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.

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.

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.