Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Keiran Harris: If we had total information, we might figure out that this person you’re talking about, they have a neurological condition called “jerk syndrome.” They have this, and it sucks to have jerk syndrome. It’s just a problem. It affects millions of Americans. It’s this horrible thing.

You say to me, “But they were a jerk. They really were a jerk.” I say, “Yeah, I know. But they have jerk syndrome, right?” You go, “Yeah, but they shouldn’t have been a jerk.” I go, “Yeah, but they’ve got the syndrome.” And you go, “Oh, OK.” I say to you, “Hey, it turns out they’ve got a pill to cure jerk syndrome.” So if we give them that pill and they no longer are a jerk anymore, and they’re completely apologetic for what they’ve done to you, would you still be mad at them? The thing I’m trying to get at is saying you are mad at this person for their biology, and obviously, when you get into this, it feels like that’s untenable.

Because, again: it would suck to have jerk syndrome. That is not their best life. If you woke up tomorrow with jerk syndrome, and you were just mean to people, or doing these really thoughtless things…

Luisa Rodriguez: That would be sad.

Keiran Harris: That would be sad, right? Actually, we, I think, don’t currently have jerk syndrome. We’re fortunate for that. We’re lucky. This person’s unlucky, and we could easily have been in their shoes. There’s no sense in which they deserve to have our anger and we deserve praise for not having it. That’s just the luck of the draw.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:16]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners. This is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

My colleague and friend Keiran and I recorded a conversation on free will, guilt, and shame last year for 80k After Hours. After hearing lots of people loved it, we decided to re-release it here on the main feed.

We cover:

• Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold them.
• How those views keep him from experiencing sustained guilt, shame, and anger.
• Whether I would become a worse person if I felt less guilt and shame — and more specifically, whether I’d work fewer hours, or donate less money, or become a worse friend.
• And some practical advice on feeling less guilt, shame, and anger on the day to day.
• And a bunch more.

One important thing to flag is that neither Keiran nor I have backgrounds or expertise in philosophy or neuroscience, and so you should probably take everything we say in this episode with a grain of salt.

But the point of this episode wasn’t to debate the philosophy. It was just to try to help people who are naturally sympathetic to the idea that free will might not exist.

Again, it’s been over a year since we recorded this, and I can genuinely say these ideas have helped me. Keiran’s a little disappointed that they haven’t completely eradicated all of my feelings of guilt and shame (which would be a tall order!), but even though those feelings still come up for me, remembering the ideas from this episode regularly helps me sit in those feelings for less time — helps me remember that I am who I am, for better and for worse, and for any given mistake I’ve made or flaws I have, I fundamentally could not have done otherwise, could not be otherwise. And that I shouldn’t feel ashamed about that.

All right, here’s me and Keiran.

The chat begins [00:03:15]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. So, Keiran, we work together. We’re also friends. And one of the most amazing things about you is that you don’t feel at least prolonged guilt or shame or anger. Is that basically right?

Keiran Harris: Yeah. Actually, I would say that I never feel enduring guilt or shame. Well, I can’t remember the last time it was more than a day of feeling guilt or shame about anything.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Keiran Harris: It’s actually very rare for it to be over an hour. It’s pretty rare for it to be over five minutes — like, it’s not happening every day. But maybe once a week or something, I’d have something that you would describe as guilt or shame for like 10 minutes or something.

Luisa Rodriguez: What’s the kind of thing that would make you feel the extremes of what you do feel? Like, what kind of thing would make you feel guilty for five minutes, versus max 24 hours?

Keiran Harris: I think the most extreme thing would be if I had done something to make my wife sad, and it was obviously me. The way I experience that is not… I never endorse it. I never endorse feeling guilty.

Luisa Rodriguez: Even then.

Keiran Harris: Even then, I don’t endorse it. The way I experience it is more like anxiety. So it’s a physical reaction. So I will feel anxious — my body will react in such a way as if it thinks I should feel guilty, and I have to sort of talk myself out of it. But yeah, it is the case that as soon as I recognise myself feeling that way, which I’ve gotten better and better at over the years, it does help a lot. And it’s only in these extreme cases when it can still be the rest of the day. It’s actually not even like 24 hours — basically just going to sleep. I can’t remember having an experience like that and then waking up the next day still feeling that way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Yeah. That’s amazing. And then the kind of thing that’s five minutes?

Keiran Harris: That might be like making a mistake at work or something. It might be something like I entered in the wrong link or something, or the show notes to a podcast episode were a bit off and someone saw some HTML or something. Just something silly, where maybe initially it’s like “ugh” — but again, it’s nothing I endorse, and it goes away pretty quickly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Is that as nice as it sounds? Sounds great.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. No, I think it is great. That’s why we’re doing this episode. Because, as you said, we are good friends. Given what I know about how you experience guilt and shame, it feels like kind of a superpower to not experience these things, with what I claim to be no real costs. I don’t really think that I suffer for this. So I am hopeful that if you and I can talk for long enough, that I can at least push you in this direction.

Keiran’s origin story [00:06:30]

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Well, I guess we’ll talk about the costs later and whether there are any. But to start, I’d love to know just how you became this way. As you said, I feel loads of guilt, loads of shame, and would love not to. The whole thing here that we’re trying to do is to see if you can bottle any of that up for me and hand me some of your secret. Is it right that you haven’t always been this way?

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that’s right. That would be weird if, just from a baby, immediately this was just genetic.

Luisa Rodriguez: Well, we have a term for it, and it’s “sociopathy” or something.

Keiran Harris: That’s right. No, so I think I had a pretty normal relationship to guilt and shame. The thing that stands out to me in my past, like I really had a problem with, was ruminating over mistakes. I mean, like in high school, I was not so interested in academic stuff. I was very interested in impressing the girls that I had crushes on. If I made what I thought was a big mistake in some way, and not impressing them or something, I would, sometimes for like months, just be going back and being like, “Oh, if I only did this thing. If in this specific moment, if I just said this thing, if I just made that slightly different decision, if I had worn a jacket that was less uncool” — whatever it was.

Luisa Rodriguez: Whoa, wild. Is that a real example?

Keiran Harris: That’s a real one, yeah. I wore this really, really dumb jacket. That was a mistake.

Luisa Rodriguez: You might be married to someone else now.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally. Anyway, so I would ruminate on this a lot. And then what started to turn for me is that I used to like talking to my friends about philosophy stuff when I was pretty young. So when I was a teenager, I was watching a documentary when I started really thinking about this. Basically, I was watching this documentary about a serial killer who was on death row. And seeing the reaction to this serial killer, seeing how many people not just wanted him to have the death penalty, but were really fervent about it, really passionate, really angry with this guy. To the point where it seemed to me like they thought that he had the option of doing what he did — so he had this free choice to murder these people or not, and he chose to murder them — and that’s why they’re so angry with him.

I thought this seems like kind of bullshit to me, because being a serial killer is such a different kind of a person. It’s such an extreme of the human experience, that to me, a serial killer was more like an alligator or something, where it was like, it’s so different. Where it’s like, if an alligator gets into your town and kills 13 people, it’s like, this is a horrible tragedy. But you wouldn’t be mad at the alligator. Even if you thought that the alligator should be put down, you wouldn’t have this thirst for justice, this retributive justice.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Right.

Keiran Harris: It seemed to me to imply that not just that they thought that the serial killer could have done otherwise, but that they could do otherwise. It seemed to me like they were basically saying, “Well, we could all be serial killers. We could all kill 13 people. We choose not to. We’re the good people; we choose not to do that. But the bad people, they’ll do it. Because obviously we all want to do that and none of us do it.”

And I thought this was crazy. Like, there’s no way these people, these mild-mannered people, could kill people. And in the reverse, I didn’t think that there was really any way for this serial killer to have not. That’s what I thought. This was like the beginning of this, with me just being like, I don’t really buy that you can just do anything. I don’t buy that you can avoid doing anything. I don’t think that’s a free choice.

Luisa Rodriguez: Had you thought about free choice much before, or was it really pretty organic?

Keiran Harris: It was pretty organic. And even this wasn’t explicit. This was just like me having independent thoughts on this. Really talking about the death penalty, basically, like me making a case to my friends about why I don’t think the death penalty makes sense.

When it actually started getting crystallised was when I read Sam Harris’s short book, Free Will. He was making basically the exact case that I was making for serial killers, but he was just making it for all of us — for everything, basically. And immediately, it just made perfect sense to me. I was just like, “This is just absolutely true.”

