80,000 Hours Podcast31 Tammi 2018

#18 - Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinction

Ofir Reich started out doing math in the military, before spending 8 years in tech startups - but then made a sharp turn to become a data scientist focussed on helping the global poor.

At UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action he helps prevent tax evasion by identifying fake companies in India, enable Afghanistan to pay its teachers electronically, and raise yields for Ethiopian farmers by messaging them when local conditions make it ideal to apply fertiliser. Or at least that’s the hope - he’s also working on ways to test whether those interventions actually work.

Full post about this episode, including a transcript and relevant links to learn more.

Why dedicate his life to helping the global poor?

Ofir sees little moral difference between harming people and failing to help them. After all, if you had to press a button to keep all of your money from going to charity, and you pressed that button, would that be an action, or an inaction? Is there even an answer?

After reflecting on cases like this, he decided that to not engage with a problem is an active choice, one whose consequences he is just as morally responsible for as if he were directly involved. On top of his life philosophy we also discuss:

* The benefits of working in a top academic environment
* How best to start a career in global development
* Are RCTs worth the money? Should we focus on big picture policy change instead? Or more economic theory?
* How the delivery standards of nonprofits compare to top universities
* Why he doesn’t enjoy living in the San Francisco bay area
* How can we fix the problem of most published research being false?
* How good a career path is data science?
* How important is experience in development versus technical skills?
* How he learned much of what he needed to know in the army
* How concerned should effective altruists be about burnout?

Keiran Harris helped produce today’s episode.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(334)

#240 – Samuel Charap on how a Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war

Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today's guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new risks — leaving us in a situation that's equally dang...

24 Maalis 1h 12min

#239 – Rose Hadshar on why automating all human labour will break our political system

The most important political question in the age of advanced AI might not be who wins elections. It might be whether elections continue to matter at all.That’s the view of Rose Hadshar, researcher at ...

17 Maalis 2h 14min

#238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably)

How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race. Nuclear deterrence rests on a state’s capacity to...

10 Maalis 1h 11min

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right. But AI ...

6 Maalis 31min

#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness

Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with...

3 Maalis 3h 25min

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to its human operators, ...

24 Helmi 2h 41min

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almos...

17 Helmi 2h 54min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of ...

10 Helmi 25min