[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] today's episode of conversations with Tyler is in fact a conversation with Tyler with myself as the victim and we
have here to interview me Robert wiblin who is one of the interviewers I most respect and indeed Envy Robert is director of research at a nonprofit called 80,000 hours and their mission is to figure out and then communicate to people how they can do the most good with their careers Robert is a long-standing leader in the effective
altruism movement he runs an excellent podcast called the 80,000 hours podcast and he is from Adelaide now with all that we're here to discuss among other things my latest book published by strip press called stubborn attachments a vision for a society of free prosperous and responsible individuals but of course in the tradition of these interviews Robert is free to arrange to
wherever he wants Robert thank you for coming on uh thanks so much it's a it's a real privilege to be to be able to interview you I I think you've had perhaps more influence on me than than any other any other writer I I'm sure I've spent thousands of hours reading marginal Revolution over the last 10 or 10 or 12 years oh thank you and in fact
I think uh I think it was reading marginal Revolution that prompted me to switch into studying economics When I Was An undergraduate you've had a pretty substantial influence on on my career or at least at least you sped it up and I guess just to be clear as as for all of these episodes this is the conversation with Tyler that I want to have not
necessarily the one that you want to listen to and we've got perhaps enough questions here for two interviews so so we'll be trying to move pretty fast but first I always open episodes of the 80,000 hours podcast with the question what are youing working on at the moment and why is it really important work I have started a new project called
emergent Ventures which is a new approach to philanthropy so the idea of emergent Ventures is to create a philanthropic fund which will support projects that are maybe too weird or too small or too foreign or have results that are too hard to measure to be accepted by other major foundations so people are applying to emerging Ventures the final decision maker is myself there
is a minimum of bureaucracy there are no layers of approval people must go through for me to see the proposal and we are just now starting to hand up grants think of it as a kind of popup philanthropy yeah so what are the key selection criteria that you're going to use to judge who gets the money and who doesn't it should be people who are
smart have good values really believe in what they're doing and have been at it for some while but also just that they're doing something unusual that will be falling into the nooks and crannies so we're getting plenty of good proposals in but my reaction for some of them is well you're going to get support for this elsewhere and those are some of
the ones who turning down yeah so so you're really going hard on the kind of neglected criteria that's correct and uh overall people where we feel we can change or alter the trajectory of their careers or speed it up is something we're looking at quite closely yeah I think in the effective arism Community we we tend to give uh top priority to
making sure that people are working on a really pressing problem so a problem that has a really huge scale that's plausibly you can solve and also that that it's neglected by other people do you think it's like more important to focus on uh finding opportunities that other people aren't funding or to make sure that people are working on yeah
problems that where they can have the largest impact you know if you talk to venture capitalists in the Bay Area where we're chatting uh they tend to focus much more on the person than the project uh for emergent Ventures I think we need both the person and the project but I still take a person first approach if you don't have the right person the
project simply cannot come off so first and foremost you're trying to figure out like who's talented enough to do something new yeah and throughout your career kind of how much is doing good guided your choice of what to work on very little I'm uh quite a selfish person I think and I enjoy pursuing my own curiosity part of me at the meta level hopes that does some good but I
don't think altruism is really for me a fundamental driving force I enjoy absorbing information and communicating it to other people and uh that's for me what is fun yeah it's interesting how much good people can do incidentally U all right so let's let's move on to uh the book stubborn attachments which I guess is coming out in in mid oober 16th
yes yeah so this is a really fascinating book CU it just covers uh many issues that I've been thinking about for the last uh 15 or 20 years that I think that people should spend a lot more time thinking about like uh time how should we think about the long-term future how should we be aggregating welfare and outcomes between different people should
we be following rules or just uh considering every case individually how should we deal with like the massive uncertainty about the effects of our actions uh should we respect human rights and like how much should we defer to kind of Common Sense morality versus thinking things through for ourselves um and per it's especially interesting
because I agree with you on so many points where I think other people don't but then we like slightly diverge at the conclusions about what we actually ought to do practically so I guess yeah uh take it away how would you summarize the the key messages of this book and how did you come to write it the underlying message of the book is simply we're
capable of making rational judgments about what is better for society and in my own discipline economics there's a long-standing threat of skepticism about that so Kenneth Arrow developed an impossibility theorem there are a lot of results that imply you can't say much about what's actually better so I this book is an synthesis of economics and
philosophy and it's trying to argue to both economists and philosophers but also ordinary readers there is a such thing as what is objectively good it is based on the idea of supporting economic growth that's the one thing that over time we can say is much better than the alternative of not having as much economic growth and a lot of the
philosophical arguments are directed toward how should we think about the future is something less valuable simply because it's far away in time and I think you and I agree on this point that we should be much more future regarding and then the book thinks through if we treat the more distant future as just as valuable as the near future what does
that imply for our actual decisions and that again to me brings us back to this point that we ought to be maximizing the rate of sustainable economic growth it's a very different normative standard than what you get from say RS nosic barfett or others yeah so I guess if I had to pick out 50 words from the book that that summarized it I would choose this
quote from page 32 which is we can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance namely number one what can we do to boost the rate of economic growth number two what can we do to make civilization more stable and number three how should we deal with environmental problems does
that seem like a key quote to you as well absolutely yeah so maybe uh let's throw you out in a couple of the key ideas so uh one is the the croia plant and compounding growth uh what do you talk about there in the book The cronia Plant is a somewhat obscure reference it's taken from the works of Frank Knight University of Chicago Economist
and KN postulated there was such a thing as a cronia plant it was a hypothetical it would simply keep on growing forever so it would be a very high value it's like an apple tree seeds fall you get more apples those seeds in turn get you more apple trees and so on and so on that's like exponential compounding growth so if you don't discount the future at a very high rate if you had
such a thing as a cronia plant it would be very valuable and then if you ask what in fact is a cronia plant it's a modern well functioning economy that does generate more output every period has something like an exponential rate of growth and it's highly valuable so we want to cultivate again economic growth why do you think that the economy grows
in this way where kind of uh shocks or improvements seem to be permanent or at least semi-permanent people generate new ideas and most new ideas don't disappear you can lose a new idea or have a dark ages but if you have good institutions you build upon those new ideas uh also you can have increases in labor Supply and capital think of those as some key
key sources of economic growth I remember when I studied uh time series econometrics uh we would sometimes look at series of GDP and you could sometimes see that they were unit route which is to say like at least in some cases they would seem like they had a unit unit route which is to say that like any shocks to to GDP seem to be permanent
and then we just kind of moved on from that and I was like wait a minute this this doesn't this imply that like any kind of small perturbations that we have today will just have effects that could last hundreds or thousands of years if if this persists and there could be therefore could be of like enormous moral importance and I guess you're kind
of following through on this logic and saying if it is the case that improvements of productivity or whatever else do just last for extremely long times and they could have like enormous moral significance and we seem to see in the data that countries that have done well several hundred years ago that has persistent effects even ranging up through today there's even one paper
suggesting how well a region was doing in the year 500 has predictive power for how well it's doing today yeah and that's not probably not only uh kind of economic or financial issues but also cultural I think of culture as one of the keys behind economic growth in fact yeah so some lists might be think listening to this and thinking well yeah
it might be the case that if we grow GDP today this will also increase GDP in a thousand years time but I don't really care about a thousand years in in the future how would what would you say to try to convince them that a thousand years in the future does have important moral significance well imagine our ancestors sitting around say a thousand
years ago saying they didn't care very much about us and they were willing to accept a growth rate say a percentage Point lower than what has been the case for the last thousand years we would all right now be in extreme poverty we would be suffering life expectancy would probably be something like 40 years of age we wouldn't have created a lot of
artistic and cultural wonders so there's a plurality of values that's supported by economic growth and that's the most fundamental thing we should be willing to endorse at a macro level so why do you think that uh the long-term future you know kind of like you know Earth after you and I have ended our natural Lives why could that be like very
valuable all of that all that time the future Earth can support so much wealth so much diversity so much Prosperity Liberty aesthetic values whatever we hold dear our carrying capacity for doing more of that by having more productivity better governance better institutions uh there's so many possibilities out there in the future we just need to actually bring them about