Charles Whitman [00:11:00]

Keiran Harris: The example that he gives is of Charles Whitman, who was known as the Clock Tower Killer (or the Texas Tower Sniper). Charles Whitman ended up killing, I think, 14 people. He killed his wife and his mother, and then he killed himself too. And he left what was basically a suicide note saying, “I have no idea why I did this. I loved my family. I have no idea what was going on. I had just been flying into irrational rage lately. I don’t recognise myself at all. I think that you should perform an autopsy on me to see what happened.” So that’s what they did. They found that he had a tumour that was pressing into his amygdala — which was exactly the kind of tumour in exactly the kind of place that you would expect someone to have done this sort of thing.

When we hear about that case, we think that is exculpatory for most people. It’s like, well, it wasn’t Charles Whitman doing this — it was Charles Whitman plus this tumour, and maybe even mostly the tumour.

Basically what Sam Harris and I are saying is that this case of the tumour is not importantly different to every case — really, that it is effectively it’s tumours all the way down: that humans are biological machines, we’re just biological robots, basically.

The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky makes this analogy with a car where its brakes have broken down: if a car’s brakes just stop working, you don’t get mad at the car for this. You just accept that the car is breaking down. Maybe you have to take it off the road. In an example of someone who’s dangerous, all those things still apply — but you don’t get mad at it. Basically, it is this realisation that with perfect information, you could always have this explanation, like with Charles Whitman. It would be like, “This bit in a different part of his brain was the reason that he did X.”

But it doesn’t have to be as extreme as the murdering case. It can be something like a husband forgot his anniversary. Why did he do that? Well, with total information, we could tell you exactly why he did that. Maybe it was something to do with his genetics, maybe something to do with what he had for lunch that day. But there’s going to be some explanation. And I believe that all actions are the result of prior causes, and there’s nothing else left — once you have all these prior causes, it will just lead to you doing exactly what you do, in any case.

If you pause the universe just before you make a decision, whatever that decision you make is what would have happened a trillion times in a row. And if that’s true, then you have to ask yourself this question — which I will ask constantly during this conversation, and I do throughout my life: Could someone have done otherwise? Whether it is murdering someone, to just leaving the butter out: Could they have done otherwise? If the answer is no, then I feel like that has big implications.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I mean, people just have the really strong intuition that “tumour there” is exculpatory. And then as soon as you take it out and someone then separately commits murders — or another person commits murders and they had no tumour to find — that that was their choice.

I guess some people just really bite that bullet, but it makes no sense to me. Obviously the other person committing murders is doing it for weird reasons as well. They’re not visible on our brain scans, and separately it doesn’t cause cancer which kills you, but it’s the same kinds of actions. Where else are they coming from? There’s something imperceptible going on probably also with their amygdala, that in 100 years we’ll probably understand perfectly, and people will have brain scans showing that they have murder parts of their brain.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think back 100 years ago, we didn’t know what epilepsy was, right? People thought that that was like demonic possessions. That was just like your best guess. Maybe not 100 years, but whatever it is — and that’s not that long ago. And science advances and we know what that is now. There’s no reason to think that won’t continue to progress, where with that murderer, or just that jerk, we now know what was going on in their brains at the time — and we could, with total information, track it back maybe to when they were born.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. Does it feel to you like the thing going on there is just like, in one case we have a clear story about the causes, and in another case we don’t understand the causes and we have this illusion that we’re making choices? Well, in my view, it’s an illusion. So something like it’s much harder to tell a story about how he has an invisible thing in his brain and also maybe had bad things happen to him as a child, or that there’s this complex set of reasons that are kind of impossible to write down. In that case, it’s much easier to just fill in the details with this illusion of free choice that feels very familiar to us.

Keiran Harris: I think that’s all true, and then I think that feeling the illusion so strongly ourselves, it’s just so easy to just project that to everyone else. So I think that it is linked — that if you can see through it for yourself, then you can see through it for other people too, at the same time.

Luisa’s origin story [00:16:41]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Cool. I think we do have super similar views on free will and free choice. I guess my origin story is a bit less organic. I’ll say what that was, just briefly, because it feels so similar, I feel like it’ll be satisfying.

My version of this was, I think I was like 18. There was a podcast on Radiolab, and it describes this case of a man who actually has epilepsy and he has seizures, and he has surgery to remove some part of his brain that they somehow know is causing seizures. They go away for like a decade, and then they come back and he has another brain surgery. He also cares a lot about music, so he’s playing the piano the whole time he’s having surgery to make sure he keeps that, and is perfectly confident that he’ll be himself when the surgery is over.

And then, I think it’s something like a year later. He’s since gotten married. They’re very happy. But a year later, the FBI shows up at his door and you find out that he’s been consuming really, really, really despicable child pornography. And that he basically, immediately after the surgery, had intense, impossible-to-control urges to download this and consume it.

And laid out this way. I’m just like, “Poor man. His life was ruined, and he spent time in prison, and people think he’s a horrible person. But this horrible thing happened to him.” And yeah, that just completely convinced me immediately. I even had a tattoo already that was from this Richard Dawkins book that actually basically is kind of in support of free will. And then I just had this tattoo, and still do, that I don’t really believe. It says, “We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” So: our genes. And yeah, I heard this podcast episode and I was like, “Crap. We can’t. Our genes and all these other things are just determining all of our actions. Oh, god.”

Anyway, I’m on board. And I do think we have kind of similar things, where it sounds like you don’t feel this anger toward, for example, a murderer, and I don’t feel any anger toward this person, even though they had horrible effects on the world. I actually think we both express something like sympathy. I’ve heard you before express something like sympathy. Which is such a different feeling.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, absolutely. I actually had heard this Radiolab episode.

Luisa Rodriguez: No way! Amazing.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I mean, I heard it after I already had my views. But I just agree with you completely. I’ve actually used this as an example when talking about this in the past.

It’s unlucky to be a bad person [00:19:57]

Keiran Harris: Imagine that you woke up tomorrow with the same uncontrollable urges that this guy did. That is just about the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s like, pretty close. It’s so horrible and everyone will hate you. To me, I couldn’t even get into a mindset where I wouldn’t feel sympathy for someone like that. And I just expand that to everything.

It’s almost easier in these cases where they’re really severe, and it’s like obviously life deranging. What I would say, and what I’m sure I’ll say to you as this conversation goes on, is that when you think about things that are not so extreme, and you think about someone who’s just a jerk, right? Who’s just like a jerk to you, and you feel angry for them for that, I say: Well, is their life better for being a jerk? Does that make them happier? Does that reduce their suffering? Is that something that you would choose to be if you could click a button and be a jerk? Is that something that they would choose to be? I don’t think so. I think it’s bad for them, and I think that there is no way that you can choose to be that kind of a person or to turn it off.

So I actually immediately feel sympathy for people like that. It’s just, in my view, unlucky. And it’s not just unlucky for them. It’s good to reflect that we are lucky for not being jerks, inasmuch as we’re not jerks.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, right. Yeah, that does make sense. The idea being that as soon as you know that not only could they not have done otherwise, it’s also just probably sucky for them. You can at least go from anger to not anger and maybe even to sympathy. Do you want to say what that looks like when you turn it inward?

Keiran Harris: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been talking about cases from other people where we get on board: they couldn’t have done otherwise. Great. If you turn this inward, the same thing still applies. There is no way to justify that there’s one case for everyone else in the world, but no, you really could do otherwise — you’re the special magic person who could do otherwise.

If we accept that we’re not magic and that we are just robots who sometimes malfunction, there is no room on my view to feel guilty, to feel ultimately responsible for your actions. Because if you really couldn’t have done otherwise, then what are you feeling guilty about?

So let’s say you’re holding a drink at a party, and you just trip out of nowhere, and you get wine on someone’s shirt. I imagine that a lot of listeners — and I’m guessing maybe even you — would feel this guilt and shame. You’d be really embarrassed and you’d feel shame over the fact that you tripped and you’d feel guilty over the fact of their shirt. And it’ll suddenly start to seem like you think you could have done otherwise in this moment.

What I’m saying is that with some practice, you can just see through this, in the moment, and be like, “Stuff happens. Oh, well.” With this sort of thing, with anything like that, it’s just, “Oh, well, I couldn’t have done otherwise, so I’m not going to feel guilty about it, not going to feel shame.”

Doubts about whether free will is an illusion [00:23:09]

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. I guess, before we go any further, do you have any doubts about the whole free will thing? Any kind of arguments that land with you?

Keiran Harris: Sure. I think what’s called libertarian free will, which is what we’ve been talking about — where you really could have done otherwise, in some sense, of like, if you stop the universe in one point and we’re an ice cream parlour and I say to you, “Pick anything you want. You can pick any of the flavours” — this is the kind of free will I think most non-philosophers think they have. They think they could truly pick any of them, and that if we pause the universe, run it a trillion times, they would pick different flavours.

