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.

Trials of HIV Treatment-as-Prevention: Ethics and Science. Friday, March 7

High hopes for overcoming the HIV epidemic rest to a large extent on HIV Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP). Large cluster-randomized controlled trials are currently under way to test the effectiveness of different TasP strategies in general populations in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, however, international antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines have already moved to definitions of ART eligibility including all – in the US guidelines – or nearly all – in the WHO guidelines – HIV-infected people. In this panel, we are bringing together the leaders of three TasP trials in sub-Saharan Africa, bioethicists, and public health researchers to debate the tension between the policy intentions expressed in these guidelines and the historic opportunity to learn whether TasP works or not. Please join us in considering different options to resolving this tension.

  • Till Bärnighausen, Harvard School of Public Health, and Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Science
  • Max Essex, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Deenan Pillay, Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Science, and University College London
  • Velephi Okello, Swaziland National AIDS Programme, Ministry of Health
  • Dan Wikler, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Nir Eyal, Harvard Medical School

 

Moderator: Megan Murray, Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School

 

Friday, March 7th, 10am-12pm

Kresge G3, Harvard School of Public Health

Harvard Effective Altruism (HEA): Tuesday, 7pm–Professor “Mad Max” Tegmark on the Future of Life

HEA’s first talk of the semester promises to be a good one, in an area we haven’t covered much before: shaping the far future. In the footsteps of the Future of Humanity Institute, and Nick Beckstead‘s research on the altruistic importance of the far future, we present:

 

The Future of Life: a Cosmic Perspective

 

a talk by Professor Max Tegmark

 

Tuesday, March 4, 7 p.m.

Sever 202

 

Exploring how we humans have repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos (and hence our future opportunities), but also the power of our humans minds to understand it and develop technologies with the power to enrich or extinguish humanity.

 

Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, his scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book “Our Mathematical Universe”. He is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”

 

MONDAY: Conference, “Companies’ Global Health ‘Footprint’: Could Rating Help?”

Imagine a rating or accreditation system for companies’ “global health footprint.” Such a system would rigorously assess companies’ overall impact on human health, including the health of the world’s poorest and sickest populations, then disseminate this information in ways that users could readily understand and act upon. If successful, such a system would inform and enhance choice for ethically-minded corporate executives, board members, investors, business partners, workers, consumers, and regulators.

Bringing together leaders and experts in ethics, global health, business, law, communication, and health-related quality and safety certification, this conference will discuss dilemmas, share best practices, and seek to identify forms of global health impact monitoring and labeling that could be affordable, rigorous, reliable, sensitive to community needs, and user-friendly.

The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is required. For more information, including the full conference agenda and registration links, please visit our website.

Organized by:
Nir Eyal, Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
Jennifer Miller, Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow

Co-sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School; the Harvard Global Health Institute; and the Petrie-Flom Center, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund.

12/9 conference: “Companies’ Global Health ‘Footprint’: Could Rating Help?”

Imagine a rating or accreditation system for companies’ “global health footprint.” Such a system would rigorously assess companies’ overall impact on human health, including the health of the world’s poorest and sickest populations, then disseminate this information in ways that users could readily understand and act upon. If successful, such a system would inform and enhance choice for ethically-minded corporate executives, board members, investors, business partners, workers, consumers, and regulators.

Bringing together leaders and experts in ethics, global health, business, law, communication, and health-related quality and safety certification, this conference will discuss dilemmas, share best practices, and seek to identify forms of global health impact monitoring and labeling that could be affordable, rigorous, reliable, sensitive to community needs, and user-friendly.

The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is required. For more information, including the full conference agenda and registration links, please visit our website.

Organized by:
Nir Eyal, Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
Jennifer Miller, Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow

Co-sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School; the Harvard Global Health Institute; and the Petrie-Flom Center, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund.

HHIP: Evaluating Effective Charities – GiveWell cofounder Elie Hassenfeld: Tuesday, 8 PM

Harvard High Impact Philanthropy presents:

Evaluating Effective Charities with Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell

How can you maximize the impact of your charitable giving?  What distinguishes the most effective causes and organizations? Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and co-Executive Director of GiveWell, will describe how his organization is revolutionizing charity evaluation with completely transparent, rigorous analysis. Q&A to follow.

