back to indexWilliam MacAskill: Effective Altruism | Lex Fridman Podcast #84
link |
The following is a conversation with William McCaskill.
link |
He's a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators
link |
of the effective altruism movement.
link |
His research focuses on the fundamentals
link |
of effective altruism or the use of evidence and reason
link |
to help others by as much as possible
link |
with our time and money, with a particular concentration
link |
on how to act given moral uncertainty.
link |
He's the author of Doing Good, Better, Effective Altruism,
link |
and a radical new way to make a difference.
link |
He is a cofounder and the president
link |
of the Center of Effective Altruism, CEA,
link |
that encourages people to commit to donate at least 10%
link |
of their income to the most effective charities.
link |
He cofounded 80,000 Hours, which is a nonprofit
link |
that provides research and advice on how you can best
link |
make a difference through your career.
link |
This conversation was recorded before the outbreak
link |
of the coronavirus pandemic.
link |
For everyone feeling the medical, psychological,
link |
and financial burden of this crisis,
link |
I'm sending love your way.
link |
Stay strong, we're in this together, we'll beat this thing.
link |
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
link |
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter,
link |
Alex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
link |
As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now,
link |
and never any ads in the middle
link |
that can break the flow of the conversation.
link |
I hope that works for you
link |
and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
link |
This show was presented by Cash App,
link |
the number one finance app in the App Store.
link |
When you get it, use code LEX Podcast.
link |
Cash App lets you send money to your friends,
link |
buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market
link |
with as little as $1.
link |
Since Cash App allows you to send
link |
and receive money digitally, peer to peer,
link |
and security in all digital transactions is very important,
link |
let me mention that PCI data security standard
link |
that Cash App is compliant with.
link |
I'm a big fan of standards for safety and security.
link |
PCI DSS is a good example of that.
link |
Where a bunch of competitors got together and agreed
link |
that there needs to be a global standard
link |
around the security of transactions.
link |
Now, we just need to do the same for autonomous vehicles
link |
and AI systems in general.
link |
So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store,
link |
Google Play, and use the code LEX Podcast,
link |
you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST,
link |
an organization that is helping to advance robotics
link |
and STEM education for young people around the world.
link |
And now, here's my conversation with William McCaskill.
link |
What does utopia for humans and all life on earth
link |
look like for you?
link |
That's a great question.
link |
What I wanna say is that we don't know,
link |
and the utopia we want to get to
link |
is an indirect one that I call the long reflection.
link |
So a period of post scarcity,
link |
no longer have the kind of urgent problems we have today,
link |
but instead can spend perhaps it's tens of thousands
link |
of years debating, engaging in ethical reflection
link |
in order before we take any kind of drastic lock in
link |
actions like spreading to the stars,
link |
and then we can figure out what is right,
link |
what is of kind of moral value.
link |
The long reflection, that's a really beautiful term.
link |
So if we look at Twitter for just a second,
link |
do you think human beings are able to reflect
link |
in a productive way?
link |
I don't mean to make it sound bad
link |
because there is a lot of fights and politics
link |
and division in our discourse.
link |
Maybe if you zoom out, it actually is civilized discourse.
link |
It might not feel like it, but when you zoom out.
link |
So I don't wanna say that Twitter is not civilized discourse.
link |
I actually believe it's more civilized
link |
than people give it credit for.
link |
But do you think the long reflection can actually be stable
link |
where we as human beings with our descendants of a brains
link |
would be able to sort of rationally discuss things
link |
together and arrive at ideas?
link |
I think overall, we're pretty good
link |
at discussing things rationally
link |
and at least in the earliest stages of our lives
link |
being open to many different ideas
link |
and being able to be convinced and change our views.
link |
I think that Twitter is designed almost
link |
to bring out all of the worst tendencies.
link |
So if the long reflection were conducted on Twitter,
link |
maybe it would be better just not even to bother.
link |
But I think the challenge really is getting to a stage
link |
where we have a society that is as conducive as possible
link |
to rational reflection, to deliberation.
link |
I think we're actually very lucky
link |
to be in a liberal society where people are able
link |
to discuss a lot of ideas and so on.
link |
I think when we look to the future,
link |
that's not at all guaranteed that society would be like that
link |
rather than a society where there's a fixed canon
link |
of values that are being imposed on all of society
link |
and where you aren't able to question that.
link |
That would be very bad for my perspective
link |
because it means we wouldn't be able
link |
to figure out what the truth is.
link |
I can already sense we're gonna go down a million
link |
tangents, but what do you think is the,
link |
if Twitter's not optimal, what kind of mechanism
link |
in this modern age of technology can we design
link |
where the exchange of ideas could be both civilized
link |
and productive and yet not be too constrained
link |
where there's rules of what you can say and can't say,
link |
which is, as you say, is not desirable,
link |
but yet not have some limits
link |
of what can be said or not and so on.
link |
Do you have any ideas, thoughts on the possible future?
link |
Of course, nobody knows how to do it,
link |
but do you have thoughts
link |
of what a better Twitter might look like?
link |
I think that text based media are intrinsically
link |
gonna be very hard to be conducive to rational discussion
link |
because if you think about it
link |
from an informational perspective,
link |
if I just send you a text of less than,
link |
what is it now, 240 characters, 280 characters, I think,
link |
that's a tiny amount of information
link |
compared to, say, you and I talking now
link |
where you have access to the words I say,
link |
which is the same as in text,
link |
but also my tone, also my body language
link |
and we're very poorly designed to be able to assess.
link |
I have to read all of this context
link |
into anything you say, so I say,
link |
maybe your partner sends you a text
link |
and has a full stop at the end.
link |
Are they mad at you?
link |
You don't know, you have to infer everything
link |
about this person's mental state
link |
from whether they put a full stop at the end of a text or not.
link |
Well, the flip side of that is it truly text
link |
that's the problem here
link |
because there's a viral aspect to the text
link |
where it's you could just post text nonstop,
link |
it's very immediate.
link |
The times before Twitter, before the internet,
link |
the way you would exchange text is you would write books.
link |
And that, while it doesn't get body language,
link |
it doesn't get tone, it doesn't, so on,
link |
but it does actually boil down after some time
link |
thinking some editing, so on, boil down ideas.
link |
So is the immediacy and the viral nature
link |
which produces the outrage mobs and so on
link |
the potential problem?
link |
I think that is a big issue.
link |
I think there's gonna be the strong selection effect
link |
where something that provokes outrage,
link |
well, that's high arousal,
link |
you're more likely to retweet that
link |
where there's kind of sober analysis
link |
is not as sexy, not as viral.
link |
I do agree that long form content
link |
is much better to productive discussion.
link |
In terms of the media that are very popular at the moment,
link |
I think that podcasting is great
link |
where like your podcasts are two hours long,
link |
so they're much more in depth than Twitter are.
link |
And you are able to convey so much more nuance,
link |
so much more caveat because it's an actual conversation.
link |
It's more like the sort of communication
link |
that we've evolved to do rather than kind of
link |
these very small little snippets of ideas
link |
that when also combined with bad incentives
link |
just clearly aren't designed for helping us get to the truth.
link |
It's kind of interesting that it's not just
link |
the length of the podcast medium,
link |
but it's the fact that it was started by people
link |
that don't give a damn about, quote unquote, demand.
link |
There's a relaxed sort of the style like that Joe Rogan does.
link |
There's a freedom to express ideas
link |
in an unconstrained way that's very real.
link |
It's kind of funny in that it feels
link |
so refreshingly real to us today.
link |
And I wonder what the future looks like.
link |
It's a little bit sad now that quite a lot
link |
of sort of more popular people are getting into podcasting.
link |
And they try to sort of create,
link |
they try to control it,
link |
they try to constrain it in different kinds of ways.
link |
People I love like Conan Obron and so on,
link |
different comedians.
link |
And I'd love to see where the real aspects
link |
of this podcasting medium persists,
link |
maybe in TV, maybe in YouTube,
link |
maybe Netflix is pushing those kind of ideas.
link |
And it's kind of, it's a really exciting word,
link |
that kind of sharing of knowledge.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a double edged sword
link |
as it becomes more popular and more profitable where
link |
on the one hand you'll get a lot more creativity,
link |
people doing more interesting things with the medium,
link |
but also perhaps you get this place to the bottom
link |
where suddenly maybe it'll be hard to find good content
link |
on podcasts because it'll be so overwhelmed
link |
by the latest bit of vital outage.
link |
So speaking of that, jumping on effective altruism
link |
for a second, so much of that internet content
link |
is funded by advertisements.
