Inaugural SG Global Chat: Harvard Effective Altruism Expanding to HSPH

SG Global Chat
Harvard Effective Altruism — Using Evidence and Reason to Maximize the Impact of Efforts to Make the World Better

October 8, 2014 12:30-1:20pm, Kresge G-2

Harvard Effective Altruism (HEA) is a student group at Harvard College and Harvard Business School. The group is dedicated to spreading the ideas of effective altruism to better the global community. Previous HEA speakers include Peter Singer, Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark and Thomas Pogge. This year, HEA plans to became a Harvard University-wide student organization. Come to the first SG Global Chat of the year to hear more about HEA, the events the group has planned, and ways to get involved. Presented by Anders Huitfeldt (ScD Candidate in Epidemiology) and Eric Gastfriend (Student at Harvard Business School).

Light lunch provided. Any questions email studentgov at hsph.harvard.edu.

Research Assistant III: Work with Professors Eyal, Hammitt, Freedberg, Kuritzkes, and collaborators on HIV cure studies’ risks, risk perceptions, and ethics

The research assistant will work with the principal investigator Nir Eyal and collaborators from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Duke University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the ACTG HIV trial site network. The multidisciplinary team uses methods of clinical epidemiology, economics, simulation modeling, and normative theory to predict risks in early-phase HIV cure studies, assess how much likely candidates for participation understand those risks, and make ethical recommendations on the conduct of HIV cure studies.

The research assistant will help prepare, conduct and analyze a pilot survey expected to take place in a US site of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). The survey will assess perceptions of HIV cure and of cure study risks. The research assistant will also promote other research and grant-related activities, through literature reviews and assistance in the preparation of abstract, poster, and manuscripts for publication, grant applications, a simple project website (using Harvard’s user-friendly OpenScholar platform), and slides for lectures and seminars. The research assistant will be in touch with top researchers in HIV cure, medical decision making, and ethics from around the country, to facilitate our meetings, a workshop, and regular conversations to plan the research and debate ethical issues around early-phase HIV cure studies.

For the full job ad:
https://jobs.brassring.com/1033/asp/tg/cim_jobdetail.asp?partnerID=25240&siteID=5341&AReq=33776BR

Harvard Effective Altruism: an event today, Michael Kremer on Sept. 10, and a fellowship opportunity

A message from Harvard Effective Altruism:

On Saturday, Sept. 6 at 3pm in Sever 111, we are holding a giving game / donation discussion and an information session for Harvard students interested in our organization. We’ll explain what effective altruism is and what HCEA does here on campus. If you’re new to HCEA, you should definitely check it out!

Wednesday, Sept. 10 at 4:30pm in Science Center Hall A: Prof. Michael Kremer – a development economist at Harvard – will give a talk entitled “How can individuals reduce global poverty?” He’ll discuss the ways that individuals can use both their money and their careers to contribute to poverty reduction and international development.

All semester long! HCEA is hosting its third Philanthropy Fellowship program for Harvard undergrads and graduate students. Fellows will attend talks from speakers like Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rob Mather of the Against Malaria Foundation, and Center for Applied Rationality president Julia Galef; learn about effective altruism at weekly dinners with other fellows and speakers; get to know likeminded students at discussions and social events; and fundraise for effective charities! You can find more information and apply on our website before 11:59pm on Sunday, Sept. 14th.

We hope to see soon! Altruistically yours,
Ales and John

Harvard Effective Altruism: Nick Bostrom, September 4 at 8 PM

[This message is from the students at Harvard Effective Altruism.]

Welcome back to school, altruists! I’m happy to announce our first talk of the semester – from philosopher Nick Bostrom. See you there!

Harvard College Effective Altruism presents:
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
with Nick Bostrom
Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University

What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Professor Bostrom will explore these questions, laying the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. Q&A will follow the talk. Copies of Bostrom’s new book – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies – will be available for purchase. RSVP on Facebook.

Thursday, September 4
8 pm
Emerson 105

Good news for many South African HIV patients—with a big glitch

On Wednesday, South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced that, as of January 2015, HIV-positive patients in the country would start receiving free antiretroviral treatment once their CD4 count fell below 500, instead of current threshold of less than 350. Some patient groups would start receiving antiretrovirals immediately upon being diagnosed with HIV infection, regardless of their clinical stage.

Last month, Till Bärnighausen, Dan Wikler and I predicted in PLoS Medicine that sub-Saharan nations would move in the direction that South Africa is now moving, and pointed out a big complication. This policy change might make several gigantic trials of so-called treatment-as-prevention in sub-Saharan Africa impossible to complete successfully. As we explained, these trials remain important for assessing the potential of treatment-as-prevention to curb the spread of HIV in general populations (with many different relationship types and different levels of care delivery and support).