Whereas what I’m saying is: no, if you track everything that’s going on in your brain, a series of events in your brain are going to lead to you feeling like chocolate. When you feel like chocolate, you’re going to make the decision to buy chocolate, because why wouldn’t you? It’s just, like, assigned to you: it’s going to be chocolate, and you’re really just like this witness to this body who is choosing chocolate. I think there’s no way that exists; if libertarian free will existed, we’re just living in a different universe.

I think actually almost no nonreligious philosophers believe in this. David Chalmers did this PhilPapers survey, and it’s roughly the same percentage of people who believe in God and believe in libertarian free will. I imagine there’s just a massive overlap to that. I don’t actually know, but I’m guessing that — roughly it’s like 14% for both or something. Because that’s one of the implications of believing there’s no free will: it undercuts most strains of, say, Christianity and Islam — because without free will, then the notions of heaven and hell can’t exist.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, I see. Yes, that makes sense.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. Because if God just created you to be a robot and then made you into a malfunctioning robot that did evil things and then he sent you to hell forever, it makes no sense. There’s a starting point where you have to have free will if heaven and hell work. That kind of free will is just like off the table to me. I don’t know. It’s one of the things I’m most confident of in the world. I can’t even imagine what the case is for that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. How do you think about the illusion of it? Do you just think at some point it was useful as we were evolving, and so we’ve got this weird thing and maybe it has some use that’s a bit hard to see?

Keiran Harris: I could definitely speculate, but certainly I don’t know. Basically, I don’t know what’s going on there, but I don’t think that the illusion is, like, evidence of it existing. I think that actually that illusion disappears if you pay close enough attention — and so it doesn’t give me that much pause, the illusion.

Luisa Rodriguez: Huh. Interesting.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. This is getting into meditation, but if you pay close enough attention to your every thought that’s arising, this subjective experience of having free will just goes away.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Well, you were going to talk about some other objection to free will that maybe you’re more sympathetic to? Or a version of it that you’re more sympathetic to?

Keiran Harris: Yeah, I was going to say that if I’m wrong about all this stuff, I am probably wrong because compatibilists like Dan Dennett, like Sean Carroll are right in the way that they think about free will.

So basically the technical term for what I’m talking about is “hard determinism” — that’s my position, which is that there’s no free will.

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s all calculations. It’s tumours all the way down.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, and that we have no free will. Compatibilists will agree that we’re in this deterministic universe, but they will say that even though that’s true — totally right about that, they totally agree on libertarian free will; they think that’s just magic and there’s no way that’s true — that we still have a type of free will. And that, in some deep sense, should give us moral responsibility. Dan Dennett uses the analogy of if you were sailing a boat at sea, you can’t control the waves, but you can control the boat.

Now, I actually don’t know what they’re talking about — I know that you’ve had a similar experience — but I can’t give you a really good version of the important differences here. I don’t actually know where most compatibilists come down on these important questions that we’ll talk about — Should you be mad at this person for that? Should you feel guilt? — these questions like this. I’m still a bit confused.

One example is I had the experience a few years ago of going on a walk with our colleague Rob Wiblin, who heard me talking about this. And he calls himself, or at least at the time called himself a compatibilist. I went like, “Oh, that’s really interesting. Yeah, let’s talk about that.” I was trying to get to the bottom of our actual disagreements, so I just kept firing thought experiments at him, like, I’m just going to try and find where we disagree. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find any examples where we disagreed. I ended the conversation just being like, “You’re not a compatibilist.”

But maybe he is a compatibilist, and there’s just no real important difference. It’s just this game around definitions, where compatibilists would like to say that free will is just a case of the brain making choices. Because of course humans make choices. Of course. So if brains are making choices, then that’s free will.

Luisa Rodriguez: By “choices,” you mean like, there are sets of actions that are available to the brain, and the brain is like, “We’re doing this one.”

Keiran Harris: Yes. And the brain isn’t coerced. There’s no gun to its head. Therefore that is some kind of degree of freedom — which again, on their account, would give you moral responsibility.

I think it’s like over 50% of philosophers think this. I find it very confusing. I don’t get it. I’ve just never been able to wrap my head around it. It all sounds to me like very smart people coming up with ways to explain this thing of like, “Look, we definitely have free will. Let’s try and figure out a way to explain it.” So I don’t know. I mean, it feels a bit strange if it’s like you and I are not smart enough to follow these arguments. It feels like we should be able to do it. But yeah, I just don’t get it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, so thinking of a really concrete example — like choosing between chocolate and, I don’t know, a brownie — do they believe that if you ran the same choice over and over again, if you could just go back in time, that the brain might make a different choice each time?

Keiran Harris: No. That’s libertarian free will, and they think that’s crazy. They think that’s magic.

Luisa Rodriguez: They literally think that the person will not do anything but the same thing over and over again. They will always choose the chocolate. And they think there’s free will involved in that.

Keiran Harris: Yes, they think that there are degrees of freedom. Again, I feel like I’m not going to do this justice because it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Luisa Rodriguez: Well, I guess neither of us will.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, I’m sure people will get mad at us because — big disclaimer — I have no background in philosophy. My background is in being a professional poker player. There’s no reason I should be right and they should be wrong. Definitely go out and you could read Sam Harris’s book to see my views and you could read Dan Dennett’s book to see a compatibilist view.

But yeah, to me, I don’t really know what they’re talking about. Also, I feel like they’re just not getting to the bottom of what actually matters here. Because I think this question is not just you and I having this fun back and forth on whether we have free will. I think this is a really important question. I think it’s really important for us psychologically. I think a life where you don’t experience sustained guilt and shame and anger and hatred is a dramatically different experience, and this has real implications globally. I am incapable of feeling hatred for someone, right? You can very easily think about how, if groups of people couldn’t hate other groups of people, that’s going to be a different world.

Or take the criminal justice system. If I was designing that, maybe I would still be putting the same people behind bars, but it would all be forward thinking. It would all be like, “OK, no one decided to be criminals. This sucks for everyone who’s going to go to jail. I’m so sorry about this, but we just can’t have you out because you’re violent. That is really horrible.” But that is a totally different way of thinking about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: So it wouldn’t be a criminal system that had punishment, like a punitive “You did something bad and you deserve to suffer.” It’s purely just to protect society from people who can’t help but do bad things.

Keiran Harris: That’s it. It is like what we were talking about at the top of the conversation: it is just real compassion for everyone. By the way, because, again, if they’ve done something really bad, they might have to be in jail for the rest of their lives. That sucks to be that person. That’s terrible.

Luisa Rodriguez: I mean, in your world, maybe prisons deprive you of your freedom, and that’s terrible, but maybe they’re not even like bad places to be.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, absolutely. You can make the argument that they should be bad places as a disincentive, if you think that if they’re bad places, maybe people would avoid doing these crimes. I’m very sceptical of that for very violent crimes. I don’t think that it’s like someone’s about to murder a family and is like, “Hmm, prison seems a little bad? I don’t think so. I might not do that today.” But you can make the case, but again, it would still be with this compassion, being like, “I am sorry we have to make this prison so unpleasant, but we’ve run the numbers and we actually think that the world would be better off in this way.” You would still be like, “We’re sorry about this.”

Where it’s like, that is not the vibe. In fact, a huge amount of what’s going on in the criminal justice system is this retributive stuff, this punitive stuff, like, “You deserve to be punished” — even if it has no benefit on society, even if you really are very confident this person is not going to reoffend.

Luisa Rodriguez: Well, in the Radiolab case, this person has the brain surgery and they commit these horrible crimes. And then once their surgeon finds out the extent of it, they’re able to prescribe drugs that totally suppress the thing. They also suppress his libido and his appetite, but he’s just like, “Yep, I’ll take that. I don’t want to be consuming child porn.”

Keiran Harris: Absolutely. Once they cure him, what is the benefit of putting him in jail? It seems like no benefit at all. There is no one who is being dissuaded from doing what he did based on this punishment.

What I was saying is just that this is a really important question, and I feel like most people don’t grapple with that. That’s my impression when I read books or interviews with compatibilists, is that they’re not really getting to these questions, for the most part. These really important questions, like: Should we restructure the criminal justice system? Should we fundamentally not be angry at people ever?

Obviously, this is not how society works. I actually don’t know anyone personally who acts as if free will is an illusion. I know that there are people out there, but I don’t know them personally. I even know that there are plenty of people like you, who are very sympathetic to my view. Like basically no one acts this way. It would be a very different world if everyone was acting the way I did.

Acting this way just for other people [00:34:57]

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah. Interesting. You’re making me realise that I actually do think I basically act this way for other people. Really this case from Radiolab has haunted me. Well, not haunted, but stuck with me. I have friends that I think do things that are hurtful to me, or hurtful to others. Often my partner is like, “I’m angry on your behalf.” And I’m like, “I’m not. They are that way because they can’t help it.” The reasons for that are a mix of, like, they have a certain type of personality because they were born with it, and then also they grew up in this other way. And no, I don’t feel angry.

