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So if you said to me, “You should devote the rest of your life to getting better at being the father of your children.”… I have an idea of how to do that. I may not succeed at it, I may struggle at it, I’m sure it’s imperfect. But if you said to me, “You know, I think Americans should get along better with Russians, Chinese and Swedes.” I don’t know how to start with that.

Russ Roberts

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.

Highlights

Micro-level problems

Reasonable people could disagree about what the most pressing problems are, right? So some people would say climate change. That would be easily their first, most pressing problem. Other people might say violence against women. Others would say racism. These are all things that typically are in the public sphere. They’re in the public sphere for a variety of reasons, but they’re in the public sphere. They’re the subject of public policy issues. They’re things that legislation gets passed to try to improve. They’re the source of activism of people who are passionate about change, about improving the world. There’s a whole realm of things like that. Poverty, clean water, clean air, climate, inequality, things that most people — not everybody — but most people would agree are things we wish were different than they are. But what about things that are at the more micro level, like kindness? What if I said to you — and I think I could make the case — that kindness and the lack of kindness is the thing we ought to be focusing on to make the world a better place? So I’m going to devote my life to improving that.

Now, if I said that, you’d say, “Well, it’s clearly a pressing problem. It’s clear that you can be a kinder person tomorrow than you were today.” But if I said, “I want to have that radiate out from my actions to have leverage. I want to do more than just make myself a kinder person, I want to create a kinder world.” And I’d say, “Boy, that’s a tough one.” I’d say it’s important, but I don’t know how to head toward mastery in that. But having said that, it might be the most important problem. I could argue that it’s the most pressing problem, the lack of kindness in human relations. In fact, the expression, “Be kind, everyone is in a battle,” is a motto to live by that most of us I think fail to live by. We’re inherently self-centered. Literally we’re genetically, evolutionarily designed to be self-interested. Not necessarily selfish, but self-interested and self-centered. We care a lot about ourselves, inevitably. One could argue that the essential challenge of the good life, for the world around us, is to temper that self-centeredness to be kinder to the people around us: our family, our friends, our colleagues at work.

If you’re listening and say, “Yeah, I kind of agree with that. I’d like to devote my life to that,” what should you do? Should you become a psychotherapist? That would be an interesting way to solve that problem. Well, not solve it, make progress on it. Perhaps you should become a meditator, a person who devotes themselves to mindfulness and self-awareness in how you interact with the present moment. Maybe you should go into religion, and you could argue that religion is one way in which kindness has been brought into the world. Or you could say the opposite. You could say, “Well, I think religion is actually a force for unkindness. It tends to lead to seeing people as the other, and we should make the case for atheism.” I think those are all interesting arguments. I wouldn’t know where to start. I have no idea where to start.

Expanding the moral circle

Russ Roberts: When you suggest that we should broaden our moral care to as wide as possible, to all sentient, say, or conscious beings, I’m not sure if that’s going to be effective given the nature of human beings and the way we’ve evolved. I would worry about that. It’s not obvious to me that we should care or be encouraged to care equally about everyone. I understand the advantage of it. I understand the good part of it, certainly the move toward less racism, less sexism, less sexual judgment. That’s got many, many wonderful things about it, but to extend it infinitely far that I care about, say, the entire universe and not so much about my family, which by the way, is very much a thread in modern utilitarian thought. Modern utilitarian thought, I am told that I should be ashamed of having a fancy birthday party for my four-year-old because that money would be better spent. It would have done more good for more people if I bought those bed nets in Africa or dewormed folks in Africa. The marginal benefit to “humanity” of my child having a fancy birthday party, I’m not a fan of fancy birthday parties, by the way, but just the claim is that having a fancy birthday party is an immoral act because of the kind of moral calculus you’re suggesting we ought to embrace.

I think that’s wrong. I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the human enterprise. I think we were raised in families, we evolved in families, we evolved in small groups. It’s just not obvious to me that we can be effective… In other words, I might be much better at giving charity in that world, but I might be a really bad dad. I may not even know actually how I can spend time reading to my kid at night knowing that I ought to be doing some consulting work at night raising money and buying more of those bed nets. So for me, instead of talking to my own kid, because my own kid’s probably going to be fine. So I think that kind of calculus, it’s just not obviously correct.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So we’re kind of the ultimate pragmatists. In as much as trying to increase concern for everyone is actually going to result in people being more selfish or not doing more good, that would be a good reason not to pursue that. And I guess even the possibility that it could backfire in that way is a mark against it, or at least going that far. I suppose I’m more hopeful than you that getting people to try to care more, at least in principle, about not harming all sentient beings would be good, on balance, in part just because it seems like expanding the moral circle so far has positive impacts. So it could be that at some point it would go so far that this would then undermine people’s motivations to be good and then make the world worse. But I guess it seems to me on the margin that it would still be good if ordinary people cared more about foreigners than they do right now; cared more about the welfare of animals than they apparently do now, given how we treat them in farming.

