good morning everyone so yeah my name is
Liz and today alongside my friend and
colleague Natalie we're going to be
talking about rational decision-making
and how we can use it to maximize both
our personal and our collective impact
so a bit about me previously I studied
astrophysics and had very lofty
aspirations of being a cosmologists and
maybe winning a Nobel Prize and all of
that wonderful stuff
however after graduation I had a fair
bit of student debt that I needed to pay
off and before I knew it I was somehow
on some reality TV show that took five
complete poker beginners and taught them
how to play and then before I knew it I
was playing poker full time and physics
kept intending to go back to it but
never quite did and so instead of
looking at the Stars this is usually the
Stars that I look at this is a classic
scene of an international poker
tournament hundreds sometimes even
thousands of people in a room not making
as much noise as you think it's all this
weird sound of chips if anyone's ever
played a tournament you'll know what
it's like but nonetheless it's been an
incredibly fun and fulfilling career and
things have gone far better than I could
ever have dreamed I've won a couple of
international titles I've been extremely
fortunate and off the back of that what
it's led to is that I've become
generally fascinated with this sort of
application of Poker thinking and
scientific thinking to our daily lives
and how you can use use this type of
thinking to optimize them because like
life poker is also a game of skill and
luck obviously the luck part comes from
the cards that you get dealt there's not
much you can do about that
and then the skill part is about what
you choose to do with them the the
decisions that you make and that's
obviously the interesting part because
poker has so many rational thinking
skills that you can use and apply to
everyday life and that's a little bit
what I'm going to talk about now
that's me doing my thing there I am so
the first of these is nuanced pokers
about sort of making predictions under
the face of an immense amount of
uncertainty you'll have all this like
conflicting information and deliberate
misinformation from your opponents and
so you really can never be certain about
anything and so you have to become very
comfortable with that our minds love to
sort of think about things in sort of a
black-and-white absolutist sense but
that's really unhelpful because we can
never be certain about anything in life
really it's very hard to predict the
future and so you have to become
comfortable in thinking in grayscale and
nuance then you have to get comfortable
in thinking in numbers if I'm playing in
a big hand I can't just get away with
going there probably bluffing that's
just gonna lose me a ton of money
because you have to train yourself to
think in probability so usually a poker
player will be thinking oh I'm 60 or 70%
confident and this again this this sort
of quantification applies to so many
things in life where you'll you'll
become more comfortable in thinking in
terms of like expected value of your
decisions and then of course it teaches
you about effectiveness and specifically
cost-effectiveness things like return on
investments and hourly rates and so all
of you as entrepreneurs think about this
stuff a lot
anything that's required to basically to
be a smart investor and then most
importantly of all poker is about
objectivity is about finding the
objective truth of a situation not what
you want the truth to be and that's can
be a huge problem because you'll be in
situations where you'll have lots of
money on the line a lot of personal ego
at stake and so you can our minds are
incredibly good at coming up with all
the reasons to believe that maybe you
desperately want to believe that your
opponent is bluffing you'll come up with
all the reasons to confirm that idea and
not really pay attention to the evidence
that they're not and so it really
requires you to understand and master
your own mind look out for all these
biases
and especially the unhelpful emotions
that can cloud your thinking so it's
really about scientific thinking about
sort of weighing up all the evidence and
information you have in order to come to
the objective truth and these are just a
few of a plethora of rational thinking
skills that I found it's taught me that
applies to life and hopefully you will
identify with many of these to in your
lives as technologists the thing about
rational thinking is that it's not just
about making the best decisions to
achieve your goals it's also about
figuring out what your goals should be
in the first place and so for me after a
few sort of blissful very hedonistic
years on the poker circuit I turned 30
and well we meant to have sound down
basically a hamster having an
existential crisis yeah basically I
turned 13 and at the same time I came
across this chart some of you might have
seen it on the wait bolt white blog it's
basically this is your life in years and
each one of these dots is a week so
basically the time you spent at this
conference you'll spend at this
conference is one of these dots and that
seems alright until well for me when I
was 30 I realized that this section had
already gone and I just completely began
freaking out and because I was like is
this you know it's poker just gonna be
my thing is this gonna be the legacy on
my tombstone that I made some expected
value from the guy down the casino she
did a great job at that no I wanted to
have I guess something bigger that I
felt I could aspire to and particularly
something that I felt could benefit the
world more concretely and this is also
will sort of compounded by the idea that
I knew I've been making pretty damn good
money and obviously we look around us
and we see there's a lot of big problems
going on and people less fortunate so I
felt like maybe there was something I
could do if I could give it to the right
place but the trouble is is that I was
very
impressed with the whole sort of current
system particularly the sort of charity
system because it didn't satisfy either
the poker player or the scientist in me
first of all there was like a huge lack
of data and transparency you know
there's all these different causes and
charities vying for your donations and
how did I know which one was best to
give my very limited resources my time
and my money too and then on top of that
I felt that any sort of acts of good
that I did any kind of charitable thing
or so on was always very emotional based
where you know I would like see some
really upsetting ad on the TV or some
disaster and I'd upset and cry a bunch
and give some money just sort of feel a
bit better and then that was the end of
it and well you know positive emotions
can be a good thing I knew that they
certainly lead to bad outcomes in poker