so if you had to kind of take figure out the expected number of like future humans that that might live uh in the future could of course be very small we could go extinct soon or it could be very large if we last a very long time would you would you want to venture a guess for the expected value there is that trillions like trillions of
trillions I'd rather have a pocket calculator I do think population will stabilize and start to decline though probably not by very much and if you take a Earth with say an average of 10 billion people lasting for centuries but not lasting for 50,000 years and I do the calculations you'd get it my modal prediction that there's many more of
them than there is of us that's right do you think that quality of life will will also go up with like high probability uh not forever but for the foreseeable future we're in the period right now we're doing more to improve living standards than the world ever has before uh that will have big ups and downs but I don't see why it has to stop what
about people say uh you know I don't care about like welfare that much I like care about other things do you think this this argument for long-termism goes through for them as well I think it does I have some early books some of them on the Arts that argue wealth is good for aesthetic values so it depends what other values people care about but wealth supports many different
opportunities the whole point of wealth is to enable a kind of diversity and choice within a framework or if there's some other thing that people value we can have more of that too do do you think like me that there's a chance that future technology could make human life just 100 or a thousand times better than it is for people today I don't know that
we have a meaningful metric for saying that but I suppose I don't think that's possible I think we can make it you know twice as good and quite a bit longer but I don't think it will be inconceivable to what we can imagine now what about just if we imagine that we uh find a way for people to take like the best most enjoyable drugs that they can take today
uh without like having negative effects on their their brain in the long term it seems like that could result in a life that's 10 times better than what typically people typically experience today um at least in at least in some narrow sense of course I think if you're a pluralist that life is maybe not better at all it has more pleasure but
these other plural values seem to be weaker because you're pursuing only pleasure so that may be a dystopian scenario for the true pluralist yeah I suppose well maybe could like push it out on in that way on kind of all of these margins you get like many different things but we we do them much more efficiently if some people speci Iz and Drug taking I'm fine with that it's
not harmful but I don't want the whole world to become Lotus seeders okay yeah so a lot of economists and people from Finance you're used to applying discount rates which causes them to to think that you know once you're 100 years out just consequences don't don't seem to matter that much and I guess if they applied that backwards it would mean that kind
of toot and Carmen thousands of years ago was like perhaps individually more important than than anyone or like everyone who's alive today um what what do you what do you have to say to people who are used to applying discount rates and use that kind of logic to to Discount the future discount rates are very useful for many purposes especially
if you're looking at a small project done in a single firm and you're trying to estimate how valuable to you is a cash flow say 20 or 30 years from now but if you're asking a question for all of society and if you apply a discount rate of you know 5% 7% whatever it's going to be you can end up with the result that say well a nickel today is
worth more than saving the existence of the entire world hundreds of years from now and that's so counterintuitive I think that just as we do not discount the well-being of people who are distant from us in space per se nor should we do so across time yeah you have this neat example of uh what if people were able to travel close to to
the speed of light and how this uh kind of even sharpens the the counterintuitiveness of using a disc arange want to describe that example if one accepts Einstein's theories of Relativity which do seem to be true albe it incomplete as you approach the speed of light the whole universe to you becomes like a frozen block of space time that in a sense you can watch or
observe from the outside and in that sense time can be thought of as a kind of Illusion and simply all of the things are happening at once and from that perspective you would wonder well why is time such a special Dimension but another way to put the point is just to imagine we're sending astronauts up into space and we're sending them away you
know at speeds approaching the speed of light uh they will if they return return in the much more distant future but to them only a small amount of time has passed so should we take less care to preserve the the well-being and lives of those astronauts simply because we're shipping them away at higher speeds again it seems like an absurd conclusion
the notion that when you have large benefits for people that matter at the macro level uh that you should apply something like a zero rate discount to well-being not to financial flows but actual well-being I think that's the correct moral position yeah so as far as I know there's almost no moral philosophers who support uh discounting
the the welfare of purely the welfare of people in the future then yeah a lot lot of people throughout society and I guess influenced by by economics don't share that view what do you think's going on there is this potentially one of the biggest moral mistakes that we're making and philosophers should be shouting about this much more philosophers and
economists should be shouting about it much more I think some of the problem is a political one so I find it relatively easy to convince a lot of philosophers so the moral rate of time discount should be zero but relatively hard to get them to accept the Practical implications of that namely that ongoing economic growth is a very very positive thing so more important than
redistributing income economists who tend to be more Market oriented even economists somewhat to the left are more Market oriented than most philosophers they're so trained that there's some kind of embedded positive real rate of interest in an economy that to then get them to accept a moral framework we are talking about well-being and macro
effects and long periods of time and to think in those terms and come up with the right answer of zero that's the problem there but economists tend to be pretty enthusiastic about economic growth because they study it and they see it its benefits pretty clearly yeah if if people aren't convinced by this argument you're just pointing out to me
there's a new book published called time biases have you managed to read that yet I've read about half of it it's quite good it's by Megan Sullivan she's a philosopher at Notre Dame uh she spends a lot of time talking about a paradox I don't consider much which is how much you should discount the past so like if someone told you well you have amnesia
but you had a very painful operation and it happened to you a month ago how much should you care and then someone says no wasn't a month ago it was two months ago it was more distant in time is that like better for you is that worse for you she explores the symmetry of paradoxes of discounting forward in time compared to those with discounting backward in time
you then then go on to point out that um if if we're very concerned about the long term and we have the option of creating economic growth this potentially allows us to kind of sidestep some of the aggregation puzzles that have really worried philosophers and and economists what's your argument there the classic aggregation puzzle in economics is simply there's a policy
some people are better off some people are worse off how can you possibly judge if the policy is worth doing there are hardly any what we as economists call Par improvements policy changes that make virtually everyone off but over a span of a few Generations if you have a higher rate of economic growth people today in today's wealthier world are
really as a whole obviously much better off than say people in the 18th century or even the 19th century uh that's an aggregation judgment we can make I think it would be reported by people's demonstrated preferences as to where they want to migrate and there are some obvious moral facts that if a standard of living is say three to five times
higher in one Society rather than another the wealthier society is better yeah okay and you then go on to argue that against the things that some people have said uh wealth actually does lead to happiness so we're not just creating wealth for its own sake but actually it is going going to increase welfare um what's what's what's the case for that
if you look at the data within Nations across classes of income or wealth wealthier people are simply much happier than poorer people there is a partial Paradox when you look at data across Nations you find a lot of poorer countries where people report they're pretty happy but I think what's going on there often is they're just using words
differently so for instance if you penans how happy are you with your healthare Kenyans actually Paul is being pretty happy with their healthare it's not that Kenyan Healthcare is so much better than we all think they're just used to a lower standard so I think when you ask people about happiness across countries there's still a positive slope
on that relationship but you're understating just how good wealth is for people wealth Al also helps keep people alive so all these polls you're only pulling the living not pulling the dead if you could pull all the dead people who passed away because new medicines were not invented for them or they took a riskier job and they died in an
accident put all those people into the poll again wealth is going to do much much better yeah so I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that while beinging literature it seems potentially still kind of an open question just how much wealth increases happiness today but I feel like you almost didn't make the strongest argument that you could make here which is that even if uh
increasing GDP or wealth today doesn't make people happier now at some point in the future it will once we use that wealth and that you know greater knowledge to figure out new technologies that can turn wealth into into welfare oh of course but also even wealthier countries today even if you don't think the money makes us happier we buy more
exports from poorer countries so the growth of China India many parts of the world has relied on the wealthy countries having so much to spend and having technology to transfer and people in those countries are clearly much better off because of the economic growth they've had lately yeah this this is a slight aside but um many people I I
think have this intuition that rich countries are harming poor countries on balance perhap by absorbing investment or the smartest people from them uh but I and I think you believe that poor countries benefit a lot from having richer richer countries on on the earth with them do you just want to make make the case for that there's very strong
evidence of positive complementarities a lot of it coming from technology transfer using medicines or electricity just general production techniques management being transferred to poor economies I do think for some small island economies there is a brain drain they're still better off that say you know the West Japan are wealthy rather than poor there's not a general brain
