Podcast

#123 – Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster

By and · Published March 14th, 2022 ·

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is devastating the lives of Ukrainians, and so long as it continues there’s a risk that the conflict could escalate to include other countries or the use of nuclear weapons. It’s essential that NATO, the US, and the EU play their cards right to ideally end the violence, maintain Ukrainian sovereignty, and discourage any similar invasions in the future.

But how? To pull together the most valuable information on how to react to this crisis, we spoke with Samuel Charap — a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, one of the US’s foremost experts on Russia’s relationship with former Soviet states, and co-author of Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.

Samuel believes that Putin views the alignment of Ukraine with NATO as an existential threat to Russia — a perhaps unreasonable view, but a sincere one nevertheless. Ukraine has been drifting further into Western Europe’s orbit and improving its defensive military capabilities, so Putin has concluded that if Russia wants to put a stop to that, there will never be a better time to act in the future.

Despite early successes holding off the Russian military, Samuel is sceptical that time is on the Ukrainian side. Though it won’t be able to create a puppet government Ukrainians view as legitimate, if committed to the task, Russia will likely gradually grind down Ukrainian resistance and take formal control of the country. If the war is to end before much of Ukraine is reduced to rubble, it will likely have to be through negotiation, rather than Russian defeat.

Many hope for Putin to be ousted from office, but Samuel cautions that he has enormous control of the Russian government and the media Russians consume, making that very unlikely in the near term. Furthermore, someone who successfully booted Putin from office is just as likely to be even more of an intransigent hardliner as they are to be a dove. In the meantime, loose talk of assassinating Putin could drive him to further reckless aggression.

The US policy response has so far been largely good, successfully balancing the need to punish Russia to dissuade large nations from bullying small ones in the future, while preventing NATO from being drawn into the war directly — which would pose a horrifying risk of escalation to a full nuclear exchange. The pressure from the general public to ‘do something’ might eventually cause national leaders to confront Russia more directly, but so far they are sensibly showing no interest in doing so.

However, use of nuclear weapons remains a low but worrying possibility. That could happen in various ways, such as:

  1. NATO shoots down Russian planes to enforce a no-fly zone — a problematic idea in Samuel’s opinion.
  2. An unintentional cycle of mutual escalation between Russia and NATO, perhaps starting with cyber attacks, or Russian bombs accidentally landing in NATO countries that neighbour Ukraine.
  3. Putin ends up with his back against the wall and believes he can no longer win the war or defend Russia without using tactical nuclear weapons.
  4. Putin decides to invade a country other than Ukraine.

Samuel is also worried that Russia may deploy chemical and biological weapons and blame it on the Ukrainians.

In Samuel’s opinion, the recent focus on the delivery of fighter jets to Ukraine is risky and not the key defence priority in any case. Instead, Ukraine could use more ground-to-air missiles to shoot Russian planes out of the sky.

Before war broke out, it’s possible Russia could have been satisfied if Ukraine followed through on the Minsk agreements and committed not to join NATO. Or it might not have, if Putin was committed to war, come what may. In any case, most Ukrainians found those terms intolerable.

At this point, the situation is even worse, and it’s hard to see how an enduring ceasefire could be agreed upon. On top of the above, Russia is also demanding recognition that Crimea is part of Russia, and acceptance of the independence of the so-calked Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. These conditions — especially the second — are entirely unacceptable to the Ukrainians. Hence the war continues, and could grind on for months until one side is sufficiently beaten down to compromise on their core demands.

Rob and Samuel discuss all of the above and also:

  • What are the implications if Sweden and/or Finland decide to join NATO?
  • What should NATO do now, and did it make any mistakes in the past?
  • What’s the most likely situation for us to be looking at in three months’ time?
  • Can Ukraine effectively win the war?

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#122 – Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising

By , , and · Published March 9th, 2022 ·

One of 80,000 Hours’ main services is our free one-on-one careers advising, which we provide to around 1,000 people a year. Today we speak to two of our advisors, who have each spoken to hundreds of people — including many regular listeners to this show — about how they might be able to do more good while also having a highly motivating career.

Before joining 80,000 Hours, Michelle Hutchinson completed a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford University and helped launch Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, while Habiba Islam studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University and qualified as a barrister.

Want to get free one-on-one advice from our team? We’re here to help.

We’ve helped thousands of people formulate their plans and put them in touch with mentors.

We’ve expanded our ability to deliver one-on-one meetings so are keen to help more people than ever before.

If you’re a regular listener to the show we’re particularly likely to want to speak with you, either now or in the future.

Learn about and apply for advising

In this conversation, they cover many topics that recur in their advising calls, and what they’ve learned from watching advisees’ careers play out:

  • What they say when advisees want to help solve overpopulation
  • How to balance doing good against other priorities that people have for their lives
  • Why it’s challenging to motivate yourself to focus on the long-term future of humanity, and how Michelle and Habiba do so nonetheless
  • How they use our latest guide to planning your career
  • Why you can specialise and take more risk if you’re in a group
  • Gaps in the effective altruism community it would be really useful for people to fill
  • Stories of people who have spoken to 80,000 Hours and changed their career — and whether it went well or not
  • Why trying to have impact in multiple different ways can be a mistake

The episode is split into two parts: the first section on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, and the second on our new 80k After Hours. This is a shameless attempt to encourage listeners to our first show to subscribe to our second feed.

That second part covers:

  • Whether just encouraging someone young to aspire to more than they currently are is one of the most impactful ways to spend half an hour
  • How much impact the one-on-one team has, the biggest challenges they face as a group, and different paths they could have gone down
  • Whether giving general advice is a doomed enterprise

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good

By and · Published February 16th, 2022 ·

If you read polls saying that the public supports a carbon tax, should you believe them? According to today’s guest — journalist and blogger Matthew Yglesias — it’s complicated, but probably not.

Interpreting opinion polls about specific policies can be a challenge, and it’s easy to trick yourself into believing what you want to believe. Matthew invented a term for a particular type of self-delusion called the ‘pundit’s fallacy’: “the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.”

If we want to advocate not just for ideas that would be good if implemented, but ideas that have a real shot at getting implemented, we should do our best to understand public opinion as it really is.

The least trustworthy polls are published by think tanks and advocacy campaigns that would love to make their preferred policy seem popular. These surveys can be designed to nudge respondents toward the desired result — for example, by tinkering with question wording and order or shifting how participants are sampled. And if a poll produces the ‘wrong answer’, there’s no need to publish it at all, so the ‘publication bias’ with these sorts of surveys is large.

Matthew says polling run by firms or researchers without any particular desired outcome can be taken more seriously. But the results that we ought to give by far the most weight are those from professional political campaigns trying to win votes and get their candidate elected because they have both the expertise to do polling properly, and a very strong incentive to understand what the public really thinks.

First and foremost, that means representing issues as they would be in a hotly contested campaign. If someone says that they sure like the idea of taxing carbon, how much do they still like it when they find out it means their electricity bills would be $100 higher, and gas will cost 20 cents more a gallon? And do they still like it when they know one of the candidates is against it and says it will cost local jobs? This sort of progressive ‘stress testing’ is more work, but can lead researchers to very different conclusions than just asking people favour ‘policy X’.

The problem is, campaigns run these expensive surveys because they think that having exclusive access to reliable information will give them a competitive advantage. As a result, they often don’t publish the findings, and instead use them to shape what their candidate says and does.

Journalists like Matthew can call up their contacts within campaigns and get a summary from people they trust. But being unable to publish the polling itself, they’re unlikely to be able to persuade sceptics.

That’s a pain and a legitimately hard problem to get around. But when assessing what ideas are winners, one thing Matthew would like everyone to keep in mind is that politics is competitive, and politicians aren’t (all) stupid. If advocating for your pet idea were a great way to win elections, someone would try it and win, and others would copy. If none of the pros are talking about your hobby horse, it might be because they know something you don’t.