link |
Just in the context of effective altruism,
link |
we're talking about the richest companies in the world,
link |
they're funded by advertisements essentially,
link |
Google, that's their primary source of income.
link |
Do you see that as, do you have any criticism
link |
of that source of income?
link |
Do you see that source of money
link |
as a potentially powerful source of money
link |
that could be used, well, certainly could be used for good,
link |
but is there something bad about that source of money?
link |
I think there's significant worries with it
link |
where it means that the incentives of the company
link |
might be quite misaligned with,
link |
are making people's lives better,
link |
where again, perhaps the incentives
link |
are towards increasing drama and debate
link |
on your social news, social media feed
link |
in order that more people are going to be engaged,
link |
perhaps kind of compulsively involved with the platform,
link |
whereas there are other business models
link |
like having an opt in subscription service,
link |
where perhaps they have other issues,
link |
but there's much more of an incentive
link |
to provide a product that its users are just
link |
really wanting, because now I'm paying for this product,
link |
I'm paying for this thing that I wanna buy,
link |
rather than I'm trying to use this thing
link |
and it's gonna get a profit mechanism
link |
that is somewhat orthogonal to me,
link |
actually just wanting to use the product.
link |
And so, I mean, in some cases,
link |
it'll work better than others.
link |
I can imagine, I can in theory imagine Facebook
link |
having a subscription service,
link |
but I think it's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
link |
Well, it's interesting, it's weird,
link |
now that you bring it up that it's unlikely.
link |
This example, I pay, I think 10 bucks a month
link |
for YouTube Red, and that's,
link |
and I don't think I get it much for that,
link |
except just, so no ads,
link |
but in general, it's just a slightly better experience.
link |
And I would gladly, now I'm not wealthy in fact,
link |
I'm operating very close to zero dollars,
link |
but I would pay 10 bucks a month to Facebook
link |
and 10 bucks a month to Twitter
link |
for some kind of more control
link |
in terms of advertisements and so on.
link |
But the other aspect of that is data, personal data.
link |
People are really sensitive about this.
link |
And I as one who hopes to one day create a company
link |
that may use people's data to do good for the world,
link |
wonder about this,
link |
won the psychology of why people are so paranoid.
link |
Well, I understand why, but they seem to be more paranoid
link |
than is justified at times.
link |
And the other is how do you do it right?
link |
So it seems that Facebook is,
link |
it seems that Facebook is doing it wrong.
link |
That's certainly the popular narrative.
link |
It's unclear to me actually how wrong,
link |
like I tend to give them more benefit of the doubt
link |
because they're, you know,
link |
it's a really hard thing to do right.
link |
And people don't necessarily realize it,
link |
but how do we respect in your view people's privacy?
link |
I mean, in the case of how worried are people
link |
about using their data?
link |
I mean, there's a lot of public debate
link |
and criticism about it.
link |
When we look at people's revealed preferences,
link |
you know, people's continuing massive use
link |
of these sorts of services,
link |
it's not clear to me how much people really do care.
link |
Perhaps they care a bit,
link |
but they're happy to in effect kind of sell their data
link |
in order to be able to use a certain service.
link |
That's a great term, revealed preferences.
link |
So these aren't preferences,
link |
you're self report in the survey,
link |
this is like your actions speak.
link |
So you might say, oh yeah, I hate the idea
link |
of Facebook having my data,
link |
but then when it comes to it,
link |
you actually are willing to give that data
link |
in exchange for being able to use the service.
link |
And if that's the case,
link |
then I think unless we have some explanation
link |
about why there's some negative externality from that
link |
or why there's some coordination failure,
link |
or if there's something that consumers
link |
are just really misled about
link |
where they don't realize why giving away data
link |
like this is a really bad thing to do,
link |
then ultimately I kind of want to respect
link |
people's preferences,
link |
they can give away their data if they want.
link |
I think there's a big difference
link |
between companies use of data and governments having data
link |
where looking at the record of history,
link |
governments knowing a lot about their people
link |
can be very bad if the government chooses to do
link |
bad things with it.
link |
And that's more worrying, I think.
link |
So let's jump into it a little bit.
link |
Most people know, but actually I two years ago
link |
had no idea what effective altruism was
link |
until I saw there was a cool looking event
link |
in an MIT group here.
link |
They, I think it's called the effective altruism club
link |
I was like, what the heck is that?
link |
And one of my friends said,
link |
I mean, he said that they're just
link |
a bunch of eccentric characters.
link |
So I was like, hell yes, I'm in.
link |
So I went to one of their events
link |
and looked up what's it about.
link |
This is quite a fascinating philosophical
link |
and just a movement of ideas.
link |
So can you tell me what is effective altruism?
link |
So the core of effective altruism
link |
is about trying to answer this question,
link |
which is how can I do as much good as possible
link |
with my scarce resources, my time and with my money?
link |
And then once we have our best guess answers to that,
link |
trying to take those ideas and put that into practice
link |
and do those things that we believe will do the most good.
link |
And we're now a community of people,
link |
many thousands of us around the world
link |
who really are trying to answer that question as best we can
link |
and then use our time and money to make the world better.
link |
So what's the difference between
link |
sort of classical general idea of altruism
link |
and effective altruism?
link |
So normally when people decide to do good,
link |
they often just aren't so reflective about those attempts.
link |
So someone might approach you on the street
link |
asking you to give to charity.
link |
And if you're feeling altruistic,
link |
you'll give to the person on the street.
link |
Or if you think, oh, I wanna do some good in my life,
link |
you might volunteer at a local place
link |
or perhaps you'll decide pursue a career
link |
where you're working in a field
link |
that's kind of more obviously beneficial
link |
like being a doctor or a nurse or a healthcare professional.
link |
But it's very rare that people apply the same level
link |
of rigor and analytical thinking
link |
to lots of other areas we think about.
link |
So take the case of someone approaching you on the street.
link |
Imagine if that person instead was saying,
link |
hey, I've got this amazing company,
link |
do you want to invest in it?
link |
It would be insane for, no one would ever think,
link |
oh, of course, I'm just a company,
link |
like you'd think it was a scam.
link |
But somehow we don't have that same level of rigor
link |
when it comes to doing good,
link |
even though the stakes are more important
link |
when it comes to trying to help others
link |
than trying to make money for ourselves.
link |
First of all, so there is a psychology
link |
at the individual level of doing good just feels good.
link |
And so in some sense, on that pure psychological part,
link |
it doesn't matter.
link |
In fact, you don't want to know if it does good or not
link |
because most of the time it won't.
link |
So like in a certain sense,
link |
it's understandable why altruism
link |
without the effective part is so appealing
link |
to a certain population.
link |
By the way, let's zoom out for a second.
link |
Do you think most people, two questions,
link |
do you think most people are good?
link |
Question number two is,
link |
do you think most people want to do good?
link |
So are most people good?
link |
I think it's just super dependent
link |
on the circumstances that someone is in.
link |
I think that the actions people take
link |
and their moral worth is just much more dependent
link |
on circumstance than it is on someone's
link |
intrinsic character.
link |
So is it evil within all of us?
link |
It seems like the better angels of our nature,
link |
there's a tendency of us as a society
link |
to tend towards good, less war,
link |
I mean with all these metrics.
link |
What is that us becoming who we want to be?
link |
Or is that some kind of societal force?
link |
What's the nature versus nurture thing here?
link |
Yeah, so in that case, I just think, yeah,
link |
so violence has massively declined over time.
link |
I think that's a slow process of cultural evolution,
link |
institutional evolution,
link |
such that now the incentives for you and I
link |
to be violent are very, very small indeed.
link |
In contrast, when we were hunter gatherers,
link |
the incentives were quite large.
link |
If there was someone who was potentially disturbing
link |
the social order and hunter gatherer setting,
link |
there was a very strong incentive to kill that person
link |
And it was just regarded 10% of deaths
link |
among hunter gatherers were murders.
link |
After hunter gatherers, when you have actual societies
link |
is when violence can probably go up
link |
because there's more incentive to do mass violence, right?
link |
To take over, conquer other people's lands
link |
and murder everybody in place and so on.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I think total death rate
link |
from human causes does go down,
link |
but you're like that if you're in a hunter gatherer situation,
link |
you're kind of a group that you're part of is very small,
link |
then you can't have massive wars
link |
that just massive communities don't exist.
link |
But anyway, the second question,
link |
do you think most people want to do good?
link |
Yeah, and then I think that is true for most people.
link |
I think you see that with the fact that,
link |
most people donate a large proportion of people volunteer.
link |
If you give people opportunities
link |
to easily help other people, they will take it.
