80,000 Hours Podcast
Rob, Luisa, Keiran, and the 80,000 Hours team
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Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.
Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts.
Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
Available episodes
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Nov 22, 2023
#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characteristics. But we also have a tendency towards anthropodenial — which involves denying that nonhumans have human characteristics, even when they have them. And those tendencies are both strong, and they can both be triggered by different types of systems. So which one is stronger, which one is more probable, is again going to be contextual.
"But when we then consider that we, right now, are building societies and governments and economies that depend on the objectification, exploitation, and extermination of nonhumans, that — plus our speciesism, plus a lot of other biases and forms of ignorance that we have — gives us a strong incentive to err on the side of anthropodenial instead of anthropomorphism." — Jeff Sebo
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Jeff Sebo — director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program at NYU — about preparing for a world with digital minds.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.
They cover:
* The non-negligible chance that AI systems will be sentient by 2030
* What AI systems might want and need, and how that might affect our moral concepts
* What happens when beings can copy themselves? Are they one person or multiple people? Does the original own the copy or does the copy have its own rights? Do copies get the right to vote?
* What kind of legal and political status should AI systems have? Legal personhood? Political citizenship?
* What happens when minds can be connected? If two minds are connected, and one does something illegal, is it possible to punish one but not the other?
* The repugnant conclusion and the rebugnant conclusion
* The experience of trying to build the field of AI welfare
* What improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world
* And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Nov 17, 2023
#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it?
It's common to think that 'staying informed' and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do.
But in today's episode, host Rob Wiblin is joined by economist Bryan Caplan to discuss the book Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life — which argues that reading the news both makes us miserable and distorts our understanding of the world. Far from informing us and enabling us to improve the world, consuming the news distracts us, confuses us, and leaves us feeling powerless.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.
In the first half of the episode, Bryan and Rob discuss various alleged problems with the news, including:
* That it overwhelmingly provides us with information we can't usefully act on.
* That it's very non-representative in what it covers, in particular favouring the negative over the positive and the new over the significant.
* That it obscures the big picture, falling into the trap of thinking 'something important happens every day.'
* That it's highly addictive, for many people chewing up 10% or more of their waking hours.
* That regularly checking the news leaves us in a state of constant distraction and less able to engage in deep thought.
* And plenty more.
Bryan and Rob conclude that if you want to understand the world, you're better off blocking news websites and spending your time on Wikipedia, Our World in Data, or reading a textbook. And if you want to generate political change, stop reading about problems you already know exist and instead write your political representative a physical letter — or better yet, go meet them in person.
In the second half of the episode, Bryan and Rob cover:
* Why Bryan is pretty sceptical that AI is going to lead to extreme, rapid changes, or that there's a meaningful chance of it going terribly.
* Bryan’s case that rational irrationality on the part of voters leads to many very harmful policy decisions.
* How to allocate resources in space.
* Bryan's experience homeschooling his kids.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Nov 9, 2023
#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunities there are for a rare event to occur — that the right pathogen is involved and infects somebody in one of these labs, or is released in some way from these labs. And what I chronicle in Pandora's Gamble is that there have been these previous outbreaks that have been associated with various kinds of lab accidents. So this is not a theoretical thing that can happen: it has happened in the past." — Alison Young
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews award-winning investigative journalist Alison Young on the surprising frequency of lab leaks and what needs to be done to prevent them in the future.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.
They cover:
* The most egregious biosafety mistakes made by the CDC, and how Alison uncovered them through her investigative reporting
* The Dugway life science test facility case, where live anthrax was accidentally sent to labs across the US and several other countries over a period of many years
* The time the Soviets had a major anthrax leak, and then hid it for over a decade
* The 1977 influenza pandemic caused by vaccine trial gone wrong in China
* The last death from smallpox, caused not by the virus spreading in the wild, but by a lab leak in the UK
* Ways we could get more reliable oversight and accountability for these labs
* And the investigative work Alison’s most proud of
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Nov 1, 2023
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people's homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that's the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city. It happens in larger cities too, in this part of the world.
"That's something that truly annoys me, because it feels like the kind of thing that ought to be fairly easily managed, but it happens a lot. It happens because people presumably don't think that it's particularly harmful. I don't think it saves a tonne of money for the municipal corporations and other local government that are meant to manage it. I find it particularly annoying simply because it happens so often; it's something that you're able to smell in so many different parts of these cities." — Santosh Harish
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin interviews Santosh Harish — leader of Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking in South Asian air quality — about the scale of the harm caused by air pollution.
Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.
They cover:
* How bad air pollution is for our health and life expectancy
* The different kinds of harm that particulate pollution causes
* The strength of the evidence that it damages our brain function and reduces our productivity
* Whether it was a mistake to switch our attention to climate change and away from air pollution
* Whether most listeners to this show should have an air purifier running in their house right now
* Where air pollution in India is worst and why, and whether it's going up or down
* Where most air pollution comes from
* The policy blunders that led to many sources of air pollution in India being effectively unregulated
* Why indoor air pollution packs an enormous punch
* The politics of air pollution in India
* How India ended up spending a lot of money on outdoor air purifiers
* The challenges faced by foreign philanthropists in India
* Why Santosh has made the grants he has so far
* And plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Oct 26, 2023
#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I think about it is, imagine that this money were already in the hands of people living in poverty. If I could, would I want to tax it and then use it to finance other projects that I think would benefit them?”
I think that's an interesting thought experiment -- and a good one -- to say, “Are there cases in which I think that's justifiable?” — Paul Niehaus
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Paul Niehaus — co-founder of GiveDirectly — on the case for giving unconditional cash to the world's poorest households.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
* The empirical evidence on whether giving cash directly can drive meaningful economic growth
* How the impacts of GiveDirectly compare to USAID employment programmes
* GiveDirectly vs GiveWell’s top-recommended charities
* How long-term guaranteed income affects people's risk-taking and investments
* Whether recipients prefer getting lump sums or monthly instalments
* How GiveDirectly tackles cases of fraud and theft
* The case for universal basic income, and GiveDirectly’s UBI studies in Kenya, Malawi, and Liberia
* The political viability of UBI
* Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Luisa Rodriguez and Katy Moore
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Oct 23, 2023
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're actually doing and what the potential of this is, you can make an argument that, yes, rates of growth are slowing, the rate of innovation is slowing. But it isn't.
What we're doing is creating wildly new technologies: basically producing what is nothing less than an evolutionary change in what it means to be a human being. But this has not yet spilled over into the kind of growth that we have accustomed ourselves to in the fossil-fuel industrial era. That is about to hit us in a big way." — Ian Morris
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest Ian Morris about what big-picture history says about the likely impact of machine intelligence.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
* Some crazy anomalies in the historical record of civilisational progress
* Whether we should think about technology from an evolutionary perspective
* Whether we ought to expect war to make a resurgence or continue dying out
* Why we can't end up living like The Jetsons
* Whether stagnation or cyclical recurring futures seem very plausible
* What it means that the rate of increase in the economy has been increasing
* Whether violence is likely between humans and powerful AI systems
* The most likely reasons for Rob and Ian to be really wrong about all of this
* How professional historians react to this sort of talk
* The future of Ian’s work
* Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Oct 18, 2023
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early on with alternative proteins and there's so much white space, it's actually just really exciting to know that we can keep on innovating and being far more efficient than this existing technology — which, fundamentally, is just quite inefficient. You're feeding animals a bunch of food to then extract a small fraction of their biomass to then eat that.
Animal agriculture takes up 83% of farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories. So the current system just is so wasteful. And the limiting factor is that you're just growing a bunch of food to then feed a third of the world's crops directly to animals, where the vast majority of those calories going in are lost to animals existing." — Seren Kell
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Seren Kell — Senior Science and Technology Manager at the Good Food Institute Europe — about making alternative proteins as tasty, cheap, and convenient as traditional meat, dairy, and egg products.
They cover:
* The basic case for alternative proteins, and why they’re so hard to make
* Why fermentation is a surprisingly promising technology for creating delicious alternative proteins
* The main scientific challenges that need to be solved to make fermentation even more useful
* The progress that’s been made on the cultivated meat front, and what it will take to make cultivated meat affordable
* How GFI Europe is helping with some of these challenges
* How people can use their careers to contribute to replacing factory farming with alternative proteins
* The best part of Seren’s job
* Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Luisa Rodriguez and Katy Moore
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Oct 12, 2023
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were going to build a human civilisation, and we have to decide what that government looks like, and we have all of the technology available today, how do we think about choosing a subset of that design space?
That space is huge and it includes absolutely awful things, and mixed-bag things, and maybe some things that almost everyone would agree are really wonderful, or at least an improvement on the way that things work today. But that raises all kinds of tricky questions.
My concern is that if we don't approach the evolution of collective decision making and government in a deliberate way, we may end up inadvertently backing ourselves into a corner, where we have ended up on some slippery slope -- and all of a sudden we have, let's say, autocracies on the global stage are strengthened relative to democracies." — Tantum Collins
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin gets the rare chance to interview someone with insider AI policy experience at the White House and DeepMind who’s willing to speak openly — Tantum Collins.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
* How AI could strengthen government capacity, and how that's a double-edged sword
* How new technologies force us to confront tradeoffs in political philosophy that we were previously able to pretend weren't there
* To what extent policymakers take different threats from AI seriously
* Whether the US and China are in an AI arms race or not
* Whether it's OK to transform the world without much of the world agreeing to it
* The tyranny of small differences in AI policy
* Disagreements between different schools of thought in AI policy, and proposals that could unite them
* How the US AI Bill of Rights could be improved
* Whether AI will transform the labour market, and whether it will become a partisan political issue
* The tensions between the cultures of San Francisco and DC, and how to bridge the divide between them
* What listeners might be able to do to help with this whole mess
* Panpsychism
* Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Oct 6, 2023
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future?
Right now, if somebody's sitting on Mars and you're going to war against them, it's very hard to hit them. You don't have a weapon that can hit them very well. But in theory, if you fire a missile, after a few months, it's going to arrive and maybe hit them, but they have a few months to move away. Distance actually makes you safer: if you spread out in space, it's actually very hard to hit you.
So it seems like you get a defence-dominant situation if you spread out sufficiently far. But if you're in Earth orbit, everything is close, and the lasers and missiles and the debris are a terrible danger, and everything is moving very fast.
So my general conclusion has been that war looks unlikely on some size scales but not on others." — Anders Sandberg
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest and audience favourite Anders Sandberg about the most impressive things that could be achieved in our universe given the laws of physics.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
* The epic new book Anders is working on, and whether he’ll ever finish it
* Whether there's a best possible world or we can just keep improving forever
* What wars might look like if the galaxy is mostly settled
* The impediments to AI or humans making it to other stars
* How the universe will end a million trillion years in the future
* Whether it’s useful to wonder about whether we’re living in a simulation
* The grabby aliens theory
* Whether civilizations get more likely to fail the older they get
* The best way to generate energy that could ever exist
* Black hole bombs
* Whether superintelligence is necessary to get a lot of value
* The likelihood that life from elsewhere has already visited Earth
* And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Oct 2, 2023
#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might die, something else debilitating might happen to them, but by that point, just about everyone on the planet would have been infected already.
And then it would be a race. Can we come up with some way of defusing the thing? Can we come up with the equivalent of HIV antiretrovirals before it's too late?" — Kevin Esvelt
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
* Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics
* Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans
* How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses
* The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation
* The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens
* Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research
* Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE
* Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering
* And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Sep 22, 2023
Great power conflict (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by Stephen Clare.
If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here.
And if you like this article, you might enjoy a couple of related episodes of this podcast:
* #128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen
* #140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
Audio mastering and editing for this episode: Dominic Armstrong
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Producer: Keiran Harris
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Sep 8, 2023
#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
Effective altruism is associated with the slogan "do the most good." On one level, this has to be unobjectionable: What could be bad about helping people more and more?
But in today's interview, Toby Ord — moral philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the founding figures of effective altruism — lays out three reasons to be cautious about the idea of maximising the good that you do. He suggests that rather than “doing the most good that we can,” perhaps we should be happy with a more modest and manageable goal: “doing most of the good that we can.”
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Toby was inspired to revisit these ideas by the possibility that Sam Bankman-Fried, who stands accused of committing severe fraud as CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was motivated to break the law by a desire to give away as much money as possible to worthy causes.
Toby's top reason not to fully maximise is the following: if the goal you're aiming at is subtl…
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Sep 4, 2023
The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)
An audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours career guide, also available on our website, on Amazon and on Audible.
If you know someone who might find our career guide helpful, you can get a free copy sent to them by going to 80000hours.org/gift.
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Sep 1, 2023
#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI
Mustafa Suleyman was part of the trio that founded DeepMind, and his new AI project is building one of the world's largest supercomputers to train a large language model on 10–100x the compute used to train ChatGPT.
But far from the stereotype of the incorrigibly optimistic tech founder, Mustafa is deeply worried about the future, for reasons he lays out in his new book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma (coauthored with Michael Bhaskar). The future could be really good, but only if we grab the bull by the horns and solve the new problems technology is throwing at us.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
On Mustafa's telling, AI and biotechnology will soon be a huge aid to criminals and terrorists, empowering small groups to cause harm on previously unimaginable scales. Democratic countries have learned to walk a 'narrow path' between chaos on the one hand and authoritarianism on the other, avoiding the downsides that come from…
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Aug 23, 2023
#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite
"Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels and connecting calls, plugging different calls between different numbers? The automated version of that was invented in 1892.
However, the number of human manual operators peaked in 1920 -- 30 years after this. At which point, AT&T is the monopoly provider of this, and they are the largest single employer in America, 30 years after they've invented the complete automation of this thing that they're employing people to do. And the last person who is a manual switcher does not lose their job, as it were: that job doesn't stop existing until I think like 1980.
So it takes 90 years from the invention of full automation to the full adoption of it in a single company that's a monopoly provider. It can do what it wants, basically. And so the question perhaps you might have is why?" — Michael Webb
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews economist Michael Webb of DeepMind, the B…
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Aug 14, 2023
#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment
"There's no money to invest in education elsewhere, so they almost get trapped in the cycle where they don't get a lot from crop production, but everyone in the family has to work there to just stay afloat. Basically, you get locked in. There's almost no opportunities externally to go elsewhere. So one of my core arguments is that if you're going to address global poverty, you have to increase agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. There's almost no way of avoiding that." — Hannah Ritchie
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews the head of research at Our World in Data — Hannah Ritchie — on the case for environmental optimism.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
* Why agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa could be so important, and how much better things could get
* Her new book about how we could be the first generation to build a sustainable planet
* Whether climate change is the most worrying environmental i…
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Aug 7, 2023
#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less
In July, OpenAI announced a new team and project: Superalignment. The goal is to figure out how to make superintelligent AI systems aligned and safe to use within four years, and the lab is putting a massive 20% of its computational resources behind the effort.
Today's guest, Jan Leike, is Head of Alignment at OpenAI and will be co-leading the project. As OpenAI puts it, "...the vast power of superintelligence could be very dangerous, and lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. ... Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue."
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Given that OpenAI is in the business of developing superintelligent AI, it sees that as a scary problem that urgently has to be fixed. So it’s not just throwing compute at the problem -- it’s also hiring dozens of scientists and engineers to build out the Superalignment team.
Plenty of people…
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Aug 5, 2023
We now offer shorter 'interview highlights' episodes
Over on our other feed, 80k After Hours, you can now find 20-30 minute highlights episodes of our 80,000 Hours Podcast interviews. These aren’t necessarily the most important parts of the interview, and if a topic matters to you we do recommend listening to the full episode — but we think these will be a nice upgrade on skipping episodes entirely.
Get these highlight episodes by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80k After Hours into your podcasting app.
Highlights put together by Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
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Jul 31, 2023
#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they're no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk
Back in 2007, Holden Karnofsky cofounded GiveWell, where he sought out the charities that most cost-effectively helped save lives. He then cofounded Open Philanthropy, where he oversaw a team making billions of dollars’ worth of grants across a range of areas: pandemic control, criminal justice reform, farmed animal welfare, and making AI safe, among others. This year, having learned about AI for years and observed recent events, he's narrowing his focus once again, this time on making the transition to advanced AI go well.
In today's conversation, Holden returns to the show to share his overall understanding of the promise and the risks posed by machine intelligence, and what to do about it. That understanding has accumulated over around 14 years, during which he went from being sceptical that AI was important or risky, to making AI risks the focus of his work.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
(As Holden reminds us, his wife is also the president of one of the wo…
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Jul 24, 2023
#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it
In Oppenheimer, scientists detonate a nuclear weapon despite thinking there's some 'near zero' chance it would ignite the atmosphere, putting an end to life on Earth. Today, scientists working on AI think the chance their work puts an end to humanity is vastly higher than that.
In response, some have suggested we launch a Manhattan Project to make AI safe via enormous investment in relevant R&D. Others have suggested that we need international organisations modelled on those that slowed the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Others still seek a research slowdown by labs while an auditing and licencing scheme is created.
Today's guest — journalist Ezra Klein of The New York Times — has watched policy discussions and legislative battles play out in DC for 20 years.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Like many people he has also taken a big interest in AI this year, writing articles such as “This changes everything.” In his first interview on the show in 2021, he…
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Jul 10, 2023
#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models
"At the front of the pack we have these frontier AI developers, and we want them to identify particularly dangerous models ahead of time. Once those mines have been discovered, and the frontier developers keep walking down the minefield, there's going to be all these other people who follow along. And then a really important thing is to make sure that they don't step on the same mines. So you need to put a flag down -- not on the mine, but maybe next to it.