drain that we see in the data but if you're a very small place and people just leave and don't come back you can through migration be worse off it doesn't mean you're worse off because the West is wealthy so in the book you also speak up in favor of rules over you know deciding how to act based on each individual each individual situation uh
what's what's your argument there there's a long-standing paradox in philosophy about rural utilitarianism versus act utilitarianism so if you follow a rule when should you deviate from the rule and I just point out the rule of maximizing sustainable economic growth they're just very high costs from deviating from that rule so if you simply adopt the attitude we're not
going to deviate from this rule we're going to stick with the rule you're better off it's also the right thing to do there's a consilience across deontological IC and utilitarian approaches and I think the case for rules is somewhat underrated in the literature they don't have to be bled Away by a million different exceptions you're just better off following the
rule yeah I don't quite understand that so is that just because if like you might make mistakes each time you're trying to reassess whether you want to follow the rule of of maximizing uh economic growth or is is there something more more fundamental going going on here each time you deviate from the rule of maximizing economic growth you're
costing the more distant future really an enormous amount of sources so it's just a very high price my argument is just a way of making Vivid how high is the cost of deviating from the rule but uh if if it is so important for welfare to increase economic growth uh won't act utilitarianism also endorse that same Behavior Uh it may very well so there
may be this broader consilience of AC in rural utilitarianism but thinking of it in terms of a rule we're bound to follow won't cost us much at all right yeah yeah maybe the reverse okay so I guess summarizing the above I think it's kind of my my view is that characterize you as kind of a total uh Global objectiv less consequentialism plus respect for
the non-aggression principle do you think that's a decent summary uh that's very close I would say respect for human rights the human rights may or may not always be defined by the non-aggression principle I think for the most part they are yeah we haven't talked about human rights yet um what what's what's your case in favor of Human Rights almost all
of the book is focused on the consequentialist arguments you know for growth and thinking about the more distant future but I add in a caveat which I don't discuss at length and that is I think there are some cases some things you simply ought not to do even if it would boost long-term economic growth so if someone were asking you to
you know Slaughter some number of innocent babies after torturing them that's simply wrong to do and that's more of a caveat in the argument it's not something I explore much in the book uh but I think there are objective rights which people hold and we should respect them and we maximize growth within that framework yeah so what what
fundamentally is the the philosophical argument in favor of Human Rights it's intuition I think that there are simply some acts that are so horrible a person who doesn't see them as horrible it would be hard to have further discourse with them but I don't think I have much to say about rights in this book that's just a kind of placeholder saying to
people look if you believe in rights as I do you don't have to run rough shod over humans you know to maximize growth in every instance you have this out the door is open you know take the out when you need to yeah uh so what are some occasions when your conception of Human Rights comes apart from the non-aggression principle cuz most of the examples I think you given the book uh
cases where you're using kind of violence against someone uh there might be cases where you're letting people die and by letting them die you're not committing kind of formal libertarian aggression against them but they might have a human right that you're in some way obliged to help them I I leave that as an open question but I don't think we
should be restricted to formal libertarian aggression as our only conception of Human Rights yeah okay uh you also talk about um the extraordinary level of of uncertainty about the future and how even quite trivial acts that that we take could potentially change the entire course of history and indeed it might be probable that they that they
Chang the course of history you want to explain the case there there's an old Ray Bradberry short story about backwards time travel you go back in time you step on one butterfly and the whole later history of the world changes so every time you stop at a traffic light sooner than later you remix timings of people's days when they start acts of intercourse you know which
children are conceived does Hitler end up being born or someone else kind of a near Hitler but who does not become Hitler so every single thing you do including our discussion remixes the future course of world history and if you're a consequentialist you need to take that seriously you need to ask does this simply make my entire Doctrine
incoherent and The Stance I take in the book is if you're pursuing this truly large significant you know Grand goal of making the future much much better off in expected value terms that will stand above the froth of the uncertainty you create by you know remixing things with every particular decision yeah so uh this this reminded me prettyy strongly
of the non-identity problem uh from from Derek parfett who you wrote once wrote a paper withd about uh discounting rates um do want to describe that the non-identity problem Derek parfit in his 1984 book reasons and persons had an example that say you would bury nuclear waste and several Generations from now the waste would say kill millions of
people but the fact that you buried the waste would change the timings of subsequent conceptions so the people who are being killed a million or say a thousand years from now they wouldn't have been born otherwise unless you had buried the waste so you could argue well I haven't harmed anyone at all by burying the waste I caused them to be born they die of a terrible cancer when
they're 27 years old but onette this is still following the Paro principle and I think I have an argument why that's wrong namely the case where you don't commit the very harmful act you might have different identities of people but you'll have a much greater aggregate of good in the more distant future and it's not about individual identities so
there's something a little oddly collectivist about about my argument you might say yeah so I guess many people have something like this intuition that yeah if you change the identities of people in the future such you can't see any correspondence between them in the two different scenarios then perhaps it doesn't uh it doesn't matter exactly
what you do because there's no specific person who you can identify who's who's worse off do you think that this is like a very strong counterargument to to those views here's a tension I think that we all have to face up to barfett talks about something called the person affecting principle like how does your action affect some particular person but
if you're willing to make aggregate judgments and engage in an act of aggregation saying some kinds of societies are better than others or some policies are better than others there's something in the micro foundations of that judgment that's fairly non-individualistic so people want to be consequentialists and they want to be pure individualist sometimes it's not
actually a fully happy marriage of views and the notion that once you jam together different measurements of well-being you're making a collective judgment about the overall course of history even slightly hegan you could also think of this book as like a hegan defense of Liberty I think I slightly messed up the explanation of the the person affecting
isssue there because often what's going on is people want to say well if if you add if you change the the number of people in in in the future that that can't necessarily be be good or bad because there's no specific individual in the both both cases who is worse off or better off uh because you change the people who are who exist in one scenario
and not the other they're only there in one case so you can't like say that they have a like higher welfare than a specific person in the in the other scenario but then uh when you point out that well almost everything you do is going to result in like there being no correspondence between the list of people in one scenario and the list of
people in the other scenario and so uh it doesn't matter whether you bury this nuclear waste that's going to going to greatly harm people in the future in one case uh people tend not to not to like that conclusion it just seems that just seems very counterintuitive and wasn't really what what they were aiming for I guess so you're going to take kind of
the the total view here where we just kind of sum up the the consequences of of our actions on lots of different people uh subject to rights constraints yes yeah do you think there's any plausible alternatives to doing that I think the most plausible alternative is simply to say the actual time Horizon is not very long that maybe in an extreme
case either the world will end soon or history will start collapsing and run in Reverse so there is no Grand glorious future that has a heavy weight in the calculation and thus we're always dealing with the here and now a quite pessimistic view I think that's the main rival view to what I put out in the book uh I don't feel I refute that argument
it's going to be true with some probability right so if you do an expected value calculation well you know retrogression is true with say probability 37% progress with 63% and the expected value calculation progress is still going to win it will have the dominant weight but we need to be very careful don't assume progress is possible and the other pessimistic
theory of History you know I say a lot of the ancient Greeks would have accepted May well be true and if that's true then this vision is a kind of uh large mistake uh but you you cannot live with pessimism right there's also a notion that more optimism is a partially self-fulfilling prophecy believing pessimistic views might make them more
likely to come about yeah in in the seminar room it seems like economists and sometimes philosophers are not willing to to aggregate welfare across people so they say yeah if like one person's worse off than than someone else you just won't be able to say which of these whether you whether overall the situation is better but then it seems
like in their everyday life when they're making calls about you know what should a group of people do they they're always willing to to aggregate that's the immediate argument that they'll always turn to what what do you think is going on there we're always willing to choose a restaurant right even if it's not the first choice of all people and the
aggregations we make when looking at economic growth are often quite large differences in income uh but I think there's a fear amongst a lot of philosophers that if you're too willing to aggregate utilitarianism becomes too strong and they don't like all of the consequences of that decision and so they try to draw the line at aggregation but as you mentioned and I think that's
grossly inconsistent with how we treat instrumental reason in our lives in our businesses and our nonprofits we aggregate all the time we're wrong a lot but the judgments are not completely outside the bounds of Reason either yeah something that's even even stranger about that argument uh to me is that if like yeah if one person is made better