if that's Hughley what you use to drive
your decision-making and so I suspected
that this was probably leading to
suboptimal donation behavior of myself
and then thirdly I felt like it wasn't
really big picture focused enough
because it wasn't really objective to
ask what are the biggest problems in the
world out of all these different
problems and which one should we really
be focusing our time on so yeah
basically I was very very stuck about
what to do and then fortunately I came
across a sort of a group of people a
movement known as effective altruism and
this is essentially the application of
scientific and poker thinking to the
idea of doing good whatever good might
be and it's a group of philosophers
technologists entrepreneurs scientists
smart people basically who care about
the world and the bigger picture and
have dedicated their lives to figuring
out what are these biggest problems and
how do we solve them most effectively
and so this this was basically the most
inspiring thing I ever came across and
it answered this question inside of me
of like what I should be focusing my
time on or at least I felt that this
offered a sort of a glimmer of hope of
how to figure out what they you know
what I should be doing
and some of my poker friends felt the
same way too so together we sort of got
involved and started an organization and
today I'm very excited to announce they
have one of these full-time effective
altruists here with us she's simply
brilliant I won't give any more intro
than that because she's enjoying herself
her name is Natalie Cargill and she's
gonna explain a little bit more about
what we're working on Thank You Liv no
pressure so my background is not in
science or in poker or anything so
glamorous but in law and this is not
actually a picture of me doing my thing
because we almost never wear wigs and as
you can perhaps tell from the slightly
glazed expression this was at my call to
the bar ceremony several glasses of wine
in I couldn't find another picture so I
love two things about more in particular
first as a barrister especially it's
particularly hard to your way
through it and it really forces you
working in unfamiliar areas and
difficult topics to think really clearly
to reason really carefully and to
express yourself very precisely and if
you don't do that someone will tell you
really quickly as I found out during my
training several times and the second
thing I love about law is that if you go
into the right areas you can actually
work on some release with big picture
questions of ethical or political or
social importance and I'm lucky that the
chambers where I'm now a tenant does
work on these big questions and public
inquiries and inquests etc so
essentially what I was always drawn to
was a career where I could work with
really thoughtful really smart people on
pretty big questions and that's what
drew me to effective altruism which I've
been involved in for a few years so as
Liv outlined effective altruism is the
intellectual and moral project of
finding those actions that will do the
most good
for the least sacrifice and then the
practical project of actually taking
those actions which is often harder
there are a couple of things that I
think make this project distinctive from
other social movements well there are
three you can see them so first of all
and I think this is perhaps the most
important effective altruism is about
maximizing the amount of good you do so
often when it comes to various sort of
philanthropic endeavors or career
choices we ask ourselves is this a good
thing to do is this a reasonable use of
resources what we should be asking is is
this the best plausibly with the best
use of my next bit of resource whether
that's time or money or energy and
there's the answer to those two
questions can often be very different
secondly effective altruism is about
using science so we've seen looking back
through history the incredible things
that happened when we applied the
scientific method to finding the truth
we had the Scientific Revolution we've
not really applied the scientific method
to finding those actions that do the
most good and we should perhaps and the
third thing that makes effective
altruism distinctive is it's about
impartiality so when we talk about
making the world a better place doing
good etc we want to do that treating
everyone equally no matter whether they
are socially proximate to us or not
whether they're here or far away whether
they exist now or in future generations
that's that's effective altruism in a
nutshell but why is it important why is
it timely and important now essentially
because we're living in a really weird
time where for the same amount of effort
some actions can plausibly do a hundred
or a thousand times more good than
others which when you think about it is
really weird in the environment in which
we involve there was no sort of one
action that would take a little bit of
effort and in some cases results in
thousand times more good
but it seems this is the case now so I
just want to give you an example from
the charity sector very briefly although
actually perhaps what we should be more
concerned with is broadly which actions
we should take which projects we should
work on but the best empirical evidence
that the moment might come from the
charity sector so say you wanted to
improve the world and you're uncertain
about how to do so you could think oh
I'll just spread my bets across a broad
range of charities and see what happens
I think it's likely that you'd end up
wasting almost all of your money if you
did that and that almost all of the
impact from your donations will come
from a very small number of things so
for example it seems plausible in 2015
we're good we're good ok most things
don't work as I just said in 2015 the
director of evidence-based policy and
large foundation reviewed a huge number
of RCTs of interventions have been
tested and about 75% of them showed no
effect or a very small effect about 10%
of them had a negative effect so
plausibly you can just sort of forget
3/4 of the things you might have
invested in that still leaves another
quarter however it's plausible that only
a tiny fraction of that will actually do
an enormous amount of good just yes for
example it's estimated that a charity
called the against malaria foundation
can create the benefit of one year of
extra healthy life for about $100 if you
focus on a slightly different area
treatment of a particular sarcoma that
also occurs in the developing world the
same benefit would cost about $50,000
the contrast is more stark if you sort
of widen the lens to developed countries
some US government departments spend
around 7 million on safe
the ark safety infrastructure for
getting the benefit of an extra life
saved the most cost effective Charities