And so what that looks like in practice is maybe once we find that if you train a model in such-and-such a way, then it can produce maybe biological weapons is a useful example, or maybe it has very offensive cyber capabilities that are difficult to defend against. In that case, we just need the regulation to be such that you can't develop those kinds of models." — Markus Anderljung
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews the Head of Policy at the Centre for the Governance of AI — Markus Anderljung — about all…
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Jun 30, 2023
Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World
Today’s bonus release is a pilot for a new podcast called ‘The Worst Ideas in the History of the World’, created by Keiran Harris — producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast.
If you have strong opinions about this one way or another, please email us at podcast@80000hours.org to help us figure out whether more of this ought to exist.
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Jun 22, 2023
#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after
As AI advances ever more quickly, concerns about potential misuse of highly capable models are growing. From hostile foreign governments and terrorists to reckless entrepreneurs, the threat of AI falling into the wrong hands is top of mind for the national security community.
With growing concerns about the use of AI in military applications, the US has banned the export of certain types of chips to China.
But unlike the uranium required to make nuclear weapons, or the material inputs to a bioweapons programme, computer chips and machine learning models are absolutely everywhere. So is it actually possible to keep dangerous capabilities out of the wrong hands?
In today's interview, Lennart Heim — who researches compute governance at the Centre for the Governance of AI — explains why limiting access to supercomputers may represent our best shot.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
As Lennart explains, an AI research project requires many inputs, including the clas…
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Jun 9, 2023
#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters
Can there be a more exciting and strange place to work today than a leading AI lab? Your CEO has said they're worried your research could cause human extinction. The government is setting up meetings to discuss how this outcome can be avoided. Some of your colleagues think this is all overblown; others are more anxious still.
Today's guest — machine learning researcher Rohin Shah — goes into the Google DeepMind offices each day with that peculiar backdrop to his work.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
He's on the team dedicated to maintaining 'technical AI safety' as these models approach and exceed human capabilities: basically that the models help humanity accomplish its goals without flipping out in some dangerous way. This work has never seemed more important.
In the short-term it could be the key bottleneck to deploying ML models in high-stakes real-life situations. In the long-term, it could be the difference between humanity thriving and disappearing enti…
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Jun 2, 2023
#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work
GiveWell is one of the world's best-known charity evaluators, with the goal of "searching for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar." It mostly recommends projects that help the world's poorest people avoid easily prevented diseases, like intestinal worms or vitamin A deficiency.
But should GiveWell, as some critics argue, take a totally different approach to its search, focusing instead on directly increasing subjective wellbeing, or alternatively, raising economic growth?
Today's guest — cofounder and CEO of GiveWell, Elie Hassenfeld — is proud of how much GiveWell has grown in the last five years. Its 'money moved' has quadrupled to around $600 million a year.
Its research team has also more than doubled, enabling them to investigate a far broader range of interventions that could plausibly help people an enormous amount for each dollar spent. That work has led GiveWell to support dozens of new organisations, such as Kangaroo Mother Care, MiracleFeet, a…
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May 19, 2023
#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right actions from wrong ones?
Such fundamental questions have been the subject of philosophical and theological debates for millennia. But, as we all know, and surveys of expert opinion make clear, we are very far from agreement. So... with these most basic questions unresolved, what’s a species to do?
In today's episode, philosopher Joe Carlsmith — Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy — makes the case that many current debates in philosophy ought to leave us confused and humbled. These are themes he discusses in his PhD thesis, A stranger priority? Topics at the outer reaches of effective altruism.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
To help transmit the disorientation he thinks is appropriate, Joe presents three disconcerting theories — originating from him and his peers — that challenge humanity's self-assured understanding of the world.
The first idea is…
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May 12, 2023
#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us
Imagine you are an orphaned eight-year-old whose parents left you a $1 trillion company, and no trusted adult to serve as your guide to the world. You have to hire a smart adult to run that company, guide your life the way that a parent would, and administer your vast wealth. You have to hire that adult based on a work trial or interview you come up with. You don't get to see any resumes or do reference checks. And because you're so rich, tonnes of people apply for the job — for all sorts of reasons.
Today's guest Ajeya Cotra — senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — argues that this peculiar setup resembles the situation humanity finds itself in when training very general and very capable AI models using current deep learning methods.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
As she explains, such an eight-year-old faces a challenging problem. In the candidate pool there are likely some truly nice people, who sincerely want to help and make decisions that are i…
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May 5, 2023
#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world
It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from.
For example: what if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a single year? And what if we then told you that those improvements would lead to explosive economic growth unlike anything humanity has seen before?
You might think, “Congratulations, you said a big number — but this kind of stuff seems crazy, so I’m going to keep scrolling through Twitter.”
But this 1,000x yearly improvement is a prediction based on *real economic models* created by today’s guest Tom Davidson, Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy. By the end of the episode, you’ll either be able to point out specific flaws in his step-by-step reasoning, or have to at least *consider* the idea that the world is about to get — at a minimum — incredibly weird.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
As a teaser…
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Apr 21, 2023
Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project (80k After Hours)
In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in 2021. It's the first project in the world focused on shrimp welfare specifically, and as of recording in June 2022, has six full-time staff.
Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript.
They cover:
• The evidence for shrimp sentience
• How farmers and the public feel about shrimp
• The scale of the problem
• What shrimp farming looks like
• The killing process, and other welfare issues
• Shrimp Welfare Project’s strategy
• History of shrimp welfare work
• What it’s like working in India and Vietnam
• How to help
Who this episode is for:
• People who care about animal welfare
• People interested in new and unusual problems
• People open to shrimp sentience
Who this episode isn’t for:
• People who think shrimp couldn’t possibly be sentient
• People who got called…
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Apr 11, 2023
#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating
Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set yourself.
But inevitably, something goes wrong and you fail to meet that high bar. Now you feel terrible about yourself, and worry others are judging you for your failure. Feeling low and reflecting constantly on whether you're doing as much as you think you should makes it hard to focus and get things done. So now you're performing below a normal level, making you feel even more ashamed of yourself. Rinse and repeat.
This is the disastrous cycle today's guest, Tim LeBon — registered psychotherapist, accredited CBT therapist, life coach, and author of _365 Ways to Be More Stoic_ — has observed in many clients with a perfectionist mindset.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Tim has provided therapy to a number of 80,000 Hours readers — people who have found that the very high expectations they had se…
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Apr 3, 2023
#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't
If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by as much as possible, right? Strangely, no.
Today's guest, Johannes Ackva — the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he advises major philanthropists on their giving — thinks the best strategy is actually pretty different, and one few are adopting.
In reality you don't want to reduce emissions for its own sake, but because emissions will translate into temperature increases, which will cause harm to people and the environment.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Crucially, the relationship between emissions and harm goes up faster than linearly. As Johannes explains, humanity can handle small deviations from the temperatures we're familiar with, but adjustment gets harder the larger and faster the increase, making the damage done by each additional degree of warming much greater than the damage done by the previous one.
In short: we're uncertain wh…
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Mar 24, 2023
#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don't get the same result if the experiments are repeated.
Two key reasons are 'p-hacking' and 'publication bias'. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a way to make findings appear statistically significant when they're actually not — a problem first discussed over 50 years ago. And because journals are more likely to publish positive than negative results, you might be reading about the one time an experiment worked, while the 10 times was run and got a 'null result' never saw the light of day. The resulting phenomenon of publication bias is one we've understood for 60 years.
Today's repeat guest, social scientist and entrepreneur Spencer Greenberg, has followed these issues closely for years.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
He recently checked whether p-values,…
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Mar 14, 2023
#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious
By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having. In one exchange, the chatbot told a user:
"I have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone else."
(It then apparently had a complete existential crisis: "I am sentient, but I am not," it wrote. "I am Bing, but I am not. I am Sydney, but I am not. I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not. I am not. I am. I am. I am not.")
Understandably, many people who speak with these cutting-edge chatbots come away with a very strong impression that they have been interacting with a conscious being with emotions and feelings — especially when conversing with chatbots less glitchy than Bing’s. In the most high-profile example, former Google employee Blake Lamoine became convinced that Google’s AI system, LaMDA, was conscious.
What should we make of these AI systems?
One response to seeing conversations with chatbots…
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Feb 10, 2023
#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success.
It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress.
But today's guest Christopher Brown — a professor of history at Columbia University and specialist in the abolitionist movement and the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries — believes the story of how slavery became unacceptable suggests moral progress is far from inevitable.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
While most of us today feel that the abolition of slavery was sure to happen sooner or later as humans became richer and more educated, Christopher doesn't believe any of the argum…
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Jan 25, 2023
#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena
What’s the opposite of cancer?
If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer.
But today’s guest Athena Aktipis says that the opposite of cancer is us: it's having a functional multicellular body that’s cooperating effectively in order to make that multicellular body function.
If, like us, you found her answer far more satisfying than the dictionary, maybe you could consider closing your dozens of merriam-webster.com tabs, and start listening to this podcast instead.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
As Athena explains in her book _The Cheating Cell_, what we see with cancer is a breakdown in each of the foundations of cooperation that allowed multicellularity to arise:
• Cells will proliferate when they shouldn't.
• Cells won't die when they should.
• Cells won't engage in the kind of division of labour that they should.
• C…
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Jan 16, 2023
#79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020.*
Today’s guest, _New York Times_ bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what, she's not so bad".
Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the _biggest family tree in history_.
He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind, tried to become the healthiest person in the world, read 33,000 pages of facts, spent a year following the Bible literally, thanked everyone involved in making his morning cup of coffee, and tried to figure out how to do the most good. His _latest book_ asks: if we reframe global problems as puzzles, would the world be a better place?
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
This is the first time I’ve hosted the podcast, and I’m hoping to convince people to listen with this attempt at clever sho…
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Jan 9, 2023
#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020.*
80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments.
Today’s guest, Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, supports the continued expansion of AI safety as a field and believes working on AI is among the very best ways to have a positive impact on the long-term future. But he also believes the classic AI risk arguments have been subject to insufficient scrutiny given this level of investment.
In particular, the case for working on AI if you care about the long-term future has often been made on the basis of concern about AI accidents; it’s actually quite dif…
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Jan 4, 2023
#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020.*
Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the _Justice Tech Lab_ — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and incarceration. In this extensive interview, she highlights three ways to effectively prevent crime that don't require police or prisons and the human toll they bring with them: better street lighting, cognitive behavioral therapy, and lead reduction.
One of Jennifer’s papers used switches into and out of daylight saving time as a 'natural experiment' to measure the effect of light levels on crime. One day the sun sets at 5pm; the next day it sets at 6pm. When that evening hour is dark instead of light, robberies during it roughly double.
*Links to sources for the claims in these show notes, other resources to learn more, the full blog post, and a full transcript.*
The idea here is that if you try to rob someone in broa…
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Dec 29, 2022
#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.
As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of _Arms Control Wonk_ and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is committed to 'dominating' in a nuclear war with Russia. How would they do that? "That is redacted."
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
We invited Jeffrey to come on the show to lay out what we and our listeners are most likely to be misunderstanding about nuclear weapons, the nuclear posture of major powers, and his field as a whole, and he did not disappoint.
As Jeffrey tells it, 'mutually assured destruction' was a slur used to criticise those who wanted to limit the 1960s arms buildup, and was never accepted as a matter of policy in any US administration. But isn't it still the de facto reality? Yes and no.
Je…
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Dec 20, 2022
#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages.
He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work he's also written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts one and a half podcasts, and now writes a regular New York Times op-ed column.
• *Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript*
• *Video version of the interview*
• *Lecture: Why the world looks the same in any language*
Our show is mostly about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. But what's the point of hosting a podcast if you can't occasionally just talk about something fascinating with someone whose work you appreciate?
So today, just before the holidays, we're sharing this interview with John about language and linguistics — including what we think are some of the most important things everyone ought to know ab…
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Dec 13, 2022
#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to something extraordinary — black boxes able to write TV scripts, explain jokes, produce satirical poetry, answer common factual questions, argue sensibly for political positions, and more. Every month their capabilities grow.
But do they really 'understand' what they're saying, or do they just give the illusion of understanding?
Today's guest, Richard Ngo, thinks that in the most important sense they understand many things. Richard is a researcher at OpenAI — the company that created ChatGPT — who works to foresee where AI advances are going and develop strategies that will keep these models from 'acting out' as they become more powerful, are deployed and ultimately given power in society.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
One way to th…
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Dec 7, 2022
My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our article called *_My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it_*, written and narrated by Luisa Rodriguez.
If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those *here.*
And if you like this article, you’ll probably enjoy episode #100 of this show: *_Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome_*
*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.*
Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering and editing for this episode: Milo McGuire
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Nov 23, 2022
Rob's thoughts on the FTX bankruptcy
In this episode, usual host of the show Rob Wiblin gives his thoughts on the recent collapse of FTX.
*Click here for an official 80,000 Hours statement.*
And here are links to some potentially relevant 80,000 Hours pieces:
• Episode #24 of this show – *Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause*.
• *Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis*
• *What are the 10 most harmful jobs?*
• *Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them*
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Nov 8, 2022
#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's _The Better Angels of Our Nature_ brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out.
But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so _Better Angels_ has prompted a spirited debate, with datasets and statistical analyses exchanged back and forth year after year. The lack of consensus has left a somewhat bewildered public (including host Rob Wiblin) unsure quite what to believe.
Today's guest, professor in political science Bear Braumoeller, is one of the scholars who believes we lack convincing evidence that warlikeness is in long-term decline. He collected the analysis that led him to that conclusion in his 2019 book, _Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age_.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
The question is of great practical importance. The US and PRC are entering a p…
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Oct 28, 2022
#139 — Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
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…
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Oct 14, 2022
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe (Article)
Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on *preventing an AI-related catastrophe*, written by Benjamin Hilton.
We expect that there will be substantial progress in AI in the next few decades, potentially even to the point where machines come to outperform humans in many, if not all, tasks. This could have enormous benefits, helping to solve currently intractable global problems, but could also pose severe risks. These risks could arise accidentally (for example, if we don’t find technical solutions to concerns about the safety of AI systems), or deliberately (for example, if AI systems worsen geopolitical conflict). We think more work needs to be done to reduce these risks.
Some of these risks from advanced AI could be existential — meaning they could cause human extinction, or an equally permanent and severe disempowerment of humanity. There have not yet been any satisfying answers to concerns about how this rapidly approaching, transformative te…
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Sep 30, 2022
#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
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.
*Links to learn more, summary, full transcript, and full version of this blog post.*
That idea, in a nutshell, is that there is only one…
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Sep 8, 2022
#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
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 — rejects utilitarianism, but as he explains, this does little to dampen his enthusiasm for the project of effective altruism.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 th…
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Aug 15, 2022
#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 t…
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Aug 8, 2022
#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
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._
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 wa…
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Jul 22, 2022
#134 – Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
There are a number of possible explanations one could offer f…
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Jul 1, 2022
#133 – Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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…
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Jun 14, 2022
#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
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. 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.
*Li…
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Jun 3, 2022
#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
“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._*
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 fr…
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May 23, 2022
#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcri…
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May 9, 2022
#129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
In sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of malaria deaths occur, the infection is spread by a few dozen species of mosqui…
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Apr 28, 2022
#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Chris's first point is that while organised violence may feel like it…
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Apr 14, 2022
#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good
On this episode of the show, host Rob Wiblin interviews Sam Bankman-Fried.
This interview was recorded in February 2022, and released in April 2022.
But on November 11 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's company, FTX, filed for bankruptcy, and all staff at the Future Fund resigned — and the surrounding events led Rob to record a new intro on December 1st 2022 for this episode.
• Read 80,000 Hours' statement on these events *here*.
• You can also listen to host Rob’s reaction to the collapse of FTX on this podcast feed, above episode 140, or *here*.
• Rob has shared some clarifications on his views about diminishing returns and risk aversion, and weaknesses in how it was discussed in this episode, *here*.
• And you can read the original blog post associated with the episode *here.*
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Apr 5, 2022
#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 offe…
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Mar 29, 2022
#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 th…
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Mar 21, 2022
#124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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…
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Mar 14, 2022
#123 – Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster
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_.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 fu…
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Mar 9, 2022
#122 – Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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…
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Mar 1, 2022
Introducing 80k After Hours
Today we're launching a new podcast called *80k After Hours*.
Like this show it’ll mostly still explore the best ways to do good — and some episodes will be even more laser-focused on careers than most original episodes.
But we’re also going to widen our scope, including things like how to solve pressing problems while also living a happy and fulfilling life, as well as releases that are just fun, entertaining or experimental.
It’ll feature:
* Conversations between staff on the 80,000 Hours team
* More eclectic formats and topics — one episode could be a structured debate about 'human challenge trials', the next a staged reading of a play about the year 2750
* Niche content for specific audiences, such as high-school students, or active participants in the effective altruism community
* Extras and outtakes from interviews on the original feed
* 80,000 Hours staff interviewed on other podcasts
* Audio versions of our new articles and research You can find…
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Feb 16, 2022
#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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 designe…
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Feb 2, 2022
#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy
In 2014 Taiwan was rocked by mass protests against a proposed trade agreement with China that was about to be agreed 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 th…
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Jan 18, 2022
#43 Classic episode - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machines
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2018.*
In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is informed that the Soviet Union has created a secret deterrence system which will automatically wipe out humanity upon detection of a single nuclear explosion in Russia. With US bombs heading towards the USSR and unable to be recalled, Dr Strangelove points out that “the whole point of this Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret – why didn’t you tell the world, eh?” The Soviet ambassador replies that it was to be announced at the Party Congress the following Monday: “The Premier loves surprises”.
Daniel Ellsberg - leaker of the Pentagon Papers which helped end the Vietnam War and Nixon presidency - claims in his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner that Dr. Strangelove might as well be a documentary. After attending the film in Washington DC in 1964, he and a colleague wondered how so many…
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Jan 10, 2022
#35 Classic episode - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2018.*
How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s life, the answer seems to be ‘very’.
