Podcast

#139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

By and · Published October 28th, 2022

A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play?

The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value‘ — in which you multiply probabilities by the value of each outcome and then sum them up — says your expected earnings are infinite. You have a 50% chance of winning $2, for ‘0.5 * $2 = $1’ in expected earnings. A 25% chance of winning $4, for ‘0.25 * $4 = $1’ in expected earnings, and on and on. A never-ending series of $1s added together comes to infinity. And that’s despite the fact that you know with certainty you can only ever win a finite amount!

Today’s guest — philosopher Alan Hájek of the Australian National University — thinks of much of philosophy as “the demolition of common sense followed by damage control” and is an expert on paradoxes related to probability and decision-making rules like “maximise expected value.”

The problem described above, known as the St. Petersburg paradox, has been a staple of the field since the 18th century, with many proposed solutions. In the interview, Alan explains how very natural attempts to resolve the paradox — such as factoring in the low likelihood that the casino can pay out very large sums, or the fact that money becomes less and less valuable the more of it you already have — fail to work as hoped.

We might reject the setup as a hypothetical that could never exist in the real world, and therefore of mere intellectual curiosity. But Alan doesn’t find that objection persuasive. If expected value fails in extreme cases, that should make us worry that something could be rotten at the heart of the standard procedure we use to make decisions in government, business, and nonprofits.

These issues regularly show up in 80,000 Hours’ efforts to try to find the best ways to improve the world, as the best approach will arguably involve long-shot attempts to do very large amounts of good.

Consider which is better: saving one life for sure, or three lives with 50% probability? Expected value says the second, which will probably strike you as reasonable enough. But what if we repeat this process and evaluate the chance to save nine lives with 25% probability, or 27 lives with 12.5% probability, or after 17 more iterations, 3,486,784,401 lives with a 0.00000009% chance. Expected value says this final offer is better than the others — 1,000 times better, in fact.

Insisting that people give up a sure thing in favour of a vanishingly low chance of a very large impact strikes some people as peculiar or even fanatical. But one of Alan’s PhD students, Hayden Wilkinson, discovered that rejecting expected value on this basis requires you to swallow even more bitter pills, like giving up on the idea that if A is better than B, and B is better than C, then A is also better than C.

Ultimately Alan leans towards the view that our best choice is to “bite the bullet” and stick with expected value, even with its sometimes counterintuitive implications. Where we want to do damage control, we’re better off looking for ways our probability estimates might be wrong.

In today’s conversation, Alan and Rob explore these issues and many others:

  • Simple rules of thumb for having philosophical insights
  • A key flaw that hid in Pascal’s wager from the very beginning
  • Whether we have to simply ignore infinities because they mess everything up
  • What fundamentally is ‘probability’?
  • Some of the many reasons ‘frequentism’ doesn’t work as an account of probability
  • Why the standard account of counterfactuals in philosophy is deeply flawed
  • And why counterfactuals present a fatal problem for one sort of consequentialism

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 and Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter

By and · Published September 30th, 2022

What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more.

The question is a classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it’s hardly just of academic interest. The issue of what (if anything) is intrinsically valuable bears on every action we take, whether we’re looking to improve our own lives, or to help others. The wrong answer might lead us to the wrong project and render our efforts to improve the world entirely ineffective.

Today’s guest, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette — philosopher and author of The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness — wants to resuscitate an answer to this question that is as old as philosophy itself.

That idea, in a nutshell, is that there is only one thing of true intrinsic value: positive feelings and sensations. And similarly, there is only one thing that is intrinsically of negative value: suffering, pain, and other unpleasant sensations.

Lots of other things are valuable too: friendship, fairness, loyalty, integrity, wealth, patience, houses, and so on. But they are only instrumentally valuable — that is to say, they’re valuable as means to the end of ensuring that all conscious beings experience more pleasure and other positive sensations, and less suffering.

As Sharon notes, from Athens in 400 BC to Britain in 1850, the idea that only subjective experiences can be good or bad in themselves — a position known as ‘philosophical hedonism’ — has been one of the most enduringly popular ideas in ethics.

And few will be taken aback by the notion that, all else equal, more pleasure is good and less suffering is bad. But can they really be the only intrinsically valuable things?

Over the 20th century, philosophical hedonism became increasingly controversial in the face of some seemingly very counterintuitive implications. For this reason the famous philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel called The Feeling of Value “a radical and important philosophical contribution.”

So what convinces Sharon that philosophical hedonism deserves another go?

Stepping back for a moment, any answer to the question “What has intrinsic value?” faces a serious challenge: “How do we know?” It’s far from clear how something having intrinsic value can cause us to believe that it has intrinsic value. And if there’s no causal or rational connection between something being valuable and our believing that it has value, we could only get the right answer by some extraordinary coincidence. You may feel it’s intrinsically valuable to treat people fairly, but maybe there’s just no reason to trust that intuition.

Since the 1700s, many philosophers working on so-called ‘metaethics’ — that is, the study of what ethical claims are and how we could know if they’re true — have despaired of us ever making sense of or identifying the location of ‘objective’ or ‘intrinsic’ value. They conclude that when we say things are ‘good,’ we aren’t really saying anything about their nature, but rather just expressing our own attitudes, or intentions, or something else.

Sharon disagrees. She says the answer to all this has been right under our nose all along.

We have a concept of value because of our experiences of positive sensations — sensations that immediately indicate to us that they are valuable and that if someone could create more of them, they ought to do so. Similarly, we have a concept of badness because of our experience of suffering — sensations that scream to us that if suffering were all there were, it would be a bad thing.

How do we know that pleasure is valuable, and that suffering is the opposite of valuable? Directly!

While I might be mistaken that a painting I’m looking at is in real life as it appears to me, I can’t be mistaken about the nature of my perception of it. If it looks red to me, it may or may not be red, but it’s definitely the case that I am perceiving redness. Similarly, while I might be mistaken that a painting is intrinsically valuable, I can’t be mistaken about the pleasurable sensations I’m feeling when I look at it, and the fact that among other qualities those sensations have the property of goodness.