off in a scenario and someone else is is made worse off it's not the case that uh it's forbidden to do the thing where one person was made worse off it simply makes it incurable with with the other scenario so you simply can't say whether it's better or worse I think on on this you uh so it doesn't lead to the conclusion that that I think people want
which is that you should be unwilling to harm one person to to benefit a a large number of people elsewhere you simply can't say whether it's better or worse and so kind of all bets are off and indeed it's in a sense permissible uh has has that argument occurred to you sure it's always instructive to look at how people behave as parents or maybe
how they you know vote in a department when they're dealing with their colleagues and there there's some form of consequentialist in all those cases so if you take the intuitions they're using in these smaller decisions and just you know build them up onto a larger scale uh I think the logic of consequentialism is very very hard to escape and when people say oh I'm a
deontologist you know Kant is the my load star in ethics I don't know how they ever make decisions at the margin based on that it seems to me quite incoherent the deontology just says there's a bunch of things you can't do or maybe some things you're obliged to do but when it's about like more or less well how much money should we spend on
the police force try to get a cont and to have a coherent framework for answering that question other than saying like crime is wrong or you're obliged to come to the help of victims of crime it can't be done yeah it's a somewhat boring moral Vision where we're just prohibited from doing a bunch of stuff and then it doesn't really have
much more to say that's right all right let's uh let's move on a bit from the stuff where uh we we see things basically the same to some areas where where we have a somewhat different view you say early on in the book if you're the kind of reader that I want uh you'll feel I have not pushed hard enough on the tough questions no matter how hard I
push so I'm going to I'm going to try to try to try to push you here and take that to heart so in the book uh and uh I guess here so far you've been focusing overwhelmingly on the importance of increasing economic growth so kind of getting to a better future faster I guess when we're talking about growth here we might imagine kind of time on
the x-axis and kind of welfare being generated in the universe on the on the y- axis and you kind of want to want to increase that faster why focus on increasing the rate rather than making sure that that doesn't go to zero well keep in mind the core recipe is the rate of sustainable economic growth so if it's going to go to zero you're knocked out of the box
so you're maximizing across both of those dimensions and I think empirically there are a large class of cases where more growth and more stability come together National Defense is the easiest way to see that if your Society stays poor someone will take you over and those who take you over are probably nasty and will harm you uh it's not the
only way in which growth and sustainability come together but at most margins they do so there's a wide enough class of cases where we can do both things at the same time yeah I would note the earlier versions of this book you know I worked on this for about 20 years uh the earlier versions had much much more on existential risk and it took me years to cut those out uh I
never repudiated any of the ideas they just came up in enough other books I felt I wanted to stick to my core notion of growth more than existential risk and stability okay yes so that's answering some of my questions because uh yeah in the book you write kind of policies that prioritize growth at break next speed are frequently unstable the average
civilization endured only 400 years and this number appears to be declining um our path in the future requires a tight rope AC balancing progress and stability along the way and you know we should believe that the end of the world is a terrible event even if that collapse comes in the very distant future similarly the continual Persistence of
civilization 300 years from now is much better than having no further civilization at that time but then I guess so much of the book is dedicated to kind of economic policy and you know how would we increase growth rather than focusing on this other word sustainability like what are the biggest threats to sustainability in the future and I guess you're just saying it's been
done elsewhere so you wanted to focus on the on the growth Richard poser was one of the first books on this and when posner's book came out I immediately started doing a lot of editing on mine but you and many other people in the effective altruism movement have written on existential risk and I endorse most of that but just at the margin it seemed
to me growth was underestimated I think the one of the main if not quite existential risks but it's a risk to ongoing growth is just environmental issues and I think there's plenty we could do for the environment that also boosts growth so cutting down on air pollution has made people healthier more productive easier to live in cities as China cuts down on air
pollution say in Beijing it will make Chinese Society more productive uh it would be more of a problem for the argument if you thought growth and stability were always at loggerheads but there are large numbers of societies that collapse because they don't grow enough they can't fend off you know say drought or weather problems or problems
in their agriculture in world history or they're conquered by someone else do do you think that's still appli today if the United States stopped growing I feel a lot of free countries in the world would collapse or be taken over or they would become unfree if we grow at a very low rate our budget will explode it will cut back on our discretionary spending
our ability to advance science to protect the Earth against an asteroid coming so yes I absolutely think it applies today yeah I think I agree that if the US stopped growing that would be uh very bad uh principally because of the kind of cultural and political effects that that that would have and perhaps that we've started to see over
the last over the last 5 years but doesn't that kind of suggest that what we want is kind of kind of sufficiently high level of growth one that kind of keeps people happy and looking forward to the future and you know being willing to like accept some um negative shocks because they know that things are going to get better in the future anyway and
that we don't necessarily have to go from you know 4% GDP growth to to 8% GDP growth that's not necessarily going to make things more stable well you're talking about going from 4 to 8% you may or may not think that's stabilizing but the actual reality is we're in the midst of one of our most wonderful labor market recoveries there's been a big
fiscal stimulus and year on Year we're doing 2.7 which is very poor compared to our past performance you see a lot of recoveries where we grow at 4% or more to get just to get back to where we were so the growth engine has slowed down there's a lot of evidence some of which I present in my other books that technological progress has slowed down
so it doesn't seem to me we're close to the margin of growth being so fast that we're thrown off the track we have high level of debt and deficits and we don't know how to pay it off and we're cutting into our future capabilities with infrastructure military defense many areas science yeah so uh in as much as you're focused on economic growth in
order to increase sustainability it seems like a a slightly odd Focus uh for at least an individual to take if they wanted to increase sustainability because there are already such strong incentives that many people face to try to uh to to grow the economy because they earn money from it you know they earn like either labor income or they
ear returns from starting businesses so if like a single person wanted to maximize kind of the sustainability of human civilization would you recommend that they focus on economic growth or do you think that there's other like more leveraged opportunities if they're willing to set aside making money it depends on the person and what kinds of
talents they have but as I argued in my earlier book The complacent class there now seem to be so many people who are simply satisficers uh they're not very interested in in innovating or even participating in a dynamic economy and they just try to do well enough so I'm here making a moral argument that at the margin many many people should be less
complacent and take more chances personally uh it will lower aggregate societal risk and do more to innovate save more work harder in some way be more Dynamic you can think of this and complacent class as two sides of a bigger picture complacent class is like the sociology of what we're doing and this is the moral side so it seems like another technology that you might be
very interested in that could have you know big effects on the trajectory of human civilization and potentially avoid Extinction although also could be very negative would be the capacity to kind of um redesign human motivation and kind of our personalities through genetic engineering so we could potentially you know select our children as such that
they are say very pacifist such they don't want to want to kill one another and if you could get you know large takeup of this uh technology that that could potentially lower existential risk and get it very close to zero and give us more more brighter prospects of surviving for a long time on the other hand the ability to kind of uh redesign
human personalities such that we're so passive and would just accept dominance would potentially again facilitate totalitarianism in kind of a very a stable like bad or neutral State what do you think of that I don't think we know yet how genetic engineering will affect existential risk or even long-term growth we don't at the moment as you
know have the capabilities really to do that so as we develop them if we do we might have a better idea but I think most people should be deeply agnostic and also somewhat worried about genetic engineering uh if you think we're on an okay civilizational trajectory right now relative to the human past and then we're going to have this other major event possibly more important than
nuclear weapons and our current trajectory is okay relative to the more distant past probably we should be more worried than cheering be my take but given that we don't have it in front of us it's hard to say it might all work out wonderfully yeah I guess you would think that like as that technology gets closer it would be important to have
people think about how do you regulate that how do we make it applied well rather than badly uh that kind of thing of course we should think about that but I'm not sure we'll succeed in regulating it very well there are many countries parents I think are willing to go to other countries there'll be Black Market versions of the Technologies the
regulation might fall to a least common denominator standard like whatever we can do I suspect we'll end up doing one way or another so I wouldn't put too much faith in oh we regulate out the bad versions and be left with the good ones we're going to get some mix of like the very good and very bad yeah I mean you're always just pushing on the margin