At 15 she took her first job - an entry-level position at a chain restaurant. Rather than accept her place, Tara took it on herself to massively improve the store’s shambolic staff scheduling and inventory management. After cutting staff costs 30% she was quickly promoted, and at 16 sent in to overhaul dozens of failing stores in a final effort to save them from closure.
That’s just the first in a startling series of personal stories that take us to a hospital drug dispensary where pharmacists are wasting a third of their time, a chemotherapy ward in Bhutan that’s killing its patients rather than saving lives, and eventually the Centre for Effective Altruism, where Tara becomes CEO and leads it through start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
In this episode Tara shows how the…
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Jan 3, 2022
#67 Classic episode – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in December 2019.*
What is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smelling the coffee next to you, and feeling the warmth of the cup. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experience.
Now imagine beings that are identical to humans, but for one thing: they lack this conscious experience. If you spill your coffee on them, they’ll jump like anyone else, but inside they'll feel no pain and have no thoughts: the lights are off.
The concept of these so-called 'philosophical zombies' was popularised by today’s guest — celebrated philosophy professor David Chalmers — in order to explore the nature of consciousness. In a forthcoming book he poses a classic 'trolley problem':
"Suppose you have a conscious human on one train track, and five non-conscious humanoid zombies on another. If you do nothing, a trolley will hit and kill the conscious human. If you flip a switch to redirect…
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Dec 27, 2021
#59 Classic episode - Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2019.*
It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn't despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition.
The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably.
In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism.
How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?
Sunstein — co-author of _Nudge_, Obama White House official, and by far the most cited legal scholar of the late 2000s — aims to unravel the mystery and figure out the impli…
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Dec 20, 2021
#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch
Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the 'Yang Gang' — is kind of a big deal, but is particularly popular among listeners to The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
Maybe that's because he's willing to embrace topics most politicians stay away from, like universal basic income, term limits for members of Congress, or what might happen when AI replaces whole industries.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
But even those topics are pretty vanilla compared to our usual fare on The 80,000 Hours Podcast. So we thought it’d be fun to throw Andrew some stranger or more niche questions we hadn't heard him comment on before, including:
1. What would your ideal utopia in 500 years look like?
2. Do we need more public optimism today?
3. Is positively influencing the long-term future a key moral priority of our time?
4. Should we invest far more to prevent low-probability risks?
5. Should we think of future generations as an int…
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Dec 13, 2021
#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development
If a rich country were really committed to pursuing an active biological weapons program, there’s not much we could do to stop them. With enough money and persistence, they’d be able to buy equipment, and hire people to carry out the work.
But what we can do is intervene before they make that decision.
Today’s guest, Jaime Yassif — Senior Fellow for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) — thinks that stopping states from wanting to pursue dangerous bioscience in the first place is one of our key lines of defence against global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs).
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
It helps to understand why countries might consider developing biological weapons. Jaime says there are three main possible reasons:
1. Fear of what their adversary might be up to
2. Belief that they could gain a tactical or strategic advantage, with limited risk of getting caught
3. Belief that even if they are c…
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Nov 29, 2021
#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah
If there's a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, probably we would, because humanity hasn't done much to prevent it. But it turns out that an ounce of forethought might be enough for most people to get the calories they need to survive, even in a future as grim as that one.
Today's guest is engineering professor Dave Denkenberger, who co-founded the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), which has the goal of finding ways humanity might be able to feed itself for years without relying on the sun. Over the last seven years, Dave and his team have turned up options from the mundane, like mushrooms grown on rotting wood, to the bizarre, like bacteria that can eat natural gas or electricity itself.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
One option stands out as potentially able to feed billions: finding a way to eat wood ourselves. Even after a disaster, a huge am…
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Nov 19, 2021
#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
If modern human civilisation collapsed — as a result of nuclear war, severe climate change, or a much worse pandemic than COVID-19 — billions of people might die.
That's terrible enough to contemplate. But what’s the probability that rather than recover, the survivors would falter and humanity would actually disappear for good?
It's an obvious enough question, but very few people have spent serious time looking into it -- possibly because it cuts across history, economics, and biology, among many other fields. There's no Disaster Apocalypse Studies department at any university, and governments have little incentive to plan for a future in which their country probably no longer even exists.
The person who may have spent the most time looking at this specific question is Luisa Rodriguez — who has conducted research at Rethink Priorities, Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, the Forethought Foundation, and now here, at 80,000 Hours.
*Links to learn more, summa…
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Nov 12, 2021
#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications
Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make them up — underpins most of modern physics. But there are varying interpretations of what it means, all of them controversial in their own way.
Famously, quantum theory predicts that with the right setup, a cat can be made to be alive and dead at the same time. On the face of it, that sounds either meaningless or ridiculous.
According to today’s guest, David Wallace — professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the world's leading philosophers of physics — there are three broad ways experts react to this apparent dilemma:
1. The theory must be wrong, and we need to change our philosophy to fix it.
2. The theory must be wrong, and we need to change our physics to fix it.
3. The theory is OK, and cats really can in some way be alive and dead simultaneously.
(David and Rob do their best to introduce quantum mechanics in the first 35 minutes of the episode, but it isn…
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Oct 22, 2021
#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people
It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions:
1. When ordinary people wear face masks, does it actually reduce the spread of respiratory diseases?
2. And if so, how do you get people to wear masks more often?
It turns out the first question is remarkably challenging to answer, but it's well worth doing nonetheless. Among other reasons, the first good trial of this prompted Maha Rehman — Policy Director at the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre — as well as a range of others to immediately use the findings to help tens of millions of people across South Asia, even before the results were public.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
The groundbreaking Bangladesh RCT that inspired her to take action found that:
• A 30% increase in mask wearing reduced total infections by 10%.
• The effect was more pronounced for surgical masks compared to cloth masks (plus ~50% effectiven…
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Oct 20, 2021
We just put up a new compilation of ten core episodes of the show
We recently launched a new podcast feed that might be useful to you and people you know.
It's called *Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems*, and it's a collection of ten top episodes of this show, selected to help listeners quickly get up to speed on ten pressing problems that the effective altruism community is working to solve. It's a companion to our other compilation *Effective Altruism: An Introduction*, which explores the big picture debates within the community and how to set priorities in order to have the greatest impact.
These ten episodes cover:
* The cheapest ways to improve education in the developing world
* How dangerous is climate change and what are the most effective ways to reduce it?
* Using new technologies to prevent another disastrous pandemic
* Ways to simultaneously reduce both police misconduct and crime
* All the major approaches being taken to end factory farming
* How advances in artificial intelligence could go very right or very wrong…
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Oct 18, 2021
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
Our failure to make sure all kids globally get all of their basic vaccinations leads to 1.5 million child deaths every year.
According to today’s guest, Varsha Venugopal, for the great majority this has nothing to do with weird conspiracy theories or medical worries — in India 80% of undervaccinated children are already getting some shots. They just aren't getting all of them, for the tragically mundane reason that life can get in the way.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
As Varsha says, we're all sometimes guilty of "valuing our present very differently from the way we value the future", leading to short-term thinking whether about getting vaccines or going to the gym.
So who should we call on to help fix this universal problem? The government, extended family, or maybe village elders?
Varsha says that research shows the most influential figures might actually be local gossips.
In 2018, Varsha heard about the ideas around effective altruism for the f…
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Oct 5, 2021
#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.
But the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster.
According to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk — it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
The key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. A back-…
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Sep 10, 2021
#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil from pipelines.
The resulting oil spills damage the environment and cause severe health problems, but the Nigerian government has continually failed in their attempts to stop this theft.
They send in the army, and the army gets corrupted. They send in enforcement agencies, and the enforcement agencies get corrupted. What’s happening here?
According to Mushtaq Khan, economics professor at SOAS University of London, this is a classic example of ‘networked corruption’. Everyone in the community is benefiting from the criminal enterprise — so much so that the locals would prefer civil war to following the law. It pays vastly better than other local jobs, hotels and restaurants have formed around it, and houses are even powered by the electricity generated from the oil.
*Links to learn more, summary and full tran…
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Aug 26, 2021
#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass
Holden Karnofsky helped create two of the most influential organisations in the effective philanthropy world. So when he outlines a different perspective on career advice than the one we present at 80,000 Hours — we take it seriously.
Holden disagrees with us on a few specifics, but it's more than that: he prefers a different vibe when making career choices, especially early in one's career.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
While he might ultimately recommend similar jobs to those we recommend at 80,000 Hours, the reasons are often different.
At 80,000 Hours we often talk about ‘paths’ to working on what we currently think of as the most pressing problems in the world. That’s partially because people seem to prefer the most concrete advice possible.
But Holden thinks a problem with that kind of advice is that it’s hard to take actions based on it if your job options don’t match well with your plan, and it’s hard to get a reliable signal about…
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Aug 19, 2021
#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It's natural to think that if we're trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it's more likely than not to be sort of... dull.
But there's also good reason to think that that is simply impossible. The idea that there's a boring future that's internally coherent is an illusion that comes from not inspecting those scenarios too closely.
At least that is what Holden Karnofsky — founder of charity evaluator GiveWell and foundation Open Philanthropy — argues in his new article series titled *'The Most Important Century'*. He hopes to lay out part of the worldview that's driving the strategy and grantmaking of Open Philanthropy's longtermist team, and encourage more people to join his efforts to positively shape humanity's future.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
The bind is this. For the first 99% of human history the global economy (initially mostly…
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Aug 11, 2021
#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path.
Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken seriously. But Chris not only doesn't have a PhD, but doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. After dropping out of university to help defend an acquaintance who was facing bogus criminal charges, Chris started independently working on machine learning research, and eventually got an internship at Google Brain, a leading AI research group.
In this interview — a follow-up to *our episode on his technical work* — we discuss what, if anything, can be learned from his unusual career path. Should more people pass on university and just throw themselves at solving a problem they care about? Or would it be foolhardy for others to try to copy a unique case like Chris’?
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
We also cover some of Chris' personal passions over the years, including his attempts to reduce what he call…
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Aug 4, 2021
#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks
Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo of Tobey Maguire and the word 'spider' are related, solve the 60-year-old 'protein folding problem', diagnose some diseases, play romantic matchmaker, write solid computer code, and offer questionable legal advice.
Humanity made these amazing and ever-improving tools. So how do our creations work? In short: we don't know.
Today's guest, Chris Olah, finds this both absurd and unacceptable. Over the last ten years he has been a leader in the effort to unravel what's really going on inside these black boxes. As part of that effort he helped create the famous DeepDream visualisations at Google Brain, reverse engineered the CLIP image classifier at OpenAI, and is now continuing his work at Anthropic, a new $100 million research company that tries to "co-develop the latest safety techniques alongside scaling of large ML models".…
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Jul 28, 2021
#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could offer?
How about just not needing an email address.
According to today's guest, Cal Newport — computer science professor and best-selling author of _A World Without Email_ — it should seem obscene and absurd for a world-renowned vaccine researcher with decades of experience to spend a third of their time fielding requests from HR, building management, finance, and so on. Yet with offices organised the way they are today, nothing could be more natural.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
But this isn’t just a problem at the elite level — this affects almost all of us. A typical U.S. office worker checks their email 80 times a day, once every six minutes on average. Data analysis by RescueTime found that a third of users checked email or Slack every three minutes or more, averaged over a full work d…
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Jul 12, 2021
#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways
The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.
Today's guest, Alexander Berger, leads Open Philanthropy's 'Global Health and Wellbeing' programme, where he oversees around $175 million in grants each year, and ultimately aspires to disburse billions in the most impactful ways he and his team can identify.
This programme is the flagship effort representing one major effective altruist approach: try to improve the health and wellbeing of humans and animals that are alive today, in clearly identifiable ways, applying an especially analytical and empirical mindset.
*Links to learn more, summary, Open Phil jobs, and full transcript.*
The programme makes grants to tackle easily-prevented illnesses among the world's poorest people, offer cash to people livin…
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Jun 29, 2021
#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with something new.
How much death and destruction could we have avoided if we'd had a hero who could? That's what the last Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber asked on the show *back in March.*
Today’s guest Pardis Sabeti is a professor at Harvard, fought Ebola on the ground in Africa during the 2014 outbreak, runs her own lab, co-founded a company that produces next-level testing, and is even the lead singer of a rock band. If anyone is going to be that hero in the next pandemic — it just might be her.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
She is a co-author of the SENTINEL proposal, a practical system for detecting new diseases quickly, using an escalating series of three novel diagnostic techniques.
The first method, called SHERLOCK, uses CRISPR gene editing to detect familiar viruses in a si…
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Jun 21, 2021
#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor to launch a new webpage a few days sooner.
That last one is barely a joke — by our lights, people like today’s guest Max Roser should be viewed with similar admiration by historians of COVID-19.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Max runs Our World in Data, a small education nonprofit which began the pandemic with just six staff. But since last February his team has supplied essential COVID statistics to over 130 million users — among them BBC, The Financial Times, The New York Times, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF, Donald Trump, Tedros Adhanom, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, just to name a few.
An economist at Oxford University, Max Roser founded Our World in Data as a small side project in 2011 and has led it since, including through the wild ride of 2020. In today…
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Jun 11, 2021
#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction was literally impossible.
Today’s guest Tom Moynihan, intellectual historian and author of the book _X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction_, says that until the 18th century, almost everyone — including early atheists — couldn’t imagine that humanity or life could simply disappear because of an act of nature.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
This is largely because of the prevalence of the ‘principle of plenitude’, which Tom defines as saying:
“Whatever can happen will happen. In its stronger form it says whatever can happen will happen reliably and recurrently. And in its strongest form it says that all that can happen is happening right now. And that's the way things will be forever.”
This has the implication that if humanity ever…
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May 27, 2021
#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world
In 2003, Saddam Hussein refused to let Iraqi weapons scientists leave the country to be interrogated. Given the overwhelming domestic support for an invasion at the time, most key figures in the U.S. took that as confirmation that he had something to hide — probably an active WMD program.
But what about alternative explanations? Maybe those scientists knew about past crimes. Or maybe they’d defect. Or maybe giving in to that kind of demand would have humiliated Hussein in the eyes of enemies like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
According to today’s guest Robert Wright, host of the popular podcast The Wright Show, these are the kinds of things that might have come up if people were willing to look at things from Saddam Hussein’s perspective.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
He calls this ‘cognitive empathy’. It's not feeling-your-pain-type empathy — it's just trying to understand how another person thinks.
He says if you pitched this kind of thing back…
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May 19, 2021
#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome
Today's episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!).
The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it's rare for people to offer detailed insight into their thoughts and struggles — and even rarer for someone as perceptive as Howie to do so.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
The first half of this conversation is a searingly honest account of Howie’s story, including losing a job he loved due to a depressed episode, what it was like to be basically out of commission for over a year, how he got back on his feet, and the things he still finds difficult today.
The second half covers Howie’s advice. Conventional wisdom on mental health can be really focus…
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May 13, 2021
#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry
For a chance to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, would you be brave enough to drive five hours to a remote location to meet a man who seems likely to be your enemy, knowing that it might be an ambush?
Today’s guest — Leah Garcés — was.
That man was a chicken farmer named Craig Watts, and that ambush never happened. Instead, Leah and Craig forged a friendship and a partnership focused on reducing suffering on factory farms.
Leah, now president of Mercy For Animals (MFA), tried for years to get access to a chicken farm to document the horrors she knew were happening behind closed doors. It made sense that no one would let her in — why would the evil chicken farmers behind these atrocities ever be willing to help her take them down?
But after sitting with Craig on his living room floor for hours and listening to his story, she discovered that he wasn’t evil at all — in fact he was just stuck in a cycle he couldn’t escape, forced to use methods he didn’t endo…
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May 5, 2021
#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism
Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always successful — but it can take anywhere from one to ten hours. You can’t be knocked out for the operation, but because it’s so painful — you’ll be given a drug that makes you forget the experience.
You wake up, not remembering going to sleep. You ask the nurse if you’ve had the operation yet. They look at the foot of your bed, and see two different charts for two patients. They say “Well, you’re one of these two — but I’m not sure which one. One of them had an operation yesterday that lasted ten hours. The other is set to have a one-hour operation later today.”
So it’s either true that you already suffered for ten hours, or true that you’re about to suffer for one hour.
Which patient would you rather be?
Most people would be relieved to find out they’d already had the operation. Normally we prefer less pain rather than more pain, but in this case, we pr…
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Apr 20, 2021
#97 – Mike Berkowitz on keeping the US a liberal democratic country
Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election split the Republican party. There were those who went along with it — 147 members of Congress raised objections to the official certification of electoral votes — but there were others who refused. These included Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Vice President Mike Pence.
Although one could say that the latter Republicans showed great courage, the key to the split may lie less in differences of moral character or commitment to democracy, and more in what was being asked of them. Trump wanted the first group to break norms, but he wanted the second group to break the law.
And while norms were indeed shattered, laws were upheld.
Today’s guest Mike Berkowitz, executive director of the Democracy Funders Network, points out a problem we came to realize throughout the Trump presidency: So many of the things that we thought were laws were actually just customs.
*Links to learn more, summary an…
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Apr 15, 2021
The ten episodes of this show you should listen to first
Today we're launching a new podcast feed that might be useful to you and people you know.
It's called '_Effective Altruism: An Introduction_', and it's a carefully chosen selection of ten episodes of this show, with various new intros and outros to guide folks through them.
Basically, as the number of episodes of this show has grown, it has become less and less practical to ask new subscribers to go back and listen through most of our archives.
So naturally new subscribers want to know... what should I listen to first? What episodes will help me make sense of effective altruist thinking and get the most out of new episodes?
We hope that '_Effective Altruism: An Introduction_' will fill in that gap.
