Four: Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions

Effective Altruism: An Introduction is a collection of ten top episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast specifically selected to help listeners quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.

Both the Green Revolution and the contraceptive pill are widely recognised as scientific breakthroughs that transformed the world. But few know that those breakthroughs only happened when they did because of a philanthropist willing to take a risky bet on a new idea.

Toby Ord makes the case that of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world that is flourishing or disintegrating is in large part up to us.

The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.

If we accept that we’re probably making major moral errors, how should we proceed?