One other thing to check that’s more reliable than polling is real-world experience. For example, voters may say they like a carbon tax on the phone — but the very liberal Washington State roundly rejected one in ballot initiatives in 2016 and 2018.

Of course you may want to advocate for what you think is best, even if it wouldn’t pass a popular vote in the face of organised opposition. The public’s ideas can shift, sometimes dramatically and unexpectedly. But at least you’ll be going into the debate with your eyes wide open.

In this extensive conversation, host Rob Wiblin and Matthew also cover:

  • How should a humanitarian think about US military interventions overseas?
  • From an ‘effective altruist’ perspective, was the US wrong to withdraw from Afghanistan?
  • Has NATO ultimately screwed over Ukrainians by misrepresenting the extent of its commitment to their independence?
  • What philosopher does Matthew think is underrated?
  • How big a risk is ubiquitous surveillance?
  • What does Matthew think about wild animal suffering, anti-ageing research, and autonomous weapons?
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan's experiments with how to do democracy

By and · Published February 2nd, 2022 ·

In 2014 Taiwan was rocked by mass protests against a proposed trade agreement with China that was about to be agreed to without the usual Parliamentary hearings. Students invaded and took over the Parliament. But rather than chant slogans, instead they livestreamed their own parliamentary debate over the trade deal, allowing volunteers to speak both in favour and against.

Instead of polarising the country more, this so-called Sunflower Student Movement ultimately led to a bipartisan consensus that Taiwan should open up its government. That process has gradually made it one of the most communicative and interactive administrations anywhere in the world.

Today’s guest — programming prodigy Audrey Tang — initially joined the student protests to help get their streaming infrastructure online. After the students got the official hearings they wanted and went home, she was invited to consult for the government. And when the government later changed hands, she was invited to work in the ministry herself.

During six years as the country’s ‘Digital Minister’ she has been helping Taiwan increase the flow of information between institutions and civil society and launched original experiments trying to make democracy itself work better.

That includes developing new tools to identify points of consensus between groups that mostly disagree, building social media platforms optimised for discussing policy issues, helping volunteers fight disinformation by making their own memes, and allowing the public to build their own alternatives to government websites whenever they don’t like how they currently work.

As part of her ministerial role, Audrey also sets aside time each week to help online volunteers working on government-related tech projects get the help they need. How does she decide who to help? She doesn’t — that decision is made by members of an online community who upvote the projects they think are best.

According to Audrey, a more collaborative mentality among the country’s leaders has helped increase public trust in government, and taught bureaucrats that they can (usually) trust the public in return.

Innovations in Taiwan may offer useful lessons to people who want to improve humanity’s ability to make decisions and get along in large groups anywhere in the world. We cover:

  • Why it makes sense to treat Facebook as a nightclub
  • The value of having no reply button, and of getting more specific when you disagree
  • Quadratic voting and funding
  • Audrey’s experiences with the Sunflower Student Movement
  • Technologies Audrey is most excited about
  • Conservative anarchism
  • What Audrey’s day-to-day work looks like
  • Whether it’s ethical to eat oysters
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won't touch

By and · Published December 20th, 2021 ·

Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the ‘Yang Gang’ — is kind of a big deal, but is particularly popular among listeners to The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Maybe that’s because he’s willing to embrace topics most politicians stay away from, like universal basic income, term limits for members of Congress, or what might happen when AI replaces whole industries.

But even those topics are pretty vanilla compared to our usual fare on The 80,000 Hours Podcast. So we thought it’d be fun to throw Andrew some stranger or more niche questions we hadn’t heard him comment on before, including:

  1. What would your ideal utopia in 500 years look like?
  2. Do we need more public optimism today?
  3. Is positively influencing the long-term future a key moral priority of our time?
  4. Should we invest far more to prevent low-probability risks?
  5. Should we think of future generations as an interest group that’s disenfranchised by their inability to vote?
  6. The folks who worry that advanced AI is going to go off the rails and destroy us all… are they crazy, or a valuable insurance policy?
  7. Will people struggle to live fulfilling lives once AI systems remove the economic need to ‘work’?
  8. Andrew is a huge proponent of ranked-choice voting. But what about ‘approval voting’ — where basically you just get to say “yea” or “nay” to every candidate that’s running — which some experts prefer?
  9. What would Andrew do with a billion dollars to keep the US a democracy?
  10. What does Andrew think about the effective altruism community?
  11. What’s one thing we should do to reduce the risk of nuclear war?
  12. Will Andrew’s new political party get Trump elected by splitting the vote, the same way Nader got Bush elected back in 2000?

As it turns out, Rob and Andrew agree on a lot, so the episode is less a debate than a chat about ideas that aren’t mainstream yet… but might be one day. They also talk about:

  • Andrew’s views on alternative meat
  • Whether seniors have too much power in American society
  • Andrew’s DC lobbying firm on behalf of humanity
  • How the rest of the world could support the US
  • The merits of 18-year term limits
  • What technologies Andrew is most excited about
  • How much the US should spend on foreign aid
  • Persistence and prevalence of inflation in the US economy
  • And plenty more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development

By and · Published December 13th, 2021 ·

If a rich country were really committed to pursuing an active biological weapons program, there’s not much we could do to stop them. With enough money and persistence, they’d be able to buy equipment, and hire people to carry out the work.

But what we can do is intervene before they make that decision.

Today’s guest, Jaime Yassif — Senior Fellow for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) — thinks that stopping states from wanting to pursue dangerous bioscience in the first place is one of our key lines of defence against global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs).

It helps to understand why countries might consider developing biological weapons. Jaime says there are three main possible reasons:

  1. Fear of what their adversary might be up to
  2. Belief that they could gain a tactical or strategic advantage, with limited risk of getting caught
  3. Belief that even if they are caught, they are unlikely to be held accountable

In response, Jaime has developed a three-part recipe to create systems robust enough to meaningfully change the cost-benefit calculation.

The first is to substantially increase transparency. If countries aren’t confident about what their neighbours or adversaries are actually up to, misperceptions could lead to arms races that neither side desires. But if you know with confidence that no one around you is pursuing a biological weapons programme, you won’t feel motivated to pursue one yourself.

The second is to strengthen the capabilities of the United Nations’ system to
investigate the origins of high-consequence biological events — whether naturally emerging, accidental or deliberate — and to make sure that the responsibility to figure out the source of bio-events of unknown origin doesn’t fall between the cracks of different existing mechanisms. The ability to quickly discover the source of emerging pandemics is important both for responding to them in real time and for deterring future bioweapons development or use.

And the third is meaningful accountability. States need to know that the consequences for getting caught in a deliberate attack are severe enough to make it a net negative in expectation to go down this road in the first place.

On top of this, Jaime also thinks it’s vitally important to get better at anticipating threats. She thinks governments around the world should be investing more in biosecurity intelligence — to find out early if other states or non-state actors are developing a fledgling interest in developing biological weapons.

But having a good plan and actually implementing it are two very different things, and today’s episode focuses heavily on the practical steps we should be taking to influence both governments and international organisations, like the WHO and UN — and to help them maximise their effectiveness in guarding against catastrophic biological risks.

Jaime and Rob explore NTI’s current proposed plan for reducing global catastrophic biological risks, and discuss:

  • The importance of reducing emerging biological risks associated with rapid technology advances
  • How we can make it a lot harder for anyone to deliberately or accidentally produce or release a really dangerous pathogen
  • The importance of having multiples theories of risk reduction
  • Why Jaime’s more focused on prevention than response
  • Multiple intervention points for reducing risks throughout the bioscience R&D lifecycle: funders, research oversight committees, suppliers of goods and services, and publishers
  • The history of the Biological Weapons Convention
  • How much we can rely on traditional law enforcement to detect terrorists
  • Jaime’s disagreements with the effective altruism community
  • And much more

And if you think you might be interested in dedicating your career to reducing GCBRs, stick around to the end of the episode to get Jaime’s advice — including on how people outside of the US can best contribute, and how to compare career opportunities in academia vs think tanks, and nonprofits vs national governments vs international orgs.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah

By and · Published November 29th, 2021 ·

If there’s a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, probably we would, because humanity hasn’t done much to prevent it. But it turns out that an ounce of forethought might be enough for most people to get the calories they need to survive, even in a future as grim as that one.