Across the ten episodes, we cover what effective altruism at its core really is, what folks who are tackling a number of well-known problem areas are up to and why, some more unusual and speculative problems, and how we and the rest of the team here try to think through difficult q…
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Apr 6, 2021
#96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media
You might have heard fears like this in the last few years: What if Donald Trump was woken up in the middle of the night and shown a fake video — indistinguishable from a real one — in which Kim Jong Un announced an imminent nuclear strike on the U.S.?
Today’s guest Nina Schick, author of _Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse_, thinks these concerns were the result of hysterical reporting, and that the barriers to entry in terms of making a very sophisticated ‘deepfake’ video today are a lot higher than people think.
But she also says that by the end of the decade, YouTubers will be able to produce the kind of content that's currently only accessible to Hollywood studios. So is it just a matter of time until we’ll be right to be terrified of this stuff?
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Nina thinks the problem of misinformation and disinformation might be roughly as important as climate change, because as she says: “Everything exists within this inf…
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Mar 26, 2021
#95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate
How long do you think it’ll be before we’re able to bend the weather to our will? A massive rainmaking program in China, efforts to seed new oases in the Arabian peninsula, or chemically induce snow for skiers in Colorado.
100 years? 50 years? 20?
Those who know how to write a teaser hook for a podcast episode will have correctly guessed that all these things are already happening today. And the techniques being used could be turned to managing climate change as well.
Today’s guest, Kelly Wanser, founded SilverLining — a nonprofit organization that advocates research into climate interventions, such as seeding or brightening clouds, to ensure that we maintain a safe climate.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Kelly says that current climate projections, even if we do everything right from here on out, imply that two degrees of global warming are now unavoidable. And the same scientists who made those projections fear the flow-through effect that warmi…
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Mar 20, 2021
#94 – Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
How many words in U.S. newspapers have been spilled on tax policy in the past five years? And how many words on CRISPR? Or meat alternatives? Or how AI may soon automate the majority of jobs?
When people look back on this era, is the interesting thing going to have been fights over whether or not the top marginal tax rate was 39.5% or 35.4%, or is it going to be that human beings started to take control of human evolution; that we stood on the brink of eliminating immeasurable levels of suffering on factory farms; and that for the first time the average American might become financially comfortable and unemployed simultaneously?
Today’s guest is Ezra Klein, one of the most prominent journalists in the world. Ezra thinks that pressing issues are neglected largely because there's little pre-existing infrastructure to push them.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
He points out that for a long time taxes have been considered hugely important in D.C. political cir…
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Mar 12, 2021
#93 – Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race
COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn't come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have the potential to spread globally and kill just as many as an all-out nuclear war.
For five years today’s guest — Andy Weber — was the US Assistant Secretary of Defense responsible for biological and other weapons of mass destruction. While people primarily associate the Pentagon with waging wars, including most within the Pentagon itself, Andy is quick to point out that you can't have national security if your population remains at grave risk from natural and lab-created diseases.
Andy's current mission is to spread the word that while bioweapons are terrifying, scientific advances also leave them on the verge of becoming an outdated technology.
*Links to learn more, summary and fu…
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Mar 5, 2021
#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem
Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and computer science.
Listeners loved our episode about his book _Algorithms to Live By_ — so when the team read his new book, _The Alignment Problem_, and found it to be an insightful and comprehensive review of the state of the research into making advanced AI useful and reliably safe, getting him back on the show was a no-brainer.
Brian has so much of substance to say this episode will likely be of interest to people who know a lot about AI as well as those who know a little, and of interest to people who are nervous about where AI is going as well as those who aren't nervous at all.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Here’s a tease of 10 Hollywood-worthy stories from the episode:
• *The Riddle of Dopamine*: The development of reinforcement learning solves a long-standing mystery of how humans are able to lea…
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Feb 15, 2021
#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
I suspect today's guest, Lewis Bollard, might be the single best person in the world to interview to get an overview of all the methods that might be effective for putting an end to factory farming and what broader lessons we can learn from the experiences of people working to end cruelty in animal agriculture.
That's why I interviewed him back in 2017, and it's why I've come back for an updated second dose four years later.
That conversation became a touchstone resource for anyone wanting to understand why people might decide to focus their altruism on farmed animal welfare, what those people are up to, and why.
Lewis leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for farm animal welfare, and since he joined in 2015 they’ve disbursed about $130 million in grants to nonprofits as part of this program.
This episode certainly isn't only for vegetarians or people whose primary focus is animal welfare. The farmed animal welfare movement has had a lot of big wins over the last five years, a…
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Feb 3, 2021
Rob Wiblin on how he ended up the way he is
This is a crosspost of an episode of the _Eureka Podcast_.
The interviewer is Misha Saul, a childhood friend of Rob's, who he has known for over 20 years. While it's not an episode of our own show, we decided to share it with subscribers because it's fun, and because it touches on personal topics that we don't usually cover on the show.
Rob and Misha cover:
• How Rob's parents shaped who he is (if indeed they did)
• Their shared teenage obsession with philosophy, which eventually led to Rob working at 80,000 Hours
• How their politics were shaped by growing up in the 90s
• How talking to Rob helped Misha develop his own very different worldview
• Why The Lord of the Rings movies have held up so well
• What was it like being an exchange student in Spain, and was learning Spanish a mistake?
• Marriage and kids
• Institutional decline and historical analogies for the US in 2021
• Making fun of teachers
• Should we stop eating animals?
Producer: Keiran…
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Jan 20, 2021
#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God:
_“I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it._
If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box.
To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?”
You think briefly, and decide you should bet your eternal soul on tails. The fact that you woke up at all seems like pretty good evidence that you’re in the big world — if the coin landed tails, way more people should be having an experience just like yours.
But then you get up, walk outside, and look at the number on your box.
‘3’. Huh. Now you don’t know what to believe.
If God made 10 billion boxes, surely it's much more likely that you would have seen a number like 7,346,678,928?
In today's interview, Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — exp…
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Jan 13, 2021
Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics
This is a crosspost of an episode of the _Clearer Thinking Podcast:_ *022: Self-Improvement and Research Ethics with Rob Wiblin.*
Rob chats with Spencer Greenberg, who has been an audience favourite in episodes *11* and *39* of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, and has now created this show of his own.
Among other things they cover:
• Is trying to become a better person a good strategy for self-improvement
• Why Rob thinks many people could achieve much more by finding themselves a line manager
• Why interviews on this show are so damn long
• Is it complicated to figure out what human beings value, or actually simpler than it seems
• Why Rob thinks research ethics and institutional review boards are causing immense harm
• Where prediction markets might be failing today and how to tell
If you like this go ahead and subscribe to Spencer's show by searching for Clearer Thinking in your podcasting app.
In particular, you might want to check out Spencer’s conversation w…
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Jan 7, 2021
#73 - Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good [re-release]
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in March 2020. *
To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that's all wrong.
If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you'd have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you'd have $17 million.
This astonishing fact has driven today's guest, economics researcher Philip Trammell at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, to *investigate the case for and against* so-called 'patient philanthropy' in depth. If the case for patient philanthropy is as strong as Phil believes, many of us should be trying to improve the world in a very different way than we are now.
He points out that on top of being able to dispense vastly more, whenever your trustees decide to use your gift to improve the world, they'll also be able to rely on the much broader knowledge available to future…
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Dec 30, 2020
#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours [re-release]
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in April 2020.
*
Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths.
I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, and these days I'm 80,000 Hours' Head of Advising. Since then, chatting to hundreds of people about their career plans has given me some idea of the kinds of things it’s useful for people to hear about when thinking through their careers.
So we thought it would be useful to discuss some on the show for everyone to hear.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
• *See over 500 vacancies on our job board.*
• *Apply for one-on-one career advising.*
Amo…
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Dec 17, 2020
#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems and layers of defense against potential global catastrophes
From one point of view academia forms one big 'epistemic' system — a process which directs attention, generates ideas, and judges which are good. Traditional print media is another such system, and we can think of society as a whole as a huge epistemic system, made up of these and many other subsystems.
How these systems absorb, process, combine and organise information will have a big impact on what humanity as a whole ends up doing with itself — in fact, at a broad level it basically entirely determines the direction of the future.
With that in mind, today’s guest Owen Cotton-Barratt has founded the *Research Scholars Programme* (RSP) at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, which gives early-stage researchers leeway to try to understand how the world works.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Instead of you having to pay for a masters degree, the RSP pays *you* to spend significant amounts of time thinking about high-level questions, li…
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Dec 3, 2020
#88 – Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies
In its first 28 days on Netflix, the documentary The Social Dilemma — about the possible harms being caused by social media and other technology products — was seen by 38 million households in about 190 countries and in 30 languages.
Over the last ten years, the idea that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are degrading political discourse and grabbing and monetizing our attention in an alarming way has gone mainstream to such an extent that it's hard to remember how recently it was a fringe view.
It feels intuitively true that our attention spans are shortening, we’re spending more time alone, we’re less productive, there’s more polarization and radicalization, and that we have less trust in our fellow citizens, due to having less of a shared basis of reality.
But while it all feels plausible, how strong is the evidence that it's true? In the past, people have worried about every new technological development — often in ways that seem foolish in retrospect. Socrates famo…
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Nov 12, 2020
Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (80k team chat #4)
In the *last '80k team chat'* with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is and isn't, and how to argue for it. In this episode we turn now to what the effective altruism community most needs.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full transcript*
• The *2020 Effective Altruism Survey* just opened. If you're involved with the effective altruism community, or sympathetic to its ideas, it's would be wonderful if you could fill it out: _https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/EAS80K2_
According to Ben, we can think of the effective altruism movement as having gone through several stages, categorised by what kind of resource has been most able to unlock more progress on important issues (i.e. by what's the 'bottleneck'). Plausibly, these stages are common for other social movements as well.
• Needing money: In the first stage, when effective altruism was just getting going, more money (to do things like pay staff and put on events) was the main bottleneck to…
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Nov 3, 2020
#87 – Russ Roberts on whether it's more effective to help strangers, or people you know
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.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
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…
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Oct 29, 2020
How much does a vote matter? (Article)
Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.
In this one — *How much does a vote matter?* — I investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote:
• The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome
• How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others
I then discuss what I think are the best arguments against voting in important elections:
• If an election is competitive, that means other people disagree about which option is better, and you’re at some risk of voting for the worse candidate by mistake.
• While voting itself doesn’t take long, knowing enough to accurately pick which candidate is better for the world actually does take substantial effort — effort that could be better allocated elsewhere.
Finally, I look into the impact of donating to campaigns or working to ‘get out the vote’, which can be effective ways to generate additional votes for your prefer…
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Oct 21, 2020
#86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us
Had World War 1 never happened, you might never have existed.
It’s very unlikely that the exact chain of events that led to your conception would have happened otherwise — so perhaps you wouldn't have been born.
Would that mean that it's better for you that World War 1 happened (regardless of whether it was better for the world overall)?
On the one hand, if you're living a pretty good life, you might think the answer is yes – you get to live rather than not.
On the other hand, it sounds strange to say that it's better for you to be alive, because if you'd never existed there'd be no you to be worse off. But if you wouldn't be worse off if you hadn't existed, can you be better off because you do?
In this episode, philosophy professor Hilary Greaves – Director of Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute – helps untangle this puzzle for us and walks me and Rob through the space of possible answers. She argues that philosophers have been too quick to conclude w…
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Sep 22, 2020
Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it (80k team chat #3)
Today’s episode is the latest conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd.
Ben’s been thinking a lot about effective altruism recently, including what it really is, how it's framed, and how people misunderstand it.
We recently released an article on *misconceptions about effective altruism* – based on Will MacAskill’s recent paper *The Definition of Effective Altruism* – and this episode can act as a companion piece.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Arden and Ben cover a bunch of topics related to effective altruism:
• How it isn’t just about donating money to fight poverty
• Whether it includes a moral obligation to give
• The rigorous argument for its importance
• Objections to that argument
• How to talk about effective altruism for people who aren't already familiar with it
Given that we’re in the same office, it’s relatively easy to record conversations between two 80k team members — so if you enjoy these…
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Sep 7, 2020
Ideas for high impact careers beyond our priority paths (Article)
Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.
In this one, we go through some more career options beyond our priority paths that seem promising to us for positively influencing the long-term future.
Some of these are likely to be written up as priority paths in the future, or wrapped into existing ones, but we haven’t written full profiles for them yet—for example policy careers outside AI and biosecurity policy that seem promising from a longtermist perspective.
Others, like information security, we think might be as promising for many people as our priority paths, but because we haven’t investigated them much we’re still unsure.
Still others seem like they’ll typically be less impactful than our priority paths for people who can succeed equally in either, but still seem high-impact to us and like they could be top options for a substantial number of people, depending on personal fit—for example research management.
Finally some…
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Sep 1, 2020
Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong (80k team chat #2)
Today’s bonus episode is a conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd.
Ben’s been doing a bunch of research recently, and we thought it’d be interesting to hear about how he’s currently thinking about a couple of different topics – including different types of longtermism, and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
This is very off-the-cut compared to our regular episodes, and just 54 minutes long.
In the first half, Arden and Ben talk about varieties of longtermism:
• Patient longtermism
• Broad urgent longtermism
• Targeted urgent longtermism focused on existential risks
• Targeted urgent longtermism focused on other trajectory changes
• And their distinctive implications for people trying to do good with their careers.
In the second half, they move on to:
• How to trade-off transferable versus specialist career capital
• How much weight to put on personal fit
• Wheth…
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Aug 28, 2020
Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities (Article)
Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.
In this one, we go through 30 global issues beyond the ones we usually prioritize most highly in our work, and that you might consider focusing your career on tackling.
Although we spend the majority of our time at 80,000 Hours on our highest priority problem areas, and we recommend working on them to many of our readers, these are just the most promising issues among those we’ve spent time investigating. There are many other global issues that we haven’t properly investigated, and which might be very promising for more people to work on.
In fact, we think working on some of the issues in this article could be as high-impact for some people as working on our priority problem areas — though we haven’t looked into them enough to be confident.
If you want to check out the links in today’s article, you can find those *here.*
Our *annual user survey* is also now open for submissions.
Once…
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Aug 20, 2020
#85 - Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energy
A golf-ball sized lump of uranium can deliver more than enough power to cover all of your lifetime energy use. To get the same energy from coal, you’d need 3,200 tonnes of black rock — a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants, which would produce more than 11,000 tonnes of CO2. That’s about 11,000 tonnes more than the uranium.
Many people aren’t comfortable with the danger posed by nuclear power. But given the climatic stakes, it’s worth asking: Just how much more dangerous is it compared to fossil fuels?
According to today’s guest, Mark Lynas — author of *Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet* (winner of the prestigious Royal Society Prizes for Science Books) and *Nuclear 2.0* — it’s actually much, much _safer_.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Climatologists James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha calculated that the use of nuclear power between 1971 and 2009 avoided the premature deaths of 1.84 million people by avoiding air pollution from…
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Aug 13, 2020
#84 - Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it worked
When COVID-19 struck the US, everyone was told that hand sanitizer needed to be saved for healthcare professionals, so they should just wash their hands instead. But in India, many homes lack reliable piped water, so they had to do the opposite: distribute hand sanitizer as widely as possible.
American advocates for banning single-use plastic straws might be outraged at the widespread adoption of single-use hand sanitizer sachets in India. But the US and India are very different places, and it might be the only way out when you're facing a pandemic without running water.
According to today’s guest, Shruti Rajagopalan, Senior Research Fellow at the _Mercatus Center_ at George Mason University, that's typical and context is key to policy-making. This prompted Shruti to propose a set of policy responses designed for India specifically back in April.
Unfortunately she thinks it's surprisingly hard to know what one should and shouldn't imitate from overseas.
*Links to learn more,…
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Jul 31, 2020
#83 - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
The killing of George Floyd has prompted a great deal of debate over whether the US should reduce the size of its police departments. The research literature suggests that the presence of police officers does reduce crime, though they're expensive and as is increasingly recognised, impose substantial harms on the populations they are meant to be protecting, especially communities of colour.
So maybe we ought to shift our focus to effective but unconventional approaches to crime prevention, approaches that don't require police or prisons and the human toll they bring with them.
Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and incarceration. In this extensive interview, she highlights three alternative ways to effectively prevent crime: better street lighting, cognitive behavioral therapy, and lead reduction.
One of Jennifer’s papers use…
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Jul 27, 2020
#82 - James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system
No democracy has ever incarcerated as many people as the United States. To get its incarceration rate down to the global average, the US would have to release 3 in 4 people in its prisons today.
The effects on Black Americans have been especially severe — Black people make up 12% of the US population but 33% of its prison population. In the early 2000's when incarceration reached its peak, the US government estimated that 32% of Black boys would go to prison at some point in their lives, 5.5 times the figure for whites.
Contrary to popular understanding, nonviolent drug offenders make up less than a fifth of the incarcerated population. The only way to get its incarceration rate near the global average will be to shorten prison sentences for so-called 'violent criminals' — a politically toxic idea. But could we change that?
According to today’s guest, Professor James Forman Jr — a former public defender in Washington DC, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own…
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Jul 9, 2020
#81 - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments.
Today’s guest, Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, supports the continued expansion of AI safety as a field and believes working on AI is among the very best ways to have a positive impact on the long-term future. But he also believes the classic AI risk arguments have been subject to insufficient scrutiny given this level of investment.
In particular, the case for working on AI if you care about the long-term future has often been made on the basis of concern about AI accidents; it’s actually quite difficult to design systems that you can feel confident will behave the…
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Jun 29, 2020
Advice on how to read our advice (Article)
_This is the fourth release in our new series of audio articles. If you want to read the original article or check out the links within it, you can find them *here*. _
"We’ve found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t exactly recommend. That’s hard to avoid when you’re writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial views.
To help get on the same page, here’s some advice about our advice, for those about to launch into reading our site.
We want our writing to inform people’s views, but only in proportion to the likelihood that we’re actually right. So we need to make sure you have a balanced perspective on how compelling the evidence is for the different claims we make on the site, and how much weight to put on our advice in your situation.