While intuitive on some level, this arguably implies some very strange things. Most famously, the philosopher Robert Nozick challenged it with the idea of an ‘experience machine’: if you could enter into a simulated world and enjoy a life far more pleasurable than the one you experience now, should you do so, even if it would mean none of your accomplishments or relationships would be ‘real’? Nozick and many of his colleagues thought not.

The idea has also been challenged for failing to value human freedom and autonomy for its own sake. Would it really be OK to kill one person to use their organs to save the lives of five others, if doing so would generate more pleasure and less suffering? Few believe so.

In today’s interview, Sharon explains the case for a theory of value grounded in subjective experiences, and why she believes these counterarguments are misguided. A philosophical hedonist shouldn’t get in an experience machine, nor override an individual’s autonomy, except in situations so different from the classic thought experiments that it no longer seems strange they would do so.

Host Rob Wiblin and Sharon cover all that, as well as:

  • The essential need to disentangle intrinsic, instrumental, and other sorts of value
  • Why Sharon’s arguments lead to hedonistic utilitarianism rather than hedonistic egoism (in which we only care about our own feelings)
  • How do people react to the ‘experience machine’ thought experiment when surveyed?
  • Why hedonism recommends often thinking and acting as though it were false
  • Whether it’s crazy to think that relationships are only useful because of their effects on our subjective experiences
  • Whether it will ever be possible to eliminate pain, and whether doing so would be desirable
  • If we didn’t have positive or negative experiences, whether that would cause us to simply never talk about goodness and badness
  • Whether the plausibility of hedonism is affected by our theory of mind
  • 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: Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists

By and · Published September 8th, 2022

Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to ‘do the most good.’ Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to ‘produce the greatest good for the greatest number.’ It’s clear enough why utilitarians should be interested in the project of effective altruism. But what about the many people who reject utilitarianism?

Today’s guest, Andreas Mogensen — senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute — does reject utilitarianism, but as he explains, this does little to dampen his enthusiasm for effective altruism.

Andreas leans towards ‘deontological’ or rule-based theories of ethics, rather than ‘consequentialist’ theories like utilitarianism which look exclusively at the effects of a person’s actions.

Like most people involved in effective altruism, he parts ways with utilitarianism in rejecting its maximal level of demandingness, the idea that the ends justify the means, and the notion that the only moral reason for action is to benefit everyone in the world considered impartially.

However, Andreas believes any plausible theory of morality must give some weight to the harms and benefits we provide to other people. If we can improve a stranger’s wellbeing enormously at negligible cost to ourselves and without violating any other moral prohibition, that must be at minimum a praiseworthy thing to do.

In a world as full of preventable suffering as our own, this simple ‘principle of beneficence’ is probably the only premise one needs to grant for the effective altruist project of identifying the most impactful ways to help others to be of great moral interest and importance.

As an illustrative example Andreas refers to the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of one’s income to the most impactful charities available, a pledge he took in 2009. Many effective altruism enthusiasts have taken such a pledge, while others spend their careers trying to figure out the most cost-effective places pledgers can give, where they’ll get the biggest ‘bang for buck’.

For someone living in a world as unequal as our own, this pledge at a very minimum gives an upper-middle class person in a rich country the chance to transfer money to someone living on about 1% as much as they do. The benefit an extremely poor recipient receives from the money is likely far more than the donor could get spending it on themselves.

What arguments could a non-utilitarian moral theory mount against such giving?

Perhaps it could interfere with the achievement of other important moral goals? In response to this Andreas notes that alleviating the suffering of people in severe poverty is an important goal that should compete with alternatives. And furthermore, giving 10% is not so much that it likely disrupts one’s ability to, for instance, care for oneself or one’s family, or participate in domestic politics.

Perhaps it involves the violation of important moral prohibitions, such as those on stealing or lying? In response Andreas points out that the activities advocated by effective altruism researchers almost never violate such prohibitions — and if a few do, one can simply rule out those options and choose among the rest.

Many approaches to morality will say it’s permissible not to give away 10% of your income to help others as effectively as is possible. But if they will almost all regard it as praiseworthy to benefit others without giving up something else of equivalent moral value, then Andreas argues they should be enthusiastic about effective altruism as an intellectual and practical project nonetheless.

In this conversation, Andreas and Rob discuss how robust the above line of argument is, and also cover:

  • Should we treat philosophical thought experiments that feature very large numbers with great suspicion?
  • If we had to allow someone to die to avoid preventing the football World Cup final from being broadcast to the world, is that permissible or not? If not, what might that imply?
  • What might a virtue ethicist regard as ‘doing the most good’?
  • If a deontological theory of morality parted ways with common effective altruist practices, how would that likely be?
  • If we can explain how we came to hold a view on a moral issue by referring to evolutionary selective pressures, should we disbelieve that view?

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 and Beppe Rådvik
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future

By and · Published August 15th, 2022

  1. People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration.
  2. The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good.
  3. We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exist, and how good or bad their lives are.
  4. So trying to make the world better for future generations is a key priority of our time.

This is the simple four-step argument for ‘longtermism’ put forward in What We Owe The Future, the latest book from today’s guest — University of Oxford philosopher and cofounder of the effective altruism community, Will MacAskill.

From one point of view this idea is common sense. We work on breakthroughs to treat cancer or end use of fossil fuels not just for people alive today, but because we hope such scientific advances will help our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as well.

Some who take this longtermist idea seriously work to develop broad-spectrum vaccines they hope will safeguard humanity against the sorts of extremely deadly pandemics that could permanently throw civilisation off track — the sort of project few could argue is not worthwhile.

But Will is upfront that longtermism is also counterintuitive. To start with, he’s willing to contemplate timescales far beyond what’s typically discussed:

If we last as long as a typical mammal species, that’s another 700,000 years. If we last until the Earth is no longer habitable, that’s hundreds of millions of years. If we manage one day to take to the stars and build a civilisation there, we could live for hundreds of trillions of years. […] Future people [could] outnumber us a thousand or a million or a trillion to one.