Today’s guest is engineering professor Dave Denkenberger, who co-founded the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), which has the goal of finding ways humanity might be able to feed itself for years without relying on the sun. Over the last seven years, Dave and his team have turned up options from the mundane, like mushrooms grown on rotting wood, to the bizarre, like bacteria that can eat natural gas or electricity itself.

One option stands out as potentially able to feed billions: finding a way to eat wood ourselves. Even after a disaster, a huge amount of calories will be lying around, stored in wood and other plant cellulose. The trouble is that, even though cellulose is basically a lot of sugar molecules stuck together, humans can’t eat wood.

But we do know how to turn wood into something people can eat. We can grind wood up in already existing paper mills, then mix the pulp with enzymes that break the cellulose into sugar and the hemicellulose into other sugars.

Dave estimates that “…if hypothetically you were to feed one person all of their calories this way, it’s only about a dollar a day from cellulosic sugar. … It’s particularly cheap because we have these factories that have most of the components already. … Because we’re trying to feed everyone no matter what, we want to look at those resilient foods that are inexpensive.”

Another option that shows a lot of promise is seaweed. Buffered by the water around them, ocean life wouldn’t be as affected by the lower temperatures resulting from the sun being obscured. Sea plants are also already used to growing in low light, because the water above them already shades them to some extent.

Dave points out that “there are several species of seaweed that can still grow 10% per day, even with the lower light levels in nuclear winter and lower temperatures. … Not surprisingly, with that 10% growth per day, assuming we can scale up, we could actually get up to 160% of human calories in less than a year.”

But to get that sort of growth, humanity would need vast numbers of places for seaweed to attach, and to hang the strands close to the surface of the sea, where they can get the greatest amount of light. The solution is to attach it to ropes and suspend them from buoys that are anchored to the ocean floor but float on the top.

Dave’s team has estimated that “the main constraint here is twisting fibers into ropes that we’re going to attach the seaweed to. We found that right now, we don’t produce that much rope — we would actually have to increase our rope-twisting capability by 300 times, which sounds kind of crazy. But it’s actually a really simple process, and people have done it in their garage with a drill, basically twisting these fibers.”

Of course it will be easier to scale up seaweed production if it’s already a reasonably sized industry. At the end of the interview, we’re joined by Sahil Shah, who is trying to expand seaweed production in the UK with his business Sustainable Seaweed.

While a diet of seaweed and trees turned into sugar might not seem that appealing, the team at ALLFED also thinks several perfectly normal crops could also make a big contribution to feeding the world, even in a truly catastrophic scenario. Those crops include potatoes, canola, and sugar beets, which are currently grown in cool low-light environments.

ALLFED even thinks humanity could throw together huge numbers of low-tech greenhouses, which would stay 5–10°C warmer than the surrounding area and allow agriculture to continue similar to before. Cost is always the issue, but Dave expects the price of basic greenhouses wouldn’t be prohibitive: “…if we look at the cost of rice, we might add another dollar a day, so you might be up to $2 a day or something like that.”

Many of these ideas could turn out to be misguided or impractical in real-world conditions, which is why Dave and ALLFED are raising money to test them out on the ground. They think it’s essential to show these techniques can work so that should the worst happen, people turn their attention to producing more food rather than fighting one another over the small amount of food humanity has stockpiled.

In this conversation, Rob, Dave, and Sahil discuss the above, as well as:

  • How much one can trust the sort of economic modelling ALLFED does
  • Bacteria that turn natural gas or electricity into protein
  • How to feed astronauts in space with nuclear power
  • Jobs at ALLFED and what they’d do with more money
  • What, if anything, individuals can do to prepare themselves for global catastrophes
  • Whether we should worry about humanity running out of natural resources
  • How David helped save $10 billion worth of electricity through energy efficiency standards
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all

By and · Published November 19th, 2021 ·

If modern human civilisation collapsed — as a result of nuclear war, severe climate change, or a much worse pandemic than COVID-19 — billions of people might die.

That’s terrible enough to contemplate. But what’s the probability that rather than recover, the survivors would falter and humanity would actually disappear for good?

It’s an obvious enough question, but very few people have spent serious time looking into it — possibly because it cuts across history, economics, and biology, among many other fields. There’s no Disaster Apocalypse Studies department at any university, and governments have little incentive to plan for a future in which almost everyone is dead and their country probably no longer even exists.

The person who may have spent the most time looking at this specific question is Luisa Rodriguez — who has conducted research at Rethink Priorities, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, the Forethought Foundation, and now here, at 80,000 Hours.

She wrote a series of articles earnestly trying to foresee how likely humanity would be to recover and build back after a full-on civilisational collapse.

In addition to being a fascinating topic in itself, if you buy philosopher Derek Parfit’s argument that the loss of all future generations entailed by human extinction would be a much greater moral tragedy than the deaths of even as many as 99% of humans alive, it’s also a question of great practical importance.

Luisa considered two distinct paths by which a global catastrophe and collapse could lead to extinction.

The first is direct extinction, where, say, 99.99% of people die, and then everyone else dies relatively quickly after that.

There are a couple of main stories people put forward for how a catastrophe like this would kill every single human on Earth — but as we’ll explain below, Luisa doesn’t buy them.

Story One:

Nuclear war has led to nuclear winter. There’s a 10-year period during which a lot of the world is really inhospitable to agriculture, and it takes a lot of ingenuity to find or grow any alternative foods. The survivors just aren’t able to figure out how to feed themselves in the time period, so everyone dies of starvation or cold.

Why Luisa doesn’t buy it:

Catastrophes will almost inevitably be non-uniform in their effects. If 80,000 people survive, they’re not all going to be in the same city — it would look more like groups of 5,000 in a bunch of different places.

People in some places will starve, but those in other places, such as New Zealand, will be able to fish, eat seaweed, grow potatoes, and find other sources of calories. Likewise, people in some places might face local disease outbreaks or be hit by natural disasters — but people will be scattered far apart enough that other groups won’t be affected by regional disasters.

It’d be an incredibly unlucky coincidence if the survivors of a nuclear war — likely spread out all over the world — happened to all be affected by natural disasters or were all prohibitively far away from areas suitable for agriculture (which aren’t the same areas you’d expect to be attacked in a nuclear war).

Story Two:

The catastrophe leads to hoarding and violence, and in addition to people being directly killed by the conflict, it distracts everyone so much from the key challenge of reestablishing agriculture that they simply fail. By the time they come to their senses, it’s too late — they’ve used up too much of the resources they’d need to get agriculture going again.

Why Luisa doesn’t buy it:

We’ve had lots of resource scarcity throughout history, and while we’ve seen examples of conflict petering out because basic needs aren’t being met, we’ve never seen the reverse.

And again, even if this happens in some places — even if some groups fought each other until they literally ended up starving to death — it would be completely bizarre for it to happen to every group in the world. You just need one group of around 300 people to survive for them to be able to rebuild the species.

———

The other pathway Luisa studied is indirect extinction: where humanity stabilises things and persists for hundreds or thousands of years, but for some reason gets stuck and never recovers to the level of technology we have today — leaving us vulnerable to something like an asteroid or a supervolcano.

But Luisa isn’t too worried about that scenario either.

Luisa’s best guess for how long it might take to recover — given that we’d already have the knowledge that agriculture and even more advanced technologies are possible, as well as artifacts to reverse engineer — is a couple thousand years at the longest.

And because it seems like the natural rate of extinction for humanity as a hunter-gatherer species has to be pretty low — otherwise we probably wouldn’t have been around in one form or another for 100,000 to a million years — it just seems like humanity would probably have plenty of time to rebuild.