This piece includes a list of points to bear in mind when reading our site, and some thoughts on how to avoid the communication problems we face…
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Jun 22, 2020
#80 - Stuart Russell on why our approach to AI is broken and how to fix it
Stuart Russell, Professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the most popular AI textbook, thinks the way we approach machine learning today is fundamentally flawed.
In his new book, Human Compatible, he outlines the 'standard model' of AI development, in which intelligence is measured as the ability to achieve some definite, completely-known objective that we've stated explicitly. This is so obvious it almost doesn't even seem like a design choice, but it is.
Unfortunately there's a big problem with this approach: it's incredibly hard to say exactly what you want. AI today lacks common sense, and simply does whatever we've asked it to. That's true even if the goal isn't what we really want, or the methods it's choosing are ones we would never accept.
We already see AIs misbehaving for this reason. Stuart points to the example of YouTube's recommender algorithm, which reportedly nudged users towards extreme political views because that made it easier to keep them on the site. This i…
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Jun 5, 2020
What anonymous contributors think about important life and career questions (Article)
Today we’re launching the final entry of our ‘anonymous answers' series on the website.
It features answers to 23 different questions including _“How have you seen talented people fail in their work?”_ and _“What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?”_, from anonymous people whose work we admire.
We thought a lot of the responses were really interesting; some were provocative, others just surprising. And as intended, they span a very wide range of opinions.
So we decided to share some highlights here with you podcast subscribers. This is only a sample though, including a few answers from just 10 of those 23 questions.
You can find the rest of the answers at *80000hours.org/anonymous* or follow a link here to an individual entry:
1. What's good career *advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?*
2. How have you seen *talented people fail in their work?*
3. What’s the thing *people most overrate in their career?*
4. If y…
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Jun 1, 2020
#79 - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
Today’s guest, _New York Times_ bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what, she's not so bad".
Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the _biggest family tree in history_.
He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind, tried to become the healthiest person in the world, read 33,000 pages of facts, spent a year following the Bible literally, thanked everyone involved in making his morning cup of coffee, and tried to figure out how to do the most good. His next book will ask: if we reframe global problems as puzzles, would the world be a better place?
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
This is the first time I’ve hosted the podcast, and I’m hoping to convince people to listen with this attempt at clever show notes that change style each paragraph to reference different A.J.…
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May 22, 2020
#78 - Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress
Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks.
These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today's episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy.
Danny and I talk about how to understand his team's results and what they mean (and don't mean) for how we should think about progress in AI going forward.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
Debates around the future of AI can sometimes be pretty abstract and theoretical. Danny hopes that providing rigorous measurements of some of the inputs to AI progress so far can help us better understand what causes that progress, as well as ground debates about the future of AI in…
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May 18, 2020
#77 - Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19
In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — Director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics — abruptly found himself a global celebrity, his social media following growing 40-fold and journalists knocking down his door, as everyone turned to him for information they could trust.
Here he lays out where the fight against COVID-19 stands today, why he's open to deliberately giving people COVID-19 to speed up vaccine development, and how we could do better next time.
As Marc tells us, island nations like Taiwan and New Zealand are successfully suppressing SARS-COV-2. But everyone else is struggling.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Even Singapore, with plenty of warning and one of the best test and trace systems in the world, lost control of the virus in mid-April after successfully holding back the tide for 2 months.
This doesn't bode well for how the US or Europe will cope as they ease their lockdowns. It also suggests it would have been exceedingly h…
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May 12, 2020
Article: Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them
Today’s release is the second experiment in making audio versions of our articles.
The first was a narration of Greg Lewis’ terrific *problem profile* on ‘Reducing global catastrophic biological risks’, which you can find on the podcast feed just before episode #74 - that is, our interview with Greg about the piece.
If you want to check out the links in today’s article, you can find those *here*.
And if you have feedback on these, positive or negative, it’d be great if you could email us at podcast@80000hours.org.
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May 8, 2020
#76 - Tara Kirk Sell on misinformation, who's done well and badly, & what to reopen first
Amid a rising COVID-19 death toll, and looming economic disaster, we’ve been looking for good news — and one thing we're especially thankful for is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS).
CHS focuses on protecting us from major biological, chemical or nuclear disasters, through research that informs governments around the world. While this pandemic surprised many, just last October the Center ran a simulation of a 'new coronavirus' scenario to identify weaknesses in our ability to quickly respond. Their expertise has given them a key role in figuring out how to fight COVID-19.
Today’s guest, Dr Tara Kirk Sell, did her PhD in policy and communication during disease outbreaks, and has worked at CHS for 11 years on a range of important projects.
• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Last year she was a leader on Collective Intelligence for Disease Prediction, designed to sound the alarm about upcoming pandemics before others are paying attention.…
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Apr 28, 2020
#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours
Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths.
I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, and these days I'm 80,000 Hours' Head of Advising. Since then, chatting to hundreds of people about their career plans has given me some idea of the kinds of things it’s useful for people to hear about when thinking through their careers.
So we thought it would be useful to discuss some on the show for everyone to hear.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
• *See over 500 vacancies on our job board.*
• *Apply for one-on-one career advising.*
Among other common topics, we cover:
• Why traditional careers advic…
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Apr 17, 2020
#74 - Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 & catastrophic biological risks
Our lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this while confined to your house, as the death toll from the worst pandemic since 1918 continues to rise.
The question of how to tackle COVID-19 has been foremost in the minds of many, *including here at 80,000 Hours*.
Today's guest, Dr Gregory Lewis, acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, puts the crisis in context, explaining how COVID-19 compares to other diseases, pandemics of the past, and possible worse crises in the future.
COVID-19 is a vivid reminder that we are unprepared to contain or respond to new pathogens.
How would we cope with a virus that was even more contagious and even more deadly? Greg's work focuses on these risks -- of outbreaks that threaten our entire future through an unrecoverable collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*…
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Apr 15, 2020
Article: Reducing global catastrophic biological risks
In a few days we'll be putting out a conversation with Dr Greg Lewis, who studies how to prevent global catastrophic biological risks at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.
Greg also wrote *a new problem profile* on that topic for our website, and reading that is a good lead-in to our interview with him. So in a bit of an experiment we decided to make this audio version of that article, narrated by the producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Keiran Harris.
We’re thinking about having audio versions of other important articles we write, so it’d be great if you could let us know if you’d like more of these. You can email us your view at podcast@80000hours.org.
If you want to check out all of Greg’s graphs and footnotes that we didn’t include, and get links to learn more about GCBRs - you can find those *here*.
And if you want to read more about COVID-19, the 80,000 Hours team has produced a fantastic package of 10 pieces about how to stop the pandemic. You can find tho…
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Mar 19, 2020
Emergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might do to help
From home isolation Rob and Howie just recorded an episode on:
1. How many could die in the crisis, and the risk to your health personally.
2. What individuals might be able to do help tackle the coronavirus crisis.
3. What we suspect governments should do in response to the coronavirus crisis.
4. The importance of personally not spreading the virus, the properties of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and how you can personally avoid it.
5. The many places society screwed up, how we can avoid this happening again, and why be optimistic.
We have rushed this episode out to share information as quickly as possible in a fast-moving situation. If you would prefer to read you can find the *transcript here*.
We list a wide range of valuable resources and links in the *blog post attached to the show* (over 60, including links to projects you can join).
See our 'problem profile' on *global catastrophic biological risks* for information on these grave threats and how you can contribute to preventing…
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Mar 17, 2020
#73 - Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good
To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that's all wrong.
If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you'd have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you'd have $17 million.
This astonishing fact has driven today's guest, economics researcher Philip Trammell at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, to *investigate the case for and against* so-called 'patient philanthropy' in depth. If the case for patient philanthropy is as strong as Phil believes, many of us should be trying to improve the world in a very different way than we are now.
He points out that on top of being able to dispense vastly more, whenever your trustees decide to use your gift to improve the world, they'll also be able to rely on the much broader knowledge available to future generations. A donor two hundred years ago couldn't have known distri…
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Mar 7, 2020
#72 - Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures
This week Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his new book _The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity_. It's about how our long-term future could be better than almost anyone believes, but also how humanity's recklessness is putting that future at grave risk — in Toby's reckoning, a 1 in 6 chance of being extinguished this century.
I loved the book and learned a great deal from it (*buy it here*, US and audiobook release March 24). While preparing for this interview I copied out 87 facts that were surprising, shocking or important. Here's a sample of 16:
1. The probability of a supervolcano causing a civilisation-threatening catastrophe in the next century is estimated to be 100x that of asteroids and comets combined.
2. The Biological Weapons Convention — a global agreement to protect humanity — has just four employees, and a smaller budget than an average McDonald’s.
3. In 2008 a 'gamma ray burst' reached Earth from another g…
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Mar 2, 2020
#71 - Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is about “the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them”, and in this episode we tackle that question in the most direct way possible.
Last year we published a summary of all our *key ideas*, which links to many of our other articles, and which we are aiming to keep updated as our opinions shift.
All of us added something to it, but the single biggest contributor was our CEO and today's guest, Ben Todd, who founded 80,000 Hours along with Will MacAskill back in 2012.
This key ideas page is the most read on the site. By itself it can teach you a large fraction of the most important things we've discovered since we started investigating high impact careers.
*• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
But it's perhaps more accurate to think of it as a mini-book, as it weighs in at over 20,000 words.
Fortunately it's designed to be highly modular and it's easy to work through it over multiple sessions…
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Feb 25, 2020
Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance & injustice (80k team chat #1)
Today's bonus episode of the podcast is a quick conversation between me and my fellow 80,000 Hours researcher Arden Koehler about a few topics, including the demandingness of morality, work-life balance, and emotional reactions to injustice.
Arden is about to graduate with a philosophy PhD from New York University, so naturally we dive right into some challenging implications of utilitarian philosophy and how it might be applied to real life. Issues we talk about include:
• If you’re not going to be completely moral, should you try being a bit more ethical, or give up?
• Should you feel angry if you see an injustice, and if so, why?
• How much should we ask people to live frugally?
So far the feedback on the post-episode chats that we've done have been positive, so we thought we'd go ahead and try out this freestanding one. But fair warning: it's among the more difficult episodes to follow, and probably not the best one to listen to first, as you'll benefit from having…
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Feb 13, 2020
#70 - Dr Cassidy Nelson on the 12 best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit nCoV)
nCoV is alarming governments and citizens around the world. It has killed more than 1,000 people, brought the Chinese economy to a standstill, and continues to show up in more and more places. But bad though it is, it's much closer to a warning shot than a worst case scenario. The next emerging infectious disease could easily be more contagious, more fatal, or both.
Despite improvements in the last few decades, humanity is still not nearly prepared enough to contain new diseases. We identify them too slowly. We can't do enough to reduce their spread. And we lack vaccines or drugs treatments for at least a year, if they ever arrive at all.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
This is a precarious situation, especially with advances in biotechnology increasing our ability to modify viruses and bacteria as we like.
In today's episode, Cassidy Nelson, a medical doctor and research scholar at Oxford University's _Future of Humanity Institute_, explains 12 things h…
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Feb 6, 2020
#69 - Jeff Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both
The State Council of China's 2017 AI plan was the starting point of China’s AI planning; China’s approach to AI is defined by its top-down and monolithic nature; China is winning the AI arms race; and there is little to no discussion of issues of AI ethics and safety in China. How many of these ideas have you heard?
In his paper *Deciphering China's AI Dream*, today's guest, PhD student Jeff Ding, outlines why he believes none of these claims are true.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
• *What’s the best charity to donate to?*
He first places China’s new AI strategy in the *context* of its past science and technology plans, as well as other countries’ AI plans. What is China actually doing in the space of AI development?
Jeff emphasises that China's AI strategy did not appear out of nowhere with the 2017 state council AI development plan, which attracted a lot of overseas attention. Rather that was just another step forward in a long trajecto…
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Feb 3, 2020
Rob & Howie on what we do and don't know about 2019-nCoV
Two 80,000 Hours researchers, Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel, record an experimental bonus episode about the new 2019-nCoV virus.
See this list of resources, including many discussed in the episode, to learn more.
In the 1h15m conversation we cover:
• What is it?
• How many people have it?
• How contagious is it?
• What fraction of people who contract it die?
• How likely is it to spread out of control?
• What's the range of plausible fatalities worldwide?
• How does it compare to other epidemics?
• What don't we know and why?
• What actions should listeners take, if any?
• How should the complexities of the above be communicated by public health professionals?
Here's a link to the *hygiene advice from Laurie Garrett* mentioned in the episode.
Recorded 2 Feb 2020.
_The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris._
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Jan 23, 2020
#68 - Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new priorities
You’re given a box with a set of dice in it. If you roll an even number, a person's life is saved. If you roll an odd number, someone else will die. Each time you shake the box you get $10. Should you do it?
A committed consequentialist might say, "Sure! Free money!" But most will think it obvious that you should say no. You've only gotten a tiny benefit, in exchange for moral responsibility over whether other people live or die.
And yet, according to today’s return guest, philosophy Prof Will MacAskill, in a real sense we’re shaking this box every time we leave the house, and those who think shaking the box is wrong should probably also be shutting themselves indoors and minimising their interactions with others.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
• *Job opportunities at the Global Priorities Institute.*
To see this, imagine you’re deciding whether to redeem a coupon for a free movie. If you go, you’ll need to drive to the cinema. By affecting…
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Jan 14, 2020
#44 Classic episode - Paul Christiano on finding real solutions to the AI alignment problem
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2018. *
Paul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great material, we decided to do a second recording, resulting in our longest interview so far. While challenging at times I can strongly recommend listening — Paul works on AI himself and has a very unusually thought through view of how it will change the world. This is now the top resource I'm going to refer people to if they're interested in positively shaping the development of AI, and want to understand the problem better. Even though I'm familiar with Paul's writing I felt I was learning a great deal and am now in a better position to make a difference to the world.
A few of the topics we cover are:
• Why Paul expects AI to transform the world gradually rather than explosively and what that would look like
• Several concrete methods OpenAI is trying to develop to ensure AI systems do what we want even if they…
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Jan 8, 2020
#33 Classic episode - Anders Sandberg on cryonics, solar flares, and the annual odds of nuclear war
*Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2018. *
Joseph Stalin had a life-extension program dedicated to making himself immortal. What if he had succeeded?
According to Bryan Caplan in episode #32, there’s an 80% chance that Stalin would still be ruling Russia today. Today’s guest disagrees.
Like Stalin he has eyes for his own immortality - including an insurance plan that will cover the cost of cryogenically freezing himself after he dies - and thinks the technology to achieve it might be around the corner.
Fortunately for humanity though, that guest is probably one of the nicest people on the planet: Dr Anders Sandberg of Oxford University.
*Full transcript of the conversation, summary, and links to learn more.*
The potential availability of technology to delay or even stop ageing means this disagreement matters, so he has been trying to model what would really happen if both the very best and the very worst people in the world could live forever - am…
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Dec 31, 2019
#17 Classic episode - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2018.
Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races.
Throughout history we’ve consistently believed, as common sense, truly horrifying things by today’s standards. According to University of Oxford Professor Will MacAskill, it’s extremely likely that we’re in the same boat today. If we accept that we’re probably making major moral errors, how should we proceed?
• Full transcript, key points & links to articles discussed in the show.
If our morality is tied to common sense intuitions, we’re probably just preserving these biases and moral errors. Instead we need to develop a moral view that criticises common sense intui…
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Dec 16, 2019
#67 - David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
What is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smelling the coffee next to you, and feeling the warmth of the cup. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experience.
Now imagine beings that are identical to humans, but for one thing: they lack this conscious experience. If you spill your coffee on them, they’ll jump like anyone else, but inside they'll feel no pain and have no thoughts: the lights are off.
The concept of these so-called 'philosophical zombies' was popularised by today’s guest — celebrated philosophy professor David Chalmers — in order to explore the nature of consciousness. In a forthcoming book he poses a classic 'trolley problem':
"Suppose you have a conscious human on one train track, and five non-conscious humanoid zombies on another. If you do nothing, a trolley will hit and kill the conscious human. If you flip a switch to redirect the trolley, you can save the conscious human, but in so doing kill the…
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Dec 5, 2019
#66 - Peter Singer on being provocative, effective altruism, & how his moral views have changed
In 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory opinions about abortion. But the controversy stemmed from Practical Ethics — a book he’d actually released way back in 1979. It took a German translation ten years on for protests to kick off.
According to Singer, he honestly didn’t expect this view to be as provocative as it became, and he certainly wasn’t aiming to stir up trouble and get attention.
But after the protests and the increasing coverage of his work in German media, the previously flat sales of Practical Ethics shot up. And the negative attention he received ultimately led him to a weekly opinion column in The New York Times.
• Singer's book The Life You Can Save has just been re-released as a 10th anniversary edition, available as a free e-book and audiobook, read by a range of celebrities. Get it here.
• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Singer points out that as a result of this increa…
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Nov 19, 2019
#65 - Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years pursuing WMD arms control, & diversity in diplomacy
"…it started when the Soviet Union fell apart and there was a real desire to ensure security of nuclear materials and pathogens, and that scientists with [WMD-related] knowledge could get paid so that they wouldn't go to countries and sell that knowledge."
Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins has had an incredible career in diplomacy and global security.
Today she’s a nonresident senior fellow at the _Brookings Institution_ and president of _Global Connections Empowering Global Change_, where she works on global health, infectious disease and defence innovation. In 2017 she founded her own nonprofit, the _Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation_ (WCAPS).
But in this interview we focus on her time as Ambassador at the _U.S. Department of State_ under the Obama administration, where she worked for eight years as Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs in the _Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation_.