So maybe a bunch of the work is going to be in pointing it inward. I do think I’m just predisposed to feeling guilt and shame. So maybe it makes sense that it’s a harder manoeuvre for me. I’m kind of tempted to experiment with it.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, let’s do it. Because on paper, you agree with me, right? That there’s no reason to think that you magically have this free will that no one else has?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yes. On paper, I agree with you. So like this case of this person who consumes child porn. I don’t want him to feel shame, maybe with an exception of, could it have been useful for him to feel more shame? Would he have reported himself earlier or something? So there’s some instrumental thing, and I think we’ll get into that.

But there’s this other thing that I can’t tell if we feel different about. Maybe we don’t. I don’t feel like he should feel shame if it’s not helpful. I do feel deeply, deeply sad about the fact that he did what he did.

Keiran Harris: I totally get what you’re saying. I mean, it makes perfect sense to be sad about this happening in the world. But to me, I would say it’s equally sad — at least on paper; it makes sense the way you don’t feel this way — if your neighbour is doing this as if it’s your experience. It sucks for you; it’s unlucky that you are now in this body that’s doing this. But it will be very unlucky for them, too. So the fact that it is you rather than someone else, I don’t actually think that is this important distinction. That’s maybe going to be where we come apart a bit.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly. Maybe we should just, like, literally play it out. I’m going to hand you the reins here.

Feeling shame over not working enough [00:37:26]

Keiran Harris: OK, great. Tell me about a type of situation in your life when you feel shame.

Luisa Rodriguez: So when do I regularly feel shame? I mean, on the day to day, it’s things around wanting to do good in the world — wanting in particular to use my career for good, and then feeling like I fall short of that regularly. The most common one is: Do I work enough? Could I be working more? Would it be good if I worked more? I’m trying to do the most good, so probably working more is more good, and so I should do that. Regularly, when I don’t, I’m both like, “I’m a bad person, and also my colleagues and people who share my values would be disappointed in me.”

Keiran Harris: OK, so let’s get into it. First thing, obviously — this is just going to be a follow-through of all of this, and maybe a bit repetitive — but: Do you think that you can choose to be a harder-working person? Do you think that is a choice that you can make? That you can wake up one morning and make this free choice to be harder working?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Interesting. It’s funny how much I do. It’s super intuitive to me right now that I could choose to be harder working. But it is true that I don’t believe it, when I reflect on it.

Keiran Harris: There’s no part of you who actually, when you reflect on it, thinks this is true? You don’t think you could choose this?

Luisa Rodriguez: No. I mean, let me just convince myself: I am a person with a brain. The brain only has a certain amount of attention for work. It also has really powerful other motivations, like wanting to go out for walks and travel — and those things get enough airtime in my brain that my brain chooses them more often than some part of me thinks is ideal. Yeah, I think it’s just the way it is.

First-person / third-person distinction [00:39:42]

Luisa Rodriguez: I actually think this is worth getting into. I think somehow it’s not free will, but somehow I could work on it. I could try to build more stamina and work toward, I don’t know, find hobbies that are maybe a bit less time consuming but still refresh me a bunch. I don’t believe that would be free, and so maybe that’s all that matters.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. It might be worth getting into. There’s a lot of confusion in this topic around the first- and third-person distinction. Like it makes sense for me to talk about you in the third person and say that “Luisa could” — whatever, if I thought it was the right thing to do; I don’t, but — “could develop the habits to work more hours.” That makes perfect sense. From the first-person perspective to be like, “I could do that, I really could. I really could make this decision and I’m going to do it now.”

This is the illusion. This is the thing that doesn’t work. This is the thing that makes no sense. It is not the case that we could simply choose to be harder working. It’s not the case on any day that you could wake up and have this free choice that “I am going to work more hours today.” You are going to work exactly as many hours as is dictated by physics. It’s just whatever the state of your brain is on that day and the environment you’re in that’s going to dictate it. And there is nothing else in the brain that gives room for you to override this in any way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. I do believe that. Just because I haven’t thought about it very much and I don’t think I have kind of integrated this other thing into my views on free will, what does it mean for it to make sense, for this third person, Luisa, to in theory be able to work on working more?

Keiran Harris: So, for example, we’re having this conversation, and I am hoping to influence you towards having less guilt. If that works then, I don’t know, a week from now maybe you report having less guilt over the last week. It makes total sense to be saying, “Luisa successfully reduced her guilt. She did so good.” That makes total sense. That’s totally coherent.

But in the first person, whether you do this or not is going to be a total mystery. This is either going to happen or it isn’t. There is this high-level thing that’s going on here, where it’s like, all of this stuff could have just landed for you when you were preparing for this interview, and you’d have been like, “Oh, it all makes sense to me. I no longer feel guilty.” That was a possibility. Another possibility is like, during this conversation, it lands for you. Maybe tomorrow when you’re thinking about it, and maybe never, obviously. And all of these things will just be a total mystery. It’s like, well, why did that happen or not? I don’t know. It’s just like your brain in that moment interacted with mine, and it worked out that way. But it’s still a good thing for the universe for you to have experienced less guilt.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I’m really trying to wrap my head around the beliefs that feel still in tension to me. That there are things that could happen that would mean I worked more hours, that I worked harder. Maybe it’s like I read more books that talk about global problems and suffering in the world, and I was more motivated to work on alleviating that suffering. Or there are things that could cause me to work less. Like, I don’t know…

Keiran Harris: Like this conversation?

Luisa Rodriguez: [laughs] Possibly. Or I learned that global problems aren’t as tractable. And so I’m like, “It’s not worth it. There’s no point.” I guess your argument is just that all of those things, like me choosing to read books, are also outside of my control.

Keiran Harris: All of them are outside of your control. Yeah, all of it. It is tumours all the way down. Everything. Every single thing, every single choice that you take.

Luisa Rodriguez: And I’m just along for the ride?

Keiran Harris: Yes.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. OK, yeah. So I’m with you. I could not just, right now, be like, “This is the turning point. This is where I step in and start working more hours, despite nothing having changed in my environment.”

Would Luisa become a worse person if she felt less guilt? [00:44:09]

Keiran Harris: So there are two things here. One is just taking this at face value that this would be a good thing to work more hours. The other thing is me pushing back on whether it’s going to be good. Because I know that you’re worried — I know that you think that if you totally bought my views, maybe you would work fewer hours. Is that right?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I guess. Yes. Even if I bought that I could feel less guilt, I’d feel worried about it having an impact in my career, and also just being a good person — who makes plans with my friends and doesn’t cancel, and is considerate of my partner, and doesn’t do things that harm him. I don’t know what happens if I feel guilt less intensely. I don’t know if I cause more harm.

Keiran Harris: I have a bunch of thoughts about this in different areas. If we just take them one by one. On the working-more-hours thing, I think that it is really up in the air whether guilt-induced extra hours are actually positive for the world. My guess is that they’re probably not.

Luisa Rodriguez: Any guilt-induced hour?

Keiran Harris: Like if you can say, “You get all the guilt-induced hours you get now, or you get none of them,” that’s the easier case to argue for, rather than the marginal one, I guess.

But if you worked the number of hours that you think you should, then what’s going to happen? I’m going to say, one, you’re much more likely to burn out and then be less likely to work to try and do good for the rest of your career. That could just straightforwardly be a mistake. The other thing is that other people are going to see you be really intense and almost burning out, and it’s going to seem very unappealing and they are not going to want to follow in your footsteps.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. If we knew all the facts about the world, and found out that me working one extra hour was net positive, even though it was guilt driven, would you… I guess it’s a bit material, if an objection I have to even pursuing this as an endeavour is, “What if it causes more harm?” If empirically we knew that me feeling less guilt about this was going to actually be bad, what would you say?

Keiran Harris: To me, this feels a little like if you said to me, “Empirically, we know that if you or I believe in the God of the Old Testament, the world will be a better place.” You say that to me, you can just prove it. And then you say to me, “Therefore, we should believe it.” I say to you, “What are you talking about? Even though I agree with you — that yeah, it would be a better world; I totally agree with your numbers — I just can’t choose to do that.”

There’s this strange thing that comes up in these conversations sometimes, where it’s like, but wouldn’t it be good if we felt like 20% more guilt than you or something? I’m like, yeah, but that’s not in your control. There’s no button for this. It’s very confusing to me why anyone would think that they can turn this on and off or anything. It’s just like, either you buy my arguments — and then you’re going to see through all of it — or you don’t, and then you’re probably going to be feeling too much guilt. I really think this is like an extra illusion, this idea of like, “I’m going to fine-tune the perfect amount of guilt.”