link |
But at the same time where a product of our circumstances
link |
and if it were more socially rewarded to be doing more good,
link |
if it were more socially rewarded to do good effectively,
link |
rather than not effectively,
link |
then we would see that behavior a lot more.
link |
So why should we do good?
link |
Yeah, my answer to this is,
link |
there's no kind of deeper level of explanation.
link |
So my answer to kind of why should you do good is,
link |
well, there is someone whose life is on the line,
link |
for example, whose life you can save
link |
via donating just actually a few thousand dollars
link |
to an effective nonprofit,
link |
like the Against Malaria Foundation.
link |
That is a sufficient reason to do good.
link |
And then if you ask, well, why ought I to do that?
link |
I'm like, I just show you the same facts again.
link |
It's that fact that is the reason to do good.
link |
There's nothing more fundamental than that.
link |
I'd like to sort of make more concrete
link |
the thing we're trying to make better.
link |
So you just mentioned malaria.
link |
So there's a huge amount of suffering in the world.
link |
Are we trying to remove,
link |
so ultimately the goal, not ultimately,
link |
but the first step is to remove the worst of the suffering.
link |
So there's some kind of threshold of suffering
link |
that we want to make sure does not exist in the world.
link |
Or do we really naturally want to take a much further step
link |
and look at things like income inequality.
link |
So not just getting everybody above a certain threshold,
link |
but making sure that there's some,
link |
that broadly speaking,
link |
there's less injustice in the world, unfairness.
link |
In some definition, of course,
link |
very difficult to define a fairness.
link |
So the metric I use is how many people do we affect
link |
and by how much do we affect them?
link |
And so that can, often that means eliminating suffering,
link |
but it doesn't have to,
link |
could be helping promote a flourishing life instead.
link |
And so if I was comparing reducing income inequality
link |
or getting people from the very pits of suffering
link |
to a higher level,
link |
the question I would ask is just a quantitative one
link |
of just if I do this first thing or the second thing,
link |
how many people am I going to benefit
link |
and by how much am I going to benefit?
link |
Am I going to move that one person from kind of 10%,
link |
0% well being to 10% well being?
link |
Perhaps that's just not as good as moving 100 people
link |
from 10% well being to 50% well being.
link |
And the idea is the diminishing returns
link |
is the idea of when you're in terrible poverty,
link |
then the $1 that you give goes much further
link |
than if you were in the middle class
link |
in the United States, for example.
link |
And this fact is really striking.
link |
So if you take even just quite a conservative estimate
link |
of how we are able to turn money into well being,
link |
the economists put it as like a log curve.
link |
That's all steeper,
link |
but that means that any proportional increase in your income
link |
has the same impact on your well being.
link |
And so someone moving from $1,000 a year to $2,000 a year
link |
has the same impact to someone moving from $100,000 a year
link |
to $200,000 a year.
link |
And then when you combine that with the fact
link |
that we in middle class members of rich countries
link |
are 100 times richer than financial terms
link |
in the global poor,
link |
that means we can do 100 times to benefit
link |
the poorest people in the world
link |
as we can to benefit people of our income level.
link |
And that's this astonishing fact.
link |
Yeah, it's quite incredible.
link |
A lot of these facts and ideas are just
link |
difficult to think about
link |
because there's an overwhelming amount of suffering
link |
in the world and even acknowledging it is difficult.
link |
I'm not exactly sure why that is.
link |
I mean, I mean, it's difficult
link |
because you have to bring to mind,
link |
you know, it's an unpleasant experience
link |
thinking about other people suffering.
link |
It's unpleasant to be empathizing with it, firstly.
link |
And then secondly, thinking about it
link |
means that maybe we'd have to change our lifestyles.
link |
And if you're very attached to the income that you've got,
link |
perhaps you don't want to be confronting ideas
link |
or arguments that might cause you
link |
to use some of that money to help others.
link |
So it's quite understandable in the psychological terms,
link |
even if it's not the right thing that we ought to be doing.
link |
So how can we do better?
link |
How can we be more effective?
link |
How does data help?
link |
In general, how can we do better?
link |
It's definitely hard.
link |
And we have spent the last 10 years engaged
link |
in kind of some deep research projects
link |
to try and answer kind of two questions.
link |
One is of all the many problems the world is facing,
link |
what are the problems we ought to be focused on?
link |
And then within those problems that we judge
link |
to be kind of the most pressing
link |
where we use this idea of focusing on problems
link |
that are the biggest in scale, that are the most tractable,
link |
where we can do have the kind of make the most progress
link |
on that problem, and that are the most neglected.
link |
Within them, what are the things that
link |
have the kind of best evidence, or we
link |
have the best guess that will do the most good?
link |
And so we have a bunch of organizations.
link |
So GiveWell, for example, is focused
link |
on global health and development,
link |
and has a list of seven top recommended charities.
link |
So the idea in general, and sorry to interrupt,
link |
is so we'll talk about sort of poverty and animal welfare
link |
and existential risk.
link |
There's all fascinating topics.
link |
But in general, the idea is there should be a group.
link |
Sorry, there's a lot of groups that
link |
seek to convert money into good.
link |
And then you also, on top of that, want to have a counting
link |
of how good they actually perform that conversion,
link |
how well they did in converting money to good.
link |
So ranking of these different groups,
link |
ranking these charities.
link |
So does that apply across basically all aspects
link |
of effective altruism?
link |
So there should be a group of people,
link |
and they should report on certain metrics
link |
of how well they've done.
link |
And you should only give your money to groups
link |
that do a good job.
link |
That's the core idea.
link |
I'd make two comments.
link |
One is just it's not just about money.
link |
So we're also trying to encourage people
link |
to work in areas where they'll have the biggest impact.
link |
And in some areas, they're really people heavy, but money poor.
link |
Other areas are kind of money rich and people poor.
link |
And so whether it's better to focus time or money
link |
depends on the cause area.
link |
And then the second is that you mentioned metrics.
link |
And while that's the ideal, and in some areas,
link |
we are able to get somewhat quantitative information
link |
about how much impact an area is having,
link |
that's not always true for some of the issues,
link |
like you mentioned, existential risks.
link |
Well, we're not able to measure in any sort of precise way
link |
like how much progress we're making.
link |
And so you have to instead fall back
link |
on just a regular argument and evaluation,
link |
even in the absence of data.
link |
So let's first sort of linger on your own story for a second.
link |
How do you yourself practice effective altruism
link |
Because I think that's a really interesting place to start.
link |
So I've tried to build effective altruism
link |
into at least many components of my life.
link |
So on the donation side, my plan is
link |
to give away most of my income over the course of my life.
link |
I've set a bar I feel happy with,
link |
and I just donate above that bar.
link |
So at the moment, I donate about 20% of my income.
link |
Then on the career side, I've also
link |
shifted kind of what I do, where I was initially
link |
planning to work on very esoteric topics
link |
in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language,
link |
things that are intellectually extremely interesting,
link |
but the path by which they really
link |
make a difference to the world is, let's just say,
link |
it's very unclear at best.
link |
And so I switched instead to the searching ethics
link |
to actually just working on this question of how we can do
link |
as much good as possible.
link |
And then I've also spent a very large chunk of my life
link |
over the last 10 years creating a number of nonprofits
link |
who, again, in different ways, are tackling
link |
this question of how we can do the most good
link |
and helping them to grow over time too.
link |
Yeah, we'll mention a few of them with the career selection,
link |
80,000 hours is a really interesting group.
link |
So maybe also just a quick pause on the origins
link |
of effective altruism, because you painted a picture
link |
who the key figures are, including yourself,
link |
in the effective altruism movement today.
link |
Yeah, there are two main strands that
link |
kind of came together to form the effective altruism movement.
link |
So one was two philosophers, myself and Toby Ord at Oxford.
link |
And we had been very influenced by the work of Peter Singer,
link |
an Australian model philosopher, who
link |
had argued for many decades that because one can do so much good
link |
at such a little cost to oneself,
link |
we have an obligation to give away most of our income,
link |
to benefit those who are actually in poverty,
link |
just in the same way that we have an obligation
link |
to run in and save a child from a drowning in a shallow pond
link |
if it were just to ruin your suit that
link |
cost a few thousand dollars.
link |
And we set up Giving What We Can in 2009,
link |
which is encouraging people to give at least 10% of their income
link |
to the most effective charities.
link |
And the second main strand was the formation of Give Well,
link |
which was originally based in New York and started in about 2007.
link |
And that was set up by Holden Karnosi and Ellie Hassenfeld,
link |
who were two hedge fund dudes who were making good money
link |
and thinking, well, where should I donate?
link |
And in the same way as if they wanted
link |
to buy a product for themselves, they
link |
would look at Amazon reviews.