When Luisa started this project, she thought, “I don’t know how to do any of the stuff we’d need to survive — I couldn’t grow a potato if my life depended on it, let alone reestablish more complex technologies. We’d be doomed.” But some wild examples of human ingenuity from the past made her realise that maybe other people are a bit more practical than she is, such as:

  • During the Serbian bombing of Bosnia, people generated electricity by pulling engines out of cars and putting them into rivers in a way that generated hydropower.
  • After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba realised they were going to lose their access to trucks — so they spent years breeding oxen to manually plough fields, which allowed them to keep generating food.
  • In World War II, people in POW camps built radios out of things like gum wrappers and pennies — allowing them to listen to music and the news.

Even just the fact that two billion people alive today practise subsistence farming — and therefore already know much more than she does about producing food — made Luisa realise that while she might be especially poorly equipped to survive a catastrophe, that doesn’t mean everyone else would be.

And having collected all this knowledge, Luisa admits that she too will now be a valuable member of a post-apocalyptic world!

In this wide-ranging and free-flowing conversation, Luisa and Rob also cover:

  • What the world might actually look like after one of these catastrophes
  • The most valuable knowledge for survivors
  • What we can learn from fallen ancient civilisations and smaller-scale disasters in modern times
  • The risk of culture shifting against science and tech
  • How fast populations could rebound
  • Implications for what we ought to do right now
  • ‘Boom and bust’ climate change scenarios
  • And much more.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications

By and · Published November 12th, 2021 ·

Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make them up — underpins most of modern physics. But there are varying interpretations of what it means, all of them controversial in their own way.

Famously, quantum theory predicts that with the right setup, a cat can be made to be alive and dead at the same time. On the face of it, that sounds either meaningless or ridiculous.

According to today’s guest, David Wallace — professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the world’s leading philosophers of physics — there are three broad ways experts react to this apparent dilemma:

  1. The theory must be wrong, and we need to change our philosophy to fix it.
  2. The theory must be wrong, and we need to change our physics to fix it.
  3. The theory is OK, and cats really can in some way be alive and dead simultaneously.

Physicists tend to want to change the philosophy, and philosophers want to change the physics.

In 1955, physicist Hugh Everett bit the bullet on Option 3 and proposed Wallace’s preferred solution to the puzzle: each time it’s faced with a ‘quantum choice,’ the universe ‘splits’ into different worlds. Anything that has a probability greater than zero (from the perspective of quantum theory) happens in some branch — though more probable things happen in far more branches.

This explanation of quantum physics, called the ‘Everettian interpretation’ or ‘many-worlds theory,’ does seem a little crazy. But quantum physics already seems crazy, and that doesn’t make it wrong. While not a consensus position, the many-worlds approach is one of the top three most popular ways to make sense of what’s going on, according to surveys of relevant experts.

Setting aside whether it’s correct for a moment, one thing that’s not often spelled out is what this many-worlds approach would concretely imply if it were right.

Is there a world where Rob (the show’s host) can roll a die a million times, and it comes up 6 every time?

As David explains in this episode: absolutely, that’s completely possible — and if Rob rolled a die a million times, there would be a world like that.

Is there a world where Rob can fly like Superman?

No, that’s physically impossible and quantum randomness doesn’t change that.

Is there a world where Rob becomes president of the US?

David thinks probably not. The things stopping Rob from becoming US president don’t seem down to random chance at the quantum level.

Is there a world where Rob deliberately murdered someone this morning?

Only if he’s already predisposed to murder — becoming a different person in that way probably isn’t a matter of random fluctuations in our brains.

Is there a world where a horse-version of Rob hosts the 80,000 Horses Podcast?

Well, due to the chance involved in evolution, it’s plausible that there are worlds where humans didn’t evolve, and intelligent horses have in some sense taken their place. And somewhere, fantastically distantly across the vast multiverse, there might even be a horse named Rob Wiblin who hosts a podcast, and who sounds remarkably like Rob. Though even then — it wouldn’t actually be Rob in the way we normally think of personal identity.

OK. So if the many-worlds interpretation is right, should that change how we live our lives?

Despite it revolutionising our understanding of what the universe is, David’s view is that it mostly shouldn’t change our actions.

Maybe you now think of a time you drove home drunk without incident as being worse — because there are branches where you actually killed someone. But David thinks that if you’d thought clearly enough about low-probability/high-consequence events, you should already have been very worried about them.

In addition to the above, Rob asks a bunch of burning questions he had about what all this might mean for ethics, including:

  • Are our actions getting more (or less) important as the universe splits into finer and finer threads?
  • If the branching of the universe creates more goodness by there being more stuff, then should we want to do the unpleasant things earlier and pleasant things later on?
  • Is there any way that we could conceivably influence other branches of the multiverse?

David and Rob do their best to introduce quantum mechanics in the first 35 minutes of the episode, but it isn’t the easiest thing to explain via audio alone. So if you need a refresher before jumping in, we recommend this YouTube video.

While exploring what David calls our “best theory of pretty much everything,” they also cover:

  • Why quantum mechanics needs an interpretation at all
  • Alternatives to the many-worlds interpretation and what they have going for them
  • Whether we can count the number of ‘worlds’ that would exist
  • The debate around what quantum mechanics is, and why a consensus answer hasn’t emerged
  • Progress in physics over the last 50 years, and the practical value of physics today
  • The peculiar philosophy of time
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel and Katy Moore

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#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people

By and · Published October 22nd, 2021 ·

It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions:

  1. When ordinary people wear face masks, does it actually reduce the spread of respiratory diseases?
  2. And if so, how do you get people to wear masks more often?

It turns out the first question is remarkably challenging to answer, but it’s well worth doing nonetheless. Among other reasons, the first good trial of this prompted Maha Rehman — Policy Director at the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre — as well as a range of others to immediately use the findings to help tens of millions of people across South Asia, even before the results were public.

The groundbreaking Bangladesh RCT that inspired her to take action found that:

  • A 30% increase in mask wearing reduced total infections by 10%.
  • The effect was more pronounced for surgical masks compared to cloth masks (plus ~50% effectiveness).
  • Mask wearing also led to an increase in social distancing.
  • Of all the incentives tested, the only thing that impacted mask wearing was their colour (people preferred blue over green, and red over purple!).

The research was done by social scientists at Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford, among others. It applied a program they called ‘NORM’ in half of 600 villages in which about 350,000 people lived. NORM has four components, which the researchers expected would work well for the general public:

N: no-cost distribution
O: offering information
R: reinforcing the message and the information in the field
M: modeling

Basically you make sure a community has enough masks and you tell them why it’s important to wear them. You also reinforce the message periodically in markets and mosques, and via role models and promoters in the community itself.

Tipped off that these positive findings were on the way, Maha took this program and rushed to put it into action in Lahore, Pakistan, a city with a population of about 13 million, before the Delta variant could sweep through the region.

Maha had already been doing a lot of data work on COVID policy over the past year, and that allowed her to quickly reach out to the relevant stakeholders — getting them interested and excited.

Governments aren’t exactly known for being super innovative, but in March and April Lahore was going through a very deadly third wave of COVID — so the commissioner quickly jumped on this approach, providing an endorsement as well as resources.

When working closely with governments, Maha says that you need to first find champions within the bureaucracy who have both the political capital as well as the required resources to pull this off. She also says it’s vital that you’re proactively following up to ensure that nothing gets dropped at any stage before it is actually launched.

Together with the original researchers, Maha and her team at LUMS collected baseline data that allowed them to map the mask-wearing rate in every part of Lahore, in both markets and mosques. And then based on that data, they adapted the original rural-focused model to a very different urban setting.

Lahore is a big, dynamic city, so the intervention needed to be designed to reach as many households as possible. And information is consumed and processed in a very different way in urban environments; for example, it’s unrealistic to think you can go door-to-door in a big city, and you don’t need to worry about cable TV and social media so much in a small village.