A natural objection to thinking millions of years ahead is that it’s hard enough to take actions that have positive effects that persist for hundreds of years, let alone “indefinitely.” It doesn’t matter how important something might be if you can’t predictably change it.

This is one reason, among others, that Will was initially sceptical of longtermism and took years to come around. He preferred to focus on ending poverty and preventable diseases in ways he could directly see were working.

But over seven years he gradually changed his mind, and in What We Owe The Future, Will argues that in fact there are clear ways we might act now that could benefit not just a few but all future generations.

He highlights two effects that could be very enduring: “…reducing risks of extinction of human beings or of the collapse of civilisation, and ensuring that the values and ideas that guide future society are better ones rather than worse.”

The idea that preventing human extinction would have long-lasting impacts is pretty intuitive. If we entirely disappear, we aren’t coming back.

But the idea that we can shape human values — not just for our age, but for all ages — is a surprising one that Will has come to more recently.

In the book, he argues that what people value is far more fragile and historically contingent than it might first seem. For instance, today it feels like the abolition of slavery was an inevitable part of the arc of history. But Will lays out that the best research on the topic suggests otherwise.

For thousands of years, almost everyone — from philosophers to slaves themselves — regarded slavery as acceptable in principle. At the time the British Empire ended its participation in the slave trade, the industry was booming and earning enormous profits. It’s estimated that abolition cost Britain 2% of its GDP for 50 years.

So why did it happen? The global abolition movement seems to have originated within the peculiar culture of the Quakers, who were the first to argue slavery was unacceptable in all cases and campaign for its elimination, gradually convincing those around them with both Enlightenment and Christian arguments. If a few such moral pioneers had fallen off their horses at the wrong time, maybe the abolition movement never would have gotten off the ground and slavery would remain widespread today.

If moral progress really is so contingent, and bad ideas can persist almost without end, it raises the stakes for moral debate today. If we don’t eliminate a bad practice now, it may be with us forever. In today’s in-depth conversation, we discuss the possibility of a harmful moral ‘lock-in’ as well as:

  • How Will was eventually won over to longtermism
  • The three best lines of argument against longtermism
  • How to avoid moral fanaticism
  • Which technologies or events are most likely to have permanent effects
  • What ‘longtermists’ do today in practice
  • How to predict the long-term effect of our actions
  • Whether the future is likely to be good or bad
  • Concrete ideas to make the future better
  • What Will donates his money to personally
  • Potatoes and megafauna
  • 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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#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine

By and · Published August 8th, 2022

After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into the background of our news coverage. But with the benefit of time we’re in a much stronger position to understand what happened, why, whether there are broader lessons to take away, and how the conflict might be ended. And the conflict appears far from over.

So today, we are returning to speak a second time with Samuel Charap — one of the US’s foremost experts on Russia’s relationship with former Soviet states, and coauthor of the 2017 book Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.

As Sam lays out, Russia controls much of Ukraine’s east and south, and seems to be preparing to politically incorporate that territory into Russia itself later in the year. At the same time, Ukraine is gearing up for a counteroffensive before defensive positions become dug in over winter.

Each day the war continues it takes a toll on ordinary Ukrainians, contributes to a global food shortage, and leaves the US and Russia unable to coordinate on any other issues and at an elevated risk of direct conflict.

In today’s brisk conversation, Rob and Sam cover the following topics:

  • Current territorial control and the level of attrition within Russia’s and Ukraine’s military forces.
  • Russia’s current goals.
  • Whether Sam’s views have changed since March on topics like: Putin’s motivations, the wisdom of Ukraine’s strategy, the likely impact of Western sanctions, and the risks from Finland and Sweden joining NATO before the war ends.
  • Why so many people incorrectly expected Russia to fully mobilise for war or persist with their original approach to the invasion.
  • Whether there’s anything to learn from many of our worst fears — such as the use of bioweapons on civilians — not coming to pass.
  • What can be done to ensure some nuclear arms control agreement between the US and Russia remains in place after 2026 (when New START expires).
  • Why Sam considers a settlement proposal put forward by Ukraine in late March to be the most plausible way to end the war and ensure stability — though it’s still a long shot.

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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#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us

By and · Published July 22nd, 2022

Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs.

Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups thought men who got too big for their britches needed to be put in their place rather than obeyed, and lifelong monogamy could hardly be expected of men or women.

Why such big systematic changes — and why these changes specifically?

That’s the question best-selling historian Ian Morris takes up in his book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Ian has spent his academic life studying long-term history, trying to explain the big-picture changes that play out over hundreds or thousands of years.

There are a number of possible explanations one could offer for the wide-ranging shifts in opinion on the ‘right’ way to live. Maybe the natural sciences progressed and people realised their previous ideas were mistaken? Perhaps a few persuasive advocates turned the course of history with their revolutionary arguments? Maybe everyone just got nicer?

In Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels Ian presents a provocative alternative: human culture gradually evolves towards whatever system of organisation allows a society to harvest the most energy, and we then conclude that system is the most virtuous one. Egalitarian values helped hunter-gatherers hunt and gather effectively. Once farming was developed, hierarchy proved to be the social structure that produced the most grain (and best repelled nomadic raiders). And in the modern era, democracy and individuality have proven to be more productive ways to collect and exploit fossil fuels.

On this theory, it’s technology that drives moral values much more than moral philosophy. Individuals can try to persist with deeply held values that limit economic growth, but they risk being rendered irrelevant as more productive peers in their own society accrue wealth and power. And societies that fail to move with the times risk being conquered by more pragmatic neighbours that adapt to new technologies and grow in population and military strength.

There are many objections one could raise to this theory, many of which we put to Ian in this interview. But the question is a highly consequential one: if we want to guess what goals our descendants will pursue hundreds of years from now, it would be helpful to have a theory for why our ancestors mostly thought one thing, while we mostly think another.

Big though it is, the driver of human values is only one of several major questions Ian has tackled through his career.

In Why the West Rules—For Now, he set out to understand why the Industrial Revolution happened in England and Europe went on to dominate much of the rest of the world, rather than industrialisation kicking off somewhere else like China, with China going on to establish colonies in Europe. (In a word: geography.)