Global coordination

I know how to work together better with my family. I have four children. My wife and I have a very complicated dynamic with each other, with each child, when the six of us are together, when subsets of us are together, it’s all different. And it’s a great learning experience. Not like golf. It’s not to be mastered. It’s to be explored. Improved on if you can. Again, not obvious how you get better at it, but life does give you lots of data. It gives you lots of experience in those areas.

So if you said to me, “You should devote the rest of your life to getting better at being the father of your children.” And you can debate whether it’s important when you’re 65, versus when you’re 35, 40. But I have an idea of how to do that. I have an idea. I may not succeed at it, I may struggle at it, I’m sure it’s imperfect. But if you said to me, “You know, I think Americans should get along better with Russians, Chinese and Swedes.” I don’t know how to start that. Now we’ve tried as humanity, we’ve tried to improve that. We created the League of Nations. We’ve created the United Nations. I’d say both those institutions were utter disasters and failures, for the most part. Some good things, mostly bad.

I don’t know how to get there from here. When you say, “We have to get along better.” Of course, that’s a nice idea. I don’t know how to do that. And, in particular, I would suggest that maybe the lesson there to be learned is we should do actually fewer things together and more things locally.

How much to trust empirical research

A lot of times, I see empirical work and I go, “That doesn’t even pass the sniff test for me.” And the sniff test is kind of like common sense, right? It’s exactly what you’re talking about. When I do a little armchair theorizing about this, it’s just not plausible that say, when people hear the word, ‘Florida’, they think of senior citizens and therefore they walk more slowly. To pick on a particular psychological study that I thought never passed the sniff test. This idea that when people hear words associated with the elderly, they move more slowly. When you look at the data in that study, people tried to replicate it, they couldn’t. So it was clear in my view it was a mistake.

It was not science. It wasn’t truth. It was just a particular finding and not reliable, not something you could count on. This so called framing problem. So that didn’t pass the sniff test for me. It seemed implausible to start with. When you looked at the magnitudes, they weren’t plausible. I think I have a really good nose after a while. I start to think, a lot of these studies that I didn’t believe, in fact, didn’t hold up when subject to replication and testing. So I started to think, “I’m really good at this sniff thing. I’ve got really good common sense.” And I think it’s possible that there are people who have better common sense, better intuition, better judgement than others. But at the same time, I’m aware that maybe I kind of overestimate my sniff ability.

How to decide whether to have kids

We want to think of happiness as a… In math, we call a ‘scalar’. A number: seven. Seven on a scale of one to 10. If you ask me right now, “How glad are you that you have four children?” Actually I’d say 11 on a scale of one to 10, but some people might… If they were honest and that’s one of the challenges of survey data, are people really going to be honest to the surveyor? The person answering the questions, are they going to be honest with themselves? Do they really want to admit that it was a terrible mistake to have kids? Do they really want to…? Who knows whether that’s honest or not?

But inevitably in a survey like that, it’s either often, not always, you can make it a little bit more nuanced, but it’s often a yes/no question. “Are you glad you had kids?” Or, “On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you if you had kids?” And I would argue that the sterility of reducing something as complicated as being a parent to a number, it’s not so much trying to measure, it’s that what you’re trying to measure is so much more complicated than a point estimate like that. A scalar, a single number. It’s a giant, in fact, a giant matrix. There are some glorious things about having children and some not so glorious things. And fundamentally, I believe that the reason most people are glad that they had kids has nothing to do with the day-to-day satisfaction and what they put on a scale of one to 10, it has to do with their identity, who they became after they had children.

For me, that’s the essence of that decision. It’s not like, “Oh, was it worth it?” All those diapers you changed, the vomit you cleaned up. The whining, the wailing, the tragedy, the wounds, the stitches. There’s a lot of negatives…the carpooling. Those are the negatives, okay? Then you have the glorious highs, the wondrous things, the deep satisfaction, the emotional joy that you feel and delight in having children. It’s not about comparing those two things. I mean, it just isn’t what it’s about. It’s about who you’ve become.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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