The scale of this project was daunting, and in today’s episode Maha tells Rob all about the day-to-day experiences and stresses required to actually make it happen.

They also discuss:

  • The results and experimental design of the Bangladesh RCT
  • The challenges of data collection in this context
  • Disasters and emergencies she had to respond to in the middle of the project
  • What she learned from working closely with the Lahore Commissioner’s Office
  • How to get governments to provide you with large amounts of data for your research
  • How she adapted from a more academic role to a ‘getting stuff done’ role
  • How to reduce waste in government procurement
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

By and · Published October 18th, 2021 ·

Our failure to get every kid in the world all of their basic vaccinations on time leads to 1.5 million deaths every year.

According to today’s guest, Varsha Venugopal, for the great majority this has nothing to do with weird conspiracy theories or medical worries — in India 80% of undervaccinated children are already getting some shots. They just aren’t getting all of them, for the tragically mundane reason that life can get in the way.

As Varsha says, we’re all sometimes guilty of “valuing our present very differently from the way we value the future,” leading to short-term thinking, whether about going to the gym or getting vaccines.

So who should we call on to help fix this universal problem? The government, extended family, or maybe village elders?

Varsha says that research shows the most influential figures might actually be local gossips.

In 2018, Varsha heard about the ideas around effective altruism for the first time. By the end of 2019, she’d gone through Charity Entrepreneurship’s strategy incubation program, and quit her normal, stable job to co-found Suvita, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the uptake of immunisation in India, which focuses on two models:

  1. Sending SMS reminders directly to parents and carers
  2. Gossip

The first one is intuitive. You collect birth registers, digitise the paper records, process the data, and send out personalised SMS messages to hundreds of thousands of families. The effect size varies depending on the context, but these messages usually increase vaccination rates by 8–18%.

The second approach is less intuitive and isn’t yet entirely understood either.

Here’s what happens: Suvita calls up random households and asks, “If there were an event in town, who would be most likely to tell you about it?”

In over 90% of the cases, the households gave both the name and the phone number of a local ‘influencer.’

And when tracked down, more than 95% of the most frequently named ‘influencers’ agreed to become vaccination ambassadors. Those ambassadors then go on to share information about when and where to get vaccinations, in whatever way seems best to them.

When tested by a team of top academics, it raised vaccination rates by 10 percentage points, or about 27%.

The advantage of SMS reminders is that they’re easier to scale up. But Varsha says the ambassador program isn’t actually that far from being a scalable model as well.

A phone call to get a name, another call to ask the influencer to join, and boom — you might have just covered a whole village rather than just a single family.

Suvita got this idea from original Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) studies, which found that community gossips were much more effective at communicating a simple piece of information than other possible options — including village elders.

In Karnataka, India, villagers were told about a phone-based raffle. Villages with at least one gossip saw an average of 65% more calls to the raffle phone number compared to villages with no gossips.

In a related large-scale randomised trial run in the state of Haryana, J-PAL specifically compared different combinations of interventions to see which mix would have the most impact for a given budget.

They looked at various combinations of three policy tools: mobile credit directly to parents and carers, text reminders directly to parents and carers, and this gossip idea.

They found that adding local ambassadors and text messages to the government’s routine immunisation programme produced the most vaccinations per dollar spent, and was about 10% more cost effective than the government’s existing vaccine promotion efforts.

Varsha says that Suvita has two major challenges on the horizon:

  1. Maintaining the same degree of oversight of their surveyors as they attempt to scale up the programme, in order to ensure the programme continues to work just as well
  2. Deciding between focusing on reaching a few more additional districts now vs. making longer-term investments that could build up to a future exponential increase

In this episode, Varsha and Rob talk about making these kinds of high-stakes, high-stress decisions, as well as:

  • How Suvita got started, and their experience with Charity Entrepreneurship
  • Weaknesses of the J-PAL studies
  • The importance of co-founders
  • Deciding how broad a programme should be
  • Varsha’s day-to-day experience
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

By and · Published October 5th, 2021 ·

Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.

But the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster.

According to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk — it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future.

The key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. A back-of-the-envelope version of the argument runs:

  • The US government is willing to pay up to $4 million (depending on the agency) to save the life of an American.
  • So saving all US citizens at any given point in time would be worth $1,300 trillion.
  • If you believe that the risk of human extinction over the next century is something like one in six (as Toby Ord suggests is a reasonable figure in his book The Precipice), then it would be worth the US government spending up to $2.2 trillion to reduce that risk by just 1%, in terms of American lives saved alone.
  • Carl thinks it would cost a lot less than that to achieve a 1% risk reduction if the money were spent intelligently. So it easily passes a government cost-benefit test, with a very big benefit-to-cost ratio — likely over 1000:1 today.

This argument helped NASA get funding to scan the sky for any asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth, and it was directly promoted by famous economists like Richard Posner, Larry Summers, and Cass Sunstein.

If the case is clear enough, why hasn’t it already motivated a lot more spending or regulations to limit existential risks — enough to drive down what any additional efforts would achieve?

Carl thinks that one key barrier is that infrequent disasters are rarely politically salient. Research indicates that extra money is spent on flood defences in the years immediately following a massive flood — but as memories fade, that spending quickly dries up. Of course the annual probability of a disaster was the same the whole time; all that changed is what voters had on their minds.

Carl suspects another reason is that it’s difficult for the average voter to estimate and understand how large these respective risks are, and what responses would be appropriate rather than self-serving. If the public doesn’t know what good performance looks like, politicians can’t be given incentives to do the right thing.

It’s reasonable to assume that if we found out a giant asteroid were going to crash into the Earth one year from now, most of our resources would be quickly diverted into figuring out how to avert catastrophe.

But even in the case of COVID-19, an event that massively disrupted the lives of everyone on Earth, we’ve still seen a substantial lack of investment in vaccine manufacturing capacity and other ways of controlling the spread of the virus, relative to what economists recommended.

Carl expects that all the reasons we didn’t adequately prepare for or respond to COVID-19 — with excess mortality over 15 million and costs well over $10 trillion — bite even harder when it comes to threats we’ve never faced before, such as engineered pandemics, risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and so on.

Today’s episode is in part our way of trying to improve this situation. In today’s wide-ranging conversation, Carl and Rob also cover:

  • A few reasons Carl isn’t excited by ‘strong longtermism’
  • How x-risk reduction compares to GiveWell recommendations
  • Solutions for asteroids, comets, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change
  • The history of bioweapons
  • Whether gain-of-function research is justifiable
  • Successes and failures around COVID-19
  • The history of existential risk
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#111 – Mushtaq Khan on how mainstream economics gets corruption and good governance all wrong

By and · Published September 10th, 2021 ·

If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil from pipelines.

The resulting oil spills damage the environment and cause severe health problems, but the Nigerian government has continually failed in their attempts to stop this theft.

They send in the army, and the army gets corrupted. They send in enforcement agencies, and the enforcement agencies get corrupted. What’s happening here?

According to Mushtaq Khan, economics professor at SOAS University of London, this is a classic example of ‘networked corruption’. Everyone in the community is benefiting from the criminal enterprise — so much so that the locals would prefer civil war to following the law. It pays vastly better than other local jobs, hotels and restaurants have formed around it, and houses are even powered by the electricity generated from the oil.

In today’s episode, Mushtaq elaborates on the models he uses to understand these problems and make predictions he can test in the real world.

Some of the most important factors shaping the fate of nations are their structures of power: who is powerful, how they are organized, which interest groups can pull in favours with the government, and the constant push and pull between the country’s rulers and its ruled. While traditional economic theory has relatively little to say about these topics, institutional economists like Mushtaq have a lot to say, and participate in lively debates about which of their competing ideas best explain the world around us.

The issues at stake are nothing less than why some countries are rich and others are poor, why some countries are mostly law abiding while others are not, and why some government programmes improve public welfare while others just enrich the well connected.

