Podcast

#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world

By and · Published May 27th, 2021 ·

In 2003, Saddam Hussein refused to let Iraqi weapons scientists leave the country to be interrogated. Given the overwhelming domestic support for an invasion at the time, most key figures in the U.S. took that as confirmation that he had something to hide — probably an active WMD program.

But what about alternative explanations? Maybe those scientists knew about past crimes. Or maybe they’d defect. Or maybe giving in to that kind of demand would have humiliated Hussein in the eyes of enemies like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

According to today’s guest Robert Wright, host of the popular podcast The Wright Show, these are the kinds of things that might have come up if people were willing to look at things from Saddam Hussein’s perspective.

He calls this ‘cognitive empathy’. It’s not feeling-your-pain-type empathy — it’s just trying to understand how another person thinks.

He says if you pitched this kind of thing back in 2003 you’d be shouted down as a ‘Saddam apologist’ — and he thinks the same is true today when it comes to regimes in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

The two Roberts in today’s episode — Bob Wright and Rob Wiblin — agree that removing this taboo against perspective taking, even with people you consider truly evil, could potentially significantly improve discourse around international relations.

They feel that if we could spread the meme that if you’re able to understand what dictators are thinking and calculating, based on their country’s history and interests, it seems like we’d be less likely to make terrible foreign policy errors.

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#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

By and · Published May 19th, 2021

Today’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!).

The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it’s rare for people to offer detailed insight into their thoughts and struggles — and even rarer for someone as perceptive as Howie to do so.

The first half of this conversation is a searingly honest account of Howie’s story, including losing a job he loved due to a depressed episode, what it was like to be basically out of commission for over a year, how he got back on his feet, and the things he still finds difficult today.

The second half covers Howie’s advice. Conventional wisdom on mental health can be really focused on cultivating willpower — telling depressed people that the virtuous thing to do is to start exercising, improve their diet, get their sleep in check, and generally fix all their problems before turning to therapy and medication as some sort of last resort.

Howie tries his best to be a corrective to this misguided attitude and pragmatically focus on what actually matters — doing whatever will help you get better.

Mental illness is one of the things that most often trips up people who could otherwise enjoy flourishing careers and have a large social impact, so we think this could plausibly be one of our more valuable episodes.

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#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

By and · Published May 13th, 2021

For a chance to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, would you be brave enough to drive five hours to a remote location to meet a man who seems likely to be your enemy, knowing that it might be an ambush?

Today’s guest — Leah Garcés — was.

That man was a chicken farmer named Craig Watts, and that ambush never happened. Instead, Leah and Craig forged a friendship and a partnership focused on reducing suffering on factory farms.

Leah, now president of Mercy For Animals (MFA), tried for years to get access to a chicken farm to document the horrors she knew were happening behind closed doors. It made sense that no one would let her in — why would the evil chicken farmers behind these atrocities ever be willing to help her take them down?

But after sitting with Craig on his living room floor for hours and listening to his story, she discovered that he wasn’t evil at all — in fact he was just stuck in a cycle he couldn’t escape, forced to use methods he didn’t endorse.

Most chicken farmers have enormous debts they are constantly struggling to pay off, make very little money, and have to work in terrible conditions — their main activity most days is finding and killing the sick chickens in their flock. Craig was one of very few farmers close to finally paying off his debts, which made him slightly less vulnerable to retaliation. That, combined with his natural tenacity and bravery, opened up the possibility for him to work with Leah.

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#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism

By and · Published May 5th, 2021

Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always successful — but it can take anywhere from one to ten hours. You can’t be knocked out for the operation, but because it’s so painful — you’ll be given a drug that makes you forget the experience.

You wake up, not remembering going to sleep. You ask the nurse if you’ve had the operation yet. They look at the foot of your bed, and see two different charts for two patients. They say “Well, you’re one of these two — but I’m not sure which one. One of them had an operation yesterday that lasted ten hours. The other is set to have a one-hour operation later today.”

So it’s either true that you already suffered for ten hours, or true that you’re about to suffer for one hour.

Which patient would you rather be?

Most people would be relieved to find out they’d already had the operation. Normally we prefer less pain rather than more pain, but in this case, we prefer ten times more pain — just because the pain would be in the past rather than the future.