Luisa Rodriguez: My guilt toggles. Yeah, right. The thing that I think it’s useful for me to hear, though, that if we did just empirically know that the God from the Old Testament made the world a better place, you’d be like, “Fine. that’s a shame, but I guess that’s the God I’d choose.”

Keiran Harris: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Then I do think I am comfortable just being, like, cool. Let’s assume we have the same views about how many hours I should be working. Let’s assume that it’s actually not better for the world for me to work more hours out of guilt, and that in the long run, it’s just worse for the world. And that it’s actually just a good thing for me to reduce the guilt I feel about not working more.

Keiran Harris: That’s what I think.

Feeling bad about not being a different person [00:48:18]

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. I feel like there’s a final step with hours. I believe it would be better for me to feel less guilt. Because we’re making this assumption that I do think is totally plausible — and probably even likely — that me feeling less guilt about this would just be better in the long run. And I believe that I’m just kind of along for the ride of how much my brain and body want to work.

Then what would it be like to, on the day to day, try to conjure those ideas up when feeling guilty? I’m just trying to remember a time last week, for example. There was a day when I felt stressed and sad. I could tell I was getting really distracted when trying to work, and that it wasn’t working, and that I should go for a walk instead. But I felt a bit guilty about that walk, because it was in the middle of a workday and probably people would have expected me to be at my computer.

I guess that’s kind of an easy case, because upon reflection, I really think it was just good for me to take the walk. If it gets a bit more ambiguous, and I just really want to go for a walk. Which sometimes happens if it’s like a really gorgeous day. I live in Oxford, and so if it’s good weather, I’m really drawn to it.

Keiran Harris: So with a lot of these ones, to me, whenever you talk about stuff like this, I think what you are feeling guilty about is not being a different person. That’s what you’re saying. You’re saying, “I should be a different person.”

I think that makes about as much sense as me saying, “I wish I was really tall and amazing at basketball, because then I could join the NBA and I would make millions of people happy and they would watch me and they would buy my jerseys.” We both agree that is ludicrous. That’s what it reads to me when you’re saying, “I wish I was the type of person who didn’t want to go for walks during the day.” It’s like, but you are.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Keiran Harris: I also independently think that’s like a totally fine and good and healthy thing to do.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure.

Keiran Harris: But even if it wasn’t, it’s like, well, that’s the world we’re in. We’re in the world where you like to take walks. What is there to feel shame about? I mean, that’s just who you are. You can’t do anything about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: This is getting to the daylight between us. I think we did get in the direction of, like, “Will I endorse this or won’t I, upon reflection?” But I feel enormous grief about the things that I am not, in a way that you don’t, and in a way that for the most part, I don’t think is adding anything to my life. It’s just taking away. It’s not making things better.

But I feel grief that I’m not smarter. I feel grief that I’m not more curious. I feel grief that I don’t work harder. So I guess often on the day to day, it feels like guilt. But even if I look through this lens and I’m like, “But you can’t have done otherwise,” then I’m just like, “Ugh, that’s so disappointing. I’m the kind of person who has my features. And they’re unchangeable.”

Keiran Harris: Yeah. There’s two things that I think of here. One is asking you: Do you ever feel joyful and appreciative of the fact that you are very smart and very curious and very hardworking, even if you think you could be even smarter and even more curious and even more hardworking? Or that’s like off the table?

Luisa Rodriguez: Do I feel appreciative of those things? Doesn’t really come up, no.

Keiran Harris: OK. The world we’re in is one where you are at least a 9 out of 10 on all these things, right? And yet you feel grief even for not being a 10 in these things. If you just grant me you’re a 9 and that you’re not a 10, I would just say, “Well, you’re in the body of someone who has a 9 on all of these things, and you’re also someone who values these things. That seems pretty great.”

But yeah, you can’t go to a 10; you can’t go to an 8 — you’re a 9. It’s not possible to change. But it’s also not a shame. There’s no problem to this. There are some things about most people’s lives that really are a shame, like chronic knee pain or something. You’re like, “Oh, that sucks. That’s really bad.” But you don’t feel the same thing, right? If you had chronic knee pain, you wouldn’t feel this shame of like, “Why don’t I have good knees? Why aren’t my knees perfect? Why don’t I have 10 out of 10 knees?”

Luisa Rodriguez: But I would feel grief, I would feel sad, I would feel loss.

Keiran Harris: But not shame or associated guilt, because you’re saying, like, “I wish I was harder working, and then I feel guilty for not working harder.” It comes back to this, like, “I feel bad for not being a different person.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think I’m actually able to make that move with you, but then what I’m left with is the sadness, and that also feels bad. I feel like there’s actually another move we have to make before Luisa just feels a bunch less pain.

Keiran Harris: Totally. So here’s my next attempt.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, great.

Keiran Harris: OK. I don’t know if you endorse this. I think that the important thing is just good being done in the universe. That’s the thing that ultimately matters, and I am truly indifferent between you or I doing good. If I did 1 unit of good and you did 99 units of good, or it was 50/50, it’s like, whatever, it’s just good being done in the universe. I’d be happy either way. It wouldn’t matter to me. It seems like you wouldn’t be happy that way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, which I feel shame about.

Keiran Harris: You feel shame about. But one thing is, you don’t hold me to these standards, right? Of me not working hard enough. It’s all just internal. Which I understand. I’m like, risking causing more shame here by you being like, “Oh, why am I so egotistical?”

Keiran Harris: OK, and then I want to say that you couldn’t do otherwise. You really literally couldn’t do otherwise. It’s not like you could sort of do otherwise — it’s you could not do otherwise. You’re you; I’m me — we will do exactly as much good as we’re going to do. We’re just along for the ride. Hopefully it’s good for the sake of the universe, but there’s just nothing you can do.

Would Luisa donate less money? [00:55:14]

Keiran Harris: I guess this is related to some of your other worries, where you were thinking that you might donate less money, right? That was one thing that you worried were about.

Luisa Rodriguez: If I feel less guilt, yeah.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. “If I feel less guilt, I’m going to donate a bunch less money or be generally a worse person.” So maybe it would be helpful for you to hear that I had the exact opposite experience with my life, having internalised these views.

I was a professional online poker player for eight years. I was, like, doing no good at all. Initially, I wasn’t even donating any money. Then I started to have these views, and then I started donating a little bit of money, but very gradually — pretty aligned, actually, as my views here got more and more solid. It then became much more important to me to do good with my career. So I quit being a poker player and then went back to school, did my best at trying to do good.

Luisa Rodriguez: Why did it become more important to you?

Keiran Harris: The relationship here is that my views on this mean that I think that I am fundamentally lucky to be in my life, and I think everyone else in a worse situation is fundamentally unlucky. I think that a child in sub-Saharan Africa who needs an insecticide-treated malarial bednet is just really unlucky. In no way is there a sense that I deserve to have plenty of money and be comfortable and have a roof over my head, and they don’t. The difference between me and other people just kind of really minimises. So that, to me, is an incentive for being like, if I don’t have these really strong biases towards myself, it just seems like I should do my best to help the universe. I think that for a lot of people, they would become more altruistic that way and less selfish and less self-involved.

I don’t think it’s this obvious thing, that if you just internalise all this, that it’s like, “Oh, I’ll become less altruistic. I’ll donate less money.” Because why do you think it’s good to donate money? And I’m sure you heard this, being a Richard Dawkins fan when you were younger, but sometimes in religious debates, the person who’s religious will say, “Well, if no one believed in God, it would be chaos.” Or even I’ve heard a very prominent pastor before one of these debates say, like, “If I didn’t believe in God, I’d be, like, murdering in the street.” You’re just like, Oooh, what? Like, that’s pretty crazy. I feel like this when people say, “But if I didn’t have free will, I’d be a much worse person.” I’m like — well, first of all, you wouldn’t be able to choose to be a worse person — but I really doubt it. I just really doubt it.

To me, there’s no good evidence that you would suddenly be like, “I’m going to donate less money.” Because, why? What’s the thing you’re predicting? You’re assuming that it’ll go in that direction. And it could; I’m not saying it couldn’t. But I also think that, take Sam Harris as another example: he just automates that 10% of the money he makes, it just goes to effective charities. There’s no free will involved in it. It’s just like, why not? That just seems like the right thing to do. His brain zaps into his consciousness, “That’s a good thing to do” — and he does it. He doesn’t have to think about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s not as philosophical, but maybe it is going to end up being a bit important to me to look at evidence on motivation and evidence on guilt motivation versus other types of motivation. And just really actually get bought into how guilt is not as good a motivator as other things.

The series by Nate Soares on guilt is coming to mind, and it’s pretty great. I mean, I’ve had the experience of, like, I feel like I should do a bunch of things, and then I actually end up hating the idea of doing them because it’s so oppressive to have to do those things.