Mushtaq’s specialties are anti-corruption and industrial policy, where he believes mainstream theory and practice are largely misguided. To root out fraud, aid agencies try to impose institutions and laws that work in countries like the U.K. today. Everyone nods their heads and appears to go along, but years later they find nothing has changed, or worse — the new anti-corruption laws are mostly just used to persecute anyone who challenges the country’s rulers.

As Mushtaq explains, to people who specialise in understanding why corruption is ubiquitous in some countries but not others, this is entirely predictable. Western agencies imagine a situation where most people are law abiding, but a handful of selfish fat cats are engaging in large-scale graft. In fact in the countries they’re trying to change everyone is breaking some rule or other, or participating in so-called ‘corruption’, because it’s the only way to get things done and always has been.

Mushtaq’s rule of thumb is that when the locals most concerned with a specific issue are invested in preserving a status quo they’re participating in, they almost always win out.

To actually reduce corruption, countries like his native Bangladesh have to follow the same gradual path the U.K. once did: find organizations that benefit from rule-abiding behaviour and are selfishly motivated to promote it, and help them police their peers.

Trying to impose a new way of doing things from the top down wasn’t how Europe modernised, and it won’t work elsewhere either.

In cases like oil theft in Nigeria, where no one wants to follow the rules, Mushtaq says corruption may be impossible to solve directly. Instead you have to play a long game, bringing in other employment opportunities, improving health services, and deploying alternative forms of energy — in the hope that one day this will give people a viable alternative to corruption.

In this extensive interview Rob and Mushtaq cover this and much more, including:

  • How does one test theories like this?
  • Why are companies in some poor countries so much less productive than their peers in rich countries?
  • Have rich countries just legalized the corruption in their societies?
  • What are the big live debates in institutional economics?
  • Should poor countries protect their industries from foreign competition?
  • Where has industrial policy worked, and why?
  • How can listeners use these theories to predict which policies will work in their own countries?

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass

By and · Published August 26th, 2021 ·

Holden Karnofsky helped create two of the most influential organisations in the effective philanthropy world. So when he outlines a different perspective on career advice than the one we present at 80,000 Hours — we take it seriously.

Holden disagrees with us on a few specifics, but it’s more than that: he prefers a different vibe when making career choices, especially early in one’s career.

While he might ultimately recommend similar jobs to those we recommend at 80,000 Hours, the reasons are often different.

At 80,000 Hours we often talk about ‘paths’ to working on what we currently think of as the most pressing problems in the world. That’s partially because people seem to prefer the most concrete advice possible.

But Holden thinks a problem with that kind of advice is that it’s hard to take actions based on it if your job options don’t match well with your plan, and it’s hard to get a reliable signal about whether you’re making the right choices.

How can you know you’ve chosen the right cause? How can you know the future job you’re aiming for will still be helpful to that cause? And what if you can’t get a job in this area at all?

Holden prefers to focus on ‘aptitudes’ that you can build in all sorts of different roles and cause areas, which can later be applied more directly.

Even if the current role or path doesn’t work out, or your career goes in wacky directions you’d never anticipated (like so many successful careers do), or you change your whole worldview — you’ll still have access to this aptitude.

So instead of trying to become a project manager at an effective altruism organisation, maybe you should just become great at project management. Instead of trying to become a researcher at a top AI lab, maybe you should just become great at digesting hard problems.

Who knows where these skills will end up being useful down the road?

Holden doesn’t think you should spend much time worrying about whether you’re having an impact in the first few years of your career — instead you should just focus on learning to kick ass at something, knowing that most of your impact is going to come decades into your career.

He thinks as long as you’ve gotten good at something, there will usually be a lot of ways that you can contribute to solving the biggest problems.

But that still leaves you needing to figure out which aptitude to focus on.

Holden suggests a couple of rules of thumb:

  1. “Do what you’ll succeed at“
  2. “Take your intuitions and feelings seriously“

80,000 Hours does recommend thinking about these types of things under the banner of career capital, but Holden’s version puts the development of these skills at the centre of your plan.

But Holden’s most important point, perhaps, is this:

Be very careful about following career advice at all.

He points out that a career is such a personal thing that it’s very easy for the advice-giver to be oblivious to important factors having to do with your personality and unique situation.

He thinks it’s pretty hard for anyone to really have justified empirical beliefs about career choice, and that you should be very hesitant to make a radically different decision than you would have otherwise based on what some person (or website!) tells you to do.

Instead, he hopes conversations like these serve as a way of prompting discussion and raising points that you can apply your own personal judgment to.

That’s why in the end he thinks people should look at their career decisions through his aptitude lens, the ‘80,000 Hours lens’, and ideally several other frameworks as well. Because any one perspective risks missing something important.

Holden and Rob also cover:

  • When not to do the thing you’re excited about
  • Ways to be helpful to longtermism outside of careers
  • ‘Money pits’ — cost-effective things that could absorb a lot of funding
  • Why finding a new cause area might be overrated
  • COVID and the biorisk portfolio
  • Whether the world has gotten better over thousands of years
  • Historical events that deserve more attention
  • Upcoming topics on Cold Takes
  • What Holden’s gotten wrong recently
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century

By and · Published August 19th, 2021 ·

Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It’s natural to think that if we’re trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it’s more likely than not to be sort of… dull.

But there’s also good reason to think that that is simply impossible. The idea that there’s a boring future that’s internally coherent is an illusion that comes from not inspecting those scenarios too closely.

At least that is what Holden Karnofsky — founder of charity evaluator GiveWell and foundation Open Philanthropy — argues in his new article series titled ‘The Most Important Century’. He hopes to lay out part of the worldview that’s driving the strategy and grantmaking of Open Philanthropy’s longtermist team, and encourage more people to join his efforts to positively shape humanity’s future.

The bind is this. For the first 99% of human history the global economy (initially mostly food production) grew very slowly: under 0.1% a year. But since the industrial revolution around 1800, growth has exploded to over 2% a year.

To us in 2020 that sounds perfectly sensible and the natural order of things. But Holden points out that in fact it’s not only unprecedented, it also can’t continue for long.

The power of compounding increases means that to sustain 2% growth for just 10,000 years, 5% as long as humanity has already existed, would require us to turn every individual atom in the galaxy into an economy as large as the Earth’s today. Not super likely.

So what are the options? First, maybe growth will slow and then stop. In that case we today live in the single miniscule slice in the history of life during which the world rapidly changed due to constant technological advances, before intelligent civilization permanently stagnated or even collapsed. What a wild time to be alive!

Alternatively, maybe growth will continue for thousands of years. In that case we are at the very beginning of what would necessarily have to become a stable galaxy-spanning civilization, harnessing the energy of entire stars among other feats of engineering. We would then stand among the first tiny sliver of all the quadrillions of intelligent beings who ever exist. What a wild time to be alive!

Isn’t there another option where the future feels less remarkable and our current moment not so special?

While the full version of the argument above has a number of caveats, the short answer is ‘not really’. We might be in a computer simulation and our galactic potential all an illusion, though that’s hardly any less weird. And maybe the most exciting events won’t happen for generations yet. But on a cosmic scale we’d still be living around the universe’s most remarkable time:

Graphic

Holden himself was very reluctant to buy into the idea that today’s civilization is in a strange and privileged position, but has ultimately concluded “all possible views about humanity’s future are wild”.

In the full series Holden goes on to elaborate on technologies that might contribute to making this the most important era in history, including computer systems that automate research into science and technology, the ability to create ‘digital people’ on computers, or transformative artificial intelligence itself.

All of these offer the potential for huge upsides and huge downsides, and Holden is at pains to say we should neither rejoice nor despair at the circumstance we find ourselves in. Rather they require sober forethought about how we want the future to play out, and how we might as a species be able to steer things in that direction.

If this sort of stuff sounds nuts to you, Holden gets it — he spent the first part of his career focused on straightforward ways of helping people in poor countries. Of course this sounds weird.

