Effective Altruism Bristol
- Help solve global problems with your career – Introductory talk + discussion (Give it a Go!) Room 4.76, Richmond Building. Directions: Go to the fourth floor, enter the South wing (red), and turn left. Monday 16-09-2024 - 18:30 until Monday 16-09-2024 - 20:00
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Help solve global problems with your career – Introductory talk + discussion (Give it a Go!)
Our aim is to help students have a significant positive impact with their careers.
We believe that a key bottleneck to solving the world's most important problems is talent – so we're trying to address this by supporting University of Bristol students to work on them.
We run an effective altruism reading group, provide 1-1 support, and connect students to job opportunities and career advice resources to help them tackle the world's most pressing issues more effectively.
This event will start with a 30-40 minute talk explaining what effective altruism is and what we do in our society. Then we’ll have a short break where you can enjoy some light refreshments and meet like-minded students. Finally, we’ll split into small groups to discuss effective altruism and global problems.
It will be on Monday, 16th Sep, 6:30–8:00pm, in room 4.76 (CALDS seminar 4), Richmond Building.
Directions: Go to the fourth floor, enter the South wing (red), and turn left.
There is no need to bring anything, and you may leave during the break if you’re not interested in the discussion. All our events are free and do not require a membership to attend. Please note that photos will be taken at this event for promotional purposes.
Accessibility: See Bristol SU website
Our values
Effective Altruism Bristol is for people who:
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Want to help others
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Try to help more rather than less
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Value all people equally
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Are open to changing their view
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Act with honesty and integrity
These values may seem obvious, but we believe that they have significant implications for how we should be thinking about altruism. In order to help more rather than less, we should try to work out what way of helping is the most effective, given our limited resources. And as we value all people equally, we shouldn’t be partial to members of a particular country or people suffering from a particular problem.
Instead, we should consider all the possible cause areas, and all the possible ways we could help people (or any sentient being), and we should choose the ones where we’ll have the most impact. Otherwise, we’d be accidentally giving preferential treatment to some group of individuals, or we’d be letting some individuals suffer at no additional cost to us.
This analysis is really important because some programmes are 100 times or even 1,000 times as helpful as others, for the same cost. For example, if you are trying to tackle blindness and you have a budget of $40,000, you could either use your entire budget to train a single guide dog to help a blind person in the US, or you could fund more than 2,000 blindness-curing surgeries in Africa, which cost less than $20 per person.
You can read more about effective altruism and its values on effectivealtruism.org.
What we do
Our ultimate goal is to help sentient beings as much as we can. We tentatively believe that the best way to do this at EA Bristol is to introduce students to effective altruism and support those who agree with it to use their careers to work on our focus areas.
We provide:
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Advice on how to have the most impact with your career (this is based on the advice on 80000hours.org – we also recommend speaking to one of their advisors as they have a lot more expertise than us!)
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Notification of graduate jobs, internships and other opportunities in effective altruism and our focus areas
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An introductory reading group where we meet up once a week to discuss topics in effective altruism
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An in-depth group where we discuss global issues and other EA-related topics in more detail and we plan and build skills for our career
We also run 1-1 meetings with our organising team as it’s a quick and effective way to support our members and get feedback on how we can run the society better. In these meetings we can answer questions about effective altruism, let you know about career resources and job opportunities and connect you to professionals in your area of interest.
Finally, we occasionally host external speakers, we organise trips to effective altruism conferences and other external events and we of course have regular socials so our members can get to know each other!
Our focus areas
As we explain above, we believe that we should prioritise between different cause areas in order to have more impact. To do this, we use the SNT framework – we estimate the scale, neglectedness and tractability of each problem, and we prioritise the ones which score highly overall. In other words, we focus on problems which cause a lot of suffering (in expectation), which few other organisations are working on and which seem relatively feasible to solve.
There are a wide range of views within effective altruism on the question of which causes we should be working on, however some common focus areas are:
Other focus areas include: nuclear weapons, climate change, great power war, mental health, global aid policy, global priorities research and improving institutional decision-making.
To be clear, it's not that we don't think other causes are important – rather that there are so many important problems and the effective altruism community obviously can't solve all of them, so we should focus on the problems where we can make the most difference.
Get involved
The best way to get involved is to apply for our introductory reading group.
It will take place every Monday 6:30–8:00pm, for 8 weeks, starting on the 23rd of September. There will be about an hour of core reading each week, along with some optional extra reading for those interested.
We only have capacity for around 30 participants, so unfortunately we won’t be able to accept everyone who applies. We select based on who we think is most likely to stay engaged for the full 8 weeks.
Apply here (deadline Friday 20th Sep)
Accessibility: See Bristol SU website
Introductory talk + discussion (Give it a Go!)
