Podcast

#103 – Max Roser on building the world's first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

By and · Published June 21st, 2021 ·

History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor to launch a new webpage a few days sooner.

That last one is barely a joke — by our lights, people like today’s guest Max Roser should be viewed with similar admiration by COVID-19 historians.

Max runs Our World in Data, a small education nonprofit which began the pandemic with just six staff. But since last February his team has supplied essential COVID statistics to over 130 million users — among them BBC, the Financial Times, The New York Times, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF, Donald Trump, Tedros Adhanom, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, just to name a few.

An economist at Oxford University, Max Roser founded Our World in Data as a small side project in 2011 and has led it since, including through the wild ride of 2020. In today’s interview, Max explains how he and his team realized that if they didn’t start making COVID data accessible and easy to make sense of, it wasn’t clear when anyone would.

But Our World in Data wasn’t naturally set up to become the world’s go-to source for COVID updates. Up until then their specialty had been in-depth articles explaining century-length trends in metrics like life expectancy — to the point that their graphing software was only set up to present yearly data.

But the team eventually realized that the World Health Organization was publishing numbers that flatly contradicted themselves, most of the press was embarrassingly out of its depth, and countries were posting case data as images buried deep in their sites, where nobody would find them. Even worse, nobody was reporting or compiling how many tests different countries were doing, rendering all those case figures largely meaningless.

As a result, trying to make sense of the pandemic was a time-consuming nightmare. If you were leading a national COVID response, learning what other countries were doing and whether it was working would take weeks of study — and that meant, with the walls falling in around you, it simply wasn’t going to happen. Ministries of health around the world were flying blind.

Disbelief ultimately turned to determination, and the Our World in Data team committed to do whatever had to be done to fix the situation. Overnight their software was quickly redesigned to handle daily data, and for the next few months Max and colleagues like Edouard Mathieu and Hannah Ritchie did little but sleep and compile COVID data.

In this episode Max explains how Our World in Data went about filling a huge gap that never should have been there in the first place — and how they had to do it all again in December 2020 when, eleven months into the pandemic, there was still nobody else to compile global vaccination statistics.

We also talk about:

  • Our World in Data’s early struggles to get funding
  • Why government agencies are so bad at presenting data
  • Which agencies did a good job during the COVID pandemic (shout out to the European CDC)
  • How much impact Our World in Data has by helping people understand the world
  • How to deal with the unreliability of development statistics
  • Why research shouldn’t be published as a PDF
  • Why academia under-incentivises data collection
  • The history of war
  • And much more

Final note: We also want to acknowledge other groups that did great work collecting and presenting COVID-19 data early on during the pandemic, including the Financial Times, Johns Hopkins University (which produced the first case map), the European CDC (who compiled a lot of the data that Our World in Data relied on), the Human Mortality Database (who compiled figures on excess mortality), and no doubt many others.

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

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#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

By and · Published June 11th, 2021 ·

It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction was literally impossible.

Today’s guest Tom Moynihan, intellectual historian and author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, says that until the 18th century, almost everyone — including early atheists — couldn’t imagine that humanity or life could simply disappear because of an act of nature.

This is largely because of the prevalence of the ‘principle of plenitude’, which Tom defines as saying:

Whatever can happen will happen. In its stronger form it says whatever can happen will happen reliably and recurrently. And in its strongest form it says that all that can happen is happening right now. And that’s the way things will be forever.

This has the implication that if humanity ever disappeared for some reason, then it would have to reappear. So why would you ever worry about extinction?