trying to make it a bit more likely that we use it good ways and bit less likely ways yeah are there any technologies that you can foresee over the next few hundred years that you think could end up being like very important or could you know put Humanity on on a different trajectory in the same way that perhaps like nuclear weapons could have done
that during the 20th century I think changing the nature of human beings and you mentioned genetic engineering but also just drugs I think the opioid epidemic has grown much more rapidly than almost anyone had expected we had long periods of time of kind of technological stagnation in in drugs because many of them were illegal but that also means there's a kind of lwh
hanging fruit and now there's more people can do in their own Labs because of Information Technology so one of my worries is that bad drugs get too much better too quickly and we have many things like opioids that we can't control and that becomes a much bigger social problem just the susceptibility of people to alcohol we take it for
granted but so many lives are lost each year so many careers is ruined so much productivity lost uh one of my kind of personal Crusades is just we should all be more critical of alcohol uh people will pull out a drink and drink in front of their children the same people would not dream of like pulling out a submachine gun and playing with it on
the table in front of their kids but I think it's more or less the same thing and to a lot of liberals like the drink is okay and the submachine gun is not I think if anything it's the other way around and I encourage people just completely voluntarily abstain from alcohol and make it a social Norm I guess if we're able to design kind of better and better addicting uh you know
substances drugs or perhaps computer games or whatever else it's kind of the case that the Mormons will will inherit the Earth or whoever is like most resistant to to those Temptations and like still wants to like have children even despite the fact that they can just shoot up on heroin that's right so I try to encourage the productive people I
know at the margin to be more Mormon right you mean have more children or like avoid avoid drugs but avoid addictive substances of the wrong kind I mean work too is an addictive substance right yeah it seems like there's a difficult tight rope here because we we both want people to you know in the short run focus on yeah growth and like
improving civilization and so on but then we don't want to lock in this value that it's bad to experience pleasure that like cuz ultimately we want to kind of cash it out in something which could which could involve kind of like using heroin Al some like much better future form of heroin do you think it's like going to be possible to like have a
culture that supports that that delicate balance if you could have better drugs but they didn't destroy people and they became the new intermediate incentive like innovate a new product become a millionaire and then you can afford to buy this truly wonderful drug that'll be great on Sundays and won't hurt your productivity that seems unlikely but right who knows
yeah uh what is kind of your vision of of the long-term future do do you think do you see it as we're going to have growth and then some kind of plateau or kind of go up and down uh or or or will it just continue Rising forever I don't think the rate of growth will rise forever uh my view of economic history is that growth comes in spurts it's not
an evenly managed process though it was for part of the postor War II era that you have a thing called general purpose Technologies one of those being like fossil fuels plus machines which became significant in the 19th century and then you have a big growth spur you do everything you can say with fossil fuels and machines
you get cars you get planes electricity powerful factories but at some point your cars only get so much better uh and then you wait for the next big breakthrough the next set of big breakthroughs May well involve the internet artificial intelligence internet of things they're not quite here yet you see many signs of them they don't make the growth rate much higher
again uh and then you will have a big period of explosive growth and then a slowing down again that's my basic model yeah so I was thinking uh perhaps less about growth and more thinking just just the absolute level of you know the economy or welfare uh in the universe in the future do you think at some point it's just going to level off because
we'll have done everything we can we'll have grabbed all the matter that we can access and we'll have figured out the best configuration for it to to produce value and at that point it's just a matter of like Ming it uh for as long as we can no I think the world will end before that happens I think at some point there'll be a new phase where we
can directly make people in some way happier or more fulfilled or be more the the people they want to be by manipulating something inside the brain we do that in very crude ways today with anti-depressants or even Viagra not manipulating the brain but seems to make people happier and uh that will be an enormous breakthrough of sorts it's not right
before us I don't even think it's the next breakthrough but it seems at some point it will be possible and once we exploit that Frontier it seems to me the game will be about numbers just having more very happy very fulfilled people and will turn our attention to making higher numbers sustainable I don't see any obvious limit to that process I do
think the world will end before we complete that process I don't think we'll ever leave the Galaxy or maybe not even the solar system but at some point it will just become a numbers game okay yeah why do you think that we we won't leave the Galaxy and and also like even if you think that that's improbable just given the fact that almost all of the
potential value that we could generate is outside of this galaxy because that's where most of the matter and energy is shouldn't we be like pretty focused on like that possible scenario where in fact we do leave the Galaxy I see the recurrence of war in human history so frequently and I'm not completely convinced by Steven Pinker so I agree
with Steven Pinker that the chance of a very violent War indeed has gone down and is going down maybe every year but the tail risk is still there and if you let the clock you know tick out for a long enough period of time at some point it will happen so so powerful abilities to manipulate energy also mean powerful weapons eventually powerful weapons in
decentralized hands I don't think we know how stable that process is but again let the clock tick out and you should be very worried yeah okay so what do you think is the probability that kind of neither humans nor some kind of successive species exists in like 100 years or a thousand years or 10,000 years 100 years I think it's extremely small it would be you know whatever is
the small chance of some kind of Galactic catastrophe uh very small A Thousand Years I think there's at least a 10% chance not that every single human is dead but that we've returned to some earlier much poorer stage that's quite destructive and maybe you know the Earth is ruled by roving bands which are violent a kind of Mad Max scenario it
seems to me chance of that is reasonably High way too high so if you're saying that there's a high probability that humans will still be around in 100 years that I guess that suggests that you think there a very low annual risk of nuclear war uh why is that I'm not sure what you mean by very low I think it's below 1% yeah I think so to I don't know if that counts as
very low but again it's going to happen sooner or later yeah and how stable is it if you just trade like one nuke back and forth two countries we don't know right it's it's never happened so I think the chance that that happens within 30 years is easily say 5% how destabilizing it will be do you have an immediate Global financial crisis or the
markets just kind of react like yeah yeah yeah some currencies go up some go down it's a terrible tragedy but for most of the world kind of sort of life goes on after these terrible tragic deaths uh we don't know yeah so if someone came to me and they were asking for advice as they sometimes do on what can they do to improve the long-term
future and they were deciding between uh increasing economic growth and say working to prevent a nuclear war or you know great power war between the US and China I would uh almost always recommend that they that they work on the ladder because I feel like there's far fewer people who are working on on that problem and so it's substantially more
neglected what what would you have to say to them uh I definitely recommend people working on lowering the risk of nuclear war one of my dissertation advisers was Thomas shelling who of course is the classic theorist of nuclear war nuclear weapons to me are always the number one issue but that said even if you sat down and said I'm
going to do my best to limit nuclear war I don't know what that means operationally if you're a president or you know in a parliament uh or maybe if you had a particular nonprofit but I'm not sure this arment is the answer or is to boost the rate of economic growth there's plenty that most people can do in that direction so I wish we had more good avenues for
lowering the risk of nuclear war I'd be very keen to hear about them we'd actually be Keen to support them with emergent Ventures fund yeah it seems like given what you're saying that it's uh likely that humans will go extinct you know before we manage to escape from this galaxy or maybe even from this solar system and that the reason for this is primarily that we're going to be
unable to coordinate between countries and individuals to prevent conflict that would destroy us that um kind of your top priority would be figuring out ways to coordinate humans better and and indeed that is kind of a a really high priority for people in the effective arism community and many people who are working on with this long- termist
framework elsewhere would do you think that you might want to write a book about you know how to improve coordination and international cooperation in future maybe that may not be an issue that's good for a book of course some issues you write about but not necessarily in book form it still seems to me that education is a net positive for coordinating people and
limiting their desire to slaughter each other I understand it's not always the case a lot of the Nazis were well educated and so on but still on net I think it's a positive force so growth and education tend to come together if we're growing more we can afford more education we can do more to support education in poorer countries so I still
think economic growth is at least a partial indirect means to some of those ends and again it's something that's easy to concretize you can to some extent measure it you know when you're failing and that makes it more useful than some other kinds of advice that maybe I still would you know truly fully support I guess I I view the invention
of nuclear weapons is kind of perhaps like the the most important U moment in in human history just looking around that time so I hope it ends up not being the most important moment in human history fingers crossed uh but uh so uh around that time um say during the 30s and 40s and 50s uh the Soviet Union uh under Stalin had had incredibly fast
economic growth it was a people were moving from Farm to uh to factories the Soviet Union was becoming substantially more powerful and um a stronger military power and developing the ability to infuture uh build nuclear weapons of its own do you think watching that in the 30s and 40s we should have been glad that the Soviet Union had a fast rate of