link |
They were like, well, what are the best charities?
link |
Found they just weren't really good answers to that question,
link |
certainly not that they were satisfied with.
link |
And so they formed Give Well in order
link |
to try and work out what are those charities where they can
link |
have the biggest impact.
link |
And then from there and some other influences,
link |
kind of community glue and spread.
link |
Can we explore the philosophical and political space
link |
that effective altruism occupies a little bit?
link |
So from the little and distant in my own lifetime
link |
that I've read of Ayn Rand's work,
link |
Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, espouses.
link |
And it's interesting to put her philosophy in contrast
link |
with effective altruism.
link |
So it espouses selfishness as the best thing you can do.
link |
And it's not actually against altruism.
link |
It's just you have that choice, but you
link |
should be selfish in it, or not.
link |
Maybe you can disagree here.
link |
But so it can be viewed as the complete opposite
link |
of effective altruism, or it can be viewed as similar
link |
because the word effective is really interesting.
link |
Because if you want to do good, then you should be damn good
link |
I think that would fit within the morality that's
link |
defined by Objectivism.
link |
So do you see a connection between these two philosophies
link |
and other, perhaps, other in this complicated space
link |
of beliefs that effective altruism is positioned as opposing
link |
I would definitely say that Objectivism Ayn Rand's
link |
philosophy is a philosophy that's quite fundamentally
link |
opposed to effective altruism in so far as Ayn Rand's philosophy
link |
is about championing egoism and saying
link |
that I'm never quite sure whether the philosophy is
link |
meant to say that just you ought to do whatever will best
link |
benefit yourself as ethical egoism,
link |
no matter what the consequences are.
link |
Or second, if there's this alternative view, which is,
link |
well, you ought to try and benefit yourself
link |
because that's actually the best way of benefiting society.
link |
Certainly, Atlas Shilaguchi is presenting her philosophy
link |
as a way that's actually going to bring
link |
about a flourishing society.
link |
And if it's the former, then well, effective altruism
link |
is all about promoting the idea of altruism.
link |
So it's saying, in fact, we ought to really be trying to help
link |
others as much as possible so it's opposed there.
link |
And then on the second side, I would just dispute
link |
the empirical premise.
link |
It would seem, given the major problems in the world today,
link |
it would seem like this remarkable coincidence,
link |
quite suspicious, one might say, if benefiting myself
link |
was actually the best way to bring about a better world.
link |
So in that point, and I think that connects also
link |
with career selection that we'll talk about,
link |
but let's consider not objectives, but capitalism.
link |
So, and the idea that you focusing on the thing
link |
that you damn are damn good at, whatever that is,
link |
may be the best thing for the world.
link |
Sort of part of it is also mindset, right?
link |
Sort of like the thing I love is robots.
link |
So maybe I should focus on building robots
link |
and never even think about the idea
link |
of effective altruism, which is kind
link |
of the capitalist notion.
link |
Is there any value in that idea and just finding
link |
the thing you're good at
link |
and maximizing your productivity in this world
link |
and thereby sort of lifting all boats
link |
and benefiting society as a result?
link |
Yeah, I think there's two things I'd wanna say on that.
link |
So one is what your comparative advantages,
link |
what your strengths are when it comes to career.
link |
There's obviously super important
link |
because there's lots of career paths I would be terrible at
link |
if I thought being an artist was the best thing one could do.
link |
Well, I'd be doomed, just really quite astonishingly bad.
link |
And so I do think, at least within the realm
link |
of things that could plausibly be very high impact,
link |
choose the thing that you think you're gonna be able
link |
to really be passionate at and excel at
link |
kind of over the long term.
link |
Then on this question of like, should one just do that
link |
in an unrestricted way and not even think
link |
about what the most important problems are?
link |
I do think that in a kind of perfectly designed society,
link |
that might well be the case.
link |
That would be a society where we've corrected
link |
all market failures, we've internalized all externalities
link |
and then we've managed to set up incentives
link |
such that people just pursuing their own strengths
link |
is the best way of doing good,
link |
but we're very far from that society.
link |
So if one did that, then it'd be very unlikely
link |
that you would focus on improving the lives
link |
of non human animals that aren't participating in markets
link |
or ensuring the long run future goes well,
link |
where future people certainly aren't participating
link |
in markets or benefiting the global poor
link |
who do participate but have so much less kind of power
link |
from a starting perspective that their views
link |
aren't accurately kind of represented by market forces too.
link |
Got it, so yeah, and sort of pure definition capitalism
link |
just may very well ignore the people
link |
that are suffering the most, the white swath of them.
link |
So if you could allow me this line of thinking here,
link |
so I've listened to a lot of your conversations online.
link |
I find, if I can compliment you,
link |
they're very interesting conversations.
link |
Your conversation on Rogan, on Joe Rogan
link |
was really interesting with Sam Harris and so on, whatever.
link |
There's a lot of stuff that's really good out there.
link |
And yet when I look at the internet,
link |
I look at YouTube, which has certain mobs,
link |
certain swaths of right leaning folks
link |
whom I dearly love, I love all people.
link |
All, especially people with ideas.
link |
They seem to not like you very much.
link |
So I don't understand why exactly.
link |
So my own sort of hypothesis is there is a right left divide
link |
that absurdly so caricatured in politics,
link |
at least in the United States.
link |
And maybe you're somehow pigeonholed into one of those sides
link |
and maybe that's what it is.
link |
Maybe your message is somehow politicized.
link |
How do you make sense of that?
link |
Because you're extremely interesting.
link |
Like you got the comments I see on Joe Rogan,
link |
there's a bunch of negative stuff.
link |
And yet if you listen to it, the conversation is fascinating.
link |
I'm not speaking, I'm not some kind of lefty extremist,
link |
but just this fascinating conversation.
link |
So why are you getting some small amount of hate?
link |
So I'm actually pretty glad that effective altruism
link |
has managed to stay relatively unpoliticized
link |
because I think the core message
link |
to just use some of your time and money
link |
to do as much good as possible
link |
to fight some of the problems in the world
link |
can be appealing across the political spectrum.
link |
And we do have a diversity of political viewpoints
link |
among people who have engaged in effective altruism.
link |
We do, however, do get some criticism
link |
from the left and the right.
link |
What's the criticism?
link |
Both will be interesting to hear.
link |
Yeah, so criticism from the left
link |
is that we're not focused enough
link |
on dismantling the capitalist system
link |
that they see as the root of most of the problems
link |
that we're talking about.
link |
And there I kind of disagree on partly of the premise
link |
where I don't think relevant alternative systems
link |
would say to the animals or to the global poor
link |
or to the future generations, kind of much better.
link |
And then also the tactics where I think
link |
there are particular ways we can change society
link |
that would massively benefit,
link |
be massively beneficial on those things
link |
that don't go via dismantling the entire system
link |
which is perhaps a million times harder to do.
link |
Then criticism on the right,
link |
there's definitely like in the sponsor,
link |
the Joe Rogan podcast.
link |
There definitely were a number of A&L fans
link |
who weren't keen on the idea of promoting altruism.
link |
There was a remarkable set of ideas,
link |
just the idea that effective altruism,
link |
unmanly, I think, was driving a lot of criticism.
link |
Okay, so I love fighting.
link |
I've been in street fights my whole life.
link |
I'm as alpha in everything I do as it gets.
link |
And the fact that I and Joe Rogan said
link |
that I thought Scent of a Woman is a better movie
link |
than John Wick put me into this beta category
link |
amongst people who are basically saying that,
link |
yeah, unmanly or it's not tough,
link |
it's not some principled view of strength
link |
that is represented by it's possible.
link |
So actually, how do you think about this?
link |
Because to me, altruism, especially effective altruism,
link |
is, I don't know what the female version of that is,
link |
but on the male side, manliest fuck, if I may say so.
link |
So how do you think about that kind of criticism?
link |
I think people who would make that criticism
link |
are just occupying a state of mind
link |
that I think is just so different from my state of mind
link |
that I kind of struggle to maybe even understand it,
link |
where if something's manly or unmanly or feminine
link |
or unfeminine, I'm like, I don't care.
link |
Is it the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do?
link |
Let me put it not in terms of man or woman,
link |
because I don't think that's useful.
link |
But I think there's a notion of acting out of fear
link |
or as opposed to out of principle and strength.
link |
Here's something that I do feel as an intuition
link |
and that I think drives some people who do find
link |
kind of a land detective and so on as a philosophy,
link |
which is a kind of taking control of your own life
link |
and having power over how you're steering your life
link |
and not kind of toutowing to others,
link |
really thinking things through.