Here are 4 more commonly held beliefs from generations past that Tom shares in the interview:

  • All regions of matter that can be populated will be populated: In other words, there are aliens on every planet, because it would be a massive waste of real estate if all of them were just inorganic masses, where nothing interesting was going on. This also led to the idea that if you dug deep into the Earth, you’d potentially find thriving societies.
  • Aliens were human-like, and shared the same values as us: they would have the same moral beliefs, and the same aesthetic beliefs. The idea that aliens might be very different from us only arrived in the 20th century.
  • Fossils were rocks that had gotten a bit too big for their britches and were trying to act like animals: they couldn’t actually move, so becoming an imprint of an animal was the next best thing.
  • All future generations were contained in miniature form, Russian-doll style, in the sperm of the first man: preformation was the idea that within the ovule or the sperm of an animal is contained its offspring in miniature form, and the French philosopher Malebranche said, well, if one is contained in the other one, then surely that goes on forever.

And here are another three that weren’t held widely, but were proposed by scholars and taken seriously:

  • Life preceded the existence of rocks: Living things, like germs or microorganisms, came first, and they extruded the earth.
  • No idea can be wrong: Nothing we can say about the world is wrong in a strong sense, because at some point in the future or the past, it has been true.
  • Maybe we were living before the Trojan War: Aristotle said that we might actually be living before Troy, because it — like every other event — will repeat at some future date. And he said that actually, the set of possibilities might be so narrow that it might be safer to say that we actually live before Troy.

But Tom tries to be magnanimous when faced with these incredibly misguided worldviews.

I think that something almost similar to scope neglect can happen, where we see the sheer extent of ignorance in the past and therefore think that is boundless. And this could lead you to think therefore our progress is also made insignificant within this boundless sea, but no, I think it’s structured. There are bounds to ignorance and we’re making progress, but within a space that’s potentially far bigger than we can currently think of.

In this nearly four-hour long interview, Tom and Rob cover all of these ideas, as well as:

  • How we know the ancients really believed such things
  • How we should respond to wacky old ideas
  • How we moved on from these theories
  • How future intellectual historians might view our beliefs today
  • The distinction between ‘apocalypse’ and ‘extinction’
  • The history of probability
  • Utopias and dystopias
  • Big ideas that haven’t flowed through into all relevant fields yet
  • Intellectual history as a possible high-impact career
  • 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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#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world

By and · Published May 27th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how do you actually do that?

Bob’s new ‘Apocalypse Aversion Project’ is focused on creating the necessary conditions for solving non-zero-sum global coordination problems, something most people are already on board with.

And in particular he thinks that might come from enough individuals “transcending the psychology of tribalism”. He doesn’t just mean rage and hatred and violence, he’s also talking about cognitive biases.

Bob makes the striking claim that if enough people in the U.S. had been able to combine perspective taking with mindfulness — the ability to notice and identify thoughts as they arise — then the U.S. might have even been able to avoid the invasion of Iraq.

Rob pushes back on how realistic this approach really is, asking questions like:

  • Haven’t people been trying to do this since the beginning of time?
  • Is there a really good novel angle that will move the needle and change how a lot of people think and behave?
  • Wouldn’t it be better to focus on a much narrower task, like getting more mindfulness and meditation and reflectiveness among the U.S. foreign policy elite?

But despite the differences in approaches, Bob has a lot of common ground with 80,000 Hours — and the result is a fun back-and-forth about the best ways to achieve shared goals.

This is a crossover episode, also appearing on The Wright Show, with Bob and Rob taking turns interviewing each other.

Bob starts by questioning Rob about effective altruism, and they go on to cover a bunch of other topics, such as:

  • Specific risks like climate change and new technologies
  • How to achieve social cohesion
  • The pros and cons of society-wide surveillance
  • How Rob got into effective altruism
  • And much more

If you’re interested to hear more of Bob’s interviews you can subscribe to The Wright Show anywhere you’re getting this one. You can also watch videos of this and all his other episodes on Bloggingheads.tv.

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

By and · Published May 19th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re in a hurry, we’ve extracted the key advice that Howie has to share in a section below.

Howie and Keiran basically treated it like a private conversation, with the understanding that it may be too sensitive to release. But, after getting some really positive feedback, they’ve decided to share it with the world.