economic growth or should it have on balance concerned us uh both because it would potentially lead to more conflict between countries because you'd have more great powers and also because the person who was leading the Soviet Union was not a very nice guy well of course it should have concerned us but onet it was obviously a huge plus because the
Soviets stopped the Nazis but keep in mind also you know my wife daughter were born in the Soviet Union and grew up in a wealthier society uh my father-in-law who you know still lives with us uh he was alive during the time of Stalin and his life was better he's still alive today because Soviets had a higher rate of economic growth uh Soviets urbanized
probably more rapidly than China has done lately that's not a well-known fact the world discovered a lot of talent through that urbanization and people being brought into formal education so it had a lot of benefits and Stalin didn't wipe us out and he beat the Nazis uh so if you're looking for any case where a higher rate of growth had a big
payoff I think it's that one that's not the counterintuitive case yeah okay so I feel like expost it definitely looks good but uh you at at the point where the where the Soviet Union got nuclear weapons I might have said looking back you know I I kind of wish that it had not become wealthy that quickly because now we have like a nuclear stand off at
and you know the 1948 or 1949 you don't know how stable that situation is going to be so looking forward you might think that there's like really a very substantial probability of humanity destroying itself during the Cold War now looking back we can say well it was it wasn't so severe but you might have thought actually it would be better if there was just one country given that we
have nuclear weapons what we really want is just like one country that's going to be a hedgemon and and dominate the world so that there won't be a nuclear war and we can have kind of permanent stability what do you think of that I don't think we understand stability and nuclear weapons very well do keep in mind the two times they've actually been used as
when only one country had them uh it doesn't mean we have a fully general theory there nuclear weapons have spread actually at a slower rate than many people had expected and you read geopolitical theorists after the end of World War II A lot of them think like there's going to be another nuclear war really soon and we tend to dismiss them
like oh those silly people you know they were just paranoid but maybe they were right and we got lucky and that's the true equilibrium I don't think we should reject that view uh that gets back to an underlying issue with a lot of claims in the book If you really think the chance civilized society might end or be defeated quite soon you can't look to
any kind of long-term Horizon to decide what is better and you're left with a kind of brute deontology for making choices uh and when when that's the connect scenario it's not about growth maximization so I mean I would accept that caveat yeah there's this interesting thing that uh if you think that the risk of Extinction is extremely
low um though nonzero then uh you should Place extremely import high value on the future because it is in expectation is going to last a very long time and we have a high chance of you know colonizing a significant fraction of the Universe um so so that that is an argument for long-termism on the other hand if you think that the risk of Extinction is actually quite high so
perhaps it's like 1% a year or something like that then it's true that if we manage to avoid Extinction this year then uh the the benefit that we get from that is not so great because we there's a still a good chance that we'll destroy ourselves in future but the risk is so high like 1% every year that there's probably a lot that could be done to
lower that so it's like potentially a more more tractable problem cuz it's a bigger problem to begin with yeah do you have any thoughts on that well let's imagine it were the case that somehow we actually knew that if we could construct Hobbit Society but with people being taller say the world would not end and if we don't construct Hobbit Society the
world will end say through nuclear weapons let's say we knew that or we thought 70% chance that's likely to be true I still don't think we actually are good at implementing the means to bring about hobbit Society we would have to become brutal totalitarians if anything we might accelerate the risk of this nuclear war so when you think of the
feasible tools at our disposal that's kind of outside our current feasible set hobit Society we're on this path I think we have to manage it we can't just you know slam the brakes on the car it'll uh carine you know off the cliff and our best chance is to master and improve Technologies to make nuclear weapons Warning Systems Second strike capability
safer rather than riskier I just think that's the path we're on and the hobbits are not there for us yeah peps if I had to like sumarize My overall worldview in just like one quote it would be this phrase from EO Wilson the real problem with humanity is we is the following we have Paleolithic emotions medial institutions and god-like technology and
it's terrifically dangerous and perhaps uh this highlights kind of my concern with the the idea that we ought to increase economic growth which seems to push more perhaps on the Godlike technology than improving the the Paleolithic emotions or the medieval institutions and I guess by focusing on improving technology we're increasing
the kind of Disconnect between the Improvement that we've had in our like engineering and scientific and technological ability uh and the fact that just our yeah our personal moral values and our institutions for governing ourselves have not kept up with that and so I'd be perhaps more interested in seeing people focus on the emotions and the institutions here to
get them to catch up with our like Godlike technology uh than than increasing the the technology itself what do you think of that I'm more optimistic than Wilson and perhaps you so he refers to Medieval institutions but in most countries institutions are much better than that like what are the good medieval institutions that stuck
around like parliament of Iceland Oxford where you've been I suppose Cambridge you know maybe a few other schools but we've built so much since then I don't mean technology I mean quality institutions with feedback and accountability if you look say at how Singapore is run a lot of the Nordic countries some parts of American Life by no means all just to be clear uh Canada
Australia where you're from you see remarkable institutions unprecedented in human history uh I don't take those for granted they're not automatic but I think one has to revise the Wilson quote and be more optimistic yeah so I agree Med ofal institutions is perhaps an exaggeration but but you think it's but it's a significant exaggeration right
yeah okay I agree I I think it's the case that probably political institutions and our decision-making capacity uh isn't improving as quickly as our technological capabilities and I think I I wish it were like the other way around that our kind of wisdom and prudence and ability to make like decisions that that are not risky was like maybe moving faster than than our
than our technology but see I see it the other way around if you look at data on economic growth you see huge productivity improvements China India basically free riding on existing Technologies not usually making them better but just managing companies better having better incentives than companies and if the world economy grew
4 point whatever percent last year way more of that 4 point say 8% is coming from better management better institutions uh than it's coming from new technology maybe like 1% of it's coming from new technology and the rest from better management and some some cases growing population capital resources so Institution are way outracing technology right now again I'm
not taking that for granted but I think people would be much more optimistic if they viewed it in that light so we're both big big fans of Philip tetlock and his work to improve improve forecasting I think it's like among among the most important work in social science and some of the most impressive interesting work that's ever been done do you think
it would be valuable to get like much more uh effort going into uh you know improving decision- making uh in in that form rather than perhaps working on like science and technology otherwise like do you think we under invest perhaps in social science relative to technical Sciences I think we underinvestment too many social scientists are overly specialized they
don't read outside their disciplines they don't have the incentives to do something the world as a whole will find useful tlock is a wonderful shining counter example to that so academic incentives uh are working less well than I think they did 20 30 years ago including in the social sciences and that we need to fix it will be very hard
to do because existing structures are tightly locked in let's take a step step back in time back to 1900 I imagine that if you were alive then you'd say that the risk of human extinction in the next 100 years would be fairly low but then in in the 40s we had the shock where we developed nuclear weapons and suddenly I think we would both agree the risk of
human extinction or the collapse of civilization went up quite substantially because kind of for the first time we had the ability for like one person or one country to to basically wipe out most humans alive at the time what do you think of the chances that in the 21st century there'll be some new breakthrough that's kind of analogous to
nuclear weapons that will again give a level shift in kind of the annual risk of of human extinction the possibility that worries me the most is simply an equivalent amount of power being more portable I don't think it has to be a new technology it certainly might be but simply the cost of a nuclear weapon or something like it being much cheaper
bioweapons they're very hard to carry around and deploy but you could quite readily imagine that becoming easier it seems to me those are likely outcomes but terrorism in general I don't think we understand well so after 911 people thought there would be many more attacks and you can ask questions why don't they Des send a few people over the Mexican
border order they get here they buy submachine guns they show up like in a famous shopping mall and they take out 17 people they don't get any further than that but it's a massive publicity event and they this just happens every two or three weeks sort of a priori it almost sounds plausible but nothing like that has happened if anyone has done
that it's our native you know like white Americans who are not in the traditional sense terrorists so like it's clearly possible but they don't do it so when you ask you know How likely is someone to do something horrible with a pretty cheap decentralized highly destructive technology we don't even see them acting at the current Frontier of
destructiveness so what you need in terms of people who are like competent enough motivated enough coherent enough have a base to operate from how hard is it in the combinatorial sense for all those to come together we don't know but I think you thinking about it more you become a little more optimistic rather than less I think that's fair but it
seems like over time as our technology gets better like the number of people and the amount of expertise and yeah the amount of security that You' need in order to to pull off an operation like that is going down and down and down and eventually it could end up being a handful of people or even a single individual and perhaps breakthroughs in