link |
I find that set of ideas just very compelling
link |
and inspirational.
link |
But I actually think of effective altruism
link |
as really that side of my personality.
link |
It's like, scratch that itch,
link |
where you are just not taking the kind of priorities
link |
that society is giving you as granted.
link |
Instead, you're choosing to act in accordance with
link |
the priorities that you think are most important in the world.
link |
And often that involves then doing quite unusual things
link |
from a societal perspective,
link |
like donating a large chunk of your earnings
link |
or working on these weird issues about AI
link |
and so on that other people might not understand.
link |
Yeah, I think that's a really gutsy thing to do.
link |
Just taking control at least at this stage.
link |
I mean, that's you taking ownership not of just yourself
link |
but your presence in this world that's full of suffering
link |
and saying as opposed to being paralyzed by that notion,
link |
it's taking control and saying I could do something.
link |
I mean, that's really powerful.
link |
But the one thing I personally hate too about the left
link |
currently that I think those folks to detect
link |
is the social signaling.
link |
When you look at yourself sort of late at night,
link |
would you do everything you're doing
link |
in terms of effective altruism if your name,
link |
because you're quite popular,
link |
but if your name was totally unattached to it,
link |
if it was in secret?
link |
Yeah, I mean, I think I would.
link |
To be honest, I think the kind of popularity is like,
link |
you know, it's a mixed bag but there are serious costs
link |
and I don't particularly, I don't like love it.
link |
Like it means you get all these people calling you a cock
link |
It's like not the most fun thing.
link |
But you also get a lot of sort of brownie points
link |
for doing good for the world.
link |
But I think my ideal life, I would be like in some library
link |
solving logic puzzles all day
link |
and I'd like really be like learning maths and so on.
link |
And have a good body of friends and so on.
link |
So your instinct for effective altruism is something deep.
link |
It's not one that is communicating socially.
link |
It's more in your heart you want to do good for the world.
link |
Yeah, I mean, so we can look back to early giving what we can.
link |
So, you know, we're setting this up for me and Toby.
link |
And I really thought that doing this would be a big hit
link |
in my academic career because I was now spending, you know,
link |
at that time more than half my time setting up this nonprofit
link |
at the crucial time when you should be like producing
link |
your best academic work and so on.
link |
And it was also the case at the time, it was kind of like
link |
the Toby Ord Club.
link |
You know, he was the most popular.
link |
There was this personal interest story around him
link |
and his plans to donate.
link |
Sorry to interrupt, but Toby was donating a large amount.
link |
Can you tell just briefly what he was doing?
link |
Yeah, so he made this public commitment to give everything here
link |
and above £20,000 per year to the most effective causes.
link |
And even as a graduate student, he was still donating
link |
about 15, 20% of his income, which is quite significant
link |
given that graduate students are not known for being super wealthy.
link |
And when we launched giving what we can,
link |
the media just loved this as like a personal interest story.
link |
So the story about him and his pledge was the most,
link |
yeah, it was actually the most popular news story of the day.
link |
And we kind of ran the same story a year later,
link |
and it was the most popular news story of the day
link |
And so it really was kind of several years before
link |
then I was also kind of giving more talks
link |
and starting to do more writing,
link |
and then especially with, you know,
link |
I wrote this book, Doing Good Better,
link |
that then there started to be kind of attention and so on.
link |
But deep inside your own relationship with effective altruism
link |
was, I mean, it had nothing to do with the publicity.
link |
Did you see yourself, how did the publicity connect with it?
link |
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm saying
link |
is I think the publicity came like several years afterwards.
link |
I mean, at the early stage when we set up giving what we can,
link |
it was really just every person we get to pledge 10% is,
link |
you know, something like $100,000 over their lifetime.
link |
And so it was just we had started with 23 members.
link |
Every single person was just this like kind of huge accomplishment.
link |
And at the time I just really thought, you know,
link |
maybe over time we'll have 100 members
link |
and that'll be like amazing.
link |
Whereas now we have, you know,
link |
over 4,000 and one and a half billion dollars pledged.
link |
That's just unimaginable to me at the time when I was first
link |
kind of getting this, you know, getting this stuff off the ground.
link |
So can we talk about poverty and the biggest problems
link |
that you think in the near term effective altruism
link |
can attack in each one.
link |
So poverty obviously is a huge one.
link |
Great. Yeah. So poverty absolutely this huge problem,
link |
700 million people in extreme poverty living in less than $2 per day
link |
where that's what that means is what $2 would buy in the US.
link |
So think about that.
link |
It's like some rice, maybe some beans.
link |
It's very, you know, really not much.
link |
And at the same time we can do an enormous amount
link |
to improve the lives of people in extreme poverty.
link |
So the things that we tend to focus on
link |
are interventions in global health.
link |
And that's for a couple of reasons.
link |
One is that global health just has this amazing track record.
link |
Life expectancy globally is up 50% relative to 60 or 70 years ago.
link |
We've eradicated smallpox, which killed 2 million lives every year,
link |
almost eradicated polio.
link |
Second is that we just have great data on what works
link |
when it comes to global health.
link |
So we just know that bed nets protect children
link |
and prevent them from dying from malaria.
link |
And then the third is just that it's extremely cost effective.
link |
So it costs $5 to buy one bed net,
link |
protects two children for two years against malaria.
link |
If you spend about $3,000 on bed nets,
link |
then statistically speaking you're going to save a child's life.
link |
And there are other interventions too.
link |
And so given the people in such suffering
link |
and we have this opportunity to, you know,
link |
do such huge good for such low cost, well, yeah, why not?
link |
So the individuals, so for me today,
link |
if I wanted to deal with the poverty, how would I help?
link |
And I wanted to say, I think donating 10% of your income
link |
is a very interesting idea or some percentage
link |
or some setting a bar instead of sticking to it.
link |
So how do we then take the step towards the effective part?
link |
So you've conveyed some notions, but who do you give the money to?
link |
Yeah, so Give Well, this organization I mentioned is...
link |
Well, it makes charity recommendations
link |
and some of its top recommendations.
link |
So Against Malaria Foundation is this organization
link |
that buys and distributes these insecticide seeded bed nets.
link |
And then it has a total of seven charities
link |
that it recommends very highly.
link |
So that recommendation, is it almost like a star of approval?
link |
Or is there some metrics?
link |
So what are the ways that Give Well conveys
link |
that this is a great charity organization?
link |
Yeah, so Give Well is looking at metrics
link |
and it's trying to compare charities ultimately
link |
in the number of lives that you can save
link |
without an equivalent benefit.
link |
So one of the charities that it recommends
link |
is Give Directly, which simply just transfers cash
link |
to the poorest families,
link |
where a poor family will get a cash transfer of $1,000.
link |
And they kind of regard that as the baseline intervention
link |
because it's so simple and people, you know,
link |
they know what to do with how to benefit themselves.
link |
That's quite powerful, by the way.
link |
So before Give Well, before the effective altruism movement,
link |
was there, I imagine there's a huge amount of corruption,
link |
funny enough, in charity organizations,
link |
or misuse of money.
link |
So there was nothing like Give Well before that?
link |
No, I mean, there were some, so I mean, the charity corruption,
link |
I mean, obviously there's some,
link |
I don't think it's a huge issue,
link |
they're also just focusing on the long things.
link |
Prior to Give Well, there were some organizations
link |
like Charity Navigator, which were more aimed
link |
at worrying about corruption and so on.
link |
So they weren't saying, these are the charities
link |
where you're going to do the most good.
link |
Instead, it was like, how good are the charity's financials?
link |
How good is its health? Are they transparent?
link |
And yeah, so that would be more useful
link |
for weeding out some of those worst charities.
link |
So Give Well is just taking this step further.
link |
Sort of in this 21st century of data,
link |
it's actually looking at the effective part.
link |
Yeah, so it's like, you know, if you know the wire cutter
link |
if you want to buy a pair of headphones,
link |
they will just look at all the headphones and be like,
link |
these are the best headphones you can buy.
link |
That's the idea with Give Well.
link |
Okay, so do you think there's a bar of what suffering is?
link |
And do you think one day we can eradicate suffering
link |
in our world amongst humans?
link |
Let's talk humans for now.
link |
Talk humans, but in general, yeah, actually.
link |
So there's a colleague of mine,
link |
kind of term abolitionism for the idea
link |
that we should just be trying to abolish suffering.
link |
And in the long run, I mean,
link |
I don't expect it anytime soon, but I think we can.
link |
I think that would require, you know,
link |
quite drastic changes to the way society is structured
link |
and perhaps even the, you know,
link |
in fact, even changes to human nature.