Here are a few quotes from early reviewers:

I think there’s a big difference between admitting you have depression/seeing a psych and giving a warts-and-all account of a major depressive episode like Howie does in this episode… His description was relatable and really inspiring.

Someone who works on mental health issues said:

This episode is perhaps the most vivid and tangible example of what it is like to experience psychological distress that I’ve ever encountered. Even though the content of Howie and Keiran’s discussion was serious, I thought they both managed to converse about it in an approachable and not-overly-somber way.

And another reviewer said:

I found Howie’s reflections on what is actually going on in his head when he engages in negative self-talk to be considerably more illuminating than anything I’ve heard from my therapist.

We also hope that the episode will:

  1. Help people realise that they have a shot at making a difference in the future, even if they’re experiencing (or have experienced in the past) mental illness, self doubt, imposter syndrome, or other personal obstacles.

  2. Give insight into what it’s like in the head of one person with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome, including the specific thought patterns they experience on typical days and more extreme days. In addition to being interesting for its own sake, this might make it easier for people to understand the experiences of family members, friends, and colleagues — and know how to react more helpfully.

Several early listeners have even made specific behavioral changes due to listening to the episode — including people who generally have good mental health but were convinced it’s well worth the low cost of setting up a plan in case they have problems in the future.

So we think this episode will be valuable for:

  • People who have experienced mental health problems or might in future;
  • People who have had troubles with stress, anxiety, low mood, low self esteem, imposter syndrome and similar issues, even if their experience isn’t well described as ‘mental illness’;
  • People who have never experienced these problems but want to learn about what it’s like, so they can better relate to and assist family, friends or colleagues who do.

In other words, we think this episode could be worthwhile for almost everybody.

Just a heads up that this conversation gets pretty intense at times, and includes references to self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

If you don’t want to hear or read the most intense section, you can skip the chapter called ‘Disaster’. And if you’d rather avoid almost all of these references, you could skip straight to the chapter called ‘80,000 Hours’.

We’ve collected a large list of high quality resources for overcoming mental health problems in our links section below.

If you’re feeling suicidal or have thoughts of harming yourself right now, there are suicide hotlines at National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the U.S. (800-273-8255) and Samaritans in the U.K. (116 123). You may also want to find and save a number for a local service where possible.

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

By and · Published May 13th, 2021 ·

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

Today’s guest — Leah Garcés — was.

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

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

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

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

Craig let Leah openly film inside the chicken houses, and shared highly confidential documents about the antibiotics put into the feed. That led to a viral video, and a New York Times story. The villain of that video was Jim Perdue, CEO of one of the biggest meat companies in the world. They show him saying, “Farmers are happy. Chickens are happy. There’s a lot of space. They’re clean.” And then they show the grim reality.

For years, Perdue wouldn’t speak to Leah. But remarkably, when they actually met in person, she again managed to forge a meaningful relationship with a natural adversary. She was able to put aside her utter contempt for the chicken industry and see Craig and Jim as people, not cartoonish villains.

Leah believes that you need to be willing to sit down with anyone who has the power to solve a problem that you don’t — recognising them as human beings with a lifetime of complicated decisions behind their actions. And she stresses that finding or making a connection is really important. In the case of Jim Perdue, it was the fact they both had adopted children. Because of this, they were able to forget that they were supposed to be enemies in that moment, talk about their experience as parents, and build some trust.

The other lesson that Leah highlights is that you need to look for win-wins and start there, rather than starting with disagreements. With Craig Watts, instead of opening with “How do I end his job”, she thought, “How can I find him a better job?” If you find solutions where everybody wins, you don’t need to spend resources fighting the former enemy. They’ll come to you.

Typically animal activists are seen as coming into rural areas to take away jobs and choices — but MFA are trying to do the opposite. They want to create new opportunities, and give farmers a level of freedom they haven’t had since they first set foot on the factory farming debt treadmill.

