Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on global priorities research and effective strategies to reduce suffering

The Sentience Institute Podcast

“We think that the most important thing right now is capacity building. We’re not so much focused on having impact now or in the next year, we’re thinking about the long term and the very big picture… Now, what exactly does capacity building mean? It can simply mean getting more people involved… I would frame it more in terms of building a healthy community that’s stable in the long term… And one aspect that’s just as important as the movement building is that we need to improve our knowledge of how to best reduce suffering. You could call it ‘wisdom building’… And CRS aims to contribute to [both] through our research… Some people just naturally tend to be more inclined to explore a lot of different topics… Others have maybe more of a tendency to dive into something more specific and dig up a lot of sources and go into detail and write a comprehensive report and I think both these can be very valuable… What matters is just that overall your work is contributing to progress on… the most important questions of our time.”

• Tobias Baumann

There are many different ways that we can reduce suffering or have other forms of positive impact. But how can we increase our confidence about which actions are most cost-effective? And what can people do now that seems promising?

Tobias Baumann is a co-founder of the Center for Reducing Suffering, a new longtermist research organisation focused on figuring out how we can best reduce severe suffering, taking into account all sentient beings.

Topics discussed in the episode:

• Who is currently working to reduce risks of astronomical suffering in the long-term future (“s-risks”) and what are they doing? (2:50)
• What are “information hazards,” how concerned should we be about them, and how can we reduce them? (12:21)
• What is the Center for Reducing Suffering’s theory of change and what are its research plans? (17:52)
• What are the main bottlenecks to further progress in the field of work focused on reducing s-risks? (29:46)
• Does it make more sense to work directly on reducing specific s-risks or on broad risk factors that affect many different risks? (34:27)
• Which particular types of global priorities research seem most useful? (38:15)
• What are some of the implications of taking a longtermist approach for animal advocacy? (45:31)
• If we decide that focusing directly on the interests of artificial sentient beings is a high priority, what are the most important next steps in research and advocacy? (1:00:04)
• What are the most promising career paths for reducing s-risks? (1:09:25)

Resources discussed in the episode are available at https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/podcast

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