link |
But I do think that suffering whenever that occurs is bad
link |
and we should want it to not occur.
link |
So there's a line.
link |
There's a gray area between suffering.
link |
Now I'm Russian, so I romanticize some aspects of suffering.
link |
There's a gray line between struggle,
link |
gray area between struggle and suffering.
link |
So one, do we want to eradicate all struggle in the world?
link |
So there's an idea, you know, that the human condition
link |
inherently has suffering in it and it's a creative force.
link |
It's a struggle of our lives and we somehow grow from that.
link |
How do you think about that?
link |
I agree that's true.
link |
So, you know, often, you know, great artists can be also suffering from,
link |
you know, major health conditions or depression and so on.
link |
Or they come from abusive parents.
link |
Yeah, for example.
link |
The most great artists they think come from abusive parents.
link |
Yeah, that seems to be at least commonly the case.
link |
But I want to distinguish between suffering as being instrumentally good,
link |
you know, it causes people to produce good things
link |
and whether it's intrinsically good.
link |
And I think intrinsically it's always bad.
link |
And so if we can produce these, you know, great achievements
link |
via some other means where, you know, if we look at the scientific enterprise,
link |
we've produced incredible things.
link |
Often from people who aren't suffering have, you know,
link |
pretty good lives.
link |
They're just, they're driven instead of, you know,
link |
being pushed by a sense of anguish.
link |
They're being driven by intellectual curiosity.
link |
If we can instead produce a society where it's all carrot and no stick,
link |
that's better from my perspective.
link |
Yeah, but I'm going to have to disagree with the notion that that's possible.
link |
But I would say most of the suffering in the world is not productive.
link |
So I would dream of effective altruism curing that suffering.
link |
But then I would say that there is some suffering that is productive
link |
that we want to keep the, because, but that's not even the focus of,
link |
because most of the suffering is just absurd.
link |
It needs to be eliminated.
link |
So let's not even romanticize this usual notion I have,
link |
but nevertheless struggle has some kind of inherent value that to me at least.
link |
There's some elements of human nature that also have to be modified
link |
in order to cure all suffering.
link |
I mean, there's an interesting question of whether it's possible.
link |
So at the moment, you know, most of the time we're kind of neutral,
link |
and then we burn ourselves and that's negative and that's really good
link |
that we get that negative signal because it means we won't burn ourselves again.
link |
There's a question like, could you design agents, humans,
link |
such that you're not hovering around the zero level,
link |
you're hovering at like bliss.
link |
And then you touch the flame and you're like, oh no,
link |
you're just slightly worse bliss.
link |
But that's really bad compared to the bliss you are normally in.
link |
So that you can have like a gradient of bliss instead of like pain and pleasure.
link |
Well, on that point, I think it's a really important point on the experience
link |
of suffering, the relative nature of it.
link |
I mean, having grown up in the Soviet Union,
link |
we're quite poor by any measure in when I was in my childhood,
link |
but it didn't feel like you were poor because everybody around you were poor.
link |
And then in America, I feel, for the first time,
link |
beginning to feel poor because of the, there's different.
link |
There's some cultural aspects to it that really emphasize that it's good to be rich.
link |
And then there's just the notion that there is a lot of income inequality
link |
and therefore you experience that inequality.
link |
That's where suffering comes.
link |
So what do you think about the inequality of suffering
link |
that we have to think about?
link |
Do you think we have to think about that as part of effective altruism?
link |
I think there are just things vary in terms of whether you get benefits
link |
or costs from them just in relative terms or in absolute terms.
link |
So a lot of the time, yeah, there's this hedonic treadmill
link |
where there's money is useful because it helps you buy things
link |
or good for you because it helps you buy things,
link |
but there's also a status component too.
link |
And that status component is kind of zero sum.
link |
If you were saying like in Russia, no one else felt poor
link |
because everyone around you was poor,
link |
whereas now you've got this, these other people who are super rich
link |
and maybe that makes you feel less good about yourself.
link |
There are some other things, however, which are just instantaneously good or bad.
link |
So commuting, for example, is just people hate it.
link |
It doesn't really change.
link |
Knowing that other people are commuting too doesn't make it any kind of less bad.
link |
But to push back on that for a second, I mean, yes,
link |
but also if some people are on horseback,
link |
your commute on the train might feel a lot better.
link |
There is a relative, I mean, everybody's complaining about society today,
link |
forgetting how much better it is, the better angels of our nature,
link |
how the technology is fundamentally improving most of the world's lives.
link |
And actually there's some psychological research on the well being benefits of volunteering,
link |
where people who volunteer tend to just feel happier about their lives.
link |
And one of the suggested explanations is it because it extends your reference class.
link |
So no longer you comparing yourself to the Joneses who have their slightly better car,
link |
but you realize that people are in much worse conditions than you.
link |
And so now your life doesn't seem so bad.
link |
That's actually on the psychological level.
link |
One of the fundamental benefits of effective altruism is, I mean,
link |
I guess it's the altruism part of effective altruism,
link |
is exposing yourself to the suffering in the world allows you to be more, yeah, happier
link |
and actually allows you in a sort of meditative, introspective way,
link |
realize that you don't need most of the wealth you have to be happy.
link |
Absolutely. I mean, I think effective altruism has been this huge benefit for me.
link |
And I really don't think that if I had more money that I was living on,
link |
that that would change my level of well being at all.
link |
Whereas engaging in something that I think is meaningful,
link |
that I think is steering humanity in a positive direction, that's extremely rewarding.
link |
And so, yeah, I mean, despite my best attempts at sacrifice,
link |
I think I've actually ended up happier as a result of engaging in effective altruism than I would have done.
link |
That's an interesting idea.
link |
So let's talk about animal welfare.
link |
Easy question. What is consciousness?
link |
Especially as it has to do with the capacity to suffer.
link |
I think there seems to be a connection between how conscious something is,
link |
the amount of consciousness and its ability to suffer.
link |
And that all comes into play about us thinking how much suffering there is in the world with regard to animals.
link |
So how do you think about animal welfare and consciousness?
link |
Okay. Well, consciousness, easy question.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I think we don't have a good understanding of consciousness.
link |
My best guess is it's got.
link |
And by consciousness, I'm meaning what it feels like to be you,
link |
the subjective experience that seems to be different from everything else we know about in the world.
link |
Yeah, I think it's clear, it's very poorly understood at the moment.
link |
I think it has something to do with information processing.
link |
So the fact that the brain is a computer or something like a computer.
link |
So that would mean that very advanced AI could be conscious.
link |
Information processors in general could be conscious with some suitable complexity.
link |
But that also, some suitable complexity, it's a question whether greater complexity creates some kind of greater consciousness,
link |
which relates to animals.
link |
If it's an information processing system and it's smaller and smaller,
link |
is an ant less conscious than a cow, less conscious than a monkey?
link |
Yeah, and again, this super hard question, but I think my best guess is yes.
link |
Like if I think, well, consciousness, it's not some magical thing that appears out of nowhere.
link |
It's not, you know, Descartes thought it was just comes in from this other realm
link |
and then enters through the pineal gland in your brain and that's kind of soul and it's conscious.
link |
So it's got something to do with what's going on in your brain.
link |
A chicken has one three hundredths of the size of the brain that you have.
link |
Ants, I don't know how small it is, maybe it's a millionth the size.
link |
My best guess, which I may well be wrong about because this is so hard,
link |
is that in some relevant sense, the chicken is experiencing consciousness to a lesser degree than the human
link |
and the ants significantly less again.
link |
I don't think it's as little as three hundredths as much, I think.
link |
There's evolutionary reasons for thinking that like the ability to feel pain comes on the scene relatively early on.
link |
And we have lots of our brain that's dedicated to stuff that doesn't seem to have to do anything to do with consciousness,
link |
language processing and so on.
link |
So it seems like the easy, so there's a lot of complicated questions there that we can't ask the animals about.
link |
But it seems that there's easy questions in terms of suffering, which is things like factory farming that could be addressed.
link |
Is that the lowest hanging fruit, if I may use crude terms here, of animal welfare?
link |
Absolutely, I think that's the lowest hanging fruit.
link |
So at the moment we kill, we raise and kill about 50 billion animals every year.
link |
So for every human on the planet, several times that number are being killed.
link |
And the vast majority of them are raised in factory farms where basically whatever your view on animals,
link |
I think you should agree, even if you think, well, maybe it's not bad to kill an animal,
link |
maybe if the animal was raised in good conditions.
link |
That's just not the empirical reality.
link |
The empirical reality is that they are kept in incredible cage confinement.
link |
They are debeaked or detailed without an aesthetic.