It turns out that conditions in chicken houses are perfect for growing hemp or mushrooms, so Mercy For Animals have started their ‘Transfarmation project’ to help farmers like Craig escape from the prison of factory farming by converting their production from animals to plants. To convince farmers to leave behind a life of producing suffering, all you need to do is find them something better — which for many of them is almost anything else.

Leah and Rob also talk about:

  • Mercy for Animals’ overall strategy for ending factory farming sooner than later
  • Why conditions for farmers are so bad
  • The importance of building on past work
  • The benefits of creating a ranking and scoring companies against each other
  • Why we should drive up the price of factory farmed meat by any means necessary
  • The difficulty of enforcing corporate pledges
  • Her disagreements with others in the animal welfare movement
  • 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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#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism

By and · Published May 5th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

Which patient would you rather be?

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

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

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

One of Christian’s experiments found that when you ask people to imagine hypothetical scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences, they care about those experiences more — which suggests that our inability to affect the past is one reason why we feel mostly indifferent to it.

But he points out that if that was the main reason, then we should also be indifferent to inevitable future experiences — if you know for sure that something bad is going to happen to you tomorrow, you shouldn’t care about it. But if you found out you simply had to have a horribly painful operation tomorrow, it’s probably all you’d care about!

Another explanation for future bias is that we have this intuition that time is like a videotape, where the things that haven’t played yet are still on the way.

If your future experiences really are ahead of you rather than behind you, that makes it rational to care more about the future than the past. But Christian says that, even though he shares this intuition, it’s actually very hard to make the case for time having a direction.

It’s a live debate that’s playing out in the philosophy of time, as well as in physics. And Christian says that even if you could show that time had a direction, it would still be hard to explain why we should care more about the past than the future — at least in a way that doesn’t just sound like “Well, the past is in the past and the future is in the future”.

For Christian, there are two big practical implications of these past, present, and future ethical comparison cases.

The first is for altruists: If we care about whether current people’s goals are realised, then maybe we should care about the realisation of people’s past goals, including the goals of people who are now dead.

The second is more personal: If we can’t actually justify caring more about the future than the past, should we really worry about death any more than we worry about all the years we spent not existing before we were born?

Christian and Rob also cover several other big topics, including:

  • A possible solution to moral fanaticism, where you can end up preferring options that give you only a very tiny chance of an astronomically good outcome over options that give you certainty of a very good outcome
  • How much of humanity’s resources we should spend on improving the long-term future
  • How large the expected value of the continued existence of Earth-originating civilization might be
  • How we should respond to uncertainty about the state of the world
  • The state of global priorities research
  • 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

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

By and · Published April 20th, 2021 ·

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

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

And while norms were indeed shattered, laws were upheld.

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

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

And what happens if current laws change?

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

In this interview Mike covers what he thinks are the three most important levers to push on to preserve liberal democracy in the United States:

  1. Reforming the political system, by e.g. introducing new voting methods
  2. Revitalizing local journalism
  3. Reducing partisan hatred within the United States

Mike says that American democracy, like democracy elsewhere in the world, is not an inevitability. The U.S. has institutions that are really important for the functioning of democracy, but they don’t automatically protect themselves — they need people to stand up and protect them.

In addition to the changes listed above, Mike also thinks that we need to harden more norms into laws, such that individuals have fewer opportunities to undermine the system.

And inasmuch as laws provided the foundation for the likes of Raffensperger, Kemp, and Pence to exhibit political courage, if we can succeed in creating and maintaining the right laws — we may see many others following their lead.

As Founding Father James Madison put it: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Mike and Rob also talk about:

  • What sorts of terrible scenarios we should actually be worried about, i.e. the difference between being overly alarmist and properly alarmist
  • How to reduce perverse incentives for political actors, including those to overturn election results
  • The best opportunities for donations in this space
  • 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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#96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media

By and · Published April 6th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

She also points out that the direct impact of fake videos is just one side of the issue. In a world where all media can be faked, everything can be denied.