But he thinks that, if you keep pushing yourself to do even more good, it’s reasonable to go from:

“I care about all people — even if they live on the other side of the world”, to “I care about all people — even if they haven’t been born yet”, to “I care about all people — even if they’re digital”.

In the conversation Holden and Rob cover each part of the ‘Most Important Century’ series, including:

  • The case that we live in an incredibly important time
  • How achievable-seeming technology – in particular, mind uploading – could lead to unprecedented productivity, control of the environment, and more
  • How economic growth is faster than it can be for all that much longer
  • Forecasting transformative AI
  • And the implications of living in the most important century

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

By and · Published August 11th, 2021 ·

Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path.

Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken seriously. But Chris not only doesn’t have a PhD, but doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. After dropping out of university to help defend an acquaintance who was facing bogus criminal charges, Chris started independently working on machine learning research, and eventually got an internship at Google Brain, a leading AI research group.

In this interview — a follow-up to our episode on his technical work — we discuss what, if anything, can be learned from his unusual career path. Should more people pass on university and just throw themselves at solving a problem they care about? Or would it be foolhardy for others to try to copy a unique case like Chris’?

We also cover some of Chris’ personal passions over the years, including his attempts to reduce what he calls ‘research debt’ by starting a new academic journal called Distill, focused just on explaining existing results unusually clearly.

As Chris explains, as fields develop they accumulate huge bodies of knowledge that researchers are meant to be familiar with before they start contributing themselves. But the weight of that existing knowledge — and the need to keep up with what everyone else is doing — can become crushing. It can take someone until their 30s or later to earn their stripes, and sometimes a field will split in two just to make it possible for anyone to stay on top of it.

If that were unavoidable it would be one thing, but Chris thinks we’re nowhere near communicating existing knowledge as well as we could. Incrementally improving an explanation of a technical idea might take a single author weeks to do, but could go on to save a day for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of students, if it becomes the best option available.

Despite that, academics have little incentive to produce outstanding explanations of complex ideas that can speed up the education of everyone coming up in their field. And some even see the process of deciphering bad explanations as a desirable right of passage all should pass through, just as they did.

So Chris tried his hand at chipping away at this problem — but concluded the nature of the problem wasn’t quite what he originally thought. In this conversation we talk about that, as well as:

  • Why highly thoughtful cold emails can be surprisingly effective, but average cold emails do little
  • Strategies for growing as a researcher
  • Thinking about research as a market
  • How Chris thinks about writing outstanding explanations
  • The concept of ‘micromarriages’ and ‘microbestfriendships’
  • And much more.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks

By and · Published August 4th, 2021 ·

Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo of Tobey Maguire and the word ‘spider’ are related, solve the 60-year-old ‘protein folding problem’, diagnose some diseases, play romantic matchmaker, write solid computer code, and offer questionable legal advice.

Humanity made these amazing and ever-improving tools. So how do our creations work? In short: we don’t know.

Today’s guest, Chris Olah, finds this both absurd and unacceptable. Over the last ten years he has been a leader in the effort to unravel what’s really going on inside these black boxes. As part of that effort he helped create the famous DeepDream visualisations at Google Brain, reverse engineered the CLIP image classifier at OpenAI, and is now continuing his work at Anthropic, a new $100 million research company that tries to “co-develop the latest safety techniques alongside scaling of large ML models”.

Despite having a huge fan base thanks to his tweets and lay explanations of ML, today’s episode is the first long interview Chris has ever given. It features his personal take on what we’ve learned so far about what ML algorithms are doing, and what’s next for this research agenda at Anthropic.

His decade of work has borne substantial fruit, producing an approach for looking inside the mess of connections in a neural network and back out what functional role each piece is serving. Among other things, Chris and team found that every visual classifier seems to converge on a number of simple common elements in their early layers — elements so fundamental they may exist in our own visual cortex in some form.

They also found networks developing ‘multimodal neurones’ that would trigger in response to the presence of high-level concepts like ‘romance’, across both images and text, mimicking the famous ‘Halle Berry neuron’ from human neuroscience.

While reverse engineering how a mind works would make any top-ten list of the most valuable knowledge to pursue for its own sake, Chris’s work is also of urgent practical importance. Machine learning models are already being deployed in medicine, business, the military, and the justice system, in ever more powerful roles. The competitive pressure to put them into action as soon as they can turn a profit is great, and only getting greater.

But if we don’t know what these machines are doing, we can’t be confident they’ll continue to work the way we want as circumstances change. Before we hand an algorithm the proverbial nuclear codes, we should demand more assurance than “well, it’s always worked fine so far”.

But by peering inside neural networks and figuring out how to ‘read their minds’ we can potentially foresee future failures and prevent them before they happen. Artificial neural networks may even be a better way to study how our own minds work, given that, unlike a human brain, we can see everything that’s happening inside them — and having been posed similar challenges, there’s every reason to think evolution and ‘gradient descent’ often converge on similar solutions.

Among other things, Rob and Chris cover:

  • Why Chris thinks it’s necessary to work with the largest models
  • Whether you can generalise from visual to language models
  • What fundamental lessons we’ve learned about how neural networks (and perhaps humans) think
  • What it means that neural networks are learning high-level concepts like ‘superheroes’, mental health, and Australiana, and can identify these themes across both text and images
  • How interpretability research might help make AI safer to deploy, and Chris’ response to skeptics
  • Why there’s such a fuss about ‘scaling laws’ and what they say about future AI progress
  • What roles Anthropic is hiring for, and who would be a good fit for them

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

By and · Published July 28th, 2021 ·

If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could offer?

How about just not needing an email address?

According to today’s guest, Cal Newport — computer science professor and best-selling author of A World Without Email — it should seem obscene and absurd for a world-renowned vaccine researcher with decades of experience to spend a third of their time fielding requests from HR, building management, finance, and on and on. Yet with offices organised the way they are today, nothing could feel more natural.

But this isn’t just a problem at the elite level — it affects almost all of us. A typical U.S. office worker checks their email 80 times a day, or once every six minutes. Data analysis by RescueTime found that a third of users checked email or Slack every three minutes or more, averaged over a full work day.

Each time that happens our focus is broken, killing our momentum on the knowledge work we’re supposedly paid to do.

When we lament how much email and chat have reduced our focus, increased our anxiety and made our days a buzz of frenetic activity, we most naturally blame ‘weakness of will’. If only we had the discipline to check Slack and email once a day, all would be well — or so the story goes.

Cal believes that line of thinking fundamentally misunderstands how we got to a place where knowledge workers can rarely find more than five consecutive minutes to spend doing just one thing.

Since the Industrial Revolution, a combination of technology and better organization have allowed the manufacturing industry to produce a hundred-fold as much with the same number of people.

Cal says that by comparison, it’s not clear that specialised knowledge workers like scientists, authors, or senior managers are any more productive than they were 50 years ago. If the knowledge sector could achieve even a tiny fraction of what manufacturing has, and find a way to coordinate its work that raised productivity by just 1%, that would generate on the order of $100 billion globally each year.

On Cal’s account, those opportunities are staring us in the face. Modern factories operated by top firms are structured with painstaking care and two centuries of accumulated experience to ensure staff can get the greatest amount possible done.

By contrast, most knowledge work today operates with no deliberate structure at all. Instead of carefully constructed processes to get the most out of each person, we just hand out tasks and leave people to organise themselves organically in whatever way feels easiest to them.

Since the 1990s, when everyone got an email address and most lost their assistants, that lack of direction has led to what Cal calls the ‘hyperactive hive mind’: everyone sends emails and chats to everyone else, all throughout the day, whenever they need anything.

Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human switchboards, answering and forwarding dozens of emails on any and every topic to keep the system from seizing up.

Finding a time for four people to meet might mean an eight-email thread. Annoying enough! But each of those four has to keep checking in to make sure the thread is progressing, and answer any new questions that come up. So in aggregate those four might interrupt their train of thought and check their email 20, 30 or even 40 times in the process of coordinating a single meeting.