link |
I think when a chicken gets killed, that's the best thing that happened to the chicken in the course of its life.
link |
And it's also completely unnecessary.
link |
This is in order to save a few pence for the price of meat or price of eggs.
link |
And we have indeed found it's also just inconsistent with consumer preference as well.
link |
People who buy the products, when you do surveys, are extremely against suffering in factory farms.
link |
It's just they don't appreciate how bad it is and just tend to go with easy options.
link |
And so then the best, the most effective programs I know of at the moment are nonprofits that go to companies
link |
and work with companies to get them to take a pledge to cut certain sorts of animal products,
link |
like eggs from cage confinement out of their supply chain.
link |
And it's now the case that the top 50 food retailers and fast food companies
link |
have all made these kind of cage for the pledges.
link |
And when you do the numbers, you get the conclusion that every dollar you're giving to these nonprofits,
link |
there's hundreds of chickens being spared from cage confinement.
link |
And then they're working to other types of animals, other products too.
link |
So is that the most effective way to have a ripple effect essentially?
link |
It's supposed to directly having regulation from on top that says you can't do this.
link |
So I would be more open to the regulation approach, but at least in the U.S.
link |
there's quite intense regulatory capture from the agricultural industry.
link |
And so attempts that we've seen to try and change regulation, it's been a real uphill struggle.
link |
There are some examples of ballot initiatives where the people have been able to vote in a ballot
link |
to say we want to ban eggs from cage conditions, and that's been huge, that's been really good.
link |
But beyond that, it's much more limited.
link |
So I've been really interested in the idea of hunting in general and wild animals and seeing nature
link |
as a form of cruelty that I am ethically more okay with, just from my perspective.
link |
And then I read about wild animal suffering.
link |
I'm just giving you the notion of how I felt because animal factory farming is so bad that living in the woods seemed good.
link |
And yet when you actually start to think about it, all of the animals in the animal world are living in terrible poverty.
link |
So you have all the medical conditions, all of that, I mean, they're living horrible lives that could be improved.
link |
That's a really interesting notion that I think may not even be useful to talk about because factory farming is such a big thing to focus on.
link |
But it's nevertheless an interesting notion to think of all the animals in the wild as suffering in the same way that humans in poverty are suffering.
link |
Yeah, I mean, and often even worse, so many animals are produced via our selection, so you have a very large number of children in the expectation that only small numbers survive.
link |
And so for those animals, almost all of them just live short lives where they starve to death.
link |
So yeah, there's huge amounts of suffering in nature.
link |
I don't think we should pretend that it's this kind of wonderful paradise for most animals.
link |
Yeah, their life is filled with hunger and fear and disease.
link |
I agree with you entirely that when it comes to focusing on animal welfare, we should focus on factory farming.
link |
But we also should be aware to the reality of what life for most animals is like.
link |
So let's talk about a topic I've talked a lot about, and you've actually quite eloquently talked about, which is the third priority that effective altruism considers as really important is existential risks.
link |
When you think about the existential risks that are facing our civilization, what's before us?
link |
What concerns you?
link |
What should we be thinking about, especially from an effective altruism perspective?
link |
Great, so the reason I started getting concerned about this was thinking about future generations, where the key idea is just while future people matter morally,
link |
there are vast numbers of future people.
link |
If we don't cause our own extinction, there's no reason why civilization might not last a million years.
link |
I mean, we last as long as a typical mammalian species.
link |
A billion years is when the earth is no longer habitable, or if we can take to the stars, then perhaps it's trillions of years beyond that.
link |
So the future could be very big indeed, and it seems like we're potentially very early on in civilization.
link |
Then the second idea is just, well, maybe there are things that are going to really derail that, things that actually could prevent us from having this long, wonderful civilization.
link |
And instead, could cause our own extinction, or otherwise perhaps lock ourselves into a very bad state.
link |
And what ways could that happen?
link |
Well, causing our own extinction, development of nuclear weapons in the 20th century, at least put on the table that we now had weapons that were powerful enough that you could very significantly destroy society.
link |
Perhaps an all out nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter.
link |
Perhaps that would be enough for the human race to go extinct.
link |
Why do you think we haven't done it?
link |
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
Why do you think we haven't done it yet?
link |
Is it surprising to you that having always, for the past few decades, several thousand of active ready to launch nuclear weapons warheads,
link |
and yet we have not launched them ever since the initial launch on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
link |
I think it's a mix of luck.
link |
So I think it's definitely not inevitable that we haven't used them.
link |
So John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis put the estimate of nuclear exchange between the US and USSR that somewhere between one in three and even.
link |
So, you know, we really did come close.
link |
At the same time, I do think mutually assured destruction is a reason why people don't go to war.
link |
It would be, you know, why nuclear powers don't go to war.
link |
Do you think that holds, if you can link around that for a second, like my dad is a physicist amongst other things.
link |
And he believes that nuclear weapons are actually just really hard to build, which is one of the really big benefits of them currently.
link |
So that you don't have, it's very hard if you're crazy to build, to acquire a nuclear weapon.
link |
So the mutually assured destruction really works when you talk, seems to work better when it's nation states, when it's serious people, even if they're a little bit, you know, dictatorial and so on.
link |
Do you think this mutually assured destruction idea will carry, how far will it carry us in terms of different kinds of weapons?
link |
Oh, yeah, I think it's your point that nuclear weapons are very hard to build and relatively easy to control because you can control fissile material is a really important one.
link |
And future technology that's equally destructive might not have those properties.
link |
So for example, if in the future, people are able to design viruses, perhaps using a DNA printing kit that's on that, you know, one can just buy.
link |
In fact, there are companies in the process of creating home DNA printing kits.
link |
Well, then perhaps that's just totally democratized, perhaps the power to reap huge destructive potential is in the hands of most people in the world, or certainly most people with effort.
link |
And then, yeah, I no longer trust mutually assured destruction because some for some people, the idea that they would die is just not a disincentive.
link |
There was a Japanese cult, for example, Om Shinrikyo in the 90s that had, what they believed was that Armageddon was coming.
link |
If you died before Armageddon, you would get good karma, you wouldn't go to hell.
link |
If you died during Armageddon, maybe you would go to hell.
link |
And they had a biological weapons program, a chemical weapons program, when they were finally apprehended, they hadn't stocks of southern gas that were sufficient to kill 4 million people engaged in multiple terrorist acts.
link |
If they had had the ability to thinter virus at home, that would have been very scary.
link |
So it's not impossible to imagine groups of people that hold that kind of belief of death as a suicide as a good thing for passage into the next world and so on.
link |
And then connect them with some weapons, then ideology and weaponry create serious problems for us.
link |
Let me ask you a quick question. What do you think is the line between killing most humans and killing all humans?
link |
How hard is it to kill everybody? Have you thought about this?
link |
I've thought about it a bit. I think it is very hard to kill everybody.
link |
So in the case of, let's say, an all out nuclear exchange, and let's say that leads to nuclear winter, we don't really know, but it might well happen. That would, I think, result in billions of deaths.
link |
Would it kill everybody? It's quite hard to see how it would kill everybody for a few reasons.
link |
One is just, there's just so many people, seven and a half billion people. So this bad event has to kill all, almost all of them.
link |
Secondly, live in such diversity of locations. So a nuclear exchange or the virus, it has to kill people who live in the coast of New Zealand, which is going to be climatically much more stable than other areas in the world.
link |
Or people who are on submarines or who have access to bunkers. So there's a very...
link |
I'm sure there's two guys in Siberia, just bad ass. There's just human nature, somehow just perseveres.
link |
And then the second thing is just, if there's some catastrophic event, people really don't want to die.
link |
So there's going to be huge amounts of effort to ensure that it doesn't affect everyone.
link |
Have you thought about what it takes to rebuild a society with smaller, smaller numbers, like how big of a setback these kinds of things are?
link |
Yeah. So then that's something where there's a real uncertainty, I think, where at some point you just lose sufficient genetic diversity, such that you can't come back.
link |
It's unclear how small that population is, but if you've only got, say, a thousand people or fewer than a thousand, then maybe that's small enough.
link |
What about human knowledge?
link |
And then there's human knowledge. I mean, it's striking how short on geological timescales or evolutionary timescales the progress in, or how quickly the progress in human knowledge has been like agriculture, we only invented in 10,000 BC.
link |
Cities were only, you know, 3,000 BC, whereas typical animal species is half a million years to a million years.
link |
Do you think it's inevitable in some sense, the agriculture, everything that came, the industrial revolution, cars, planes, the internet, that level of innovation you think is inevitable?