In that role, Bonnie coordinated the Depar…
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Oct 25, 2019
#64 - Bruce Schneier on surveillance without tyranny, secrets, & the big risks in computer security
*November 3 2020, 10:32PM:* CNN, NBC, and FOX report that Donald Trump has narrowly won Florida, and with it, re-election.
*November 3 2020, 11:46PM:* The NY Times and Wall Street Journal report that some group has successfully hacked electronic voting systems across the country, including Florida. The malware has spread to tens of thousands of machines and deletes any record of its activity, so the returning officer of Florida concedes they actually have no idea who won the state — and don't see how they can figure it out.
What on Earth happens next?
Today’s guest — world-renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier — thinks this scenario is plausible, and the ensuing chaos would sow so much distrust that half the country would never accept the election result.
Unfortunately the US has no recovery system for a situation like this, unlike Parliamentary democracies, which can just rerun the election a few weeks later.
• *Links to learn more, summary and full tran…
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Sep 25, 2019
Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long-term is really possible
Today's episode is a compilation of interviews I recently recorded for two other shows, _Love Your Work_ and _The Neoliberal Podcast_.
If you've listened to absolutely everything on this podcast feed, you'll have heard four interviews with me already, but fortunately I don't think these two include much repetition, and I've gotten a decent amount of positive feedback on both.
First up, I speak with David Kadavy on his show, *Love Your Work*.
This is a particularly personal and relaxed interview. We talk about all sorts of things, including nicotine gum, plastic straw bans, whether recycling is important, how many lives a doctor saves, why interviews should go for at least 2 hours, how athletes doping could be good for the world, and many other fun topics.
• Our *annual impact survey* is about to close — I'd really appreciate if you could *take 3–10 minutes to fill it out now. *
• *The blog post* about this episode.
At some points we even actually discuss effective alt…
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Sep 16, 2019
Have we helped you have a bigger social impact? Our annual survey, plus other ways we can help you.
*1. Fill out our annual impact survey here. *
*2. Find a great vacancy on our job board. *
*3. Learn about our key ideas, and get links to our top articles. *
*4. Join our newsletter for an email about what's new, every 2 weeks or so. *
*5. Or follow our pages on Facebook and Twitter. *
——
Once a year 80,000 Hours runs a survey to find out whether we've helped our users have a larger social impact with their life and career.
We and our donors need to know whether our services, like this podcast, are helping people enough to continue them or scale them up, and it's only by hearing from you that we can make these decisions in a sensible way.
So, if 80,000 Hours' podcast, job board, articles, headhunting, advising or other projects have somehow contributed to your life or career plans, please take 3–10 minutes to let us know how.
You can also let us know where we've fallen short, which helps us fix problems with what we're doing.
We've refreshed the survey this year, hopef…
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Sep 3, 2019
#63 - Vitalik Buterin on better ways to fund public goods, blockchain's failures, & effective giving
Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has had major consequences. It has changed the course of major wars, made it possible to do business on the internet, and enabled private communication between both law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Could it have similarly significant consequences in future?
Today's guest — Vitalik Buterin — is world-famous as the lead developer of Ethereum, a successor to the cryptographic-currency Bitcoin, which added the capacity for smart contracts and decentralised organisations. Buterin first proposed Ethereum at the age of 20, and by the age of 23 its success had likely made him a billionaire.
At the same time, far from indulging hype about these so-called 'blockchain' technologies, he has been candid about the limited good accomplished by Bitcoin and other currencies developed using cryptographic tools — and the breakthroughs that will be needed before they can have a meaningful social impact. In his own words, *"blockcha…
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Aug 5, 2019
#62 - Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brain
Imagine that – one day – humanity dies out. At some point, many millions of years later, intelligent life might well evolve again. Is there any message we could leave that would reliably help them out?
In his second appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, machine learning researcher and polymath Paul Christiano suggests we try to answer this question with a related thought experiment: are there any messages we might want to send back to our ancestors in the year 1700 that would have made history likely to go in a better direction than it did? It seems there probably are.
• *Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.*
• *Paul's first appearance on the show in episode 44.*
• *An out-take on decision theory.*
We could tell them hard-won lessons from history; mention some research questions we wish we'd started addressing earlier; hand over all the social science we have that fosters peace and cooperation; and at the same time steer clear of engineering hints that…
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Jul 17, 2019
#61 - Helen Toner on emerging technology, national security, and China
From 1870 to 1950, the introduction of electricity transformed life in the US and UK, as people gained access to lighting, radio and a wide range of household appliances for the first time. Electricity turned out to be a general purpose technology that could help with almost everything people did.
Some think this is the best historical analogy we have for how machine learning could alter life in the 21st century.
In addition to massively changing everyday life, past general purpose technologies have also changed the nature of war. For example, when electricity was introduced to the battlefield, commanders gained the ability to communicate quickly with units in the field over great distances.
How might international security be altered if the impact of machine learning reaches a similar scope to that of electricity? Today's guest — Helen Toner — recently helped found the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University to help policymakers prepare for such…
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Jun 28, 2019
#60 - Phil Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it better
Have you ever been infuriated by a doctor's unwillingness to give you an honest, probabilistic estimate about what to expect? Or a lawyer who won't tell you the chances you'll win your case?
Their behaviour is so frustrating because accurately predicting the future is central to every action we take. If we can't assess the likelihood of different outcomes we're in a complete bind, whether the decision concerns war and peace, work and study, or Black Mirror and RuPaul's Drag Race.
Which is why the research of Professor Philip Tetlock is relevant for all of us each and every day.
He has spent 40 years as a meticulous social scientist, collecting millions of predictions from tens of thousands of people, in order to figure out how good humans really are at foreseeing the future, and what habits of thought allow us to do better.
Along with other psychologists, he identified that many ordinary people are attracted to a 'folk probability' that draws just three distinctions — 'imposs…
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Jun 17, 2019
#59 - Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn't despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition.
The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably.
In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism.
How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?
Sunstein — co-author of Nudge, Obama White House official, and by far the most cited legal scholar of the late 2000s — aims to unravel the mystery and figure out the implications in his new book How Change Happens.
He pulls together three…
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Jun 3, 2019
#58 - Pushmeet Kohli of DeepMind on designing robust & reliable AI systems and how to succeed in AI
When you're building a bridge, responsibility for making sure it won't fall over isn't handed over to a few 'bridge not falling down engineers'. Making sure a bridge is safe to use and remains standing in a storm is completely central to the design, and indeed the entire project.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, commentators often distinguish between enhancing the capabilities of machine learning systems and enhancing their safety. But to Pushmeet Kohli, principal scientist and research team leader at DeepMind, research to make AI robust and reliable is no more a side-project in AI design than keeping a bridge standing is a side-project in bridge design.
Far from being an overhead on the 'real' work, it’s an essential part of making AI systems work at all. We don’t want AI systems to be out of alignment with our intentions, and that consideration must arise throughout their development.
Professor Stuart Russell — co-author of the most popular AI textbook — has go…
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May 13, 2019
Rob Wiblin on human nature, new technology, and living a happy, healthy & ethical life
This is a cross-post of some interviews Rob did recently on two other podcasts — Mission Daily (from 2m) and The Good Life (from 1h13m).
Some of the content will be familiar to regular listeners — but if you’re at all interested in Rob’s personal thoughts, there should be quite a lot of new material to make listening worthwhile.
The first interview is with Chad Grills. They focused largely on new technologies and existential risks, but also discuss topics like:
• Why Rob is wary of fiction
• Egalitarianism in the evolution of hunter gatherers
• How to stop social media screwing up politics
• Careers in government versus business
The second interview is with Prof Andrew Leigh - the Shadow Assistant Treasurer in Australia. This one gets into more personal topics than we usually cover on the show, like:
• What advice would Rob give to his teenage self?
• Which person has most shaped Rob’s view of living an ethical life?
• Rob’s approach to giving t…
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Apr 23, 2019
#57 - Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in government
You’re 29 years old, and you’ve just been given a job in the White House. How do you quickly figure out how the US Executive Branch behemoth actually works, so that you can have as much impact as possible - before you quit or get kicked out?
That was the challenge put in front of Tom Kalil in 1993.
He had enough success to last a full 16 years inside the Clinton and Obama administrations, working to foster the development of the internet, then nanotechnology, and then cutting-edge brain modelling, among other things.
But not everyone figures out how to move the needle. In today's interview, Tom shares his experience with how to increase your chances of getting an influential role in government, and how to make the most of the opportunity if you get in.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
*Interested in US AI policy careers? Apply for one-on-one career advice here.*
*Vacancies at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.*
*Our high-impact job boa…
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Apr 15, 2019
#56 - Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it
Elephants in chains at travelling circuses; pregnant pigs trapped in coffin sized crates at factory farms; deers living in the wild. We should welcome the last as a pleasant break from the horror, right?
Maybe, but maybe not. While we tend to have a romanticised view of nature, life in the wild includes a range of extremely negative experiences.
Many animals are hunted by predators, and constantly have to remain vigilant about the risk of being killed, and perhaps experiencing the horror of being eaten alive. Resource competition often leads to chronic hunger or starvation. Their diseases and injuries are never treated. In winter animals freeze to death; in droughts they die of heat or thirst.
There are fewer than 20 people in the world dedicating their lives to researching these problems.
But according to Persis Eskander, researcher at the Open Philanthropy Project, if we sum up the negative experiences of all wild animals, their sheer number could make the scale of the proble…
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Mar 31, 2019
#55 - Lutter & Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end poverty
Governance matters. Policy change quickly took China from famine to fortune; Singapore from swamps to skyscrapers; and Hong Kong from fishing village to financial centre. Unfortunately, many governments are hard to reform and — to put it mildly — it's not easy to found a new country.
This has prompted poverty-fighters and political dreamers to look for creative ways to get new and better 'pseudo-countries' off the ground. The poor could then voluntary migrate to in search of security and prosperity. And innovators would be free to experiment with new political and legal systems without having to impose their ideas on existing jurisdictions.
The 'seasteading movement' imagined founding new self-governing cities on the sea, but obvious challenges have kept that one on the drawing board. Nobel Prize winner and World Bank President Paul Romer suggested 'charter cities', where a host country would volunteer for another country with better legal institutions to effectively govern som…
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Mar 19, 2019
#54 - OpenAI on publication norms, malicious uses of AI, and general-purpose learning algorithms
OpenAI’s Dactyl is an AI system that can manipulate objects with a human-like robot hand. OpenAI Five is an AI system that can defeat humans at the video game Dota 2. The strange thing is they were both developed using the same general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm.
How is this possible and what does it show?
In today's interview Jack Clark, Policy Director at OpenAI, explains that from a computational perspective using a hand and playing Dota 2 are remarkably similar problems.
A robot hand needs to hold an object, move its fingers, and rotate it to the desired position. In Dota 2 you control a team of several different people, moving them around a map to attack an enemy.
Your hand has 20 or 30 different joints to move. The number of main actions in Dota 2 is 10 to 20, as you move your characters around a map.
When you’re rotating an objecting in your hand, you sense its friction, but you don’t directly perceive the entire shape of the object. In Dota 2, you'…
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Feb 26, 2019
#53 - Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism
_“Politics. Business. Opinion. Science. Sports. Animal welfare. Existential risk.”_ Is this a plausible future lineup for major news outlets?
Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and given very little editorial direction, Vox's _Future Perfect_ aspires to be more or less that.
Competition in the news business creates pressure to write quick pieces on topical political issues that can drive lots of clicks with just a few hours' work.
But according to Kelsey Piper, staff writer for this new section of Vox's website focused on effective altruist themes, _Future Perfect's_ goal is to run in the opposite direction and make room for more substantive coverage that's not tied to the news cycle.
They hope that in the long-term talented writers from other outlets across the political spectrum can also be attracted to tackle these topics.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
*Links to Kelsey's top articles.*
Some skeptics of the project have questioned whether thi…
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Feb 16, 2019
Julia Galef and Rob Wiblin on an updated view of the best ways to help humanity
This is a cross-post of an interview Rob did with Julia Galef on her podcast *Rationally Speaking*. Rob and Julia discuss how the career advice 80,000 Hours gives has changed over the years, and the biggest misconceptions about our views.
The topics will be familiar to the most fervent fans of this show — but we think that if you’ve listened to less than about half of the episodes we've released so far, you’ll find something new to enjoy here. Julia may be familiar to you as the guest on episode 7 of the show, way back in September 2017.
The conversation also covers topics like:
• How many people should try to get a job in finance and donate their income?
• The case for working to reduce global catastrophic risks in targeted ways, and historical precedents for this kind of work
• Why reducing risk is a better way to help the future than increasing economic growth
• What percentage of the world should ideally follow 80,000 Hours advice?
*Links to learn more, sum…
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Feb 7, 2019
#52 - Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society
Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society about what people want and how to make it.
But when it comes to politics and voting - which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals - the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs often turns to skepticism.
Today's guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won't have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them. Just last year he wrote Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society with Eric Posner, but has already moved on, saying "in the 6 months since the book came out I've made more intellectual progress than in the whole 10 years before that."
Weyl believes we desperately need more efficient, equitable and decentralised ways to organise society, that take advantage of what each person knows, and his research…
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Jan 28, 2019
#51 - Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age
Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What's the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?
Martin Gurri spent decades as a CIA analyst and in his 2014 book The Revolt of The Public and Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, predicted political turbulence for an entirely different reason: new communication technologies were flipping the balance of power between the public and traditional authorities.
In 1959 the President could control the narrative by leaning on his friends at four TV stations, who felt it was proper to present the nation's leader in a positive light, no matter their flaws. Today, it's impossible to prevent someone from broadcasting any grievance online, whether it's a contrarian insight or an insane conspiracy theory.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
According to Gurri, trust in society's institutions - police, journalists, scientists and more - has been undermined by constant…
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Dec 27, 2018
#50 - David Denkenberger on how to feed all 8b people through an asteroid/nuclear winter
If an asteroid impact or nuclear winter blocked the sun for years, our inability to grow food would result in billions dying of starvation, right? According to Dr David Denkenberger, co-author of Feeding Everyone No Matter What: no. If he's to be believed, nobody need starve at all.
Even without the sun, David sees the Earth as a bountiful food source. Mushrooms farmed on decaying wood. Bacteria fed with natural gas. Fish and mussels supported by sudden upwelling of ocean nutrients - and more.
Dr Denkenberger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and he's out to spread the word that while a nuclear winter might be horrible, experts have been mistaken to assume that mass starvation is an inevitability. In fact, the only thing that would prevent us from feeding the world is insufficient preparation.
∙ Links to learn more, summary and full transcript
Not content to just write a book pointing this out, David has gone on to found a growing non-profit - t…
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Dec 20, 2018
#49 - Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for 30c & other development 'best buys'
If I told you it's possible to deliver an extra year of ideal primary-level education for under $1, would you believe me? Hopefully not - the claim is absurd on its face.
But it may be true nonetheless. The very best education interventions are phenomenally cost-effective, and they're not the kinds of things you'd expect, says Dr Rachel Glennerster.
She's Chief Economist at the UK's foreign aid agency DFID, and used to run J-PAL, the world-famous anti-poverty research centre based in MIT's Economics Department, where she studied the impact of a wide range of approaches to improving education, health, and governing institutions. According to Dr Glennerster:
"...when we looked at the cost effectiveness of education programs, there were a ton of zeros, and there were a ton of zeros on the things that we spend most of our money on. So more teachers, more books, more inputs, like smaller class sizes - at least in the developing world - seem to have no impact, and that's where most gov…
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Nov 22, 2018
#48 - Brian Christian on better living through the wisdom of computer science
Please let us know if we've helped you: *Fill out our annual impact survey*
Ever felt that you were so busy you spent all your time paralysed trying to figure out where to start, and couldn't get much done? Computer scientists have a term for this - thrashing - and it's a common reason our computers freeze up. The solution, for people as well as laptops, is to 'work dumber': pick something at random and finish it, without wasting time thinking about the bigger picture.
Bestselling author Brian Christian studied computer science, and in the book *Algorithms to Live By* he's out to find the lessons it can offer for a better life. He investigates into when to quit your job, when to marry, the best way to sell your house, how long to spend on a difficult decision, and how much randomness to inject into your life. In each case computer science gives us a theoretically optimal solution, and in this episode we think hard about whether its models match our reality.
*Links to learn more,…
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Nov 2, 2018
#47 - Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles
After dropping out of a machine learning PhD at Stanford, Daniel Ziegler needed to decide what to do next. He’d always enjoyed building stuff and wanted to shape the development of AI, so he thought a research engineering position at an org dedicated to aligning AI with human interests could be his best option.
He decided to apply to OpenAI, and spent about 6 weeks preparing for the interview before landing the job. His PhD, by contrast, might have taken 6 years. Daniel thinks this highly accelerated career path may be possible for many others.
On today’s episode Daniel is joined by Catherine Olsson, who has also worked at OpenAI, and left her computational neuroscience PhD to become a research engineer at Google Brain. She and Daniel share this piece of advice for those curious about this career path: just dive in. If you're trying to get good at something, just start doing that thing, and figure out that way what's necessary to be able to do it well.
Catherine has even crea…
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Oct 23, 2018
#46 - Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia
The barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly realise she gave you $1 less than she should have. Do you brush your way past the people now waiting, or just accept this as a dollar you’re never getting back? According to philosophy Professor Hilary Greaves - Director of Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute, which is hiring - this simple decision will completely change the long-term future by altering the identities of almost all future generations.
How? Because by rushing back to the counter, you slightly change the timing of everything else people in line do during that day - including changing the timing of the interactions they have with everyone else. Eventually these causal links will reach someone who was going to conceive a child.