In treatment-as-prevention, antiretrovirals are offered to patients immediately upon their diagnosis with HIV. The hope is that very early treatment would be better for these patients and prevent them from infecting others. We also offered some ways out of this mess, but they involve untraditional approaches to research conduct and to policy. Our piece was featured in the June issue of UNAIDS’ HIV This Month.

Harvard Effective Altruism (HEA): Thursday, April 17th: Critch on Aversion Factoring & Career Choice

A communication from Harvard Effective Altruism:

Aversion Factoring & Career Choice

with Dr. Andrew Critch

Thursday, April 17th 7-8:30 PM

Emerson 305

We often limit ourselves by avoiding things we find bothersome or scary.  But for almost anything you find bothersome, there’s someone out there who doesn’t!  How does that work?  Can you copy their enjoyment-powers?  If so, you have many more options for growth, career choice, and general do-gooding.  This presentation is based around a technique Dr. Critch teaches at the Center for Applied Rationality for using aversions as a source of creativity, and then getting over them.

Dr. Critch’s interest in rationality began as a teenager growing up in Newfoundland, Canada, where he says he “just had a lot of time to think about it”. When he was 14, he made his first attempt to extrapolate his instinctive preferences into a function whose expected integral he wanted to maximize. (In college he found out that some economists had been crazy enough to think humans worked this way automatically). He also won numerous national awards in mathematics and public-speaking competitions.

 

Saturday, April 5th: Aid Grade! (from Harvard Effective Altruism)

A communication from Harvard Effective Altruism:

 

Hi altruists,

Saturday, April 5th is a big day for EA at Harvard: we have three different awesome events for you! Our guest for the day, flying up from DC for the occasion, will be Dr. Eva Vivalt, the founder of AidGrade. AidGrade helps figure out what works in international development by doing rigorous and engaging analyses of different interventions to find out their effects. They’re also looking for interns and full-time hires for this work, so please visit if you’re interested!

We’ll be having a talk on AidGrade’s research from 1-2pm, followed by a research-a-thon from 2-6 where we help AidGrade do some meta-analysis. The day will be topped off by a Boston-area effective altruism meetup at Clover–with another special guest, Jacob Trefethen of 80,000 Hours Cambridge UK, and many awesome local effective altruists.

Read More

Call for applications: Brocher Summer Academy 2014: Ethical Choices for DALYs and the Measurement of the Global Burden of Disease

Confirmed speakers: Christopher Murray (IHME)—Keynote, Matt Adler (Duke), Greg Bognar (La Trobe U), John Broome (Oxford), Dan Brock (Harvard), Richard Cookson (York U), Owen Cotton-Barratt (Oxford), David Evans (WHO), Marc Fleurbaey (Princeton U), Ned Hall (Harvard), Dan Hausman (U of Wisconsin, Madison), Elselijn Kingma (U of Eindhoven), Jeremy Lauer (WHO), Colin Mathers (WHO), Erik Nord (Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo), Ole Norheim (U of Bergen), Andreas Reis (WHO), Joshua Salomon (Harvard and IHME), Abha Saxena (WHO), Erik Schokkaert (KU Leuven), Drew Schroeder (Claremont McKenna), Alex Voorhoeve (LSE), James Woodward (U of Pittsburgh).

Organizers: Daniel Wikler (Harvard), Nir Eyal (Harvard), Samia Hurst (U of Geneva)

The biennial Summer Academy in the Ethics of Global Population Health is hosted by the Brocher Foundation on the shores of Lake Geneva June 9-13 2014, introducing faculty and advanced graduate students to population‐level bioethics. This fast‐developing academic field addresses ethical questions in population‐ and global health rather than ones in individual patient care.

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project is a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors. From its inception in the early 1990s, scientists and philosophers recognized that ethical and philosophical questions arise at every turn. For example, it must be decided whether each year in the lifespan is to count alike, and whether future deaths and disabilities should be given the same weight as those in the present. These choices and decisions matter: the share of disease burden due to myocardial infarction could vary as much as 400% depending on what position is adopted on two of the ethical choices described in the GBD 2010 report.  Read More

Harvard Effective Altruism: Josh Greene this Tuesday

Emotion, Reason and Altruism
with Professor Joshua Greene

Tuesday, March 11th, 7 PM,
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall
Why do people have radically different opinions as to who to help and how? How can we get along with people who seem to fundamentally disagree with us about what to want? Professor Josh Greene addresses this and more in Emotion, Reason, and Altruism.
Joshua Greene direct Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab, which uses cutting edge cognitive neuroscience techniques to study how people actually make moral decisions, integrating thinking from philosophy, social science, and social psychology to address questions of why people disagree as much as they do, and what we can do about it.