Christian Tarsney, a philosopher at Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute, has written a couple of papers about this ‘future bias’ — that is, that people seem to care more about their future experiences than about their past experiences.

That probably sounds perfectly normal to you. But do we actually have good reasons to prefer to have our positive experiences in the future, and our negative experiences in the past?

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#97 – Mike Berkowitz on keeping the U.S. a liberal democratic country

By and · Published April 20th, 2021

Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election split the Republican party. There were those who went along with it — 147 members of Congress raised objections to the official certification of electoral votes — but there were others who refused. These included Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Vice President Mike Pence.

Although one could say that the latter Republicans showed great courage, the key to the split may lie less in differences of moral character or commitment to democracy, and more in what was being asked of them. Trump wanted the first group to break norms, but he wanted the second group to break the law.

And while norms were indeed shattered, laws were upheld.

Today’s guest Mike Berkowitz, executive director of the Democracy Funders Network, points out a problem we came to realize throughout the Trump presidency: So many of the things that we thought were laws were actually just customs.

So once you have leaders who don’t buy into those customs — like, say, that a president shouldn’t tell the Department of Justice who it should and shouldn’t be prosecuting — there’s nothing preventing said customs from being violated.

And what happens if current laws change?

A recent Georgia bill took away some of the powers of Georgia’s Secretary of State — Brad Raffensberger. Mike thinks that’s clearly retribution for Raffensperger’s refusal to overturn the 2020 election results. But he also thinks it means that the next time someone tries to overturn the results of the election, they could get much farther than Trump did in 2020.

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#96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media

By and · Published April 6th, 2021

You might have heard fears like this in the last few years: What if Donald Trump was woken up in the middle of the night and shown a fake video — indistinguishable from a real one — in which Kim Jong Un announced an imminent nuclear strike on the U.S.?

Today’s guest Nina Schick, author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, thinks these concerns were the result of hysterical reporting, and that the barriers to entry in terms of making a very sophisticated ‘deepfake’ video today are a lot higher than people think.

But she also says that by the end of the decade, YouTubers will be able to produce the kind of content that’s currently only accessible to Hollywood studios. So is it just a matter of time until we’ll be right to be terrified of this stuff?

Nina thinks the problem of misinformation and disinformation might be roughly as important as climate change, because as she says: “Everything exists within this information ecosystem, it encompasses everything.” We haven’t done enough research to properly weigh in on that ourselves, but Rob did present Nina with some early objections, such as:

  • Won’t people quickly learn that audio and video can be faked, and so will only take them seriously if they come from a trusted source?
  • If photoshop didn’t lead to total chaos, why should this be any different?

But the grim reality is that if you wrote “I believe that the world will end on April 6, 2022” and pasted it next to a photo of Albert Einstein — a lot of people would believe it was a genuine quote. And Nina thinks that flawless synthetic videos will represent a significant jump in our ability to deceive.

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#95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate

By and · Published March 26th, 2021

How long do you think it’ll be before we’re able to bend the weather to our will? A massive rainmaking program in China, efforts to seed new oases in the Arabian peninsula, or chemically induce snow for skiers in Colorado.

100 years? 50 years? 20?

Those who know how to write a teaser hook for a podcast episode will have correctly guessed that all these things are already happening today. And the techniques being used could be turned to managing climate change as well.

Today’s guest, Kelly Wanser, founded SilverLining — a nonprofit organization that advocates research into climate interventions, such as seeding or brightening clouds, to ensure that we maintain a safe climate.

Kelly says that current climate projections, even if we do everything right from here on out, imply that two degrees of global warming are now unavoidable. And the same scientists who made those projections fear the flow-through effect that warming could have.

Since our best case scenario may already be too dangerous, SilverLining focuses on ways that we could intervene quickly in the climate if things get especially grim — their research serving as a kind of insurance policy.

After considering everything from mirrors in space, to shiny objects on the ocean, to materials on the Arctic, their scientists concluded that the most promising approach was leveraging one of the ways that the Earth already regulates its temperature — the reflection of sunlight off particles and clouds in the atmosphere.

Cloud brightening is a climate control approach that uses the spraying of a fine mist of sea water into clouds to make them ‘whiter’ so they reflect even more sunlight back into space.