Cal points out that this is so normal we don’t even think of it as a way of organising work, but it is: it’s what happens when management does nothing to enable teams to decide on a better way of coordinating themselves. And if any individual tries to opt out and focus on one thing for an entire day, they’re throwing a wrench in the ‘hyperactive hive mind’, which explains why calls for individual discipline have done so little to fix the problem.

A few industries have made progress taming the ‘hyperactive hive mind’. Cal points to tech support ticketing systems, which throttle correspondence and keep engineers focused on one problem at a time until they can’t get any further, at which point that problem is parked and they’re given a single new problem to work on next.

He also points to ‘extreme programming’, a system in which two software engineers sit side-by-side in front of one computer and together write code to solve a specific problem for their entire work day. As they work, those software engineers have no email account and no phone number. All incoming and outgoing communication with the rest of the world is run through a dedicated liaison officer so they can maintain 100% focus. Usually after six hours of real actual work they need to go home and rest.

But on Cal’s telling, in this interview and in A World Without Email, this barely scratches the surface of the improvements that are possible within knowledge work. And reining in the hyperactive hive mind won’t just help people do higher quality work, it will free them from the 24/7 anxiety that there’s someone somewhere they haven’t gotten back to.

In this interview Cal and Rob cover that, as well as:

  • Is the hyperactive hive-mind really one of the world’s most pressing problems?
  • The historical origins of the ‘hyperactive hive-mind’
  • The harm caused by attention switching
  • Who’s working to solve the problem and how
  • Why it took more than a century to come up with the ‘assembly line’ method for factory organisation
  • Cal’s top productivity advice for high school students, university students, and early-career employees
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

By and · Published July 12th, 2021 ·

The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.

Today’s guest, Alexander Berger, leads Open Philanthropy’s ‘Global Health and Wellbeing’ programme, where he oversees around $175 million in grants each year, and ultimately aspires to disburse billions in the most impactful ways he and his team can identify.

This programme is the flagship effort representing one major effective altruist approach: try to improve the health and wellbeing of humans and animals that are alive today, in clearly identifiable ways, applying an especially analytical and empirical mindset.

The programme makes grants to tackle easily-prevented illnesses among the world’s poorest people, offer cash to people living in extreme poverty, prevent cruelty to billions of farm animals, advance biomedical science, and improve criminal justice and immigration policy in the United States.

Open Philanthropy’s researchers rely on empirical information to guide their decisions where it’s available, and where it’s not, they aim to maximise expected benefits to recipients through careful analysis of the gains different projects would offer and their relative likelihoods of success.

Job opportunities at Open Philanthropy

Alexander’s Global Health and Wellbeing team is hiring two new Program Officers to oversee work to reduce air pollution in south Asia — which hugely damages the health of hundreds of millions — and to improve foreign aid policy in rich countries, so that it does more to help the world’s poorest people improve their circumstances. They’re also seeking new generalist researchers.

Learn more about these and other vacancies here.

Disclaimer of conflict of interest: 80,000 Hours and our parent organisation, the Centre For Effective Altruism, have received substantial funding from Open Philanthropy.

This ‘global health and wellbeing’ approach — sometimes referred to as ‘neartermism’ — contrasts with another big school of thought in effective altruism, known as ‘longtermism’, which aims to direct the long-term future of humanity and its descendants in a positive direction. Longtermism bets that while it’s harder to figure out how to benefit future generations than people alive today, the total number of people who might live in the future is far greater than the number alive today, and this gain in scale more than offsets that lower tractability.

The debate between these two very different theories of how to best improve the world has been one of the most significant within effective altruist research since its inception. Alexander first joined the influential charity evaluator GiveWell in 2011, and since then has conducted research alongside top thinkers on global health and wellbeing and longtermism alike, ultimately deciding to dedicate his efforts to improving the world today in identifiable ways.

In this conversation Alexander advocates for that choice, explaining the case in favour of adopting the ‘global health and wellbeing’ mindset, while going through the arguments for the longtermist approach that he finds most and least convincing.

Rob and Alexander also tackle:

  • Why it should be legal to sell your kidney, and why Alexander donated his to a total stranger
  • Why it’s shockingly hard to find ways to give away large amounts of money that are more cost effective than distributing anti-malaria bed nets
  • How much you gain from working with tight feedback loops
  • Open Philanthropy’s biggest wins
  • Why Open Philanthropy engages in ‘worldview diversification’ by having both a global health and wellbeing programme and a longtermist programme as well
  • Whether funding science and political advocacy is a good way to have more social impact
  • Whether our effects on future generations are predictable or unforeseeable
  • What problems the global health and wellbeing team works to solve and why
  • Opportunities to work at Open Philanthropy

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

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#104 – Dr Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

By and · Published June 29th, 2021 ·

When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with something new.

How much death and destruction could we have avoided if we’d had a hero who could? That’s what the last Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber asked on the show back in March.

Today’s guest Pardis Sabeti is a professor at Harvard, fought Ebola on the ground in Africa during the 2014 outbreak, runs her own lab, co-founded a company that produces next-level testing, and is even the lead singer of a rock band. If anyone is going to be that hero in the next pandemic — it just might be her.

She is a co-author of the SENTINEL proposal, a practical system for detecting new diseases quickly, using an escalating series of three novel diagnostic techniques.

The first method, called SHERLOCK, uses CRISPR gene editing to detect familiar viruses in a simple, inexpensive filter paper test, using non-invasive samples.

Rapid diagnostic tests [are a] terrific technology, but usually it takes about six months to develop a new one because the proteins are a little more bespoke… Whereas the genome sequence, it’s just literally like a code, you just put it in and you immediately can target… You type it out and you have it going.

If SHERLOCK draws a blank, we escalate to the second step, CARMEN, an advanced version of SHERLOCK that uses microfluidics and CRISPR to simultaneously detect hundreds of viruses and viral strains. More expensive, but far more comprehensive.

Most infections all look the same — Lassa looks like Ebola, which looks like malaria, which looks like typhoid, and other things at varying stages. So you don’t want to have to know exactly what you’re looking for in a lot of cases; you want to do a broad differential that you test for.

If neither SHERLOCK nor CARMEN detects a known pathogen, it’s time to pull out the big gun: metagenomic sequencing. More expensive still, but sequencing all the DNA in a patient sample lets you identify and track every virus — known and unknown — in a sample.

Those are the kinds of technologies that we can have in the kinds of labs that we could have in every country on the planet, and even in a lot of regional centers. Then if something comes up and all the standard tests that you’ve run don’t know what it is, you can basically try to put it through.

If Pardis and her team succeeds, our future pandemic potential patient zero may:

  1. Go to the hospital with flu-like symptoms, and immediately be tested using SHERLOCK — which will come back negative
  2. Take the CARMEN test for a much broader range of illnesses — which will also come back negative
  3. Their sample will be sent for metagenomic sequencing, which will reveal that they’re carrying a new virus we’ll have to contend with
  4. At all levels, information will be recorded in a cloud-based data system that shares data in real time; the hospital will be alerted and told to quarantine the patient
  5. The world will be able to react weeks — or even months — faster, potentially saving millions of lives

It’s a wonderful vision, and one humanity is ready to test out. But there are all sorts of practical questions, such as:

  • How do you scale these technologies, including to remote and rural areas?
  • Will doctors everywhere be able to operate them?
  • Who will pay for it?
  • How do you maintain the public’s trust and protect against misuse of sequencing data?
  • How do you avoid drowning in the data the system produces?

In this conversation Pardis and Rob address all those questions, as well as:

  • Pardis’ history with trying to control emerging contagious diseases
  • The potential of mRNA vaccines
  • Other emerging technologies
  • How to best educate people about pandemics
  • The pros and cons of gain-of-function research
  • Turning mistakes into exercises you can learn from
  • Overcoming enormous life challenges
  • Why it’s so important to work with people you can laugh with
  • And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

Continue reading →