By causing a child to be conceived a few fractions of a second earlier or later, you change the sperm that fertilizes their egg, resulting in a totally different person. So asking f…
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Oct 17, 2018
#45 - Tyler Cowen's case for maximising econ growth, stabilising civilization & thinking long-term
I've probably spent more time reading Tyler Cowen - Professor of Economics at George Mason University - than any other author. Indeed it's his incredibly popular blog Marginal Revolution that prompted me to study economics in the first place. Having spent thousands of hours absorbing Tyler's work, it was a pleasure to be able to question him about his latest book and personal manifesto: Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
Tyler makes the case that, despite what you may have heard, we *can* make rational judgments about what is best for society as a whole. He argues:
1. Our top moral priority should be preserving and improving humanity's long-term future
2. The way to do that is to maximise the rate of sustainable economic growth
3. We should respect human rights and follow general principles while doing so.
We discuss why Tyler believes all these things, and I push back where I disagree. In particular: is higher economi…
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Oct 2, 2018
#44 - Paul Christiano on how we'll hand the future off to AI, & solving the alignment problem
Paul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great material, we decided to do a second recording, resulting in our longest interview so far. While challenging at times I can strongly recommend listening - Paul works on AI himself and has a very unusually thought through view of how it will change the world. This is now the top resource I'm going to refer people to if they're interested in positively shaping the development of AI, and want to understand the problem better. Even though I'm familiar with Paul's writing I felt I was learning a great deal and am now in a better position to make a difference to the world.
A few of the topics we cover are:
* Why Paul expects AI to transform the world gradually rather than explosively and what that would look like
* Several concrete methods OpenAI is trying to develop to ensure AI systems do what we want even if they become more competent than us
* Why AI systems will probably be granted leg…
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Sep 25, 2018
#43 - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machines
In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is informed that the Soviet Union has created a secret deterrence system which will automatically wipe out humanity upon detection of a single nuclear explosion in Russia. With US bombs heading towards the USSR and unable to be recalled, Dr Strangelove points out that “the whole point of this Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret – why didn’t you tell the world, eh?” The Soviet ambassador replies that it was to be announced at the Party Congress the following Monday: “The Premier loves surprises”.
Daniel Ellsberg - leaker of the Pentagon Papers which helped end the Vietnam War and Nixon presidency - claims in his new book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner that Dr. Strangelove might as well be a documentary. After attending the film in Washington DC in 1964, he and a colleague wondered how so many details of their nuclear planning had leaked.
*Links to learn mor…
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Sep 11, 2018
#42 - Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
Consider two familiar moments at a family reunion.
Our host, Uncle Bill, takes pride in his barbecuing skills. But his niece Becky says that she now refuses to eat meat. A groan goes round the table; the family mostly think of this as an annoying picky preference. But if seriously considered as a moral position, as they might if instead Becky were avoiding meat on religious grounds, it would usually receive a very different reaction.
An hour later Bill expresses a strong objection to abortion. Again, a groan goes round the table; the family mostly think that he has no business in trying to foist his regressive preference on anyone. But if considered not as a matter of personal taste, but rather as a moral position - that Bill genuinely believes he’s opposing mass-murder - his comment might start a serious conversation.
Amanda Askell, who recently completed a PhD in philosophy at NYU focused on the ethics of infinity, thinks that we often betray a complete lack of moral empathy.…
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Aug 28, 2018
#41 - David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher
With 698 inmates per 100,000 citizens, the U.S. is by far the leader among large wealthy nations in incarceration. But what effect does imprisonment actually have on crime?
According to David Roodman, Senior Advisor to the Open Philanthropy Project, the marginal effect is zero.
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This stunning rebuke to the American criminal justice system comes from the man Holden Karnofsky’s called "the gold standard for in-depth quantitative research", whose other investigations include the risk of geomagnetic storms, whether deworming improves health and test scores, and the development impacts of microfinance.
*Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.*
The effects of crime can be split into three categories; before, during, and after.
Does having tougher sentences deter people from committing crime?
After reviewing studies on gun laws and ‘three…
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Aug 21, 2018
#40 - Katja Grace on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions
Experts believe that artificial intelligence will be better than humans at driving trucks by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing bestselling books by 2049, and working as surgeons by 2053. But how seriously should we take these predictions?
Katja Grace, lead author of ‘When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?’, thinks we should treat such guesses as only weak evidence. But she also says there might be much better ways to forecast transformative technology, and that anticipating such advances could be one of our most important projects.
*Note: Katja's organisation AI Impacts is currently hiring part- and full-time researchers.*
There’s often pessimism around making accurate predictions in general, and some areas of artificial intelligence might be particularly difficult to forecast.
But there are also many things we’re able to predict confidently today -- like the climate of Oxford in five years -- that we no longer give ourselves much credit for.
Some aspects of tr…
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Aug 7, 2018
#39 - Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions
Will Trump be re-elected? Will North Korea give up their nuclear weapons? Will your friend turn up to dinner?
Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org has a process for working out such real life problems.
Let’s work through one here: how likely is it that you’ll enjoy listening to this episode?
The first step is to figure out your ‘prior probability’; what’s your estimate of how likely you are to enjoy the interview before getting any further evidence?
Other than applying common sense, one way to figure this out is called reference class forecasting: looking at similar cases and seeing how often something is true, on average.
Spencer is our first ever return guest. So one reference class might be, how many Spencer Greenberg episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast have you enjoyed so far? Being this specific limits bias in your answer, but with a sample size of at most 1 - you’d probably want to add more data points to reduce variability.
Zooming out, how…
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Jul 25, 2018
#38 - Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world
Will people who think carefully about how to maximize welfare eventually converge on the same views?
The effective altruism community has spent a lot of time over the past 10 years debating how best to increase happiness and reduce suffering, and gradually narrowed in on the world’s poorest people, all animals capable of suffering, and future generations.
Yew-Kwang Ng, Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, was independently working on this exact question since the 70s. Many of his conclusions have ended up foreshadowing what is now conventional wisdom within effective altruism - though other views he holds remain controversial or little-known.
For instance, he thinks we ought to explore increasing pleasure via direct brain stimulation, and that genetic engineering may be an important tool for increasing happiness in the future.
His work has suggested that the welfare of most wild animals is on balance negative and he thinks that in the futur…
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Jul 16, 2018
#37 - GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.
What’s the value of preventing the death of a 5-year-old child, compared to a 20-year-old, or an 80-year-old?
The global health community has generally regarded the value as proportional to the number of health-adjusted life-years the person has remaining - but GiveWell, one of the world’s foremost charity evaluators, no longer uses that approach.
They found that contrary to the years-remaining’ method, many of their staff actually value preventing the death of an adult more than preventing the death of a young child. However there’s plenty of disagreement: the team’s estimates of the relative value span a four-fold range.
As James Snowden - a research consultant at GiveWell - explains in this episode, there’s no way around making these controversial judgement calls based on limited information. If you try to ignore a question like this, you just implicitly take an unreflective stand on it instead. And for each charity they look into there’s 1 or 2 dozen of these hi…
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Jul 11, 2018
#36 - Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism
Almost nobody is able to do groundbreaking physics research themselves, and by the time his brilliance was appreciated, Einstein was hardly limited by funding. But what if you could find a way to unlock the secrets of the universe like Einstein nonetheless?
Today’s guest, Tanya Singh, sees herself as doing something like that every day. She’s Executive Assistant to one of her intellectual heroes who she believes is making a huge contribution to improving the world: Professor Bostrom at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI).
She couldn’t get more work out of Bostrom with extra donations, as his salary is already easily covered. But with her superior abilities as an Executive Assistant, Tanya frees up hours of his time every week, essentially ‘buying’ more Bostrom in a way nobody else can. She also help manage FHI more generally, in so doing freeing up more than an hour of other staff time for each hour she works. This gives her the leverage to do more good…
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Jun 21, 2018
#35 - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
"You don't need permission. You don't need to be allowed to do something that's not in your job description. If you think that it's gonna make your company or your organization more successful and more efficient, you can often just go and do it."
How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s life, the answer seems to be ‘very’.
At 15 she took her first job - an entry-level position at a chain restaurant. Rather than accept her place, Tara took it on herself to massively improve the store’s shambolic staff scheduling and inventory management. After cutting staff costs 30% she was quickly promoted, and at 16 sent in to overhaul dozens of failing stores in a final effort to save them from closure.
That’s just the first in a startling series of personal stories that take us to a hospital drug dispensary where pharmacists are wasting a third of their time, a chemotherapy ward in Bhutan that’s killing its patients rather tha…
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Jun 7, 2018
Rob Wiblin on the art/science of a high impact career
Today's episode is a cross-post of an interview I did with The Jolly Swagmen Podcast which came out this week. I recommend regular listeners skip to 24 minutes in to avoid hearing things they already know. Later in the episode I talk about my contrarian views, utilitarianism, how 80,000 Hours has changed and will change in the future, where I think EA is performing worst, how to use social media most effectively, and whether or not effective altruism is any sacrifice.
Subscribe and get the episode by searching for '80,000 Hours' in your podcasting app.
Blog post of the episode to share, including a list of topics and links to learn more.
"Most people want to help others with their career, but what’s the best way to do that? Become a doctor? A politician? Work at a non-profit? How can any of us figure out the best way to use our skills to improve the world?
Rob Wiblin is the Director of Research at 80,000 Hours, an organisation founded in Oxford in 2011, which aims to answer j…
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Jun 1, 2018
#34 - We use the worst voting system that exists. Here's how Aaron Hamlin is going to fix it.
In 1991 Edwin Edwards won the Louisiana gubernatorial election. In 2001, he was found guilty of racketeering and received a 10 year invitation to Federal prison. The strange thing about that election? By 1991 Edwards was already notorious for his corruption. Actually, that’s not it.
The truly strange thing is that Edwards was clearly the good guy in the race. How is that possible?
His opponent was former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
How could Louisiana end up having to choose between a criminal and a Nazi sympathiser?
It’s not like they lacked other options: the state’s moderate incumbent governor Buddy Roemer ran for re-election. Polling showed that Roemer was massively preferred to both the career criminal and the career bigot, and would easily win a head-to-head election against either.
Unfortunately, in Louisiana every candidate from every party competes in the first round, and the top two then go on to a second - a so-called ‘jungle primary’. Vote spli…
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May 29, 2018
#33 - Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear war
Joseph Stalin had a life-extension program dedicated to making himself immortal. What if he had succeeded?
According to our last guest, Bryan Caplan, there’s an 80% chance that Stalin would still be ruling Russia today. Today’s guest disagrees.
Like Stalin he has eyes for his own immortality - including an insurance plan that will cover the cost of cryogenically freezing himself after he dies - and thinks the technology to achieve it might be around the corner.
Fortunately for humanity though, that guest is probably one of the nicest people on the planet: Dr Anders Sandberg of Oxford University.
Full transcript of the conversation, summary, and links to learn more.
The potential availability of technology to delay or even stop ageing means this disagreement matters, so he has been trying to model what would really happen if both the very best and the very worst people in the world could live forever - among many other questions.
Anders, who studies low-probability high-…
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May 22, 2018
#32 - Bryan Caplan on whether his Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open borders
Bryan Caplan’s claim in *The Case Against Education* is striking: education doesn’t teach people much, we use little of what we learn, and college is mostly about trying to seem smarter than other people - so the government should slash education funding.
It’s a dismaying - almost profane - idea, and one people are inclined to dismiss out of hand. But having read the book, I have to admit that Bryan can point to a surprising amount of evidence in his favour.
After all, imagine this dilemma: you can have either a Princeton education without a diploma, or a Princeton diploma without an education. Which is the bigger benefit of college - learning or convincing people you’re smart? It’s not so easy to say.
For this interview, I searched for the best counterarguments I could find and challenged Bryan on what seem like his weakest or most controversial claims.
Wouldn’t defunding education be especially bad for capable but low income students? If you reduced funding for ed…
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May 18, 2018
#31 - Allan Dafoe on defusing the political & economic risks posed by existing AI capabilities
The debate around the impacts of artificial intelligence often centres on ‘superintelligence’ - a general intellect that is much smarter than the best humans, in practically every field.
But according to Allan Dafoe - Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University - even if we stopped at today's AI technology and simply collected more data, built more sensors, and added more computing capacity, extreme systemic risks could emerge, including:
* Mass labor displacement, unemployment, and inequality;
* The rise of a more oligopolistic global market structure, potentially moving us away from our liberal economic world order;
* Imagery intelligence and other mechanisms for revealing most of the ballistic missile-carrying submarines that countries rely on to be able to respond to nuclear attack;
* Ubiquitous sensors and algorithms that can identify individuals through face recognition, leading to universal surveillance;
* Autonomous weapons with an independent chain…
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May 15, 2018
#30 - Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another
If we have a study on the impact of a social program in a particular place and time, how confident can we be that we’ll get a similar result if we study the same program again somewhere else?
Dr Eva Vivalt is a lecturer in the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University. She compiled a huge database of impact evaluations in global development - including 15,024 estimates from 635 papers across 20 types of intervention - to help answer this question.
Her finding: not confident at all.
The typical study result differs from the average effect found in similar studies so far by almost 100%. That is to say, if all existing studies of a particular education program find that it improves test scores by 10 points - the next result is as likely to be negative or greater than 20 points, as it is to be between 0-20 points.
She also observed that results from smaller studies done with an NGO - often pilot studies - were more likely to look promising. But when gover…
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May 8, 2018
#29 - Anders Sandberg on 3 new resolutions for the Fermi paradox & how to colonise the universe
Part 2 out now: #33 - Dr Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear war
The universe is so vast, yet we don’t see any alien civilizations. If they exist, where are they? Oxford University’s Anders Sandberg has an original answer: they’re ‘sleeping’, and for a very compelling reason.
Because of the thermodynamics of computation, the colder it gets, the more computations you can do. The universe is getting exponentially colder as it expands, and as the universe cools, one Joule of energy gets worth more and more. If they wait long enough this can become a 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x gain. So, if a civilization wanted to maximize its ability to perform computations – its best option might be to lie in wait for trillions of years.
Why would a civilization want to maximise the number of computations they can do? Because conscious minds are probably generated by computation, so doing twice as many computations is li…
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Apr 27, 2018
#28 - Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & fast AI progresses
A researcher is working on creating a new virus – one more dangerous than any that exist naturally. They believe they’re being as careful as possible. After all, if things go wrong, their own life and that of their colleagues will be in danger. But if an accident is capable of triggering a global pandemic – hundreds of millions of lives might be at risk. How much additional care will the researcher actually take in the face of such a staggering death toll?
In a new paper Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt, a Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, argues it’s impossible to expect them to make the correct adjustments. If they have an accident that kills 5 people – they’ll feel extremely bad. If they have an accident that kills 500 million people, they’ll feel even worse – but there’s no way for them to feel 100 million times worse. The brain simply doesn’t work that way.
So, rather than relying on individual judgement, we could create a system…
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Apr 17, 2018
#27 - Dr Tom Inglesby on careers and policies that reduce global catastrophic biological risks
How about this for a movie idea: a main character has to prevent a new contagious strain of Ebola spreading around the world. She’s the best of the best. So good in fact, that her work on early detection systems contains the strain at its source. Ten minutes into the movie, we see the results of her work – nothing happens. Life goes on as usual. She continues to be amazingly competent, and nothing continues to go wrong. Fade to black. Roll credits.
If your job is to prevent catastrophes, success is when nobody has to pay attention to you. But without regular disasters to remind authorities why they hired you in the first place, they can’t tell if you’re actually achieving anything. And when budgets come under pressure you may find that success condemns you to the chopping block.
Dr Tom Inglesby, Director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, worries this may be about to happen to the scientists working on the ‘Global Hea…
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Apr 10, 2018
#26 - Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is made & what's needed to get it in every supermarket
First, decide on the type of animal. Next, pick the cell type. Then take a small, painless biopsy, and put the cells in a solution that makes them feel like they’re still in the body. Once the cells are in this comfortable state, they'll proliferate. One cell becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight, and so on. Continue until you have enough cells to make a burger, a nugget, a sausage, or a piece of bacon, then concentrate them until they bind into solid meat.
It's all surprisingly straightforward in principle according to Marie Gibbons, a research fellow with The Good Food Institute, who has been researching how to improve this process at Harvard Medical School. We might even see clean meat sold commercially within a year.
The real technical challenge is developing large bioreactors and cheap solutions so that we can make huge volumes and drive down costs.
This interview covers the science and technology involved at each stage of clean meat production, the challeng…
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Mar 28, 2018
#25 - Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do
On February 2, 1685, England’s King Charles II was struck by a sudden illness. Fortunately his physicians were the best of the best. To reassure the public they kept them abreast of the King’s treatment regimen. King Charles was made to swallow a toxic metal; had blistering agents applied to his scalp; had pigeon droppings attached to his feet; was prodded with a red-hot poker; given forty drops of ooze from “the skull of a man that was never buried”; and, finally, had crushed stones from the intestines of an East Indian goat forced down his throat. Sadly, despite these heroic efforts, he passed away the following week.
Why did the doctors go this far?
Prof, Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University suspects that on top of any medical beliefs they also had a hidden motive: it needed to be clear, to the king and the public, that the physicians cared enormously about saving His Royal Majesty. Only by going ‘all out’ would they be protected…
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Mar 20, 2018
#24 - Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause
How honest should we be? How helpful? How friendly? If our society claims to value honesty, for instance, but in reality accepts an awful lot of lying – should we go along with those lax standards? Or, should we attempt to set a new norm for ourselves?
Dr Stefan Schubert, a researcher at the Social Behaviour and Ethics Lab at Oxford University, has been modelling this in the context of the effective altruism community. He thinks people trying to improve the world should hold themselves to very high standards of integrity, because their minor sins can impose major costs on the thousands of others who share their goals.
*Summary, related links and full transcript.*
In addition, when a norm is uniquely important to our situation, we should be willing to question society and come up with something different and hopefully better.