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#94 – Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most

By and · Published March 20th, 2021

How many words in U.S. newspapers have been spilled on tax policy in the past five years? And how many words on CRISPR? Or meat alternatives? Or how AI may soon automate the majority of jobs?

When people look back on this era, is the interesting thing going to have been fights over whether or not the top marginal tax rate was 39.5% or 35.4%, or is it going to be that human beings started to take control of human evolution; that we stood on the brink of eliminating immeasurable levels of suffering on factory farms; and that for the first time the average American might become financially comfortable and unemployed simultaneously?

Today’s guest is Ezra Klein, one of the most prominent journalists in the world. Ezra thinks that pressing issues are neglected largely because there’s little pre-existing infrastructure to push them.

He points out that for a long time taxes have been considered hugely important in D.C. political circles — and maybe once they were. But either way, the result is that there are a lot of congressional committees, think tanks, and experts that have focused on taxes for decades and continue to produce a steady stream of papers, articles, and opinions for journalists they know to cover (often these are journalists hired to write specifically about tax policy).

To Ezra (and to us, and to many others) AI seems obviously more important than marginal changes in taxation over the next 10 or 15 years — yet there’s very little infrastructure for thinking about it. There isn’t a committee in Congress that primarily deals with AI, and no one has a dedicated AI position in the executive branch of the U.S. Government; nor are big AI think tanks in D.C. producing weekly articles for journalists they know to report on.

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#93 – Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete and ending the new nuclear arms race

By and · Published March 12th, 2021

COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the damage biological threats can do. But the threat doesn’t come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have the potential to spread globally and kill just as many as an all-out nuclear war.

For five years, today’s guest, Andy Weber, was the US’ Assistant Secretary of Defense responsible for biological and other weapons of mass destruction. While people primarily associate the Pentagon with waging wars (including most within the Pentagon itself) Andy is quick to point out that you don’t have national security if your population remains at grave risk from natural and lab-created diseases.

Andy’s current mission is to spread the word that while bioweapons are terrifying, scientific advances also leave them on the verge of becoming an outdated technology.

He thinks there is an overwhelming case to increase our investment in two new technologies that could dramatically reduce the risk of bioweapons, and end natural pandemics in the process: mass genetic sequencing and mRNA vaccines.

First, advances in mass genetic sequencing technology allow direct, real-time analysis of DNA or RNA fragments collected from all over the human environment. You cast a wide net, and if you start seeing DNA sequences that you don’t recognise spreading through the population — that can set off an alarm.

Andy notes that while the necessary desktop sequencers may be expensive enough that they’re only in hospitals today, they’re rapidly getting smaller, cheaper, and easier to use. In fact DNA sequencing has recently experienced the most dramatic cost decrease of any technology, declining by a factor of 10,000 since 2007. It’s only a matter of time before they’re cheap enough to put in every home.

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#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem

By and · Published March 5th, 2021

Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and computer science.

Listeners loved our episode about his book Algorithms to Live By — so when the team read his new book, The Alignment Problem, and found it to be an insightful and comprehensive review of the state of the research into making advanced AI useful and reliably safe, getting him back on the show was a no-brainer.

Brian has so much of substance to say this episode will likely be of interest to people who know a lot about AI as well as those who know a little, and of interest to people who are nervous about where AI is going as well as those who aren’t nervous at all.

Here’s a tease of 10 Hollywood-worthy stories from the episode:

  • The Riddle of Dopamine: The development of reinforcement learning solves a long-standing mystery of how humans are able to learn from their experience.
  • ALVINN: A student teaches a military vehicle to drive between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, without intervention, in the early nineties, using a computer with a tenth the processing capacity of an Apple Watch.
  • Couch Potato: An agent trained to be curious is stopped in its quest to navigate a maze by a paralysing TV screen.
  • Pitts & McCulloch: A homeless teenager and his foster father figure invent the idea of the neural net.
  • Tree Senility: Agents become so good at living in trees to escape predators that they forget how to leave, starve, and die.
  • The Danish Bicycle: A reinforcement learning agent figures out that it can better achieve its goal by riding in circles as quickly as possible than reaching its purported destination.
  • Montezuma’s Revenge: By 2015 a reinforcement learner can play 60 different Atari games — the majority impossibly well — but can’t score a single point on one game humans find tediously simple.
  • Curious Pong: Two novelty-seeking agents, forced to play Pong against one another, create increasingly extreme rallies.
  • AlphaGo Zero: A computer program becomes superhuman at Chess and Go in under a day by attempting to imitate itself.
  • Robot Gymnasts: Over the course of an hour, humans teach robots to do perfect backflips just by telling them which of 2 random actions look more like a backflip.

