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…social norms have to be evaluated on the basis of their outcomes, like everything else. And that might prompt people to think that they should break norms and rules fairly frequently. But we wanted to push against that…

Stefan Schubert

How honest should we be? How helpful? How friendly? If our society claims to value honesty, for instance, but in reality accepts an awful lot of lying – should we go along with those lax standards? Or, should we attempt to set a new norm for ourselves?

Dr Stefan Schubert, a researcher at the Social Behaviour and Ethics Lab at Oxford University, has been modelling this in the context of the effective altruism community. He thinks people trying to improve the world should hold themselves to very high standards of integrity, because their minor sins can impose major costs on the thousands of others who share their goals.

In addition, when a norm is uniquely important to our situation, we should be willing to question society and come up with something different and hopefully better.

But in other cases, we can be better off sticking with whatever our culture expects, both to save time, avoid making mistakes, and ensure others can predict our behaviour.

In this interview Stefan offers a range of views on the projects and culture that make up ‘effective altruism’ – including where it’s going right and where it’s going wrong.

Stefan did his PhD in formal epistemology, before moving on to a postdoc in political rationality at the London School of Economics, while working on advocacy projects to improve truthfulness among politicians. At the time the interview was recorded Stefan was a researcher at the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford.

We also discuss:

  • Should we trust our own judgement more than others’?
  • How hard is it to improve political discourse?
  • What should we make of well-respected academics writing articles that seem to be completely misinformed?
  • How is effective altruism (EA) changing? What might it be doing wrong?
  • How has Stefan’s view of EA changed?
  • Should EA get more involved in politics, or steer clear of it? Would it be a bad idea for a talented graduate to get involved in party politics?
  • How much should we cooperate with those with whom we have disagreements?
  • What good reasons are there to be inconsiderate?
  • Should effective altruism potentially focused on a more narrow range of problems?

The 80,000 Hours podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

So I think it is really important to develop expertise in order to get influence. The effective altruist concept itself is not enough to get people to listen to you. You also need to demonstrate expertise in specific areas. I think we’re really good at that, in existential risk in particular. And I think that’s really crucial in order to get people to listen to us.

I think there’s a strong focus on quality now. EA is a very intellectual movement, or community. And I think in intellectual matters, the very best are disproportionately impactful. Someone like Nick Bostrom is many orders of magnitude more important than an average professor.

People who tend to be reasonable generally, there’s something that happens when politics enters the picture. And I’m somewhat worried about this. I was at some point a bit worried that effective altruism would develop into a fairly traditional progressive social movement, and with associated poor epistemics. I think that risk mostly seems to have passed now. But I do think it’s important to emphasize.

And I think in general, people are sort of naturally tribal, or tribalistic. And they sort of want to side with their own tribe, and they want to have other tribes to point to the finger against.

Cause-neutrality is just this idea that you should be willing to consider new causes. Because, unless you’re lucky, you might have chosen intuitively a cause which is not the most effective. And it might actually be many times less effective than the most impactful cause if it’s the case that the distribution of impact across causes is very uneven.

So, I think one misconception is that people think that cause-neutrality entails that we should work on this broad range of different causes. So, cause-neutrality sets EA apart from other movements. Other movements like the feminist movement or the environmentalist movement arguably aren’t cause-neutral. But another thing which sets EA apart is that it’s working on a number of different causes. So in the paper we call this cause divergence. But it doesn’t actually follow from cause-neutrality that we should be cause-divergent. Because it could very well be that we should invest all our resources in one cause — the very best cause.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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