Consider Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape. If that happened in 2020 instead of 2016, he would have almost certainly claimed it was fake — and that claim wouldn’t be obviously ridiculous. Malignant politicians everywhere could plausibly deny footage of them receiving a bribe, or ordering a massacre. What happens if in every criminal trial, a suspect caught on camera can just look at the jury and say “that video is fake”?

Nina says that undeniably, this technology is going to give bad actors a lot of scope for not having accountability for their actions.

As we try to inoculate people against being tricked by synthetic media, we risk corroding their trust in all authentic media too. And Nina asks: If you can’t agree on any set of objective facts or norms on which to start your debate, how on earth do you even run a society?

Nina and Rob also talk about a bunch of other topics, including:

  • The history of disinformation, and groups who sow disinformation professionally
  • How deepfake pornography is used to attack and silence women activitists
  • The key differences between how this technology interacts with liberal democracies vs. authoritarian regimes
  • Whether we should make it illegal to make a deepfake of someone without their permission
  • And the coolest positive uses of this technology

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

By and · Published March 26th, 2021 ·

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

100 years? 50 years? 20?

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

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

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

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

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

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

These ‘streaks’ in clouds are already created by ships because the particulates from their diesel engines inadvertently make clouds a bit brighter.

Kelly says that scientists estimate that we’re already lowering the global temperature this way by 0.5–1.1ºC, without even intending to.

While fossil fuel particulates are terrible for human health, they think we could replicate this effect by simply spraying sea water up into clouds. But so far there hasn’t been funding to measure how much temperature change you get for a given amount of spray.

And we won’t want to dive into these methods head first because the atmosphere is a complex system we can’t yet properly model, and there are many things to check first. For instance, chemicals that reflect light from the upper atmosphere might totally change wind patterns in the stratosphere. Or they might not — for all the discussion of global warming the climate is surprisingly understudied.

The public tends to be skeptical of climate interventions, otherwise known as geoengineering, so in this episode we cover a range of possible objections, such as:

  • It being riskier than doing nothing
  • That it will inevitably be dangerously political
  • And the risk of the ‘double catastrophe’, where a pandemic stops our climate interventions and temperatures sky-rocket at the worst time.

Kelly and Rob also talk about:

  • The many climate interventions that are already happening
  • The most promising ideas in the field
  • And whether people would be more accepting if we found ways to intervene that had nothing to do with making the world a better place.

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

By and · Published March 20th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

On top of this, the status quo always has a psychological advantage. If something was thought important by previous generations, we naturally assume it must be important today as well — think of how students continued learning ancient Greek long after it had ceased to be useful even in most scholarly careers.

All of this generates a strong ‘path dependence’ that can lock the media in to covering less important topics despite having no intention to do so.

According to Ezra, the hardest thing to do in journalism — as the leader of a publication, or even to some degree just as a writer — is to maintain your own sense of what’s important, and not just be swept along in the tide of what “the industry / the narrative / the conversation has decided is important.”

One reason Ezra created the Future Perfect vertical at Vox is that as he began to learn about effective altruism, he thought: “This is a framework for thinking about importance that could offer a different lens that we could use in journalism. It could help us order things differently.”

Ezra says there is an audience for the stuff that we’d consider most important here at 80,000 Hours. It’s broadly believed that nobody will read articles on animal suffering, but Ezra says that his experience at Vox shows these stories actually do really well — and that many of the things that the effective altruist community cares a lot about are “…like catnip for readers.”

Ezra’s bottom line for fellow journalists is that if something important is happening in the world and you can’t make the audience interested in it, that is your failure — never the audience’s failure.

But is that really true? In today’s episode we explore that claim, as well as:

  • How many hours of news the average person should consume
  • Where the progressive movement is failing to live up to its values
  • Why Ezra thinks ‘price gouging’ is a bad idea
  • Where the FDA has failed on rapid at-home testing for COVID-19
  • Whether we should be more worried about tail-risk scenarios
  • And his biggest critiques of the effective altruism community

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

By and · Published March 12th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the world Andy envisions, each morning before you brush your teeth you also breathe into a tube. Your sequencer can tell you if you have any of 300 known pathogens, while simultaneously scanning for any unknown viruses. It’s hooked up to your WiFi and reports into a public health surveillance system, which can check to see whether any novel DNA sequences are being passed from person to person. New contagious diseases can be detected and investigated within days — long before they run out of control.