in global health can produce that same
benefit for around $3500 so the broader
point is not simply what we should fund
this intervention rather than that
intervention but these really really
stark differences in effectiveness are
possible and this should give us pause
and make us think well this is a bit odd
maybe we should think really really
carefully about the actions that we take
so we don't end up wasting most of our
potential impact and maybe we should ask
ourselves what are the problems that we
should be working on in the first place
I find this a pretty useful framework
for thinking about which problems to
work on it's it's pretty simple you'll
have more impact on a problem the bigger
it is the more solvable it is and the
more neglected it is so the bigger it is
this is pretty obvious say we want to
end factory farming it would be better
if we ended factory farming in China
rather than in say the Czech Republic
because more individuals are affected in
terms of solve ability we could think of
some problems that are really huge such
as aging or such as an asteroid hitting
the earth and these are enormous in
scale but seem relative to other
problems less solvable in terms of
neglected nurse all things being equal
we want to work on problems that are
relatively neglected because the less
time and effort that has already gone
into these problems the more likely
it'll be that there's low-hanging fruit
that we can sort of swoop in and take
for example climate change is an
extremely large problem on a global
scale we seem to have reason to think
that it's pretty solvable there are
things we can do about it however
relative to other problems of similar
scale for example the risks posed by
artificially engineered viruses it is
comparatively not neglect
it this is just a framework and there
are no conclusions built into it and the
framework itself is not immutable but a
number of researchers over a number of
years have converged on some areas that
seem really important so for example
Global Health this is in many ways a
really messy and complex problem but in
others pretty solvable there are things
there are diseases that we know how to
treat cheaply and if we were to fund
those cheap interventions lives would be
saved
another example factory farming or
possibly up to a hundred billion animals
every year erased on factory farms in
conditions likely to cause some extreme
levels of suffering not to mention the
effect on climate on human health on
antibiotic resistance etc we know that
there are interventions that work and
yet last year collectively as humanity
we spent more money going to see a film
called sausage party which is about an
anthropomorphised sausage than we did on
all charities working to end factory
farming this is a an appallingly
neglected problem and then there's a
whole sort of bucket of problems related
to reducing existential risk that is
reducing the chance of an event that
could permanently end intelligent life
on earth or drastically and permanently
curtail its potential a little bit of
context on this so this is a graph of
GDP per capita over recorded history as
you can see for a long time pretty much
nothing happened that was really boring
and everyone was really poor was
unthinkable that you could affect things
the other side of the country let alone
the other side of the world and then
something happened anyone what happened
yes the Industrial Revolution and
potentially the most transformative
event in recorded history so it wasn't
just GDP that shot up but life
expectancy percentage of people living
in a democracy an energy capture per
person per day basically life got better
for most
however what also shot up that
ridiculous rate is will making capacity
as a historian is documented so
basically every time we invent a new
technology most of the time it goes
really well but every time we invent a
new technology there's also the risk
that this is the one that has more
destructive power than we're ready to
handle and if we look back over the last
century we see exactly this we see it in
the number of nuclear weapons that we
have on hair-trigger alert if you want
to be terrified look up the Wikipedia
page on nuclear near-misses
it's long we may have just been lucky we
also see potential risks posed by
extreme climate change if the climate
warms by more than 10 degrees it's game
over
and looking forward we should expect to
see this pattern continue as we develop
new technologies for example it seems
plausible that in the coming decades we
are going to be able to engineer a virus
that is as contagious as a flu as deadly
as Ebola and has a long incubation
period so it can spread around the world
before we have a chance to react also a
number of experts are concerned that
artificial general intelligence seems to
be something that's going to be
happening in the next few decades and
the task of aligning the goals are the
super intelligent general intelligence
with human goals may not be as easy as
it seems and there are things we can do
about this now so there's a lot to do
funding hasn't caught up and we donated
over 400 billion last year less than 1
billion of that went to pandemic
preparedness Oh wrong slide and pandemic
preparedness was one of the most well
funded in these pressing problems so we
clearly sort of haven't caught up to the
nature of the challenges we're facing
but I'm not here predominantly to talk
about funding I'd also like to talk
about talent and to ask for your help
we're really just at the beginning of
this intellectual project and there's so
much more intellectual ground to break
and so many more actions that we need to
take and projects we need to start there
are fundamental questions about what is
the value of the future why do we think
it's going to be passe
or negative how does economics game
theory coordination theory changed when
we assume altruistic actors rather than
self-motivated actors at the calls level
how are we going to think about risks
posed by new types of global conflict
how can we improve institutional
decision-making how can we improve
forecasting at a project level recently
projects have been proposed such as
having a database where we can subsidize
a prediction market for questions
relevant to these types of risks so in
summary I'm here today to ask for your
help in the spirit of this conference
please take a photo of our emails please
do and please just send us a blank email
and if you can help us spread these
ideas if you've got ideas of people we
can talk to places we can talk places we
can write and present live and I really
really a keen to do this and if we can
help you if you're working on a project
to make the world better by asking the
big-picture questions please do email us
we would love to share you look cool
with you thank you very much
you