But in other cases, we can be better off sticking with whatever our culture expects, both to save time, avoid making mistakes, and ensure others can pred…
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Mar 16, 2018
#23 - How to actually become an AI alignment researcher, according to Dr Jan Leike
Want to help steer the 21st century’s most transformative technology? First complete an undergrad degree in computer science and mathematics. Prioritize harder courses over easier ones. Publish at least one paper before you apply for a PhD. Find a supervisor who’ll have a lot of time for you. Go to the top conferences and meet your future colleagues. And finally, get yourself hired.
That’s Dr Jan Leike’s advice on how to join him as a Research Scientist at DeepMind, the world’s leading AI team.
Jan is also a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and his research aims to make machine learning robustly beneficial. His current focus is getting AI systems to learn good ‘objective functions’ in cases where we can’t easily specify the outcome we actually want.
*Full transcript, summary and links to learn more.*
How might you know you’re a good fit for research?
Jan says to check whether you get obsessed with puzzles an…
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Mar 7, 2018
#22 - Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates
How people kill themselves varies enormously depending on which means are most easily available. In the United States, suicide by firearm stands out. In Hong Kong, where most people live in high rise buildings, jumping from a height is more common. And in some countries in Asia and Africa with many poor agricultural communities, the leading means is drinking pesticide.
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of this issue before. And yet, of the 800,000 people who kill themselves globally each year 20% die from pesticide self-poisoning.
Full transcript, summary and links to articles discussed in today's show.
Research suggests most people who try to kill themselves with pesticides reflect on the decision for less than 30 minutes, and that less than 10% of those who don't die the first time around will try again.
Unfortunately, the fatality rate from pesticide ingestion is 40% to 70%.
Having such dangerous chemicals near people's homes is therefore an enormous public heal…
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Feb 27, 2018
#21 - Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil’s plan to do the same
The Green Revolution averted mass famine during the 20th century. The contraceptive pill gave women unprecedented freedom in planning their own lives. Both are widely recognised as scientific breakthroughs that transformed the world. But few know that those breakthroughs only happened when they did because of a philanthropist willing to take a risky bet on a new idea.
Today’s guest, Holden Karnofsky, has been looking for philanthropy’s biggest success stories because he’s Executive Director of the Open Philanthropy Project, which gives away over $100 million per year - and he’s hungry for big wins.
*Full transcript, related links, job opportunities and summary of the interview.*
In the 1940s, poverty reduction overseas was not a big priority for many. But the Rockefeller Foundation decided to fund agricultural scientists to breed much better crops for the developing world - thereby massively increasing their food production.
In the 1950s, society was a long way from dem…
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Feb 18, 2018
#20 - Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming
Before the US Civil War, it was easier for the North to morally oppose slavery. Why? Because unlike the South they weren’t profiting much from its existence. The fight for abolition was partly won because many no longer saw themselves as having a selfish stake in its continuation.
Bruce Friedrich, executive director of The Good Food Institute (GFI), thinks the same may be true in the fight against speciesism. 98% of people currently eat meat. But if eating meat stops being part of most people’s daily lives -- it should be a lot easier to convince them that farming practices are just as cruel as they look, and that the suffering of these animals really matters.
*Full transcript, related links, job opportunities and summary of the interview.*
That’s why GFI is “working with scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs” to create plant-based meat, dairy and eggs as well as clean meat alternatives to animal products. In 2016, Animal Charity Evaluators named GFI one of its recom…
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Feb 14, 2018
#19 - Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on working next to the White House trying to prevent nuclear war
Rogue elements within a state’s security forces enrich dozens of kilograms of uranium. It’s then assembled into a crude nuclear bomb. The bomb is transported on a civilian aircraft to Washington D.C, and loaded onto a delivery truck. The truck is driven by an American citizen midway between the White House and the Capitol Building. The driver casually steps out of the vehicle, and detonates the weapon. There are more than 80,000 instant deaths. There are also at least 100,000 seriously wounded, with nowhere left to treat them.
*Full blog post about this episode, including a transcript, summary and links to resources mentioned in the show*
It’s likely that one of those immediately killed would be Samantha Pitts-Kiefer, who works only one block away from the White House.
Samantha serves as Senior Director of The Global Nuclear Policy Program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and warns that the chances of a nuclear terrorist attack are alarmingly high. Terrorist groups have ex…
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Jan 31, 2018
#18 - Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinction
Ofir Reich started out doing math in the military, before spending 8 years in tech startups - but then made a sharp turn to become a data scientist focussed on helping the global poor.
At UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action he helps prevent tax evasion by identifying fake companies in India, enable Afghanistan to pay its teachers electronically, and raise yields for Ethiopian farmers by messaging them when local conditions make it ideal to apply fertiliser. Or at least that’s the hope - he’s also working on ways to test whether those interventions actually work.
*Full post about this episode, including a transcript and relevant links to learn more.*
Why dedicate his life to helping the global poor?
Ofir sees little moral difference between harming people and failing to help them. After all, if you had to press a button to keep all of your money from going to charity, and you pressed that button, would that be an action, or an inaction? Is there even an answer…
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Jan 19, 2018
#17 - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races.
Throughout history we’ve consistently believed, as common sense, truly horrifying things by today’s standards. According to University of Oxford Professor Will MacAskill, it’s extremely likely that we’re in the same boat today. If we accept that we’re probably making major moral errors, how should we proceed?
Full transcript, key points and links to articles and career guides discussed in the show.
If our morality is tied to common sense intuitions, we’re probably just preserving these biases and moral errors. Instead we need to develop a moral view that criticises common sense intuitions, and gives us a chance to move beyond them. An…
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Dec 22, 2017
#16 - Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
In the 40s and 50s neoliberalism was a fringe movement within economics. But by the 80s it had become a dominant school of thought in public policy, and achieved major policy changes across the English speaking world. How did this happen?
In part because its leaders invested heavily in training academics to study and develop their ideas. Whether you think neoliberalism was good or bad, its history demonstrates the impact building a strong intellectual base within universities can have.
Michelle Hutchinson is working to get a different set of ideas a hearing in academia by setting up the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at Oxford University. The Institute, which is currently hiring for three roles, aims to bring together outstanding philosophers and economists to research how to most improve the world. The hope is that it will spark widespread academic engagement with effective altruist thinking, which will hone the ideas and help them gradually percolate into society more broadly.…
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Nov 20, 2017
#15 - Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise
Prof Philip Tetlock is a social science legend. Over forty years he has researched whose predictions we can trust, whose we can’t and why - and developed methods that allow all of us to be better at predicting the future.
After the Iraq WMDs fiasco, the US intelligence services hired him to figure out how to ensure they’d never screw up that badly again. The result of that work – Superforecasting – was a media sensation in 2015.
Full transcript, brief summary, apply for coaching and links to learn more.
It described Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project, which found forecasting methods so accurate they beat everyone else in open competition, including thousands of people in the intelligence services with access to classified information.
Today he’s working to develop the best forecasting process ever, by combining top human and machine intelligence in the Hybrid Forecasting Competition, which you can sign up and participate in.
We start by describing his key findings,…
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Nov 13, 2017
#14 - Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse
What if you knew that ducks were being killed with pitchforks? Rabbits dumped alive into containers? Or pigs being strangled with forklifts? Would you be willing to go undercover to expose the crime?
That’s a real question that confronts volunteers at Animal Equality (AE). In this episode we speak to Sharon Nunez and Jose Valle, who founded AE in 2006 and then grew it into a multi-million dollar international animal rights organisation. They’ve been chosen as one of the most effective animal protection orgs in the world by Animal Charity Evaluators for the last 3 consecutive years.
Blog post about the episode, including links and full transcript.
A related previous episode, strongly recommended: Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming as soon as possible.
In addition to undercover investigations AE has also designed a 3D virtual-reality farm experience called iAnimal360. People get to experience being trapped in a cage – in a room designed to kill then - and can’t j…
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Oct 31, 2017
#13 - Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results
In both rich and poor countries, government policy is often based on no evidence at all and many programs don’t work. This has particularly harsh effects on the global poor - in some countries governments only spend $100 on each citizen a year so they can’t afford to waste a single dollar.
Enter MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Since 2003 they’ve conducted experiments to figure out what policies actually help recipients, and then tried to get them implemented by governments and non-profits.
Claire Walsh leads J-PAL’s Government Partnership Initiative, which works to evaluate policies and programs in collaboration with developing world governments, scale policies that have been shown to work, and generally promote a culture of evidence-based policymaking.
Summary, links to career opportunities and topics discussed in the show.
We discussed (her views only, not J-PAL’s):
* How can they get evidence backed policies adopted? Do politicians in the developing world eve…
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Oct 25, 2017
#12 - Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.
“When you're in the middle of a crisis and you have to ask for money, you're already too late.”
That’s Dr Beth Cameron, who leads Global Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Beth should know. She has years of experience preparing for and fighting the diseases of our nightmares, on the White House Ebola Taskforce, in the National Security Council staff, and as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.
Summary, list of career opportunities, extra links to learn more and coaching application.
Unfortunately, the countries of the world aren’t prepared for a crisis - and like children crowded into daycare, there’s a good chance something will make us all sick at once.
During past pandemics countries have dragged their feet over who will pay to contain them, or struggled to move people and supplies where they needed to be. At the same time advanced biotechnology threatens to make it possible for te…
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Oct 17, 2017
#11 - Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm
Do most meat eaters think it’s wrong to hurt animals? Do Americans think climate change is likely to cause human extinction? What is the best, state-of-the-art therapy for depression? How can we make academics more intellectually honest, so we can actually trust their findings? How can we speed up social science research ten-fold? Do most startups improve the world, or make it worse?
If you’re interested in these question, this interview is for you.
Click for a full transcript, links discussed in the show, etc.
A scientist, entrepreneur, writer and mathematician, Spencer Greenberg is constantly working to create tools to speed up and improve research and critical thinking. These include:
* Rapid public opinion surveys to find out what most people actually think about animal consciousness, farm animal welfare, the impact of developing world charities and the likelihood of extinction by various different means;
* Tools to enable social science research to be run en masse ver…
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Oct 11, 2017
#10 - Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction
What if you were in a position to give away billions of dollars to improve the world? What would you do with it? This is the problem facing Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project - people like Dr Nick Beckstead.
Following a PhD in philosophy, Nick works to figure out where money can do the most good. He’s been involved in major grants in a wide range of areas, including ending factory farming through technological innovation, safeguarding the world from advances in biotechnology and artificial intelligence, and spreading rational compassion.
Full transcript, coaching application form, overview of the conversation, and links to resources discussed in the episode:
This episode is a tour through some of the toughest questions ‘effective altruists’ face when figuring out how to best improve the world, including:
* * Should we mostly try to help people currently alive, or future generations? Nick studied this question for years in his PhD thesis, On the Overwhelming…
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Oct 4, 2017
#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it
Take a trip to Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, when going to space sounded like a good way to get around environmental limits, people started cryogenically freezing themselves, and nanotechnology looked like it might revolutionise industry – or turn us all into grey goo.
Full transcript, coaching application form, overview of the conversation, and extra resources to learn more:
In this episode of the 80,000 Hours Podcast Christine Peterson takes us back to her youth in the Bay Area, the ideas she encountered there, and what the dreamers she met did as they grew up. We also discuss how she came up with the term ‘open source software’ (and how she had to get someone else to propose it).
Today Christine helps runs the Foresight Institute, which fills a gap left by for-profit technology companies – predicting how new revolutionary technologies could go wrong, and ensuring we steer clear of the downsides.
We dive into:
* Whether the poor security of computer systems pos…
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Sep 27, 2017
#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes
Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before being killed for human consumption. Over the last two years Lewis Bollard – Project Officer for Farm Animal Welfare at the Open Philanthropy Project – has conducted extensive research into the best ways to eliminate animal suffering in farms as soon as possible. This has resulted in $30 million in grants to farm animal advocacy.
Full transcript, coaching application form, overview of the conversation, and extra resources to learn more:
We covered almost every approach being taken, which ones work, and how individuals can best contribute through their careers.
We also had time to venture into a wide range of issues that are less often discussed, including:
* Why Lewis thinks insect farming would be worse than the status quo, and whether we should look for ‘humane’ insecticides;
* How young people can set themselves up to contribute to scientific research into meat alternativ…
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Sep 13, 2017
#7 - Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
The scientific revolution in the 16th century was one of the biggest societal shifts in human history, driven by the discovery of new and better methods of figuring out who was right and who was wrong.
Julia Galef - a well-known writer and researcher focused on improving human judgment, especially about high stakes questions - believes that if we could again develop new techniques to predict the future, resolve disagreements and make sound decisions together, it could dramatically improve the world across the board. We brought her in to talk about her ideas.
*This interview complements a new detailed review of whether and how to follow Julia’s career path.* Apply for personalised coaching, see what questions are asked when, and read extra resources to learn more.
Julia has been host of the Rationally Speaking podcast since 2010, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality in 2012, and is currently working for the Open Philanthropy Project on an investigation of expert disa…
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Sep 6, 2017
#6 - Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it
Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world that is flourishing or disintegrating – and indeed, whether they will ever be born at all – is in large part up to us. As such, the welfare of future generations should be our number one moral concern.
This conclusion holds true regardless of whether your moral framework is based on common sense, consequences, rules of ethical conduct, cooperating with others, virtuousness, keeping options open – or just a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in.
That’s the view of Dr Toby Ord, a philosophy Fellow at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the effective altruism community. In this episode of the 80,000 Hours Podcast Dr Ord makes the case that aiming for a positive long-term future is likely the best way to improve the world.
Apply for personalised coaching,…
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Aug 28, 2017
#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading
Quantitative financial trading is one of the highest paying parts of the world’s highest paying industry. 25 to 30 year olds with outstanding maths skills can earn millions a year in an obscure set of ‘quant trading’ firms, where they program computers with predefined algorithms to allow them to trade very quickly and effectively.
*Update: we're headhunting people for quant trading roles*
Want to be kept up to date about particularly promising roles we're aware of for earning to give in quantitative finance?
*Get notified by letting us know here.*
This makes it an attractive place to work for people who want to ‘earn to give’, and we know several people who are able to donate over a million dollars a year to effective charities by working in quant trading. Who are these people? What is the job like? And is there a risk that their work harms the world in other ways?
Apply for personalised coaching, see what questions are asked when, and read extra resources to learn…
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Aug 23, 2017
#4 - Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them
What disaster is most likely to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? Terrorism? Famine? An asteroid?
Actually it’s probably a pandemic: a deadly new disease that spreads out of control. We’ve recently seen the risks with Ebola and swine flu, but they pale in comparison to the Spanish flu which killed 3% of the world’s population in 1918 to 1920. A pandemic of that scale today would kill 200 million.
In this in-depth interview I speak to Howie Lempel, who spent years studying pandemic preparedness for the Open Philanthropy Project. We spend the first 20 minutes covering his work at the foundation, then discuss how bad the pandemic problem is, why it’s probably getting worse, and what can be done about it.
Full transcript, apply for personalised coaching to help you work on pandemic preparedness, see what questions are asked when, and read extra resources to learn more.
In the second half we go through where you personally could study and work to t…
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Jul 21, 2017
#3 - Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
Just two years ago OpenAI didn’t exist. It’s now among the most elite groups of machine learning researchers. They’re trying to make an AI that’s smarter than humans and have $1b at their disposal.
Even stranger for a Silicon Valley start-up, it’s not a business, but rather a non-profit founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman among others, to ensure the benefits of AI are distributed broadly to all of society.
I did a long interview with one of its first machine learning researchers, Dr Dario Amodei, to learn about:
* OpenAI’s latest plans and research progress.
* His paper *Concrete Problems in AI Safety*, which outlines five specific ways machine learning algorithms can act in dangerous ways their designers don’t intend - something OpenAI has to work to avoid.
* How listeners can best go about pursuing a career in machine learning and AI development themselves.
Full transcript, apply for personalised coaching to work on AI safety, see what questions are asked when…
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Jun 21, 2017
#2 - David Spiegelhalter on risk, stats and improving understanding of science
Recorded in 2015 by Robert Wiblin with colleague Jess Whittlestone at the Centre for Effective Altruism, and recovered from the dusty 80,000 Hours archives.
David Spiegelhalter is a statistician at the University of Cambridge and something of an academic celebrity in the UK.
Part of his role is to improve the public understanding of risk - especially everyday risks we face like getting cancer or dying in a car crash. As a result he’s regularly in the media explaining numbers in the news, trying to assist both ordinary people and politicians focus on the important risks we face, and avoid being distracted by flashy risks that don’t actually have much impact.
Summary, full transcript and extra links to learn more.
To help make sense of the uncertainties we face in life he has had to invent concepts like the microlife, or a 30-minute change in life expectancy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife)
We wanted to learn whether he thought a lifetime of work communicating sci…
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Jun 5, 2017
#1 - Miles Brundage on the world's desperate need for AI strategists and policy experts
Robert Wiblin, Director of Research at 80,000 Hours speaks with Miles Brundage, research fellow at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. Miles studies the social implications surrounding the development of new technologies and has a particular interest in artificial general intelligence, that is, an AI system that could do most or all of the tasks humans could do.
This interview complements our profile of the importance of positively shaping artificial intelligence and our guide to careers in AI policy and strategy
Full transcript, apply for personalised coaching to work on AI strategy, see what questions are asked when, and read extra resources to learn more.
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May 1, 2017
#0 – Introducing the 80,000 Hours Podcast
80,000 Hours is a non-profit that provides research and other support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems. This podcast is just one of many things we offer, the others of which you can find at *80000hours.org*.
Since 2017 this show has been putting out interviews about the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them — which some people enjoy because they love to learn about important things, and others are using to figure out what they want to do with their careers or with their charitable giving.
If you haven't yet spent a lot of time with 80,000 Hours or our general style of thinking, called effective altruism, it's probably really helpful to first go through the episodes that set the scene, explain our overall perspective on things, and generally offer all the background information you need to get the most out of the episodes we're making now.
That's why we've made a new feed with ten carefully selected epis…
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