In War! What is it Good For?, he tried to explain why it is that violent conflicts often lead to longer lives and higher incomes (i.e. wars build empires which suppress interpersonal violence internally), while other times they have the exact opposite effect (i.e. advances in military technology allow nomads to raid and pull apart these empires).

In today’s episode, we discuss all of Ian’s major books, taking on topics such as:

  • Whether the evidence base in history — from document archives to archaeology — is strong enough to persuasively answer any of these questions
  • Whether or not wars can still lead to less violence today
  • Why Ian thinks the way we live in the 21st century is probably a short-lived aberration
  • Whether the grand sweep of history is driven more by “very important people” or “vast impersonal forces”
  • Why Chinese ships never crossed the Pacific or rounded the southern tip of Africa
  • In what sense Ian thinks Brexit was “10,000 years in the making”
  • The most common misconceptions about macrohistory

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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#133 – Max Tegmark on how a ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection

By and · Published July 1st, 2022

On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about things without ever trying to fix them.

That “put up or shut up” New Year’s resolution led to the first Puerto Rico conference and Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence — milestones for researchers taking the safe development of highly capable AI systems seriously.

Max’s primary work has been cosmology research at MIT, but his energetic and freewheeling nature has led him into so many other projects that you would be forgiven for forgetting it. In the 2010s he wrote two best-selling books, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and in 2014 founded a non-profit, the Future of Life Institute, which works to reduce all sorts of threats to humanity’s future including nuclear war, synthetic biology, and AI.

Max has complained about many other things over the years, from killer robots to the impact of social media algorithms on the news we consume. True to his ‘put up or shut up’ resolution, he and his team went on to produce a video on so-called ‘Slaughterbots’ which attracted millions of views, and develop a podcast and website called ‘Improve The News’ to help readers separate facts from spin.

But given the stunning recent advances in capabilities — from OpenAI’s DALL-E to DeepMind’s Gato — AI itself remains top of his mind.

You can now give an AI system like GPT-3 the text: “I’m going to go to this mountain with the faces on it. What is the capital of the state to the east of the state that that’s in?” And it gives the correct answer (Saint Paul, Minnesota) — something most AI researchers would have said was impossible without fundamental breakthroughs just seven years ago.

So back at MIT, he now leads a research group dedicated to what he calls “intelligible intelligence.” At the moment, AI systems are basically giant black boxes that magically do wildly impressive things. But for us to trust these systems, we need to understand them.

He says that training a black box that does something smart needs to just be stage one in a bigger process. Stage two is: “How do we get the knowledge out and put it in a safer system?”

His favourite MIT project so far involved taking a bunch of data from the 100 most complicated or famous physics equations, creating an Excel spreadsheet with each of the variables and the results, and saying to the computer, “OK, here’s the data. Can you figure out what the formula is?”

For general formulas, this is really hard. About 400 years ago, Johannes Kepler managed to get hold of the data that Tycho Brahe had gathered regarding how the planets move around the solar system. Kepler spent four years staring at the data until he figured out what the data meant: that planets orbit in an ellipse.

Max’s team’s code was able to discover that in just an hour.

Today’s conversation starts off giving a broad overview of the key questions about artificial intelligence: What’s the potential? What are the threats? How might this story play out? What should we be doing to prepare?

Rob and Max then move on to recent advances in capabilities and alignment, the mood we should have, and possible ways we might misunderstand the problem.

They then spend roughly the last third talking about Max’s current big passion: improving the news we consume — where Rob has a few reservations.

They also cover:

  • Whether we would be able to understand what superintelligent systems were doing
  • The value of encouraging people to think about the positive future they want
  • How to give machines goals
  • Whether ‘Big Tech’ is following the lead of ‘Big Tobacco’
  • Whether we’re sleepwalking into disaster
  • Whether people actually just want their biases confirmed
  • Why Max is worried about government-backed fact-checking
  • 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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#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

By and · Published June 14th, 2022

If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free.

This problem exists in extreme form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine learning models that generate uncanny human text and images can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But once trained, such models may be only a few gigabytes in size and run just fine on ordinary laptops.

Today’s guest, the computer scientist and polymath Nova DasSarma, works on computer and information security for the AI company Anthropic with the security team. One of her jobs is to stop hackers exfiltrating Anthropic’s incredibly expensive intellectual property, as recently happened to Nvidia. As she explains, given models’ small size, the need to store such models on internet-connected servers, and the poor state of computer security in general, this is a serious challenge.

The worries aren’t purely commercial though. This problem looms especially large for the growing number of people who expect that in coming decades we’ll develop so-called artificial ‘general’ intelligence systems that can learn and apply a wide range of skills all at once, and thereby have a transformative effect on society.

If aligned with the goals of their owners, such general AI models could operate like a team of super-skilled assistants, going out and doing whatever wonderful (or malicious) things are asked of them. This might represent a huge leap forward for humanity, though the transition to a very different new economy and power structure would have to be handled delicately.

If unaligned with the goals of their owners or humanity as a whole, such broadly capable models would naturally ‘go rogue,’ breaking their way into additional computer systems to grab more computing power — all the better to pursue their goals and make sure they can’t be shut off.

As Nova explains, in either case, we don’t want such models disseminated all over the world before we’ve confirmed they are deeply safe and law-abiding, and have figured out how to integrate them peacefully into society. In the first scenario, premature mass deployment would be risky and destabilising. In the second scenario, it could be catastrophic — perhaps even leading to human extinction if such general AI systems turn out to be able to self-improve rapidly rather than slowly, something we can only speculate on at this point.

If highly capable general AI systems are coming in the next 10 or 20 years, Nova may be flying below the radar with one of the most important jobs in the world.

We’ll soon need the ability to ‘sandbox’ (i.e. contain) models with a wide range of superhuman capabilities, including the ability to learn new skills, for a period of careful testing and limited deployment — preventing the model from breaking out, and criminals from breaking in. Nova and her colleagues are trying to figure out how to do this, but as this episode reveals, even the state of the art is nowhere near good enough.

