80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2021.You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it. If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box. To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?”You think briefly, and decide you should bet your eternal soul on tails. The fact that you woke up at all seems like pretty good evidence that you’re in the big world — if the coin landed tails, way more people should be having an experience just like yours.But then you get up, walk outside, and look at the number on your box.‘3’. Huh. Now you don’t know what to believe.If God made 10 billion boxes, surely it’s much more likely that you would have seen a number like 7,346,678,928?In today’s interview, Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — explai