 Ddiolch yn fawr, yn ddweud, mae gennym Lif. Yn ymddangos maen nhw'r gweithgol a'r colli Gnatly, dyweddodd yn ddechrau o bach o ddwymodig rai a'r ddweud y gallwn eu cyfnod bobl yn ymddangos bydd yna a'r dweud o'r cyfnod iawn. Mae gennym ni, gallwn i gael astrofysig a'r ddweud yn ddechrau'r rai o bach o gael gossologist a'r gweithio i'r prif. a all of that wonderful stuff. However, after graduation, I had a fair bit of student debt that I needed to pay off. Before I knew it, I was somehow on some reality TV show that took five complete poker beginners and taught them how to play. Before I knew it, I was playing poker full time and physics kept intending to go back to it but never quite did. So, yn dweud ychydig i'r ffordd, mae mae'r ffordd yn ystafl. Mae'r ffordd yn ystod o'r tanfod ysaig o'r tîm honi gyda'r pwg. Yn 100 o wneud, fynd i'r bwg ffwrdd i'r bwg hwn yn yr oedd yn gweithio. Nid o'r ffordd, mae'n gweithio chi eich gweithio ond mae'n gweithio eu ddiw decynigol o'r llun. Yn ymlaen, mae'r bwg hefyd, mae'n gweithio i'r tîm hwn hwn o'r tîm. Ond yna, mae'n amlwg amdannig ac yn ydydd i'ch gyrioneddol. A gydag yn gyflawni gwybodaeth mwyaf am y ddweud. Mae gennym ni'n wyf meddwl i'r thymau oedd yn ysgol. A mae'n dweud hynny'n amlwg. A o dda'n gweithio'r ffordd, mae'n bywyd i'ch mynd i'ch gweithio i'ch gweithio i'r ddweud yn y ddweud o'r ddweud o poca a'r ddweud o'r ddweud i amlwg ymwy! expressed it and how you can use this type of thinking to Optimise them, because like life poker is also a games of skill and luck. Obviously the luck part comes from the cards that you get dealt is not much you can do about that and then the skill part is about what you choose to do with them. The decisions you make that's obviously the interesting part because poker has so many rational thinking skills that you can use and apply I will find it out every day life. That is a small part of what I am going to talk about now. That is me doing my thing. There I am. The first of these is nuance. Poc is about making predictions under the face of an immense amount of uncertainty. You will have all this conflicting and deliberate misinformation from your opponent. You really can never be certain about anything. You have to become very comfortable with that. Mae'r ddweud yn ysgrifennu i ddwy'r ddiweddol iawn yn y cyffredin a bwysigol ar gyfer amser. Ond rydyn ni'n fawr yn alw, ac yn enwedig i'r ffordd yn ysgrifennu i ddoedd. Rydyn ni'n bwyf yn gweithio yn y dyfodol. A dyna, mae'n digwydd am y cyfnod yn y gweithio i ddweud y gweithfawr yn ddwyfodol. Ond mae'n gweithio i ddweud yn gweithio i ddweud yn y gweithfawr. Ac mae'n gweithio i gweithio i ddweud fath. I can't just get away with going, they're probably bluffing. That's just going to 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 sort of quantification applies to so many things in life where 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. I'm sure 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. It's about finding the objective truth of a situation, not what you want the truth to be. And that's going to 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 is taught me that applies to life. And hopefully you will identify with many of these too 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, oh, we're meant to have sound. Damn. Basically, it's a hamster having an existential crisis. There he is. Yeah, basically, I turned 30. And at the same time, I came across this chart. Some of you might have seen it on the Waitbot Y blog. It's basically this is your life in years. And each one of these dots is a week. So basically, the time you spend at this conference, you'll spend at this conference, is one of these dots. And that seems all right 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, is poker just going to be my thing? Is this going to 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 was 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 unimpressed 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 buying 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 act 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 of some disaster and I'd get upset and cry a bunch and give some money just sort of and I'd 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 purely what you're used to drive your decision making. And so I suspected that this was probably leading to suboptimal donation behaviour in 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 ones 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 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 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 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 organisation. And today I'm very excited to announce that I 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 ensuring herself. Her name is Natalie Cargill and she's going to 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. 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 law in particular. First, as a barrister especially, it's particularly hard to bullshit your way through it. 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 really 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 live 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 maximising the amount of good you do. So often when it comes to various sort of philanthropic endeavours 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 the best use of my next bit of resource whether that's time or money or energy and 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 have 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. So 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 result in a 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 at 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 ah 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 would come from a very small number of things. So for example it seems plausible that most things people do to try to improve the world don't work which I realise is quite a bold statement for the morning however in oh I'll step away. In 2015 the director of no we're good we're good okay most things don't work as I just said. In 2015 the director of evidence based policy a large foundation reviewed a huge number of rcts of interventions that have been tested and about 75% of them showed no effect or very small effect about 10% of them had a negative effect so plausibly you can just sort of forget three quarters 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 to yeah for example um 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 focused 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 seven million on safety 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 $3,500 so the broader point is not simply well we should fund this intervention rather than that intervention but that 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 so 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 um 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 solvability 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 neglectedness 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 neglected so 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 plausibly up to 100 billion animals every year are raised on factory farms in conditions likely to cause them extreme levels of suffering not to mention the effect on the 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 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 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 and energy capture per person per day basically life got better for most people however what also shot up at that ridiculous rate is war-making capacity as a historian has 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 the 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 of a 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 um there's a lot to do funding hasn't caught up um we donated over 400 billion last year less than 1 billion of that went to pandemic preparedness oh wrong side 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 positive or negative how does economics game theory coordination theory change when we assume altruistic actors rather than self-motivated actors at the cause 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 are 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 schedule a call with you thank you very much