Upcoming interviews on the 80,000 Hours Podcast

[Robert_Wiblin]

Next week I’m interviewing Laura Deming about her work establishing an anti-ageing venture capital fund.

Later this month I’m interviewing Natalie Cargill and Liv Boeree about establishing Effective Giving and their public outreach work promoting EA.

We haven’t found a date yet, but I’m also likely to be interviewing the famous cryptography and computer security expert Bruce Schneier about opportunities to do a lot of good through information security careers.

There’s always time pressure that prevents us getting to everything we’d like to ask, but feel free to leave a comment below to suggest the questions you’d be interested to hear answered.

For those who missed them, over the last month or two we’ve put out a number of interviews that are also likely to interest forum contributors:

• Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. What, if anything, should we do about that?

• How to have a big impact in government & huge organisations, based on 16 years’ experience in the White House

• DeepMind’s plan to make AI systems robust & reliable, why it’s a core issue in AI design, and how to succeed at AI research

• Prof Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it’s so often abrupt & unpredictable

• Accurately predicting the future is central to absolutely everything. Professor Tetlock has spent 40 years studying how to do it better.

[Aaron Gertler]

Rob Wiblin: Are Forum comments fine for submitting questions, or is there another way you’d prefer they be submitted?

Laura Deming: Some question derived from the following cluster:

• What are some ways in which your youth has been a hindrance in setting up your projects?

• Do you think that youth is a current bottleneck for many people who might be much more productive if they could get past artificial age-based barriers to doing good work?

• What kinds of policy/​legal/​culture changes would give us a chance to unlock a lot of young talent?

Liv and Natalie: If you’re working with/​talking to a potential donor who already has a history of donating heavily to non-EA causes/​organizations, how does that change the way you approach your pitch? Do you ever attempt to nudge donors away from organizations they’ve supported, or is that always a bad idea? (It seems difficult to do this kind of nudge if the donor doesn’t initiate it themselves, but nudging successfully could free up millions of dollars in additional funding.)

[EdoArad]

Laura Deming: I’m very interested in the tradeoff and relation between investing more in basic science (with the goal of major theoretical breakthroughs) and developing technology and products (which can have immediate impact but perhaps not as important in the long term).

For example,

1. What is the role of the Academia in progress on aging, as opposed to private research groups? In general, how much resources do they have and what are they incentivized to?

2. What are the current bottlenecks in longevity research and tech?

3. How do you view the market and general public view of longevity in the near future?