In today’s conversation, Rob and Nova cover:

  • How good or bad information security is today
  • The most secure computer systems that exist today
  • How to design an AI training compute centre for maximum efficiency
  • Whether ‘formal verification’ can help us design trustworthy systems
  • How wide the practical gap is between AI capabilities and AI safety
  • How to disincentivise hackers
  • What should listeners do to strengthen their own security practices
  • Jobs at Anthropic
  • And a few more things as well

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 and Beppe Rådvik
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

By , and · Published June 3rd, 2022

“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the next 365 days, they’ll try to rebuild as much of civilisation as they can — from glass, to lenses, to microscopes. This is: The Knowledge!”

If you were a contestant on such a TV show, you’d love to have a guide to how basic things you currently take for granted are done — how to grow potatoes, fire bricks, turn wood to charcoal, find acids and alkalis, and so on.

Today’s guest Lewis Dartnell has gone as far compiling this information as anyone has with his bestselling book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm.

But in the aftermath of a nuclear war or incredibly deadly pandemic that kills most people, many of the ways we do things today will be impossible — and even some of the things people did in the past, like collect coal from the surface of the Earth, will be impossible the second time around.

As Lewis points out, there’s “no point telling this band of survivors how to make something ultra-efficient or ultra-useful or ultra-capable if it’s just too damned complicated to build in the first place. You have to start small and then level up, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

So it might sound good to tell people to build solar panels — they’re a wonderful way of generating electricity. But the photovoltaic cells we use today need pure silicon, and nanoscale manufacturing — essentially the same technology as microchips used in a computer — so actually making solar panels would be incredibly difficult.

Instead, you’d want to tell our group of budding engineers to use more appropriate technologies like solar concentrators that use nothing more than mirrors — which turn out to be relatively easy to make.

A disaster that unravels the complex way we produce goods in the modern world is all too possible. Which raises the question: why not set dozens of people to plan out exactly what any survivors really ought to do if they need to support themselves and rebuild civilisation? Such a guide could then be translated and distributed all around the world.

The goal would be to provide the best information to speed up each of the many steps that would take survivors from rubbing sticks together in the wilderness to adjusting a thermostat in their comfy apartments.

This is clearly not a trivial task. Lewis’s own book (at 300 pages) only scratched the surface of the most important knowledge humanity has accumulated, relegating all of mathematics to a single footnote.

And the ideal guide would offer pretty different advice depending on the scenario. Are survivors dealing with a radioactive ice age following a nuclear war? Or is it an eerily intact but near-empty post-pandemic world with mountains of goods to scavenge from the husks of cities?

If we take catastrophic risks seriously and want humanity to recover from a devastating shock as far and fast as possible, producing such a guide before it’s too late might be one of the higher-impact projects someone could take on.

As a brand-new parent, Lewis couldn’t do one of our classic three- or four-hour episodes — so this is an unusually snappy one-hour interview, where Rob and Lewis are joined by Luisa Rodriguez to continue the conversation from her episode of the show last year.

They cover:

  • The biggest impediments to bouncing back
  • The reality of humans trying to actually do this
  • The most valuable pro-resilience adjustments we can make today
  • How to recover without much coal or oil
  • How to feed the Earth in disasters
  • And the most exciting recent findings in astrobiology

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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#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

By and · Published May 23rd, 2022

Imagine you lead a nonprofit that operates on a shoestring budget. Staff are paid minimum wage, lunch is bread and hummus, and you’re all bunched up on a few tables in a basement office.

But over a few years, your cause attracts some major new donors. Your funding jumps a thousandfold, from $100,000 a year to $100,000,000 a year. You’re the same group of people committed to making sacrifices for the cause — but these days, rather than cutting costs, the right thing to do seems to be to spend serious money and get things done ASAP.

You suddenly have the opportunity to make more progress than ever before, but as well as excitement about this, you have worries about the impacts that large amounts of funding can have.

This is roughly the situation faced by today’s guest Will MacAskill — University of Oxford philosopher, author of the forthcoming book What We Owe The Future, and founding figure in the effective altruism movement.

Years ago, Will pledged to give away more than 50% of his income over his life, and was already donating 10% back when he was a student with next to no income. Since then, the coalition he founded has been super successful at attracting the interest of donors who collectively want to give away billions in the way Will and his colleagues were proposing.

While surely a huge success, it brings with it risks that he’s never had to consider before:

  • Will and his colleagues might try to spend a lot of money trying to get more things done more quickly — but actually just waste it.
  • Being seen as profligate could strike onlookers as selfish and disreputable.
  • Folks might start pretending to agree with their agenda just to get grants.
  • People working on nearby issues that are less flush with funding may end up resentful.
  • People might lose their focus on helping others as they get seduced by the prospect of earning a nice living.
  • Mediocre projects might find it too easy to get funding, even when the people involved would be better off radically changing their strategy, or shutting down and launching something else entirely.

But all these ‘risks of commission’ have to be weighed against ‘risk of omission’: the failure to achieve all you could have if you’d been truly ambitious.

People looking askance at you for paying high salaries to attract the staff you want is unpleasant.

But failing to prevent the next pandemic because you didn’t have the necessary medical experts on your grantmaking team is worse than unpleasant — it’s a true disaster. Yet few will complain, because they’ll never know what might have been if you’d only set frugality aside.

Will aims to strike a sensible balance between these competing errors, which he has taken to calling judicious ambition. In today’s episode, Rob and Will discuss the above as well as:

  • Will humanity likely converge on good values as we get more educated and invest more in moral philosophy — or are the things we care about actually quite arbitrary and contingent?
  • Why are so many nonfiction books full of factual errors?
  • How does Will avoid anxiety and depression with more responsibility on his shoulders than ever?
  • What does Will disagree with his colleagues on?
  • Should we focus on existential risks more or less the same way, whether we care about future generations or not?
  • Are potatoes one of the most important technologies ever developed?
  • 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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#129 – Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

By and · Published May 9th, 2022

The good news is deaths from malaria have been cut by a third since 2005. The bad news is it still causes 250 million cases and 600,000 deaths a year, mostly among young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

We already have dirt-cheap ways to prevent and treat malaria, and the fraction of the Earth’s surface where the disease exists at all has been halved since 1900. So why is it such a persistent problem in some places, even rebounding 15% since 2019?