link |
I think given how quickly it arose, so in the case of agriculture, I think that was dependent on climate. So it was the kind of glacial period was over, the earth warmed up a bit.
link |
That made it much more likely that humans would develop agriculture.
link |
When it comes to the industrial revolution, it's just, you know, again, only took a few thousand years from cities to industrial revolution.
link |
If we think, okay, we've gone back to this, even let's say agricultural era, but there's no reason why we wouldn't go extinct in the coming tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years.
link |
It seems just that it would be very surprising if we didn't rebound unless there's some special reason that makes things different.
link |
So perhaps we just have a much greater disease burden now. So HIV exists, it didn't exist before.
link |
And perhaps that's kind of latent in being suppressed by modern medicine and sanitation and so on, but would be a much bigger problem for some utterly destroyed society that was trying to rebound.
link |
Or there's just maybe there's something we don't know about.
link |
So another existential risk comes from the mysterious, the beautiful artificial intelligence.
link |
So what's the shape of your concerns about AI?
link |
I think there are quite a lot of concerns about AI and sometimes the different risks don't get distinguished enough.
link |
So the kind of classic worry most is closely associated with Nick Bossam and Elias Jukowski is that we at some point move from having narrow AI systems to artificial general intelligence.
link |
You get this very fast feedback effect where AI is able to build artificial intelligence helps you to build greater artificial intelligence.
link |
We have this one system that's suddenly very powerful, far more powerful than others than perhaps far more powerful than, you know, the rest of the world combined.
link |
And then secondly, it has goals that are misaligned with human goals.
link |
And so it pursues its own goals.
link |
It realizes, hey, there's this competition, namely from humans, it would be better if we eliminated them in just the same way as Homo sapiens eradicated the Neanderthals.
link |
In fact, it in fact killed off most large animals on the planet that walked the planet.
link |
So that's kind of one set of worries.
link |
I think that's not my, I think these shouldn't be dismissed as science fiction.
link |
I think it's something we should be taking very seriously.
link |
But it's not the thing you visualize when you're concerned about the biggest near term.
link |
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's like one possible scenario that would be astronomically bad.
link |
I think that other scenarios that would also be extremely bad, comparably bad, are more likely to occur.
link |
So one is just we are able to control AI.
link |
So we're able to get it to do what we want it to do.
link |
And perhaps there's not like this fast takeoff of AI capabilities within a single system, it's distributed across many systems that do somewhat different things.
link |
But you do get very rapid economic and technological progress as a result that concentrates power into the hands of a very small number of individuals, perhaps a single dictator.
link |
And secondly, that single individual is or small group of individuals or single country is then able to like lock in their values indefinitely via transmitting those values to artificial systems that have no reason to die.
link |
Like, you know, their code is copyable.
link |
Perhaps, you know, Donald Trump or Xi Jinping creates their kind of AI progeny and an image. And once you have a system that's content, once you have a society that's controlled by AI, you no longer have one of the main drivers of change
link |
historically, which is the fact that human life spans are, you know, only 100 years give or take.
link |
That's really interesting. So as opposed to sort of killing off all humans is locking in and creating a hell on earth, basically a set of principles under which the society operates that's extremely undesirable.
link |
So everybody is suffering indefinitely.
link |
Or it doesn't. I mean, it also doesn't need to be hell on earth. It could just be the wrong values. So we talked at the very beginning about how I want to see this kind of diversity of different values and exploration so that we can just work out what is kind of morally like
link |
what is good, what is bad, and then pursue the thing that's best.
link |
So actually, so the idea of wrong values is actually probably the beautiful thing is there's no such thing as right and wrong values because we don't know the right answer.
link |
We just kind of have a sense of which value is more right, which is more wrong. So any kind of lock in makes a value wrong, because it prevents exploration of this kind.
link |
Yeah. And just, you know, imagine if fascist value, you know, imagine if there was Hitler's utopia or Stalin's utopia or Donald Trump's or Xi Jinping's forever.
link |
You know, how, how good or bad would that be compared to the best possible future we could create. And my suggestion is it really suck compared to the best possible future we could create.
link |
And you're just one individual. There's some individuals for whom Donald Trump is perhaps the best possible future.
link |
And so that's the whole point of us individuals exploring the space together.
link |
And what's trying to figure out which is the path that will make America great again.
link |
So how can effective altruism help? I mean, this is a really interesting notion they actually describing of artificial intelligence being used as extremely powerful technology in the hands of very few potentially one person to create some very undesirable effect.
link |
So as opposed to AI, and again, the source of the undesirableness there is the human AI is just a really powerful tool.
link |
So whether it's that or whether AI is AI just runs away from us completely.
link |
How, as individuals, as, as people in the effective altruism movement, how can we think about something like this?
link |
Understand poverty and welfare.
link |
But this is a far out incredibly mysterious and difficult problem.
link |
Great. Well, I think there's three paths as an individual.
link |
So if you're thinking about, you know, career paths, you can pursue.
link |
So one is going down the line of technical AI safety.
link |
So this is most relevant to the kind of AI winning AI taking over scenarios where this is just technical work on current machine learning systems.
link |
Often sometimes going more theoretical to on how we can ensure that an AI is able to learn human values and able to act in the way that you want it to act.
link |
And that's a pretty mainstream issue and approach in machine learning today.
link |
So, you know, we definitely need more people doing that.
link |
Second is on the policy side of things, which I think is even more important at the moment, which is how should developments in AI be managed?
link |
On a political level, how can you ensure that the benefits of AI are very distributed?
link |
Power isn't being concentrated in the hands of a small set of individuals.
link |
How do you ensure that there aren't arms races between different AI companies that might result in them, you know, cutting corners with respect to safety?
link |
And so there the input as individuals who can have is this, we're not talking about money, we're talking about effort.
link |
We're talking about career choices.
link |
Yeah, we're talking about career choice. Yeah.
link |
But then it is the case that supposing, you know, you're like, I've already decided my career and I'm doing something quite different.
link |
You can contribute with money to where at the center for the effect of autism, we set up the long term future fund.
link |
So if you go on to effectiveautism.org, you can donate where a group of individuals will then work out what's the highest value place they can donate to work on existential risk issues with a particular focus on AI.
link |
And what's path number three?
link |
This was path number three.
link |
This is the donations with the third option I was thinking of.
link |
And then, yeah, you can also donate directly to organizations working on this like Center for Human Compatible AI at Berkeley, Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, or other organizations too.
link |
Does AI keep you up at night?
link |
This kind of concern?
link |
Yeah, it's kind of a mix where I think it's very likely things are going to go well.
link |
I think we're going to be able to solve these problems. I think that's by far the most likely outcome, at least over the next.
link |
By far the most likely.
link |
So if you look at all the trajectories running away from our current moment in the next 100 years, you see AI creating destructive consequences as a small subset of those possible trajectories.
link |
Or at least, yeah, kind of eternal, disruptive consequences. I think that being a small subset.
link |
At the same time, it still freaks me out.
link |
I mean, when we're talking about the entire future of civilization, then small probabilities, 1% probability, that's terrifying.
link |
What do you think about Elon Musk's strong worry that we should be really concerned about existential risks of AI?
link |
Yeah, I mean, I think, broadly speaking, I think he's right.
link |
I think if we talked, we would probably have very different probabilities on how likely it is that we're doomed.
link |
But again, when it comes to talking about the entire future of civilization, it doesn't really matter if it's 1% or if it's 50%.
link |
We ought to be taking every possible safeguard we can to ensure that things go well rather than poorly.
link |
Last question. If you yourself could eradicate one problem from the world, what would that problem be?
link |
That's a great question. I don't know if I'm cheating in saying this, but I think the thing I would most want to change is just the fact that people...
link |
don't actually care about ensuring the long run future goes well.
link |
People don't really care about future generations. They don't think about it. It's not part of their aims.
link |
Well, in some sense, you're not cheating at all because in speaking the way you do and writing the things you're writing, you're addressing exactly this aspect.
link |
That is your input into the effective altruism movement.
link |
So for that, well, thank you so much. It's an honor to talk to you. I really enjoyed it.
link |
Thanks so much for having me on.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with William McCaskill and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
link |
Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code lexpodcast.
link |
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words from William McCaskill.
link |
One additional unit of income can do 100 times as much to benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I, earning the typical US wage of $28,000 a year.
link |
It's not often that you have two options, one of which is 100 times better than the other.
link |
Imagine a happy hour where you can either buy yourself a beer for $5 or buy someone else a beer for $0.05.
link |
If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous next rounds on me.
link |
But that's effectively the situation we're in all the time.
link |
It's like a 99% off sale or buy one get 99 free.
link |
It might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.