The second major breakthrough comes from mRNA vaccines, which are today being used to end the COVID pandemic. The wonder of mRNA vaccines is that they can instruct our cells to make any random protein we choose and trigger a protective immune response from the body.

Until now it has taken a long time to invent and test any new vaccine, and there was then a laborious process of scaling up the equipment necessary to manufacture it. That leaves a new disease or bioweapon months or years to wreak havoc.

But using the sequencing technology above, we can quickly get the genetic codes that correspond to the surface proteins of any new pathogen, and switch them into the mRNA vaccines we’re already making. Inventing a new vaccine would become less like manufacturing a new iPhone and more like printing a new book — you use the same printing press and just change the words.

So long as we maintained enough capacity to manufacture and deliver mRNA vaccines, a whole country could in principle be vaccinated against a new disease in months.

Together these technologies could make advanced bioweapons a threat of the past. And in the process humanity’s oldest and deadliest enemy — contagious disease — could be brought under control like never before.

Andy has always been pretty open and honest, but his retirement last year has allowed him to stop worrying about being seen to speak for the Department of Defense, or for the president of the United States – and so we were also able to get his forthright views on a bunch of interesting other topics, such as:

  • The chances that COVID-19 escaped from a research facility
  • Whether a US president can really truly launch nuclear weapons unilaterally
  • What he thinks should be the top priorities for the Biden administration
  • If Andy was 18 and starting his career over again today, what would his plan be?
  • The time he and colleagues found 600kg of unsecured, highly enriched uranium sitting around in a barely secured facility in Kazakhstan, and eventually transported it to the United States
  • 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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#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem

By and · Published March 5th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

We also cover:

  • How reinforcement learning actually works, and some of its key achievements and failures
  • How a lack of curiosity can cause AIs to fail to be able to do basic things
  • The pitfalls of getting AI to imitate how we ourselves behave
  • The benefits of getting AI to infer what we must be trying to achieve
  • Why it’s good for agents to be uncertain about what they’re doing
  • Why Brian isn’t that worried about explicit deception
  • The interviewees Brian most agrees with, and most disagrees with
  • Developments since Brian finished the manuscript
  • The effective altruism and AI safety communities
  • 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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#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened

By and · Published February 15th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

Some of those include:

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

We also cover:

  • Switzerland’s ballot measure on eliminating factory farming
  • What a Biden administration could mean for reducing animal suffering
  • How chicken is cheaper than peanuts
  • The biggest recent wins for farmed animals
  • Things that haven’t gone to plan in animal advocacy
  • Political opportunities for farmed animal advocates in Europe
  • How the US is behind Brazil and Israel on animal welfare standards
  • The value of increasing media coverage of factory farming
  • The state of the animal welfare movement
  • And much more

If you’d like an introduction to the nature of the problem and why Lewis is working on it, in addition to our 2017 interview with Lewis, you could check out this 2013 cause report from 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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#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

By and · Published January 19th, 2021 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ajeya thinks that for that notion to make sense, there needs to be a good chance we can settle other planets and solar systems and build a society that’s both very large relative to what’s possible on Earth and, by virtue of being so spread out, able to protect itself from extinction for a very long time.

But imagine that humanity has two possible futures ahead of it: Either we’re going to have a huge future like that, in which trillions of people ultimately exist, or we’re going to wipe ourselves out quite soon, thereby ensuring that only around 100 billion people ever get to live.

If there are eventually going to be 1,000 trillion humans, what should we think of the fact that we seemingly find ourselves so early in history? Being among the first 100 billion humans, as we are, is equivalent to walking outside and seeing a three on your box. Suspicious! If the future will have many trillions of people, the odds of us appearing so strangely early are very low indeed.