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#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened

By and · Published February 15th, 2021

I suspect today’s guest, Lewis Bollard, might be the single best person in the world to interview to get an overview of all the methods that might be effective for putting an end to factory farming and what broader lessons we can learn from the experiences of people working to end cruelty in animal agriculture.

That’s why I interviewed him back in 2017, and it’s why I’ve come back for an updated second dose four years later.

That conversation became a touchstone resource for anyone wanting to understand why people might decide to focus their altruism on farmed animal welfare, what those people are up to, and why.

Lewis leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for farm animal welfare, and since he joined in 2015 they’ve disbursed about $130 million in grants to nonprofits as part of this program.

This episode certainly isn’t only for vegetarians or people whose primary focus is animal welfare. The farmed animal welfare movement has had a lot of big wins over the last five years, and many of the lessons animal activists and plant-based meat entrepreneurs have learned are of much broader interest.

Some of those include:

  • Between 2019 and 2020, Beyond Meat’s cost of goods sold fell from about $4.50 a pound to $3.50 a pound. Will plant-based meat or clean meat displace animal meat, and if so when? How quickly can it reach price parity?
  • One study reported that philosophy students reduced their meat consumption by 13% after going through a course on the ethics of factory farming. But do studies like this replicate? And what happens several months later?
  • One survey showed that 33% of people supported a ban on animal farming. Should we take such findings seriously? Or is it as informative as the study which showed that 38% of Americans believe that Ted Cruz might be the Zodiac killer?
  • Costco, the second largest retailer in the U.S., is now over 95% cage-free. Why have they done that years before they had to? And can ethical individuals within these companies make a real difference?

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#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

By and · Published January 19th, 2021

You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God:

“I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it.

If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box.

To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?”

You think briefly, and decide you should bet your eternal soul on tails. The fact that you woke up at all seems like pretty good evidence that you’re in the big world — if the coin landed tails, way more people should be having an experience just like yours.

But then you get up, walk outside, and look at the number on your box.

‘3’. Huh. Now you don’t know what to believe.

If God made 10 billion boxes, surely it’s much more likely that you would have seen a number like 7,346,678,928?

In today’s interview, Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — explains why this thought experiment from the niche of philosophy known as ‘anthropic reasoning’ could be relevant for figuring out where we should direct our charitable giving.

Some thinkers both inside and outside Open Philanthropy believe that philanthropic giving should be guided by ‘longtermism’ — the idea that we can do the most good if we focus primarily on the impact our actions will have on the long-term future.

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#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems & layers of defence against potential global catastrophes

By , and · Published December 16th, 2020

From one point of view academia forms one big ‘epistemic’ system — a process which directs attention, generates ideas, and judges which are good. Traditional print media is another such system, and we can think of society as a whole as a huge epistemic system, made up of these and many other subsystems.

How these systems absorb, process, combine and organise information will have a big impact on what humanity as a whole ends up doing with itself — in fact, at a broad level it basically entirely determines the direction of the future.

With that in mind, today’s guest Owen Cotton-Barratt has founded the Research Scholars Programme (RSP) at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, which gives early-stage researchers the freedom to try to understand how the world works.

Instead of you having to pay for a masters degree, the RSP pays you to spend significant amounts of time thinking about high-level questions, like “What is important to do?” and “How can I usefully contribute?”

Participants get to practice their research skills, while also thinking about research as a process and how research communities can function as epistemic systems that plug into the rest of society as productively as possible.

The programme attracts people with several years of experience who are looking to take their existing knowledge — whether that’s in physics, medicine, policy work, or something else — and apply it to what they determine to be the most important topics.