8 pm, Tuesday, Nov. 12; Sever 102

RSVP here

Elie Hassenfeld graduated from Columbia in 2004 and co-founded GiveWell in mid-2007 where he currently serves as co-Executive Director. GiveWell finds outstanding charity and publishes the full details of its analysis to help donors decide where to give. The Boston Globe has called GiveWell “The gold standard for giving” and its research has attracted attention from Peter Singer and other media. GiveWell has tracked over $10 million in donations to its recommendations as a direct result of its research.

HHIP: Friday, November 8: Peter Singer – Effective Altruism

Harvard High Impact Philanthropy presents:

Peter Singer on Effective Altruism

Effective altruism is a new movement consisting of many individuals and several independent organizations, all focused on the deceptively simple idea that we should try to do as much good as we can. The existence of this movement raises many interesting questions, both practical and philosophical, which this talk will discuss.

Friday, November 8th; 4 – 5 PM, in Science Center D

RSVP to the event

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the Princeton University Center for Human Values and Laureate Professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He is well known for his philosophical work, as well as for his books – most recently including The Life You Can Save.
This event is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund, as well as Harvard’s Departments of Economics and Philosophy.

Prof. Singer will also speak on “Ethics and Animals: Where Are We Now?” at 12 PM in Austin 200 (Ames Courtroom), 1515 Massachusetts Ave.

 

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn highlights X-risk

By Nir Eyal

Young people often assume that their life expectancies will remain what life expectancy is today—although life expectancy will grow by the time they are old. When all of us imagine our futures, we often neglect to take account of radical technologies which were not foreseeable prior to their invention, just as the internet wasn’t, and instead imagine something closer to present realities. We do not appreciate how different the future could be.

Among other things, the future might be dangerous to humankind in ways that we fail currently to appreciate. We got lucky, and nuclear energy seems hard for individuals to develop at home, but will that last, and will new WMDs be impossible to replicate with 3D printers or other future technologies? Can anyone guarantee that viruses manufactured for scientific research will not be spread by error or terror? Can we guarantee that robots designed for contained military purposes would not go out of control? Or that once artificial intelligence is advanced enough to design other artificial intelligence, humans will remain safe for long? Some of the greatest dangers to our species are unknown, simply because the technologies that create them have not been invented yet—just as many technologies that exist and threaten us today were not invented 100 years ago.

In a multimedia presentation that drew a prolonged applause from a crowd of Harvard undergraduates, Estonian programmer Jaan Tallin wove together three stories: the story of Kazaa and Skype, which he helped start; his personal journey into studying and promoting the study of existential risk; and a “sermon” (as he put it, tongue in cheek) on the ethical responsibilities of technology developers.

Tallin proposed taking active steps in anticipation of our future errors, both to make businesses robust and to keep our species safe in an opaque future: incorporating safety margins, and continually questioning one’s assumptions. He concluded by arguing, provocatively, that indispensable to both goals is having fun.

The talk was organized by the student organization Harvard High Impact Philanthropy (HHIP).

HHIP: Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, talks on responsible technology development

So You Want to be a Technology Developer…

The roots of Skype go back to one email. If that email hadn’t been sent, the world today might be different. In general, technology development is not something that “just happens” — instead, it’s a result of particular actions by individual people. Moreover, the responsibility of technology developers must increase proportionally to the power of their creations. The talk sketches out a vision of what it means to be a responsible technology developer, using behind the scenes stories and videos from the early days of Skype development.

 Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype

Wednesday, October 30th

5:30 – 6:30 PM

Science Center A

RSVP to this event

The event is organized by Harvard HIP (High Impact Philanthropy).

Wednesday @ 8pm – Thomas Pogge: Effective Altruism or Mobilization for Institutional Reform?

Harvard High-Impact Philanthropy presents

Effective Altruism or Mobilization for Institutional Reform?

a lecture by Thomas Pogge

Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University

Wednesday, October 9, 8 PM Sever 214

Professor Pogge will discuss whether some institutional reform efforts may be as effective or more effective than “effective altruism” and also whether effectiveness is the only standard by which such alternative ways of protecting people are to be compared.

Thomas Pogge is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. Additionally, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo; a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University; and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire’s Centre for Professional Ethics. He is also an editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Planning on coming? RSVP here