biology are the the most likely cause of that do do you think that perhaps the risk that the annual risk of human extinction is going down or up there's like there's kind ofing factors here and I guess like the Improvement of technology in that sense is one thing that's pushing it up though I suppose we could also invent technologies that might give us the ability to to prevent
that from ever happening I think it will go up over the next Century I don't think it's going up right now I once asked some of my friends an interesting question if a single person by a sheer Act of will that they had to sustain for only five minutes could destroy you know a city of their choice how much time would have to pass before one individual
on Earth would take the action to destroy that city is it like it would occur in two seconds it would occur in 10 minutes it would occur within a year I don't think we know but no one should be optimistic about that scenario let's say that humans do continue for thousands perhaps millions of years but uh for reason we decide just to never
leave Earth and so we don't use any of the resources that are available elsewhere in which would be my prediction by the way I think space is overrated okay uh it seems like on your view that should be like a a horrific tragedy that almost all the value that that Humanity could have created has been lost in that case space is hard right so it's I'm not say sure but go on
yeah it's far there are severe physical strains you're subject to while you're being transported communication back and forth takes a very long time under plausible scenario iOS limited by the speed of light and what's really out there uh maybe there are exoplanets but when you have to construct atmosphere uh there's a risk diversification argument
for doing it but simply being under the ocean or high up in the sky or distant corners of the earth we're not about to run out of space or anything close to it so I don't really see what's the economic reason to have something completely external say to the solar system yeah so it seems like you're okay with the idea that we can turn yeah just
more matter and more energy into into more value it seems like so there's like uh what's five times by 10 to the to the 22 stars out there in in the accessible Universe at the moment admittedly as as like the galaxies reced it's declining by about a millionth per year but if you're in favor of growth and like creating more value it just seems like
almost all the value like no matter what you value it has to be out there in all that matter that we can reorganize just given your your your um desire for kind of growth on Earth I'm kind of I don't understand how it could be the case that you wouldn't be upset that like we might just stop at the boundaries of kind of the Earth's atmosphere oh I'm upset about it uh I'm
just not very optimistic so if you put me in the legislature you know I'll vote to increase funding for space exploration but just relative especially in the Bay Area relative to other people I speak to in this kind of Fringe group of intellectuals who think about space I'm more pessimistic than just about all of them but it's also that I'm more
optimistic about the Earth the ocean of course is enormous it could be platforms it could be underwater uh deserts places that can be Terror formed cities in the sky so you do want diversification protection against a big nuclear war maybe for that you need other planets you know there's the moon there's there's Mars they're actually big enough
to have diversification but but it does seem like no matter how uh you know hard we go on Earth at some point we'll just have like found the best configuration we can make for kind of all the matter and the energy that we can Harvest here and then in order to continue growing like and to avoid a plateau which is kind of terrible on your view uh that
the the only path is to go out and and like this this beautiful thing that once we go out into space and we start colonizing then we get cubic growth because we're like growing like a sphere I'm never going to vote no on that just some cautionary notes there is a history of imperialism where mostly European societies have grown and taken over
other parts of the globe and they did not in every way do maximum good to say the least and I worry about how we might treat societies we encounter we also May draw attention to ourselves as a Target or a threat I'll still vote Yes on the expenditures but I don't view it by any means this huge net positive it's something I also worry about a good deal
and I also just think our corner of the Galaxy will be wiped out before we get that far yeah it seems like to make this view stable it's so you have to think you're thinking that the probability of Extinction is uh High such that like you're pretty confident we'll never go to space but it's not so high enough that like that the overwhelmingly
important thing is to work on extinction right now or maybe or maybe you you maybe do think that what we should do is lower the risk of a catastrophe but like the best way to do that is via increasing the growth rate yes and let's say you're mod scenario is everything ends in 10,000 years that's still a long enough time Horizon where the long-term
results of higher growth now are very significantly positive for billions of humans and that will play the dominant role in a moral calculus yeah but the idea that somehow we're going to be sitting here 3 million years from now and I'll have my Galaxy and you have yours and we're not even human anymore and it's not even recognizable to
something from science fiction I would bet against that if we could arrange bets on it yeah so uh why do you think the we couldn't develop kind of self-replicating probes like I agree that humans are not going to travel to other galaxies that's way too hard but at some point we should be able to create kind of intelligence that somewhat resembles humans or might even
be better than humans uh in some form that is like easier to transport uh through space you know on computers or whatever the the future example of computers is and then that that kind of intelligence would have a much better shot at uh you know spreading spreading to the Stars it can travel much faster it's like much more resilient and then
it arrives there and starts like creating more copies of itself we don't see self-replicating probes from other parts of the universe now maybe we are those self-replicating probes in some way right we were seeded but the fact that we don't in an obvious way see them to me uh strengthens the case for pessimism yeah although you probably have read this paper that came out of
the future of humanity Institute the firmy Paradox is not nearly as absolute as people used to think but it's still an issue you still should update in basian terms that you don't see the aliens right yeah I I I agree that's worrying but because we have these alternative explanations that we might just be the chance event where where life began I still kind of have have
some hope that that we'll get there we'll be the first ones to to colonize at least this part of the universe I'm going to vote with you I can say for now cool so you're you know in favor of markets and kind of liberal governance but I see kind of two arguments here that that might justify an alternative approach so one is uh you're in favor of
uh economic like faster economic growth um and centrally planned economies in the past have been able to reinvest a much larger fraction of GDP in kind of future growth just building more factories rather than producing consumer goods then market economies have been able to so perhaps you might be interested in having some greater like
Central planning of the economy that would allow us to do much more investment through like science and technology or perhaps physical capital that will allow us to increase the economic growth rate what do you think of that well we need to become more concrete but the wealthiest Societies in today's world or for the most part the freest ones uh there's no guarantee that
will always hold but I think that's an argument for some kind of liberal freedom but if you look at say China since 1979 yes they grew because they became significantly Freer but I suspect they also did better keeping some elements of Communist Party rule in place than if they had say followed the advice of Western reformers and I think they you
know for the most part not on every decision but did the right thing so I think we need to recognize that yeah but that's not a centrally planned economy either it's because they gave up Central planning yeah but nonetheless they spent very heavily on infrastructure and still do uh and that in large part comes from the government yeah and so I guess we
don't want to give up the benefits of markets absolutely uh but I guess you'd be fairly happy if the United States just spent quite a lot more on supporting Science and Technology research and like perhaps the government built lots more infrastructure I would spend much more on Science and Technology when you say infrastructure I want to disaggregate but there are
certainly plenty of things I'd be willing to spend more but the idea that you just throw a trillion dollar bill at infrastructure and what ends up happening is the senators from Wyoming have their say and you just build a lot more roads and actually make climate change worse and you don't upgrade power G or do things very smart I don't want
to just uncritically endorse infrastructure that's to me can be a negative yeah I'm with you so then perhaps another argument for for lower liberalism would be uh you're saying that basically you think there's a high chance that humans are going to drive themselves to Extinction the reason is a lack of coordination and conflict one
possible cheap cheap energy right okay and cheap energy too much power too much power in like the hands of people the ability to destroy one another this is like a very severe problem perhaps in order to solve that problem we should be willing to have a world government kind of run towards a Singleton as Nick Bostrom calls it which would be like
kind of having one decision-making process that like is able to kind of control everyone else prevent conflicts even if it doesn't produce the optimal decisions at least we won't have Extinction we'll get like some uh be able to survive for a lot longer and get generate some more value even if this Singleton doesn't make like the absolute
best decisions that we might think of from a liberal point of view what do you think of that argument well it's hard enough to get the European Union to stay together and those countries have so much commonality of Interest I expect some further Nations after brexit to off over time try to get southeast Asia to agree even to like a local you know aian
being much stronger being an EU like phenomen simply impossible so it's a recipe for creating conflict I understand the appeal of the vision you know I'm all for an NAA I like multilateral institutions uh but I think it's the wrong way to go the UN is you know of some use but in many ways an impotent bureaucracy you would not want it ruling
over us you tend to recreate some of the worst aspects of national bureaucracy CES and then Infuse them into a least common denominator sort of politically correct institution that's just not very effective so I think that's the wrong path overall yeah so but could could you imagine perhaps that we we convinced like many people of this kind of long-term framework they share our
belief that uh Extinction is very possible and and would be a terrible catastrophe and so they're willing to make many concessions perhaps if you could just get kind of China and the United States to you know are band together to say yeah our top priority is avoiding Extinction and War so we're going to like work together very closely
