Making a Difference Ⅱ: High Stakes
edX
3 Courses
San Jose State University is a public university situated in San Jose, CA that offers more than 145 bachelor's and master's degree programs. SJSU fosters academic excellence and a varied learning community that readies students for personal and professional success.
Overview
Climate Change, Nuclear War, Man-made Pandemics, The rise of AI – Humanity has never been more capable, and yet it has never been more at risk.
This course, which is the second part of the Making a Difference program, provides a collection of practical tools from economics, technology, climate science, the life sciences, and more to help you achieve a positive impact on the world. From the small decisions we make every day, through the initiatives we choose to support, to our most significant life choices, such as what career to pursue, relying on reliable sources and well-established tools in decision-making can help you drive a change you believe in.
We will learn some of the most important frameworks and tools to prioritize impactful opportunities – even in the most challenging circumstances, such as preparing for unprecedented risks or comparing completely different cause areas. Each lesson will also introduce you to a new cause area with plenty of concrete and actionable opportunities for making a difference, including some of humanity’s largest modern risks.
This course is a follow-up to Making a Difference Ⅰ: Evidence-based Impact, where we learned some foundational tools and ideas for assessing and driving impact and explored opportunities backed by strong evidence.
In this course, we pivot away from the evidence-rich environments of the previous course and explore what we can do about risks so great that we can’t wait until we have all the evidence.
