Winter 2021 EA Fellowship Topics

Over the course of four weeks, you’ll have weekly 2-hour discussions with a cohort of 3-5 participants and one facilitator. Before attending each discussion, you’ll complete a set of readings (and sometimes a brief written exercise).

The topics we’ll cover each week:

Week 1: The Effectiveness Mindset
In the first two weeks, we’ll investigate our opportunities to do good, come to terms with the tradeoffs we face in our altruistic efforts, and learn about high-impact opportunities in global health. We give you tools to quantify and evaluate how much good an intervention can achieve; to examine the drastic differences in expected impact between interventions; and to uncover these differences through research, so that you can find the most promising opportunities.

Week 2: Expanding Our Compassion
Over time, humans have granted equal moral consideration to a progressively wider range of groups. This week examines the implications of this “expanding moral circle” for considering other beings such as animals on factory farms. Additionally, we often consider our impact only on the next few years or perhaps a few decades down the line. But should the long-term future also be a priority? Do future lives matter less than present-day lives? This week, we explore “longtermism”, which calls for us to improve the long-run trajectory of human civilization.

Week 3: Existential Risk
“If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years—enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes—those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.” (Toby Ord, The Precipice)

We’ll define “existential risk”, explore major anthropogenic sources of existential risk and strategies for addressing it, and examine why this work might be both important and neglected.

1-on-1: Next Steps
Effective altruism isn’t a fixed set of ideas. We want to keep improving our work, so that we can get closer to finding the best ways to do good. Criticism, whether from inside or outside of the movement, has been essential to its development. Here, we cover prominent critiques of EA—the ideas, and the way they've been implemented. In some cases, we also share counterarguments.

And we can’t improve the world just by learning about it. At some point, we also have to take action—whether by donating or through our work. In this final week, we hope to help you apply the principles of effective altruism to your own life, learn about how to use your career to solve the world's most pressing problems, and critically reflect back on the rest of the fellowship.

This week will involve a 1-on-1 conversation with your discussion facilitator, at a time of your choice during the first two weeks of the spring semester.