That’s one of many questions I put to today’s guest, James Tibenderana — doctor, medical researcher, and technical director at a major global health nonprofit known as Malaria Consortium. James studies the cutting edge of malaria control and treatment in order to optimise how Malaria Consortium spends £100 million a year across countries like Uganda, Nigeria, and Chad.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of malaria deaths occur, the infection is spread by a few dozen species of mosquito that are ideally suited to the local climatic conditions and have thus been impossible to eliminate so far.

And as James explains, while COVID-19 may have an ‘R’ (reproduction number) of 5, in some situations malaria has a reproduction number in the 1,000s. A single person with malaria can pass the parasite to hundreds of mosquitoes, which themselves each go on to bite dozens of people each, allowing cases to quickly explode.

The nets and antimalarial drugs Malaria Consortium distributes have been highly effective where distributed, but there are tens of millions of young children who are yet to be covered simply due to a lack of funding.

Despite the success of these approaches, given how challenging it will be to create a malaria-free world, there’s enthusiasm to find new approaches to throw at the problem. Two new interventions have recently generated buzz: vaccines and genetic approaches to control the mosquito species that carry malaria.

The RTS,S vaccine is the first-ever vaccine that attacks a protozoa as opposed to a virus or bacteria. Under development for decades, it’s a great scientific achievement. But James points out that even after three doses, it’s still only about 30% effective. Unless future vaccines are substantially more effective, they will remain just a complement to nets and antimalarial drugs, which are cheaper and each cut mortality by more than half.

On the other hand, the latest mosquito-control technologies are almost too effective. It is possible to insert genes into specific mosquito populations that reduce their ability to reproduce. Of course these genes would normally be eliminated by natural selection, but by using a ‘gene drive,’ you can ensure mosquitoes hand these detrimental genes down to 100% of their offspring. If deployed, these genes would spread and ultimately eliminate the mosquitoes that carry malaria at low cost, thereby largely ridding the world of the disease.

Because a single country embracing this method would have global effects, James cautions that it’s important to get buy-in from all the countries involved, and to have a way of reversing the intervention if we realise we’ve made a mistake. Groups like Target Malaria are working on exactly these two issues.

James also emphasises that with thousands of similar mosquito species out there, most of which don’t carry malaria, for better or worse gene drives may not make any difference to the number of mosquitoes out there.

In this comprehensive conversation, Rob and James discuss all of the above, as well as most of what you could reasonably want to know about the state of the art in malaria control today, including:

  • How malaria spreads and the symptoms it causes
  • The use of insecticides and poison baits
  • How big a problem insecticide resistance is
  • How malaria was eliminated in North America and Europe
  • Whether funding is a key bottleneck right now
  • The key strategic choices faced by Malaria Consortium in its efforts to create a malaria-free world
  • 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: Katy Moore

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#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen

By and · Published April 28th, 2022

In nature, animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of evolution is that the risk of violence is just too great.

Which might make one wonder: if war is so destructive, why does it happen? The question may sound naïve, but in fact it represents a deep puzzle. If a war will cost trillions and kill tens of thousands, it should be easy for either side to make a peace offer that both they and their opponents prefer to actually fighting it out.

The conundrum of how humans can engage in incredibly costly and protracted conflicts has occupied academics across the social sciences for years. In today’s episode, we speak with economist Chris Blattman about his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, which summarises what they think they’ve learned.

Chris’s first point is that while organised violence may feel like it’s all around us, it’s actually very rare in humans, just as it is with other animals. Across the world, hundreds of groups dislike one another — but knowing the cost of war, they prefer to simply loathe one another in peace.

In order to understand what’s wrong with a sick patient, a doctor needs to know what a healthy person looks like. And to understand war, social scientists need to study all the wars that could have happened but didn’t — so they can see what a healthy society looks like and what’s missing in the places where war does take hold.

Chris argues that social scientists have generated five cogent models of when war can be ‘rational’ for both sides of a conflict:

  1. Unchecked interests — such as national leaders who bear few of the costs of launching a war.
  2. Intangible incentives — such as an intrinsic desire for revenge.
  3. Uncertainty — such as both sides underestimating each other’s resolve to fight.
  4. Commitment problems — such as the inability to credibly promise not to use your growing military might to attack others in future.
  5. Misperceptions — such as our inability to see the world through other people’s eyes.

In today’s interview, we walk through how each of the five explanations work and what specific wars or actions they might explain.

In the process, Chris outlines how many of the most popular explanations for interstate war are wildly overused (e.g. leaders who are unhinged or male) or misguided from the outset (e.g. resource scarcity).

The interview also covers:

  • What Chris and Rob got wrong about the war in Ukraine
  • What causes might not fit into these five categories
  • The role of people’s choice to escalate or deescalate a conflict
  • How great power wars or nuclear wars are different, and what can be done to prevent them
  • How much representative government helps to prevent war
  • 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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#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good

By and · Published April 14th, 2022

This podcast highlighted Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of someone ambitiously pursuing a high-impact career. To say the least, we no longer endorse that. See our statement for why.

The show’s host, Rob Wiblin, has also released some personal comments on this episode and the FTX bankruptcy on The 80,000 Hours Podcast feed, which you can listen to here.

If you were offered a 100% chance of $1 million to keep yourself, or a 10% chance of $15 million — it makes total sense to play it safe. You’d be devastated if you lost, and barely happier if you won.

But if you were offered a 100% chance of donating $1 billion, or a 10% chance of donating $15 billion, you should just go with whatever has the highest expected value — that is, probability multiplied by the goodness of the outcome — and so swing for the fences.

This is the totally rational but rarely seen high-risk approach to philanthropy championed by today’s guest, Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam founded the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX, which has grown his wealth from around $1 million to $20,000 million.

Added 30 November 2022: What I meant to refer to as totally rational in the above paragraph is thinking about the ‘expected value’ of one’s actions, not maximizing expected dollar returns as if you were entirely ‘risk-neutral’. See clarifications on what I (Rob Wiblin) think about risk-aversion here.

