on farmed animal welfare, where he has conducted extensive research into the best ways to eliminate animal suffering in farms as soon as possible. 
He might be the single best person in the world to introduce the problem of factory farming.
Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interviewThis episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on September 27th, 2017. 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 abuseSeries produced by Keiran Harris.