Toby Ord Biography
Toby Ord is an Australian philosopher who in 2009, formed Giving What We Can, an international society whose members vow to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and he is a significant figure in the effective altruism movement, which encourages using reason and evidence to improve the lives of others whenever possible.
How old is Toby Ord? – Age
He is 44 years old as of July 2023. He was born in 1979 in Melbourne, Australia. His real name is Toby David Godfrey Ord.
Toby Ord Family – Education
He later enrolled at the University of Melbourne, where he originally studied computer science. After completing his first degree, he transferred to philosophy to further his interest in ethics. Ord attended the University of Oxford for his graduate studies, earning a B.Phil. and a D.Phil. in philosophy.
Toby Ord Wife
Ord resides in Oxford with his wife, Bernadette Young, a physician.
Toby Ord Giving What We Can
At Oxford, Ord intended to donate a sizable amount of his income to the most cost-effective charities he could locate.Following a number of inquiries from persons interested in making a similar commitment, Ord decided to establish an organization dedicated to assisting like-minded donors.
In 2009, Ord founded Giving What We Can, an international organization whose members have vowed to donate at least 10% of their earnings to the most cost-effective charity. The organization is affiliated with and participates in the effective altruism movement.Giving What We Can aims not just to urge individuals to donate more money to charity, but also to emphasize the necessity of giving to the most cost-efficient organizations, stating that “research shows that some are up to 1,000 times as effective as others.”
Giving What We Can had more than 4,500 members by February 2020, and they had promised more than $1.5 billion to charitable causes. At first, Ord himself made the decision to set a salary ceiling of £20,000 per year and donate all of his excess earnings to carefully considered charitable causes. After a year, he reduced this amount to £18,000. This cutoff increases yearly due to inflation. By December 2019, he had given out £106,000, or 28% of his earnings. He estimates that he will have donated about £1 million in total during his career.
Toby Ord Book
His book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, was published in March 2020. The New Yorker describes Ord’s study motivations. Ord has authored papers on the viability and possibility of hypercomputation, which are computational models that can produce non-Turing-computable outputs, such as a computer capable of solving the halting problem.
Toby Ord Career
Ord has been a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford since 2014. Ord refers to his interest as “the big picture questions facing humanity.” He is a trustee of the Centre for Effective Altruism and the non-profit organization 80,000 Hours, where he conducts research on jobs with the most beneficial social impact and provides career recommendations based on his findings.
Ord’s work has mostly focused on moral philosophy. In practical ethics, he has focused on bioethics, moral demands, and global priorities. He has also made contributions to global health, serving as an advisor on the third edition of the Disease Control Priorities Project. In normative ethics, his research has focused on consequentialism, and on moral uncertainty. In normative ethics, his research has concentrated on consequentialism and moral uncertainty. Ord’s current primary research topic is existential danger.