“We are always in triage. I fervently hope that one day we will be able to save everyone. In the meantime, it is irresponsible to pretend that we aren’t making life and death decisions with the allocation of our resources. Pretending there is no choice only makes our decisions worse."
- Holly Elmore, explaining the need to prioritize given our limited resources.

If you want to use your time or money to help others, you probably want to...

Around 700 million people still live in poverty, mostly in low-income countries. Efforts to help them - by policy reform, cash transfers, or provision of health services - can be incredibly effective.

Alongside investigating this issue, we also discuss how much more effective some interventions are than others, and we introduce a simple tool for estimating important figures.

Key concepts from this session include:

• Differences in impact: It appears that some of our options to help do many

“The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?” 
– Jeremy Bentham (1789)

Should we care about non-human animals? We'll show how it can be important to care impartially, rather than ignoring weird topics or unusual beneficiaries. We'll also give you some ideas for how we could improve the lives of animals that suffer in factory farms.

Key concepts from this...

“So if we drop the baton, succumbing to an existential catastrophe, we would fail our ancestors in a multitude of ways. We would fail to achieve the dreams they hoped for; we would betray the trust they placed in us, their heirs; and we would fail in any duty we had to pay forward the work they did for us. To neglect existential risk might thus be to wrong not only the people of the...

"Longtermism" is the view that improving the long term future is a key moral priority of our time. This can bolster arguments for working on reducing some of the extinction risks that we covered in the last section. 

We’ll also explore some views on what our future could look like, and why it might be pretty different from the present. And we'll introduce forecasting: a set of methods for improving and learning from our attempts to predict the future.

Transformative artificial intelligence may well be developed this century. If it is, it may begin to make many significant decisions for us, and rapidly accelerate changes like economic growth. Are we set up to deal with this new technology safely?

We are also including pieces on Bayes’ rule in this session because it is an important theory for helping us think clearly about all sorts of difficult questions. The insights into how to assess evidence that follow from Bayes’ rule are applicable both in the particular case of transformative artificial intelligence as well as much more broadly.

It's really important to think for yourself and  reflect on the arguments you've heard in previous weeks: you might uncover places where you disagree, or mistakes in the reasoning. And even if you don't you'll probably understand the ideas more deeply if you've thought about their weakest points.

So in this week, we encourage you to take some time to reflect on your confusions and concerns about the ideas so far, and to read up on some of the strongest counterarguments.

In this final section, we hope to help you apply the principles of effective altruism to your own life and career.

You probably won’t be ready to make a major change just yet - you might want to read and reflect more before you do that. So instead we’ll help you to think through some of your key uncertainties, generate tests for those uncertainties, and plan out how you can make sure you follow through on your intentions.