I’ve had the experience even with donations — where I feel like I should donate, and I feel a bit grumpy about that. And then I lift the “should” — I’m like, “OK, you don’t have to. What would happen if you didn’t have to?” Another part of me then gets to actually come in and be like, “No, we want to. We want to because it’s good.” Yeah, that is just personal lived experience that I should remind myself of more: that when I lift the “should,” which is that very guilt-driven part of me, what I leave room for is this very good part of me that’s like, “No, I know we don’t have to, but we want to, because it’s valuable.”

Keiran Harris: Yeah, it’s a good thing. I would be almost shocked if you were like, “I don’t care about that anymore. I don’t care about anything.” Like, “OK… that’s interesting.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Another experience I’ve had with this is when you started managing me a few months ago. And we were talking about hours, and you were like, “I don’t care when you work or how much you work. I know you want to make these podcasts, so you’ll do them. If you don’t want to make them, we’ll have another conversation. I don’t care when you do or don’t spend another 20 minutes trying to do a bit more work, because we both want to do this thing, very intrinsically.”

Keiran Harris: We’re on the same team.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. You were totally right, and it was very liberating to me.

Keiran Harris: And you might end up working more hours, actually, incidentally, with all this, because you just feel more motivated. You feel happier, feel less stressed, less anxious; it’s not oppressive to be like, “I’ve got to work another two hours.” You don’t have to work. You can if you want to.

Would Luisa become a worse friend? [01:01:07]

Keiran Harris: So that’s one. Another one I wanted to touch on was, you’re worried about being a worse friend? Do you want to give an example of what you’re worried about then?

Luisa Rodriguez: I mean, a super small one is like I sometimes make plans, and then when it gets closer to the plan, I really want to cancel for just a bunch of reasons that often don’t have to do with the person — that are just about my energy levels and how social I actually am. Then I think I often don’t cancel, out of guilt, and go. And actually, often I even am happy I went — that’s true often in specific instances. But maybe I’m not happy that I always force myself to go to things, because I do get very socially burnt out. So something like, if I took away that guilt, I’d probably be a much flakier friend.

Keiran Harris: OK, great. Well, not great, but I’m going to give you my thoughts.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, I have a bunch of thoughts here. One thing is that if your friends knew that you were going to dinner even though you didn’t want to — you didn’t have the energy for it; you didn’t feel like it — but you were coming out of guilt, do you think they would be happy about that? Would they be psyched? Or would they, like me, be kind of horrified that really you didn’t want to be there at all and that it’s just this guilt-driven thing? Because to me, having a stronger friendship — and I hope that we have this — is you being able to say, “I just feel tired. I don’t want to go to dinner with you.” And I’d be 100% fine. I just dispute that it’s being a better friend. I don’t think it is. I think that you would build stronger friendships being able to just be open, and be like, “Yeah, I’m tired.”

But coming back to the topic of the whole conversation: I don’t think you can choose. I don’t think you can choose to not not feel like going, and I don’t think you can ultimately be responsible for whether you go or not. But even if there was free will, I don’t think that this should be like, a source of shame for you. I don’t think it means in any way that you’re a bad friend.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, let’s see. This one, I think, is coming back again to which are helpful motivations — and empirically, probably guilt is not the most helpful motivation. Probably the thing I actually endorse here is that I take away the “should” where the should is guilt driven, and I see what’s left. And if it wants to go, great. Often I think that actually would be true, and it’s a shame that guilt is the thing that usually ends up forcing me to go, because then I feel exhausted by the fact that I had to go in this way that just felt negative, like dragging myself there.

Yeah, either I lift away this oppressive “I feel guilty and I should go and I want to go,” or I don’t — and I learn that about myself over time and make fewer commitments that I can’t keep.

Keiran Harris: Right.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Those both do seem good to me, and not being a bad friend. But let’s say occasionally I do make a plan — that I’ve misjudged whether I want to go, and it turns out I don’t want to go, and I feel guilt about not wanting to go, or I feel guilt about cancelling. Does it sink in that I could not have done otherwise and that that’s helpful?

Keiran Harris: Did you at any point on that day wake up and be like, “I know I’ve got a thing on today. I feel like going right now, but I’m going to choose to not feel that way later. I’m going to turn this switch and there we go. Now I don’t feel like going anymore.”

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess, again, no. But I feel sad that in practice, it’s sad for the friend who I’m cancelling on.

Keiran Harris: Sadness is very different than guilt, and it’s less corrosive. If we could move your guilt to always be sadness — I mean, not depression, but if it was just like, “I’m sad for that friend; they wanted to do this thing and they don’t get to now, and that’s a bit sad” — that feels like progress to me.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. OK, yeah. Does that feel right?

Keiran Harris: Unless it’s like intense sadness. But if you’re just a bit sad for them or something.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I think in the case of the friendship, it is just a bit sad. In the case of work guilt, it’s a deeper sadness because I can access the idea that this, in theory, could be much more harmful than cancelling on a single person. Especially if my job were really directly connected to doing good. If I were distributing malaria bed nets, and on a given day, I was like, “Nah, don’t want today,” and it was like 100 bed nets fewer distributed, it would feel like a pretty big sadness to me that I couldn’t do more good.

Keiran Harris: We’re getting off track from the free will stuff for a while, but doesn’t this feel quite short term? The sadness that you’re going to feel at this versus me? You can keep coming back to me in this example, where, yeah, I missed a day of work; I didn’t donate as many bed nets. I feel nothing. I feel no guilt. I go back to work the next day. I keep doing it for the next 40 years — versus the person who feels an enormous amount of guilt, and just presumably can’t work for as long as I do. It’s just probably not sustainable. You’ll end up delivering less bed nets.

All of the worry about the consequences here, I’m not even convinced it’s correct. Again, you can’t choose to buy my arguments or anything: either this is going to land or it’s not. The worries, I think, are unfounded — or it’s at least very unclear. Maybe that’s a useful tool as well. Again, not to make this all about me, but think about me for some of these worries — where you’re like, “I worry I wouldn’t be as good a friend” — and be like, do you think that I’m not as good a friend because I don’t have these experiences of shame and guilt? Or can you think of cases where I’ve let you down when I wouldn’t have otherwise? I don’t think I’m doing that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s true. Just in practice, we’re super compatible, so I don’t often feel let down by you, or like you’ve done something wrong.

Pride [01:08:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: In preparing, we thought we might talk about pride, and how when you don’t believe that you’re responsible for your choices, it’s harder to feel really proud of your achievements. We’ve talked about how I’d feel better in a world where I did a bunch of good — and more good than you, even if the same amount of good was done in another world, where you did a bunch more good than me.

I wonder if there is something that really is more core to your argument going on, where it would be valuable for me to internalise more of the, like, “I am just as lucky as I am in my traits and as unlucky as I am in my traits. All of them are completely out of my control.” I think the thing I need is just acceptance. Like acceptance of my traits exactly as they are because there’s nothing I can do.

Keiran Harris: Nothing you can do, yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: But then what do you do with pride? Do you not feel proud of, I don’t know, your work on the podcast? Or just the general fact that you’re trying to do good in the world? Is that something you’ve lost, or given up? And would I be giving that up? Would I be losing that?

Keiran Harris: So it is totally true that everything I’m saying about free will and guilt and shame and anger and hatred, it all does mean that when applied to myself, I can’t think that I am truly responsible for anything good I do. It is actually true that I don’t have the subjective experience of pride like other people do. That is true. That fell away, and I used to have that like anyone else.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you miss it?

Keiran Harris: No, I don’t miss it at all. Because I’ll tell you what it’s like. People do think that this is really sad and something that they would really miss and it’s a real problem.

I’ll give you an example. You know that I wrote a pilot to a TV show, shared it with a bunch of people, happened to get good feedback. Basically, when I write this thing and I share it with people, someone else might have the experience of if they get positive feedback, they would feel really proud of writing this thing. Like they created this thing and feel really proud about that and it’s amazing.

My experience is kind of like playing a slot machine, where I write this thing and I share it with people, and basically winning the jackpot is finding out that I’m in a world where I’m like Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad — I’m like as good a writer as he is. Everyone loves it so much that they just insist I have to drop everything and just make this thing. That is like a world that I would love to be in. But I’m just like along for the ride, where I’m just waiting to find out if that’s true: if I win the jackpot, that’s true; if I lose, then everyone hates it, right? And everywhere in between. But I just watch and see, just like, “Oh, does anyone like it?”

In this case, a lot of people liked it. And I was like, “Oh, that’s nice. It’s nicer to live in a world where people liked that thing I wrote than not.” But there is no deep sense of satisfaction — because again, I can’t get away from this thing of like, if I’m a decent writer or not, I can’t choose it either way. I can’t tell this story where I can go back far enough, where I’m like, “Yes, I am a good writer, because I put a bunch of work into it in 2013, and I definitely chose to do that.”