It also attracts people without much experience, but who have a lot of ideas. If you went directly into a PhD programme, you might have to narrow your focus quickly. But the RSP gives you time to explore the possibilities, and to figure out the answer to the question “What’s the topic that really matters, and that I’d be happy to spend several years of my life on?”

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#88 – Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies

By and · Published December 3rd, 2020

In its first 28 days on Netflix, the documentary The Social Dilemma — about the possible harms being caused by social media and other technology products — was seen by 38 million households in about 190 countries and in 30 languages.

Over the last ten years, the idea that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are degrading political discourse and grabbing and monetizing our attention in an alarming way has gone mainstream to such an extent that it’s hard to remember how recently it was a fringe view.

It feels intuitively true that our attention spans are shortening, we’re spending more time alone, we’re less productive, there’s more polarization and radicalization, and that we have less trust in our fellow citizens, due to having less of a shared basis of reality.

But while it all feels plausible, how strong is the evidence that it’s true? In the past, people have worried about every new technological development — often in ways that seem foolish in retrospect. Socrates famously feared that being able to write things down would ruin our memory.

At the same time, historians think that the printing press probably generated religious wars across Europe, and that the radio helped Hitler and Stalin maintain power by giving them and them alone the ability to spread propaganda across the whole of Germany and the USSR. And a jury trial — an Athenian innovation — ended up condemning Socrates to death. Fears about new technologies aren’t always misguided.

Tristan Harris, leader of the Center for Humane Technology, and co-host of the Your Undivided Attention podcast, is arguably the most prominent person working on reducing the harms of social media, and he was happy to engage with Rob’s good-faith critiques.

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Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (& how to analyse replaceability)

By , , and · Published November 12th, 2020

In the last ’80k team chat’ with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is and isn’t, and how to argue for it. In this episode we turn now to what the effective altruism community most needs.

According to Ben, we can think of the effective altruism movement as having gone through several stages, categorised by what kind of resource has been most able to unlock more progress on important issues (i.e. by what’s the ‘bottleneck’). Plausibly, these stages are common for other social movements as well.

  • Needing money: In the first stage, when effective altruism was just getting going, more money (to do things like pay staff and put on events) was the main bottleneck to making progress.
  • Needing talent: In the second stage, we especially needed more talented people being willing to work on whatever seemed most pressing.
  • Needing specific skills and capacity: In the third stage, which Ben thinks we’re in now, the main bottlenecks are organizational capacity, infrastructure, and management to help train people up, as well as specialist skills that people can put to work now.

What’s next? Perhaps needing coordination — the ability to make sure people keep working efficiently and effectively together as the community grows.

Ben and I also cover the career implications of those stages, as well as the ability to save money and the possibility that someone else would do your job in your absence.

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#87 – Russ Roberts on whether it’s more effective to help strangers, or people you know

By and · Published November 3rd, 2020

If you want to make the world a better place, would it be better to help your niece with her SATs, or try to join the State Department to lower the risk that the US and China go to war?

People involved in 80,000 Hours or the effective altruism community would be comfortable recommending the latter. This week’s guest — Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast EconTalk, and author of a forthcoming book on decision-making under uncertainty and the limited ability of data to help — worries that might be a mistake.

I’ve been a big fan of Russ’ show EconTalk for 12 years — in fact I have a list of my top 100 recommended episodes — so I invited him to talk about his concerns with how the effective altruism community tries to improve the world.

These include:

  • Being too focused on the measurable
  • Being too confident we’ve figured out ‘the best thing’
  • Being too credulous about the results of social science or medical experiments
  • Undermining people’s altruism by encouraging them to focus on strangers, who it’s naturally harder to care for
  • Thinking it’s possible to predictably help strangers, who you don’t understand well enough to know what will truly help
  • Adding levels of wellbeing across people when this is inappropriate
  • Encouraging people to pursue careers they won’t enjoy

These worries are partly informed by Russ’ ‘classical liberal’ worldview, which involves a preference for free market solutions to problems, and nervousness about the big plans that sometimes come out of consequentialist thinking.

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#86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal’s mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us

By , and · Published October 21st, 2020

Had World War 1 never happened, you might never have existed.

It’s very unlikely that the exact chain of events that led to your conception would have happened if the war hadn’t — so perhaps you wouldn’t have been born.

