List of Introductory EA Presentations

Peter Wildeford

List of Introductory EA Presentations

Peter Wildeford

1 min readDec 29, 2014

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Prabhat Soni

Hey I know this post is very old. But in case someone stumbles across this post, the best presentation for introducing EA in my opinion is:

this presentation by Ajeya Cotra or a slightly modified version (and IMO better) set of slides by Kuhan Jeyapragasan.

Pablo

11y

Thanks for compiling this list. I just created a YouTube playlist with all these videos, plus several others. You'll find it here.

konrad

10y

We should definitely add Beth Barnes' talk, it seems to currently be the best first general intro talk.

Peter Wildeford

10y

Added. Thanks! It was a really good talk.

Tom_Ash

10y

Peter and I try to share most of these lists that we/others working through .impact write on the EA Wiki, so you can edit it directly there!

RyanCarey

11y

If I had to make a list of the very best videos, it would be:

The How and Why of Effective Altruism by Peter Singer (TED)
The Way We Think about Charity is Dead Wrong by Dan Pallotta (TED)
How to save hundreds of lives by Toby Ord (TEDxCambridgeUniversity)
Can we prevent the end of the world? by Martin Rees (TED)

Here are some extra introductory materials for a longer list:

Nick Beckstead on the Dylan Rattigan Show
Wall St Saves The World - Will MacAskill
Earth in its final century? - Martin Rees
Think Rationally Via Bayes Rule - Julia Galef
The Future of Life, a Cosmic Perspective - Max Tegmark
Effective altruism to warm our hearts - Frazer Kirkman
Choosing for effective altruism - TEDx UniMelb, Helen Toner

RyanCarey

11y

Great work, Peter.

My criticism is - consider including more long-run impact stuff; less animals stuff.

I'm not sold on the relevance of Animal Factories and the Abuse of Power for the stated goal of spreading effective altruism to new audiences. Prima facie, talks about animal welfare will make people care about animals more than effectiveness, and will bore some people who don't care about animals. I'd be willing to pay that price if I was fairly sure that animal charities were at least among the most effective but that seems like an unsupportable epistemic position.

On the other hand, there are good arguments for caring about longer-run impact, so I would favour giving risks/deep time/tech a bigger mention.

Pablo

11y

I agree with this assessment. My impression is that concern for animals is much more likely to mind-kill people than concern for either world poverty or the far-future. I find this very sad, because human-caused animal suffering is a very important, tractable and uncrowded cause. It might be worth doing further research on ways to spread concern for sentience in ways that raise, rather than lower, the sanity waterline.

Peter Wildeford

11y

I readjusted the presentations based on people's suggestions:

"Animal Factories and the Abuse of Power" by Wayne Pacelle (TEDxManhattan) is out.

Can we prevent the end of the world? by Martin Rees (TED) is in.

"Earth in its final century?", "Think Rationally Via Bayes Rule", "The Future of Life, a Cosmic Perspective", "Effective altruism to warm our hearts", and "Choosing for effective altruism" are in.

Rob's slides for "What is effective altruism?" and "Effective Altruism and Classical Liberalism" are in.

Robert_Wiblin

11y