Title: How can we do the most good for the world?

Presenter: Will MacAskill

Content

• It was an interesting introduction to use the scientific and industrial revolution as an analogy for a missing ethical revolution, and I thought that it and your animation in the background were effective.
• You referenced that your colleagues and you have been working on the effective altruism foundation. It would help to have more understanding about who you all are. Are you a bunch of unemployed post-grads drinking beer or an arm of some think-tank. Don't let your audience assume the worst; add some information to demonstrate your credentials.
• You presented your philosophy of effective altruism and the question it intends to answer: How can we do the most good. At some point, I would have appreciated a paragraph comparing this with Peter Singer's ethical utilitarianism and how they differ. (Or is Singer one of your colleagues? Do you see why I say it's not good to leave your background so vague?)
• I understand the point you're making about why neglected problems are better to prioritize because of diminishing returns. A real-life example would have helped mel here. It seems that you have to deal with how to manage the trade-off between solveable and neglected. Your examples described world health being very solvable and factory farming being very neglected. Would you have us prioritize factory farming over world health because it's more neglected when you categorize human health as very solveable? 
• Once you began talking about existential catastrophes, it felt like you were rambling. You had told us that your philosophy is based on evidence and careful reasoning, but it seemed you were just throwing a lot of broad concepts at us that you wanted us to accept without supporting evidence and reasoning. You posited that our future is going to be really big. Another broad statement that you asked us to accept without basis was that it will be so much richer in the future and showed us an asymptotic graph. Where did your projection for future progress come from, and why do you say this is what we should expect? Why do you think the slope will turn drastically lower? Why are you convinced that the slope is persistently positive and not negative as we face diminishing resources? Why will the slope slow down far in the future and not next year? Then you suddenly referenced geo-engineering, synthetic bio-risk, and AI as potential big threats and potential big resources. To me, it felt the opposite of evidential and reasoned.
• Be careful about using your value judgements to defend progress. Since you've already established examples on health, I'd recommend that you continue using health statistics to support your point that things are improving over the long term. You can alienate cultures that hear Westerners citing homosexuality and democracy as indications of improvement, as it confirms their suspicion that we're just present-day, egotistic, cultural imperialists.
• Your conclusion gave us a clear call to action. In the end, though, it seemed to me that you punted on the question of how to do the most good. You gave us four problems to focus on (factory farming, world health, nuclear war, and pandemics). Then you added climate change, geo-engineering, synthetic bio-risk, and AI (which you bundled under a single heading but still have to face as separate problems). So which one needs to be solved first to do the most good for the world? It felt to me that you abandoned the effective altruism philosophy and the health and farming problems and just wanted to lecture us on the existential risks that you feel most threatened by. Overall, I was disappointed that you didn’t end by applying your philosophy's formula to show us how you personally reach a ranked conclusion (and perhaps acknowledge that others' values will lead them to other results).