Would that mean that it’s better for you that World War 1 happened (regardless of whether it was better for the world overall)?

On the one hand, if you’re living a pretty good life, you might think the answer is yes – you get to live rather than not.

On the other hand, it sounds strange to say that it’s better for you to be alive, because if you’d never existed there’d be no you to be worse off. But if you wouldn’t be worse off if you hadn’t existed, can you be better off because you do?

In this episode, philosophy professor Hilary Greaves – Director of Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute – helps untangle this puzzle for us and walks me and Rob through the space of possible answers. She argues that philosophers have been too quick to conclude what she calls existence non-comparativism – i.e, that it can’t be better for someone to exist vs. not.

Where we come down on this issue matters. If people are not made better off by existing and having good lives, you might conclude that bringing more people into existence isn’t better for them, and thus, perhaps, that it’s not better at all.

This would imply that bringing about a world in which more people live happy lives might not actually be a good thing (if the people wouldn’t otherwise have existed) — which would affect how we try to make the world a better place.

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Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it

By , , and · Published September 21st, 2020

Today’s episode is the latest conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd.

Ben’s been thinking a lot about effective altruism recently, including what it really is, how it’s framed, and how people misunderstand it.

We recently released an article on misconceptions about effective altruism – based on Will MacAskill’s recent paper The Definition of Effective Altruism – and this episode can act as a companion piece.

Arden and Ben cover a bunch of topics related to effective altruism:

  • How it isn’t just about donating money to fight poverty
  • Whether it includes a moral obligation to give
  • The rigorous argument for its importance
  • Objections to that argument
  • How to talk about effective altruism for people who aren’t already familiar with it

Given that we’re in the same office, it’s relatively easy to record conversations between two 80k team members — so if you enjoy these types of bonus episodes, let us know at [email protected], and we might make them a more regular feature.

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Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong

By , , and · Published September 1st, 2020

Today’s bonus episode is a conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd.

Ben’s been doing a bunch of research recently, and we thought it’d be interesting to hear about how he’s currently thinking about a couple of different topics – including different types of longtermism, and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong.

You can get it by subscribing to the 80,000 Hours Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about the show here.

This is very off-the-cut compared to our regular episodes, and just 54 minutes long.

In the first half, Arden and Ben talk about varieties of longtermism:

  • Patient longtermism
  • Broad urgent longtermism
  • Targeted urgent longtermism focused on existential risks
  • Targeted urgent longtermism focused on other trajectory changes
  • And their distinctive implications for people trying to do good with their careers.

In the second half, they move on to:

  • How to trade-off transferable versus specialist career capital
  • How much weight to put on personal fit
  • Whether we might be highlighting the wrong problems and career paths.

Given that we’re in the same office, it’s relatively easy to record conversations between two 80k team members — so if you enjoy these types of bonus episodes, let us know at [email protected], and we might make them a more regular feature.

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#85 – Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energy

By , and · Published August 20th, 2020

A golf-ball sized lump of uranium can deliver more than enough power to cover all your lifetime energy use. To get the same energy from coal, you’d need 3,200 tonnes of the stuff — a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants, which would go on to produce more than 11,000 tonnes of CO2. That’s about 11,000 tonnes more than the uranium.

Many people aren’t comfortable with the danger posed by nuclear power. But given the climatic stakes, it’s worth asking: Just how much more dangerous is it compared to fossil fuels?

According to today’s guest, Mark Lynas — author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (winner of the prestigious Royal Society Prizes for Science Books) and Nuclear 2.0. — it’s actually much, much safer.

Climatologists James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha calculated that the use of nuclear power between 1971 and 2009 avoided the premature deaths of 1.84 million people by preventing air pollution from burning coal.

What about radiation or nuclear disasters? According to Our World In Data, in generating a given amount of electricity, nuclear, wind, and solar all cause about the same number of deaths — and it’s a tiny number.

So what’s going on? Why isn’t everyone demanding a massive scale-up of nuclear energy to save lives and stop climate change? Mark and many other activists believe that unchecked climate change will result in the collapse of human civilization, so the stakes could not be higher.

Mark says that many environmentalists — including him — simply grew up with anti-nuclear attitudes all around them (possibly stemming from a widespread conflation of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy) and haven’t thought to question them.

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