If we accept the analogy, maybe we can be confident that humanity is at a high risk of extinction based on this so-called ‘doomsday argument‘ alone.

If that’s true, maybe we should put more of our resources into avoiding apparent extinction threats like nuclear war and pandemics. But on the other hand, maybe the argument shows we’re incredibly unlikely to achieve a long and stable future no matter what we do, and we should forget the long term and just focus on the here and now instead.

There are many critics of this theoretical ‘doomsday argument’, and it may be the case that it logically doesn’t work. This is why Ajeya spent time investigating it, with the goal of ultimately making better philanthropic grants.

In this conversation, Ajeya and Rob discuss both the doomsday argument and the challenge Open Phil faces striking a balance between taking big ideas seriously, and not going all in on philosophical arguments that may turn out to be barking up the wrong tree entirely.

They also discuss:

  • Which worldviews Open Phil finds most plausible, and how it balances them
  • Which worldviews Ajeya doesn’t embrace but almost does
  • How hard it is to get to other solar systems
  • The famous ‘simulation argument’
  • When transformative AI might actually arrive
  • The biggest challenges involved in working on big research reports
  • What it’s like working at Open Phil
  • 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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#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems & layers of defense against potential global catastrophes

By , and · Published December 16th, 2020 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owen thinks one of the most useful things about the two-year programme is being around other people — other RSP participants, as well as other researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute — who are trying to think seriously about where our civilisation is headed and how to have a positive impact on this trajectory.

Instead of being isolated in a PhD, you’re surrounded by folks with similar goals who can push back on your ideas and point out where you’re making mistakes. Saving years not pursuing an unproductive path could mean that you will ultimately have a much bigger impact with your career.

RSP applications are set to open in the Spring of 2021 — but Owen thinks it’s helpful for people to think about it in advance.

In today’s episode, Arden and Owen mostly talk about Owen’s own research. They cover:

  • Extinction risk classification and reduction strategies
  • Preventing small disasters from becoming large disasters
  • How likely we are to go from being in a collapsed state to going extinct
  • What most people should do if longtermism is true
  • Advice for mathematically-minded people
  • 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
Transcript: Zakee Ulhaq

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

By and · Published December 3rd, 2020 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tristan and Rob provide a thorough exploration of the merits of possible concrete solutions – something The Social Dilemma didn’t really address.

Given that these companies are mostly trying to design their products in the way that makes them the most money, how can we get that incentive to align with what’s in our interests as users and citizens?

One way is to encourage a shift to a subscription model. Presumably, that would get Facebook’s engineers thinking more about how to make users truly happy, and less about how to make advertisers happy.

One claim in The Social Dilemma is that the machine learning algorithms on these sites try to shift what you believe and what you enjoy in order to make it easier to predict what content recommendations will keep you on the site.

But if you paid a yearly fee to Facebook in lieu of seeing ads, their incentive would shift towards making you as satisfied as possible with their service — even if that meant using it for five minutes a day rather than 50.

One possibility is for Congress to say: it’s unacceptable for large social media platforms to influence the behaviour of users through hyper-targeted advertising. Once you reach a certain size, you are required to shift over into a subscription model.

That runs into the problem that some people would be able to afford a subscription and others would not. But Tristan points out that during COVID, US electricity companies weren’t allowed to disconnect you even if you were behind on your bills. Maybe we can find a way to classify social media as an ‘essential service’ and subsidize a basic version for everyone.

Of course, getting governments more involved in social media could itself be dangerous. Politicians aren’t experts in internet services, and could simply mismanage them — and they have their own perverse motivation as well: shift communication technology in ways that will advance their political views.

Another way to shift the incentives is to make it hard for social media companies to hire the very best people unless they act in the interests of society at large. There’s already been some success here — as people got more concerned about the negative effects of social media, Facebook had to raise salaries for new hires to attract the talent they wanted.