But I don’t find it depressing at all. There’s nothing I miss about it. It’s just totally fine. It’s just like finding out which world you’re in for these things.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. It’s interesting. As much as I’m motivated by guilt, I’m also extremely motivated by praise. So I might just be a particularly tricky case for this, because I talk about having an addiction to praise. And the idea of having to wean myself off of it — because the good things I do aren’t attributable to me in some meaningful sense, beyond just like I was along for the ride as my body did those things purely out of luck — the idea of taking that away, is I’m like, “Oh, it sounds like withdrawal. I don’t want that. I like my praise.”

Keiran Harris: Right. I mean, yeah, if it’s an addiction, then yeah, maybe it’s better to break that. Like, with most addictions. Maybe it’s not good for you.

Because of course, obviously this has come up with you just starting to host podcasts. Where it’s like, I think you’re fantastic, but maybe other people wouldn’t. That’s obviously possible. And much more than it would be for me, it’s this scary thing — where it’s like, you put these episodes out there and maybe people thought that you were good, you were bad. If they think you were bad, this is going to be really hard for you — in a way that, for me, I’m just finding out what world I’m in. I’m like, “OK.” And it’s still a shame, right? You can still be kind of saddened by something and be like, “I kind of wish that I had found myself in the world where I was really good at that.” But just nothing cuts that deep.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. So I feel surprised — and I still feel like this is the distance between us — that you’re not sadder that you’re not in that other world. Because the joy I feel when I’m good at things and the sadness I feel when I’m not doesn’t feel that tied to “because I made amazing choices.” I think because I’m already somewhat bought in, it feels kind of tied to just like who I am, which I do think is pretty physics-y. I am who I am because my brain does the things, but when my brain doesn’t do the things I want — if my brain weren’t good at podcasting — that would feel devastating. It’s not that I think I literally could have done things differently, such that I would have been a better podcast host. It’s that I really want to be in the body of someone who’s a great podcast host. That’d be really nice.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, which makes sense to me. I think if you internalise all this stuff, the thing you would lose is this sense of shame, right? Because if you release episodes in the world, and we asked for feedback on these things, and everyone thought the average thing was like 6 out of 10 or something, then is this, like, shame that you weren’t better? Is it guilt that you were like, I don’t know, wasting people’s time or doing this job when someone else could?

Luisa Rodriguez: Probably mostly shame.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. It’s that I think you would lose. You can still feel sad about the fact that you’re in a world where you weren’t good at this thing. That would have been nice to experience. But yeah, you take the shame away. It’s the same thing about if you get a lottery ticket, and did you win or not? “No, I didn’t win. All right.” There’s no shame to it. Maybe you feel ashamed of buying the lottery ticket.

But I mean, the other thing is just that I would want you to not have so much of your joy tied up in these things that you can’t control. You should just experience joy in the people you love. And you can reliably just spend your time doing things that are joyful and not these big, high-stakes things — like being good at this job.

Love [01:15:35]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I guess that just makes me wonder, what are the implications for love? Given that I feel like I love my partner because he’s in control of his actions, and chooses to do things that are sweet, and kind, and funny. Does this feel like it’s affected the extent to which, or the way that you feel love? If you don’t really feel like your partner is kind of acting as an agent, doing things that contribute to you loving them?

Keiran Harris: This has come up before in conversations like this, where people think that if you don’t experience pride, can you experience love? And it always kind of baffles me. I can tell you, in my personal experience, as you know, I think I feel love very deeply. I don’t know — because people don’t talk about this very openly — but I wouldn’t be shocked if I’ve never met a husband who feels love for their wife more deeply than I do.

I just don’t get the thing of, like, the reason I would love my wife is because she’s free to take certain actions. I don’t need her to be ultimately in control of her kindness or her sense of humour any more than I need her to be ultimately in control of her cute button nose. I don’t know, it’s just like, a thing that she has. One easy way to make this clear is to think about how parents love their kids: they don’t love their babies because they’re like, “Here’s all the things they do. If they didn’t do these things, I wouldn’t love them.”
That’s not true.

So I find it strange that people think this way — or seem to think this way — about their partners: that it’s like they need to be ultimately the authors of all of the nice things they’re doing or it’s meaningless or something. I just don’t get it. I just feel love so strongly, and it never occurs to me that it’s a problem.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah. In this case, I think maybe because it’s much easier for me to internalise everyone around me as robots, and that’s fine and not weird or an issue. I think I’m actually just completely on board there. Which is this interesting kind of inconsistency, almost, in my beliefs. It does make me think that the work to be done here is just on how it’s fine for me to be lucky enough to be liked by some people, unlucky enough to be liked by others, lucky enough to do some work well, unlucky enough to not be able to do other work well. The thing that feels missing is acceptance of it, of that luck and unluck, in my case.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the game is acceptance. Not everyone’s going to like you.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Did you have to practice any of this? Because maybe I have some narrative that you were like, “I don’t believe in free will. Now I no longer feel guilt or shame.”

Keiran Harris: It was more gradual than that. It is a practice, right? This is getting back a little bit to meditation, which I am a big fan of, as you know. But it is a practice. It is both recognising what you’re feeling and then being able to remind yourself to give these little prompts.

I’ll tell you what I feel if I am feeling shame. So let’s say I released a podcast and it’s got like an audio glitch in it. In my bones, I’m like, “That’s bad.” I ask myself, “Could I have done otherwise? Could I have chosen to be a different person who wouldn’t have made that mistake?” And in the case when it’s other people who have done things — like in the case of whether I’m mad at someone, whether I know them or not — “Could they have done otherwise? Could they have been a different person?”

I literally ask myself those questions, right? And I do this all the time. I will say, “Could you have done otherwise?” to myself, or “Could they have done otherwise?” I will actually say this. It is just my way of cutting through it.

Keiran Harris: So let’s say Rob does something annoying, right? We’ve all been there. And I’ll be like — I’m quite good at this now — “Could Rob have done otherwise? No? OK, it’s just Rob being Rob.

Bears and hurricanes [01:19:53]

Keiran Harris: There’s another example that I can give that maybe helps with this: You were out hiking and you were mauled by a bear, and you just survive. You get in the hospital, but you have to be in the hospital for, like, six months. In that situation, you’re very unlikely to be mad at the bear. You’re like, “Well, I was hiking. It’s the bear’s home. Not the bear’s fault.”

Different scenario: you’re in a zoo where a bear is there, and you’re visiting the bear and you see that there’s a zookeeper that is really clumsy and doesn’t seem to be paying attention. They’re like, throwing a basketball against a gate where a lock is, and you’re like, “That person should stop doing that thing.” They keep throwing it, and the gate flies open eventually. The bear gets out, mauls you, and you just survive. You’re in the hospital for six months. In this scenario, you’re still not mad at the bear, but you were probably really mad at the zookeeper, because you’re like, “He should have done otherwise. He should have known better. The human really could have done otherwise.”

Yet, for me, given all we talked about here, they are the same thing. We’re both animals, both biological machines. The clumsy zookeeper is just the bear in the scenario.

For me, in the silly example where Rob’s done something wrong, and in a more extreme example, like someone’s really wronged me — I basically just say to myself, “They’re just a bear.”

Or even more extreme than that: if one of your loved ones was hurt by a person, you would potentially feel real anger towards that person who hurt them. If they are hurt in a hurricane, you don’t feel mad at the hurricane. To me, again, there is no super important difference here. My experience going through life is just like, everyone is just a bear or a hurricane, including me, and there’s just no point to getting mad at them.

Luisa Rodriguez: I think I am there. I’m just more upset that there was a hurricane, and more upset that there was a bear.

Keiran Harris: But that feels OK. That feels so much better to me than guilt and shame, to just feel sad about that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. Yeah. OK, so maybe there are two steps for me. One step is just getting myself in the mindset where I remember people are bears — which is really easy for me to access once I think about it, but probably still isn’t the natural place I go, even when it’s in line with my beliefs.

The thing that feels even harder is the next step, which feels related to the Stoic mantra of: feel things about what you can control, and change what you can control; don’t feel things about things you can’t control — don’t worry about them, they are out of your control and it’s adding nothing. In this worldview that you have, and that I basically have, you can’t control anything. So like, literally don’t feel sadness about the things that are bad.

Keiran Harris: But you will still feel sadness. You will. It’s like, I’m not actually like a weird robot. I feel sad and I feel upset. I get emotional about things, as you’ve seen. I get upset about things. It’s just that you — under this worldview, if you internalise this — get to turn off the more corrosive version of this, which is the guilt, which is the shame, which is the hatred. You just turn these off. I just really don’t think that you’re going to predictably end up worse off. I think obviously there are huge benefits to this, especially for someone like you who feels these things intensely.