This event will start with a 30-40 minute talk explaining what effective altruism is and what we do in our society. Then we’ll have a short break where you can enjoy some light refreshments and meet like-minded students. Finally, we’ll split into small groups to discuss effective altruism and global problems.
It will be on Monday, 16th Sep, 6:30–8:00pm, in CALDS seminar 4, Richmond Building.
There is no need to bring anything, and you may leave during the break if you’re not interested in the discussion. All our events are free and do not require a membership to attend. Please note that photos will be taken at this event for promotional purposes.
Accessibility: See Bristol SU website
Stay in touch
To contact us, email hello@eabristol.org or DM us on our Instagram.
Sign up to our mailing list here – this is the best way to keep up-to-date.
Venue/Timing
Venue : Room 4.76, Richmond Building. Directions: Go to the fourth floor, enter the South wing (red), and turn left.
Type: Alcohol Free Events, Campaigns, Free, Give It A Go, Society Events, Talks and Lectures, Welcome Week
Start Date: Monday 16-09-2024 - 18:30
End date: Monday 16-09-2024 - 20:00
Location
Contact Details
hello@eabristol.org
Terms and Conditions
Click here to view terms and conditions
Covid-19
- You should not attend any events if you have tested positive for COVID-19 or have COVID-19 symptoms. We recommend taking a Lateral Flow Test before attending any event.
- The venues we work with will have different COVID measures in place which must be adhered to.
- If an event has to be cancelled due to government restrictions around COVID-19, we will attempt to reschedule the event. Your ticket will remain valid for the rescheduled date. Refunds will only be issued if rescheduling is not possible.
General Terms and Conditions
- Bristol SU operates ticket purchasing for multiple events at venues across the city. These terms and conditions only apply where they are not superseded by an event promoter or a particular venue’s terms and conditions.
- Admission to all events is subject to the restrictions employed by the host venue.
- Students must bring their University of Bristol UCard to every event they wish to attend for identification purposes. For members of the public, photo ID will be required (e.g. passport, driving licence, proof of age card)
- Re-admission is not allowed once you have attended an event unless approved by the manager on duty.
- Right of admission is reserved by the venue management. Please note that you are still subject to Bristol SU’s event admission procedures and can be refused entry if you breach these.
- Your UCard is not transferrable – i.e. you cannot lend it to anyone else to get into the venue.
- Every effort will be made to allow priority queuing at all events – however, this cannot be guaranteed.
- All events are restricted to AGE 18+ unless specifically noted on the event page. All guests are required to provide proof of age if asked by the door staff, and you can be refused entry if you are unable to do this. Please note that any Bristol student who forgets their UCard will not be able to enter just by quoting their student number unless they can also produce proof of age.
- We may use your email address to contact you regarding any relevant changes to the event (e.g. rescheduling or cancellation).
Refunds - *** Please note that this is standard practice at every entertainments venue in the UK. *** ALL TICKETS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE AND NON-TRANSFERRABLE. All sales are final. Refunds are not available on tickets once they have been purchased, including those purchased in error or non-attendance due to illness or injury. However, the following are certain instances in which a refund may be given. THERE ARE NO OTHER INSTANCES IN WHICH A REFUND MAY BE OFFERED.
- The entire event has been cancelled by the promoter or Bristol SU. In this instance, refunds are available to everyone who has purchased a ticket in advance.
- The main performing artiste has cancelled or the event altered for reasons beyond our control, but the event has still taken place. Again, refunds will only be considered in exceptional circumstances and where authorised.
- The event has sold out, and there are people waiting for extra tickets. In this instance refunds may be given, and the tickets then resold to people on the waiting list once the re-sale cash has been received.
- In all instances the duty manager’s decision will be final.
Transfer Policy
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All tickets purchased for Bristol SU events are non-transferrable – they are assigned exclusively to your account and cannot be moved to that of another person.
Physical Ticket Replacements
- For events with physical tickets, it is the responsibility of the individual purchaser to keep their ticket safe once it has been collected from the information point or welcome desk. Please note that replacement tickets will not be issued in the event of their loss or damage, and will need to be repurchased in this instance. It is advised that you write your name and Uni number on the back of your ticket so that it can be returned if handed in!
Filming, Photography and Broadcast
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During events, the SU may broadcast the event live, take photographs or record videos (as adapted or otherwise) to be used for marketing and editorial purposes of the SU in all media worldwide, without restriction and in any format. Photographs and videos taken on the day may appear in the following publications without limitation: The SU website, SU social media channels, and SU publications. If you have any concerns about appearing in photographs, film or live broadcasts, please let us know in advance by emailing bristolsu-marketing@bristol.ac.uk and we will do our best to comply with your wishes.
Contact
- We may use the email address you use to purchase tickets in order to give you updates about your purchase, the event or to seek feedback on the event itself after you've attended.
Act cancellations
- Bristol SU reserves the right to substitute performers in the event of an act cancelling.