Despite that, Sam still drives a Corolla and sleeps on a beanbag, because the only reason he started FTX was to make money to give it away. In 2020, when he was 5% as rich as he is now, he was nonetheless the second biggest individual donor to Joe Biden’s general election campaign.

In today’s conversation, Sam outlines how at every stage in FTX’s development, he and his team were able to choose the high-risk path to maximise expected value — precisely because they weren’t out to earn money for themselves.

This year his philanthropy has kicked into high gear with the launch of the FTX Future Fund, which has the initial ambition of giving away hundreds of millions a year and hopes to soon escalate to over a billion a year.

The Fund is run by previous guest of the show Nick Beckstead, and embodies the same risk-loving attitude Sam has learned from entrepreneurship and trading on financial markets. Unlike most foundations, the Future Fund:

  • Is open to supporting young people trying to get their first big break
  • Makes applying for a grant surprisingly straightforward
  • Is willing to make bets on projects it completely expects to fail, just because they have positive expected value.

Their website lists both areas of interest and more concrete project ideas they are looking to support. The hope is these will inspire entrepreneurs to come forward, seize the mantle, and be the champions who actually make these things happen. Some of the project proposals are pretty natural, such as:

Some might raise an eyebrow:

And others are quirkier still:

While these ideas may seem pretty random, they all stem from a particular underlying moral and empirical vision that the Future Fund has laid out.

In this conversation, we speak with Sam about the hopes he and the Fund have for how the long-term future of humanity might go incredibly well, the fears they hold about how it could go incredibly badly, and what levers they might be able to pull to slightly nudge us towards the former.

Listeners who want to launch an ambitious project to improve humanity’s future should not only listen to the episode, but also look at the full list of the kind of things Sam and his colleagues are hoping to fund, see if they’re inspired, and if so, apply to get the ball rolling.

On top of that we also cover:

  • How Sam feels now about giving $5 million to Biden’s general election campaign
  • His fears and hopes for artificial intelligence
  • Whether or not blockchain technology actually has useful real-world applications
  • What lessons Sam learned from some serious early setbacks
  • Why he fears the effective altruism community is too conservative
  • Why Sam is as authentic now as he was before he was a celebrity
  • And much more.

Note: Sam has donated to 80,000 Hours in the past

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

November 17 2022, 1pm GMT: This podcast highlighted Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of someone ambitiously pursuing a high-impact career. To say the least, we no longer endorse that. See our statement for why.

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#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs

By and · Published April 5th, 2022

Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don’t, because it doesn’t.

Incredible though it might seem, according to today’s guest — economist Bryan Caplan, the author of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and The Case Against Education — the best evidence we have on the question suggests that, within reason, what parents do has little impact on how their children’s lives play out once they’re adults.

Of course, kids do resemble their parents. But just as we probably can’t say it was attentive parenting that gave me my mother’s nose, perhaps we can’t say it was attentive parenting that made me succeed at school. Both the social environment we grow up in and the genes we receive from our parents influence the person we become, and looking at a typical family we can’t really distinguish the impact of one from the other.

But nature does offer us up a random experiment that can let us tell the difference: identical twins share all their genes, while fraternal twins only share half their genes. If you look at how much more similar outcomes are for identical twins than fraternal twins, you see the effect of sharing 100% of your genetic material, rather than the usual 50%. Double that amount, and you’ve got the full effect of genetic inheritance. Whatever unexplained variation remains is still up for grabs — and might be down to different experiences in the home, outside the home, or just random noise.

The crazy thing about this research is that it says for a range of adult outcomes (e.g. years of education, income, health, personality, and happiness), it’s differences in the genes children inherit rather than differences in parental behaviour that are doing most of the work. Other research suggests that differences in “out-of-home environment,” such as the friends one makes at school, take second place. Parenting style does matter for something, but it comes in a clear third.

You might think that these studies are accidentally recruiting parents who are all unusually competent, by including only the kind of people who respond to letters asking them to participate in a university study of twin behaviour. But in fact that effect is small, because many countries and hospitals have enrolled twins in this research almost by default, and academics can check on some kinds of outcomes using tax, death, and court records, which include almost everyone.

Bryan lays out all the above in his book Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work And More Fun Than You Think.

He is quick to point out that there are several factors that help reconcile these findings with conventional wisdom about the importance of parenting.

First, for some adult outcomes, parenting was a big deal (i.e. the quality of the parent/child relationship) or at least a moderate deal (i.e. drug use, criminality, and religious/political identity).

Second, these are adult outcomes — parents can and do influence you quite a lot, so long as you’re young and still living with them. But as soon as you move out, the influence of their behaviour begins to wane and eventually becomes hard to spot.

Third, this research only studies variation in parenting behaviour that was common among the families studied. The studies are just mute on anything that wasn’t actually done by many parents in their sample.

And fourth, research on international adoptions shows they can cause massive improvements in health, income and other outcomes. So a large enough change in one’s entire environment, say from Haiti to the United States, does matter, even if moving between families within the United States has modest effects.

Despite all that, the findings are still remarkable, and imply many hyper-diligent parents could live much less stressful lives without doing their kids any harm at all. In this extensive interview host Rob Wiblin interrogates whether Bryan can really be right, or whether the research he’s drawing on has taken a wrong turn somewhere.

And that’s just one topic we cover, some of the others being:

  • People’s biggest misconceptions about the labour market
  • Arguments against high levels of immigration
  • Whether most people actually vote based on self-interest
  • Whether philosophy should stick to common sense or depart from it radically
  • How to weigh personal autonomy against the possible benefits of government regulation
  • Bryan’s track record of winning 23 out of 23 bets about how the future would play out
  • 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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#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders

By and · Published March 29th, 2022

Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe that people lived with for decades has gradually faded from memory, and nuclear warhead stockpiles have declined by 83%. Nuclear brinksmanship, proxy wars, and the game theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) have come to feel like relics of another era.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all that.

