Peter Singer

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866 appearances 5 recordings 3 series first heard Nov 2020 last heard 20 Apr

Peter Singer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Australian Finance Podcast · Making effective donations to charity with Peter Singer · 8 Nov 2020 podcast

I'll donate to that.

But I think it's just as important or even more important to do research into making sure that what you're doing in that area of altruism is effective.

And you mentioned the mathematics.

Well, you don't have to do the mathematics because if you really

are a research nerd and want to check it all out for yourself, you can certainly do it.

But there are, through these organizations I mentioned, there are teams of researchers who are doing this full time, who are completely independent of the organizations that they're recommending, who don't get any kind of commission or cut from those organizations.

And so that's what makes it a lot easier for the ordinary person to be an effective altruist

than it would have been, say, 20 years ago when that kind of research just wasn't available.

Yeah.

And I remember now that you asked me to give you an example.

So in fact, one of the earliest people in the effective altruism

movement to actually get it started before there was even that term for it, is another Australian, a man called Toby Ord, who is from Melbourne, but went to Oxford, did a graduate degree there and is now an associate professor.

I don't remember his exact title at Oxford.

And he wanted to make that kind of calculation for himself.

How much good could I actually do?

And so he assumed that he was going to

have an academic career, which means you have a fairly predictable salary as you rise through the academic ranks.

So he assumed, he looked at how much he was likely to earn by the time he retired, this was while he was still a PhD student, and took that sum of money and then looked around to say, how can I use that most effectively?

And what he came up with was an organisation that was preventing blindness caused by trachoma.

Trachoma is

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