Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 21 days 15 hours 7 minutes
#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it?
It's common to think that 'staying informed' and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do...
#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunities there are for a rare event to occur — that the right pathogen is involved and infects somebody in one of these labs, or is released in some way from these labs...
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people's homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that's the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city...
#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I think about it is, imagine that this money were already in the hands of people living in poverty...
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're actually doing and what the potential of this is, you can make an argument that, yes, rates of growth are slowing, the rate of innovation is slowing. But it isn't.
What we're doing is creating wildly new technologies: basically producing what is nothing less than an evolutionary change in what it means to be a human being...
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early on with alternative proteins and there's so much white space, it's actually just really exciting to know that we can keep on innovating and being far more efficient than this existing technology — which, fundamentally, is just quite inefficient...
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were going to build a human civilisation, and we have to decide what that government looks like, and we have all of the technology available today, how do we think about choosing a subset of that design space?
That space is huge and it includes absolutely awful things, and mixed-bag things, and maybe some things that almost everyone would agree are really wonderful, or at least an...
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future?
Right now, if somebody's sitting on Mars and you're going to war against them, it's very hard to hit them. You don't have a weapon that can hit them very well. But in theory, if you fire a missile, after a few months, it's going to arrive and maybe hit them, but they have a few months to move away...
#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might die, something else debilitating might happen to them, but by that point, just about everyone on the planet would have been infected already.
And then it would be a race...
Great power conflict (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by Stephen Clare.
If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here...