I just think it’s at least ambiguous on the cases where you’re like, “But this would be bad for the world” or “This would be bad for me; I would feel worse.” I don’t know about that. I think overall, my guess is that it is better in expectation to switch off your guilt. But again, we can’t choose. We can’t choose whether or not this conversation is going to land for you.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, right. Yeah. I think some parts definitely have. It does feel now to me like the biggest hurdle is reminding myself of the arguments at the right times, such that they actually pop into my brain when it would be helpful for them to.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, seriously.

Luisa Rodriguez: It sounds like meditation mantras and all of that is kind of habit-building.

Jerk Syndrome [01:24:24]

Luisa Rodriguez: If I were in therapy, I’d set myself some things to practise.

Keiran Harris: Homework.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly. What would you think I should practice? How do you think I should?

Keiran Harris: I think it’ll be a lot easier for you to do this initially for other people. So the next time you find yourself being angry with someone, try and ask yourself, “Could they have done otherwise?” And really sit with it. Sit with it, think about it. If you’re struggling with it, try and pinpoint when they could have done that. Because they didn’t choose when to be born. They didn’t choose where to be born. They didn’t choose their parents. They didn’t choose their genes. They didn’t choose to have that childhood. They didn’t choose to do anything that led them to be the person on this day, when they did that thing that made you angry at them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Can we try it real quick?

Keiran Harris: Sure, absolutely.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so I’ve got someone, and I feel angry at them. I’m feeling it now. I won’t say any more about it. But I guess I pretty quickly can be like, “They couldn’t have done otherwise.” They did this thing that was hurtful to me. I think probably it’s because of their genes and their upbringing. And I can even feel some compassion for them, because it wasn’t a nice thing to do. It’s not great to be a person who can’t help but do things that are cruel. I still feel anger. I feel angry that I’m in this world where I got hurt. But I don’t feel angry at them.

Keiran Harris: Yes, exactly. That’s the shift I’d want you to do too, because I feel that too. I feel angry sometimes about the world, but it is a very different experience to be angry at the universe rather than angry at this specific person. So yeah, it sucks to be in a world where this person hurt you. That really sucks. It makes sense to be upset about finding yourself in that world. But the really corrosive thing is holding on to this anger, or even hatred, towards this person.

Keiran Harris: One way of thinking about this that I find fun: If we had total information, we might figure out that this person you’re talking about, they have a neurological condition called “jerk syndrome.” They have this, and it sucks to have jerk syndrome. It’s just a problem. It affects millions of Americans. It’s this horrible thing.

You say to me, “But they were a jerk. They really were a jerk.” I say, “Yeah, I know. But they have jerk syndrome, right?” You go, “Yeah, but they shouldn’t have been a jerk.” I go, “Yeah, but they’ve got the syndrome.” And you go, “Oh, OK.” I say to you, “Hey, it turns out they’ve got a pill to cure jerk syndrome. So if we give them that pill and they no longer are a jerk anymore, and they’re completely apologetic for what they’ve done to you, would you still be mad at them?” The thing I’m trying to get at is saying you are mad at this person for their biology, for just the lottery of their biology, that’s the thing you’re mad at. Obviously, when you get into this, it feels like that’s untenable.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. It reminds me of another thing I do pretty naturally, and it’s very similar to the tumour thing. I’m much less likely to ever feel angry or frustrated or even disappointed with someone when they have mental health issues. If the person cancelled on me because they’re struggling with depression, I’m just like, “Oh, yeah, completely forgivable. They couldn’t have come because their brain chemistry makes it impossible for them to leave the house most times.” That feels fine. It just feels actually totally fine. It is just kind of funny that we really need a label for it. I need the thing called jerk syndrome.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. But maybe you should think of it this way, actually. Maybe you should actually say, when someone’s a jerk, just be like, “They’ve got jerk syndrome. That sucks for them.” Because, again, you were totally right: it would suck to have jerk syndrome. That is not their best life. If you woke up tomorrow with jerk syndrome, and you were just mean to people or doing these really thoughtless things…

Luisa Rodriguez: That would be sad.

Keiran Harris: That would be sad. Right. Actually, again, turning it back on feeling fortunate: we — I think — don’t currently have jerk syndrome. We’re fortunate for that. We’re lucky. This person’s unlucky, and we could easily have been in their shoes. There’s no sense in which they deserve to have our anger and we deserve praise for not having it. That’s just the luck of the draw.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Maybe this is a thing I can use as a way to apply this to my own case, or to point it in words: the experience of going on antidepressants for me was night and day. My experience was night and day. It was like flipping a switch. I guess that might be another helpful thing to remember. I mean, it’s not a pill for jerk syndrome, but it’s a pill for sad syndrome. And when I feel disappointed that, like, I’m too anxious to go to a bunch of social events, and I wish I were the kind of person that was less anxious, something like, “It’d be nice if we had a pill for that.” We don’t yet.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. As this whole thing is trying to get you to feel the same way about yourself as you do for others, I’m talking about feeling compassion for the jerks of the world. But the compassion for yourself too, of being like, “I feel anxious about going to this party, and that’s a shame because that’s making my life worse. I didn’t choose to have the anxiety. I didn’t choose to be the kind of person who would care about missing parties.” But again, I don’t have it in my head that “the better person” would be the one who goes to the party.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Keiran Harris: But again, that’s just total luck, right? It’s like, why do I think that way and why do you not? I didn’t choose. Why do I think that now? I don’t know. Why do you not think that? We don’t know. It’s just all luck. It doesn’t give us the basis to feel shame or guilt or anger. This is just the world we’re in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Cool. I have this homework thing, where I’m going to try to notice when people (or I) couldn’t have done otherwise. I think I want a piece of homework that helps me cope with the pain of knowing that I and others couldn’t have done otherwise.

Keiran Harris: Well, the thing that comes to mind is pushing on this thing of it not really mattering if Luisa is the one who is doing the most good, or is the best friend, or is the smartest person, or the most creative. Again, this reminder of just being more in touch with the reality that we’re in: that you happen to find yourself in this very smart, very creative, very hardworking body. To ask more than that. Almost seems like I don’t know. Again, hashtag free will. It does feel like, very ungrateful to want to go from nine and a half to ten.

Luisa Rodriguez: I mean, it sounds like gratitude.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, gratitude.

Luisa Rodriguez: I have tried gratitude before, but not at all with this framing, and I can imagine this framing working better for me. I think when I’ve tried gratitude, I’ve been like, yeah, “I’m grateful that my partner loves me. I’m grateful that I live in a nice house, and I live in a nice town.” I haven’t done much of, “I’m grateful for the ways I lucked out in my biology.”

Keiran Harris: Yeah. That’s all true. To give you a more ambitious case, next time that you say that you’ll go to a party, let’s say, and then on the day of it, you really don’t want to go — just not feeling energetic, just kind of dreading it — if you can just not go and not feel bad about it. And try and feel grateful for the fact that you’ve tapped into this, to be like, “I get to stay home and do what I want to do. I get to do that. That’s the thing I can be grateful for. But also, I am grateful that I’m not feeling guilty about this, that I’m not feeling shame.”

Like, have this positive feedback loop of it being a positive experience — which is how I would experience it — rather than a negative, like it’s a horrible thing that happened. It doesn’t have to be horrible. I very sincerely, if I was there with you, I’d be like, “No, this is great. You get to stay home. Amazing!” And the more you do that, the less horrible this will feel. Just be like, “I’m now — through no free will — the kind of person who gets to follow my own preferences more confidently.” That feels great.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Cool. I think I should try those things.

Keiran Harris: Great.

Luisa Rodriguez: I feel significantly closer to your position.

Keiran Harris: Oh, amazing.

Luisa Rodriguez: I think there’s still a gap in how often I will have the right ideas come up in my head about this, so I probably won’t actually feel less guilt immediately, unless I work on it. But I feel bought into the set of beliefs that would get me to, if I could really embody them in a moment, not feel as guilty — or even just disappointed that I’m not a different person.

Keiran Harris: Well, that’s wonderful. And that makes me feel good. Even though I was not the ultimate author of any of it, it still feels good.

Keiran’s outro [01:34:47]

Keiran Harris: If you’re interested in more practical mental health advice, you could check out episode #100 of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, where I interview my colleague Howie on having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome, and our latest episode over on the original feed (#149) where Rob interviews Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating.

You could also read Luisa’s excellent article My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it. You can find a link to that in the show notes for this episode, or you could listen to the audio version Luisa recorded — that’s also on the original 80,000 Hours Podcast feed from December 2022.

All right, audio mastering and technical editing for this episode by Milo McGuire.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site and put together by Katy Moore.

And I produce the show.

Thanks for listening.