According to Joan Rohlfing — President of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit focused on reducing threats from nuclear and biological weapons — the annual risk of a ‘global catastrophic nuclear event’‘ never fell as low as people like to think, and for some time has been on its way back up.

At the same time, civil society funding for research and advocacy around nuclear risks is being cut in half over a period of years — despite the fact that at $60 million a year, it was already just a thousandth as much as the US spends maintaining its nuclear deterrent.

If new funding sources are not identified to replace donors that are withdrawing (like the MacArthur Foundation), the existing pool of talent will have to leave for greener pastures, and most of the next generation will see a career in the field as unviable.

While global poverty is on the decline and life expectancy increasing, the chance of a catastrophic nuclear event is probably trending in the wrong direction.

Joan points out that the New START treaty, which dramatically limits the number of warheads the US and Russia can deploy at one time, narrowly survived in 2021 due to the election of Joe Biden. But it will again require renewal in 2026, which may or may not happen, depending on whether the relationship between the two great powers can be repaired over the next four years.

Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees that turned out not to be worth the paper they were written on. States that have nuclear weapons (such as North Korea), states that are pursuing them (such as Iran), and states that have pursued nuclear weapons but since abandoned them (such as Libya, Syria, and South Africa) may take this as a valuable lesson in the importance of military power over promises.

China has been expanding its arsenal and testing hypersonic glide missiles that can evade missile defences. Japan now toys with the idea of nuclear weapons as a way to ensure its security against its much larger neighbour. India and Pakistan both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1980s and their relationship continues to oscillate from hostile to civil and back.

At the same time, the risk that nuclear weapons could be interfered with due to weaknesses in computer security is far higher than during the Cold War, when systems were simpler and less networked.

In the interview, Joan discusses several steps that can be taken in the immediate term, such as renewed efforts to extend and expand arms control treaties, changes to nuclear use policy, and the retirement of what they see as vulnerable delivery systems, such as land-based silos.

In the bigger picture, NTI seeks to keep hope alive that a better system than deterrence through mutually assured destruction remains possible. The threat of retaliation does indeed make nuclear wars unlikely, but it necessarily means the system fails in an incredibly destructive way: with the death of hundreds of millions if not billions.

In the long run, even a tiny 1 in 500 risk of a nuclear war each year adds up to around an 18% chance of catastrophe over the century.

Joan concedes that MAD was probably the best available system for preventing the use of nuclear weapons in 1950. But we’ve had 70 years of advances in technology since then that have opened up new possibilities, such as far more reliable surveillance than could have been dreamed up by Truman and Stalin. But MAD has been the conventional wisdom for so long that almost nobody is working on alternative paradigms.

In this conversation we cover all that, as well as:

  • How arms control treaties have evolved over the last few decades
  • Whether lobbying by arms manufacturers is an important factor shaping nuclear strategy
  • Places listeners could work at or donate to
  • The Biden Nuclear Posture Review
  • How easily humanity might recover from a nuclear exchange
  • Implications for the use of nuclear energy

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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#124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

By and · Published March 21st, 2022

If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you’d have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today’s guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become so fashionable that they’re at risk of being seriously overrated and applied where they don’t belong.

Such concepts might even cause harm — trying to make a project embody all three is as likely to ruin it as help it flourish.

First, what do people mean by ‘sustainability’? Usually they mean something like the programme will eventually be able to continue without needing further financial support from the donor. But how is that possible? Governments, nonprofits, and aid agencies aim to provide health services, education, infrastructure, financial services, and so on — and all of these require ongoing funding to pay for materials and staff to keep them running.

I buy my groceries from a supermarket, and I’m not under the illusion that one day I’ll be able to stop paying and still get everything I need for free. And there’s nothing wrong with this way of getting life’s necessities being ‘unsustainable’ — so long as I want groceries, I’ll keep paying for them.

Given that someone needs to keep paying, Karen tells us that in practice, ‘sustainability’ is usually a euphemism for the programme at some point being passed on to someone else to fund — usually the national government. And while that can be fine, the national government of Kenya only spends $400 per person to provide each and every government service — just 2% of what the US spends on each resident. Incredibly tight budgets like that are typical of low-income countries. While the concept of ‘sustainability’ sounds great, to say “We’re going to pass the cost of this programme on to a government funded by very poor people’s taxes” sounds at best ambiguous.

‘Participatory’ also sounds nice, and inasmuch as it means leaders are accountable to the people they’re trying to help, it probably is. But Karen tells us that in the field, ‘participatory’ usually means that recipients are expected to be involved in planning and delivering services themselves.

While that might be suitable in some situations, it’s hardly something people in rich countries always want for themselves. Ideally we want government healthcare and education to be high quality without us having to attend meetings to keep it on track — and people in poor countries have as many or more pressures on their time. While accountability is desirable, an expectation of participation can be as much a burden as a blessing.

Finally, making a programme ‘holistic’ could be smart, but as Karen lays out, it also has some major downsides. For one, it means you’re doing lots of things at once, which makes it hard to tell which parts of the project are making the biggest difference relative to their cost. For another, when you have a lot of goals at once, it’s hard to tell whether you’re making progress, or really put your mind to focusing on making one thing go extremely well. And finally, holistic programmes can be impractically expensive — Karen tells the story of a wonderful ‘holistic school health’ programme that, if continued, was going to cost 3.5 times the entire school’s budget.

Smallpox elimination was one of humanity’s greatest health achievements and its focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else made it the complete opposite of a holistic program.

In today’s in-depth conversation, Karen Levy and I chat about the above, as well as:

  • Why it pays to figure out how you’ll interpret the results of an experiment ahead of time
  • The trouble with misaligned incentives within the development industry
  • Projects that don’t deliver value for money and should be scaled down
  • Whether governments typically pay for a project once outside funding is withdrawn
  • How Karen accidentally became a leading figure in the push to deworm tens of millions of schoolchildren
  • Logistical challenges in reaching huge numbers of people with essential services
  • How Karen has enjoyed living in Kenya for several decades
  • Lessons from Karen’s many-decades career
  • The goals of Karen’s new project: Fit for Purpose

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 and Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#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.

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

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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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