80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

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

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

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 period of renewed great power comp

A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play? The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you multiply probabilities by the value of each outcome and then sum them up — says your expected earnings are infinite. You have a 50% chance of winning $2, for '0.5 * $2 = $1' in expected earnings. A 25% chance of winning $4, for '0.25 * $4 = $1' in expected earnings, and on and on. A never-ending series of $1s added together comes to infinity. And that's despite the fact that you know with certainty you can only ever win a finite amount! Today's guest — philosopher Alan Hájek of the Australian National University — thinks of much of philosophy as “the demolition of common sense followed by damage control” and is an expert on paradoxes related to probability and

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 technology can be safely developed

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 thing of true intrinsic value: positi

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 that the only moral reason for a

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 they hope will safeguard human

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 war continues it takes a toll on ord

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 for the wide-ranging shifts in

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 about many other things over the years

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. Links to learn more, summary

“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 from the surface of the Earth, will be impossibl

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 transcript. Years ago, Will pledged t

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 mosquito that are ideally suited to

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's all around us, it's actually ve

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.

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 offer us up a random experiment tha

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 thousandth as much as the US spends ma

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 of these require ongoing funding t