Lecture
What are the world's biggest problems? (part 2b) @ Cambridge University
- Switching off nuclear power stations is predicted to render efforts to unplug mobile phone chargers ineffective, saving at most 0.01% of Britain's electricity with no noticeable effect.
- Rigorous evaluation via randomized control trials suggests that approximately 75% of social interventions yield no statistically significant or only very small positive effects, leading to high odds of achieving very little in local UK or US programs.
- International poverty is identified as more pressing than domestic poverty in the UK or US due to greater scale, neglectedness, and tractability, with global health interventions cited as superior to cash transfers for generating positive spillovers.
- An investment of every $3,000 in insecticide-treated malaria nets is expected to prevent one child death from malaria and yield additional benefits, with specific disease death rates anticipated to continue plummeting similar to the elimination of smallpox.
- Promoting migration from developing countries to the US is estimated to increase individual income approximately tenfold, while immigrant transfers to families abroad are expected to remain several times larger than all global aid spending.
- The promotion of unskilled migration faces a significant downside regarding uncertainty in making the process palatable, despite the high potential impact.
- Risks to future generations possess potentially greater scale than benefits limited to the present population, with global catastrophic risks characterized by potentially massive scale, variable neglectedness, and low tractability due to the difficulty of identifying solutions.
- Ending factory farming is expected to perform well across neglect, scale, and tractability metrics, with the potential to end the lives of 50 billion animals through the development of better meat substitutes and lab meats.
- Scientific discoveries are projected to benefit all future generations, and identifying the correct problems to focus on is predicted to enable individuals to achieve many times greater impact than would be possible otherwise.