But Tristan asks us to consider what would happen if everyone who’s offered a role by Facebook didn’t just refuse to take the job, but instead took the interview in order to ask them directly, “what are you doing to fix your core business model?”

Engineers can ‘vote with their feet’, refusing to build services that don’t put the interests of users front and centre. Tristan says that if governments are unable, unwilling, or too untrustworthy to set up healthy incentives, we might need a makeshift solution like this.

Despite all the negatives, Tristan doesn’t want us to abandon the technologies he’s concerned about. He asks us to imagine a social media environment designed to regularly bring our attention back to what each of us can do to improve our lives and the world.

Just as we can focus on the positives of nuclear power while remaining vigilant about the threat of nuclear weapons, we could embrace social media and recommendation algorithms as the largest mass-coordination engine we’ve ever had — tools that could educate and organise people better than anything that has come before.

The tricky and open question is how to get there — Rob and Tristan agree that a lot more needs to be done to develop a reform agenda that has some chance of actually happening, and that generates as few unforeseen downsides as possible. Rob and Tristan also discuss:

  • Justified concerns vs. moral panics
  • The effect of social media on US politics
  • Facebook’s influence on developing countries
  • Win-win policy proposals
  • Big wins over the last 5 or 10 years
  • Tips for individuals
  • 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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Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (80k team chat #4)

By , , and · Published November 12th, 2020 ·

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

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

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

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

The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey just opened. If you’re involved with the effective altruism community, or sympathetic to its ideas, it’s a great thing to fill out.

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

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: Zakee Ulhaq.

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

By and · Published November 3rd, 2020 ·

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

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

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

These include:

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

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

While we do disagree on a range of things — such as whether it’s possible to add up wellbeing across different people, and whether it’s more effective to help strangers than people you know — I make the case that some of these worries are founded on common misunderstandings about effective altruism, or at least misunderstandings of what we believe here at 80,000 Hours.

We primarily care about making the world a better place over thousands or even millions of years — and we wouldn’t dream of claiming that we could accurately measure the effects of our actions on that timescale.

I’m more skeptical of medicine and empirical social science than most people, though not quite as skeptical as Russ (check out this quiz I made where you can guess which academic findings will replicate, and which won’t).

And while I do think that people should occasionally take jobs they dislike in order to have a social impact, those situations seem pretty few and far between.

But Russ and I disagree about how much we really disagree. In addition to all the above we also discuss:

  • How to decide whether to have kids
  • Was the case for deworming children oversold?
  • Whether it would be better for countries around the world to be better coordinated

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: Zakee Ulhaq.

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

By , and · Published October 21st, 2020 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those wanting to have children in order to give them the pleasure of a good life would in some sense be mistaken. And if humanity stopped bothering to have kids and just gradually died out we would have no particular reason to be concerned.

Furthermore it might mean we should deprioritise issues that primarily affect future generations, like climate change or the risk of humanity accidentally wiping itself out.

This is our second episode with Professor Greaves. The first one was a big hit, so we thought we’d come back and dive into even more complex ethical issues.

We also discuss:

  • The case for different types of ‘strong longtermism’ — the idea that we ought morally to try to make the very long run future go as well as possible
  • What it means for us to be ‘clueless’ about the consequences of our actions
  • Moral uncertainty — what we should do when we don’t know which moral theory is correct
  • Whether we should take a bet on a really small probability of a really great outcome
  • The field of global priorities research at the Global Priorities Institute and beyond

Interested in applying this thinking to your career?

If you found this interesting, and are thinking through how considerations like these might affect your career choices, our team might be able to speak with you one-on-one. We can help you consider your options, make connections with others working on similar issues, and possibly even help you find jobs or funding opportunities.

Apply to speak with our team

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: Zakee Ulhaq.

Continue reading →

Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it (80k team chat #3)

By , , and · Published September 21st, 2020 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Zakee Ulhaq.

Continue reading →