you if not to control everything just to control access to the kinds of technologies that would potentially produce human extinction could you see like in the next you know 100 500 years that kind of uh you know cooperation to to to make Humanity more stable and civilization uh continue well there's already a great deal of international cooperation on nuclear weapons so right
now we're trying to manage the North Korean situation the cooperation is highly imperfect but it's remarkable how much is there when the Soviet Union was collapsing and there were you know possibly loose nuclear weapons there was a good deal of international cooperation to deal with that problem so we have you know very immediate successes near us
and could we do better absolutely but the idea of there being this general public movement where you get people to do the right thing by scaring them I think that's the opposite if our politics usually works uh voters like to live in denial and if you scare people too much with pite climate change they respond by thinking it's not actually
all that significant and I think some kind of more POS positive Vision you're more likely to get people on the sustainability bandwagon and that's one of the kind of backstories to my book I'm trying to give a positive Vision emphasizing less you know scaring the heck out of people and more here are the glories at the end of the road what you
can do you know for your descendant and world history and scaring people seems to backfire in politics yeah so we've been talking a lot about uh the possibility of of a nuclear apocalypse here uh and and that is like a somewhat trickier one to to figure out how to solve but you bring up climate change where it seems like it's a lot more tractable it's pretty clear like what
kinds of Technologies you could work on in order to you reduce the risk of like really run away climate change if we get unlucky do you think it's like particularly valuable for people to go and work on technologies that kind of differentially reduce the risk of catastrophes like climate change oh absolutely yeah and I think the last few
years a lot of those technologies have made more rapid progress than I would have thought yeah so like electric cars like fracking just the interest in China in cutting back on the aare pollution solar nuclear some of it's still on the drawing board but I think they really intend to do it and probably will so the progress in the fight against climate
change even in the last few years is much higher than people think even though we don't see the results yet in terms of you know measurements of carbon emissions I wouldn't quite say I'm an optimist but there have been big gains in the immediate past are there any other Technologies uh that you're excited about because they kind of
differentially improve civilizational stability well everyone talks about batteries but I often feel batteries are a mixed blessing so batteries of course would make it much easier to have green energy but batteries ALS also ease the decentralized storage of power and carrying around of destructive power so if instead of like a gun which is like
awful but it's hard to kill a thousand people just shooting a gun right if you have some kind of you know pack on your back with a battery and then an energy creating weapon that you just walk around with and you have crazy people doing this the way they do now with guns uh that worries me I still think on net you know better batteries are a plus but
cat both ways it seems like the most important technology from your point of view might be the ability to uh surveil people so that we can uh prevent any any group from um using really concentrated energy to to to to end human civilization but also kind of the social technology then to regulate that such that it doesn't lead to totalitarianism
you think a research into something like that could could be very valuable uh I worry a great deal about surveillance which of course has proceeded most rapidly in China if surveillance really would make us safer uh that would be an argument for it but surveillance tends to corrupt your rulers and it tends to increase the returns to being in charge and I think
over time it increases the chances of say aou d'a or political instability in China even though you have more stability at the ground level uh you may have less stability at the top but I think this is one of the two or three biggest issues facing the world right now what are we going to do with surveillance and AI facial and gate
recognition I don't think we know what to do would say I more worry about it than applaud it yeah I think I think I'm with you I'm not sure whether like more surveillance or less surveillance is is is better right now but I guess it seems like finding better ways to to govern surveillance given that we're probably going to have quite a lot of it so that
it doesn't lead to these negative political outcomes could be like extremely important research question that more things tanks should be looking into and it's quite possibly true that the gains in surveillance we've had so far are what have limited some of the potential squl attacks to 911 we we can't know that for sure as Outsiders but many people suggest this is probably
the case yeah so in terms of ways that Humanity might end we've got kind of nuclear war just kind of a great power war between the US and China even setting aside nuclear weapons we've got climate change and I guess we're both concerned about just like new power like new technologies that would really concentrate energy that would allow you
know allow a lot of destructive power what do you think about per perhaps a fifth one on that list which is kind of a negative Global totalitarianism because technology allows like a negative political order to stabilize Itself by monitoring people too much well that may happen in China so one scenario is the Chinese government will simply clamp down on opposition through
surveillance and that will will be stable for a very long period of time that might make Society in China worse but I don't see why it's destabilizing even if it's undesirable oh no I mean I don't think it would be destabilizing the problem is would be very stable but like bad would still lose most of the value because perhaps we've locked in a
bunch of you know negative or neutral moral values that's one of my big worries for the forthcoming future you mentioned climate change I don't think it's an existential risk I do think the expected costs are maybe higher than than most people one to admit but the notion that it would wipe out human civilization as we know it you would
need a very extreme scenario I don't think that's very likely I agree with you yeah I think it's unlikely that climate change could could lead to Extinction I mean maybe it could like lead to significant loss of life I guess one possible way it could go is that it turns out to be like the temperature increase is much more than we expect so
we get like more like 6 to 9 degrees of warming this like sets us back economically which like sets off you know triggers like a negative Cascade of consequences the worry most worrisome scenario keep in mind that regular air pollution and I don't carbon based just air pollution right now it kills six to seven million people a year obviously a
large number now some of those are older people or frail people they might have died soon anyway but still it's a number hardly anyone talks about climate change right now is not killing 6 to7 million people a year and this we just absorb and move on so as you indicated a lot of the risk climate change is how it might set off other kinds of conflict yeah or
or kind of just the tale that we've totally mismeasured how it's going to affect the climate um I think this this is like relatively unlikely but perhaps it's still worth worry you know having some people worry about or we could do bad geoengineering and make the world too cold okay uh let's move on to some other things in the in the book that I
wasn't entirely convinced by you make the argument in one of the chapters that even though kind of our actions seem to have like very large and morally significant effects on the long run that that doesn't necessarily mean that we have you know incredibly onerous moral duties that we don't necessarily have to set aside all of our projects in order
to you know maximize the the growth rate of GDP or or improve you know civilization stability what's what's your case then well I do think you have an obligation to act in accordance with maximizing the growth rate of GDP but given how human beings are built that's mostly going to involve leading you know a pretty selfish life trying to earn
more uh having a family you know raising your children well it's close to in sync with common sense morality which to me is a plus of my argument what it's telling you to do doesn't sound so crazy you don't have to re-engineer human nature so if someone from more of a rep Peter Singer Direction says well all the doctors have to run off to Africa like
people won't do that uh we can't and shouldn't coerce them into doing that and the notion that by living a quote unquote good life but making some improvements at the margin that that's what you're obliged to do I find that very appealing it's like change at the margin small steps toward a much better world that's the subheader on marginal Revolution it's also a more salable
Vision but I think that it Accords with long-standing moral intuitions like shows it's on the right track yeah okay so it seems like given your framework of long-termism like the moral consequences of our actions are like much larger than what most people think when they're only thinking about the the short-term effects of their actions so in that
sense that the moral consequences are like should like bear bear on us more than they otherwise do well but it's very tricky though if you go around telling people everything you do is going to change the whole world uh they're going to get pissed off at you uh they're going to tune you out so this a Stussy and undercurrent in the book
like the long term's really important but people still need to focus to some extent on the short term to get to the long term they can only handle so much computationally so it's not that I think the right answer is for everyone to be like so attuned to the exact correct moral theory they're going to use rules of thumb we're going to rely on Common
Sense morality whether we like it or not you know even professional philosophers will and that's okay is one thing I'm saying just always seek some improvement at the margin yeah so so on The View that uh you know increasing GDP is uh like a very important thing for people to do or like among the most valuable things that they could do do you think
that like people who are taking holidays for example or people who just like aren't you know starting the business that would that would grow as much as possible or perhaps you know people who could go work in think tanks and do economic reform that would increase GDP much more than what they're doing right now would would you at least and let's
say that they do have some moral concerns so you're not not so concerned about them like misreading your argument or or getting angry and rejecting it would you say to those people that they do kind of have a duty to do absolutely and I try to encourage them all the time I try to hire them you know into think tanks reseearch centers it's one of my
goals in the more practical side of my life so absolutely yeah so let's say it were the case that um you know the best way to to increase growth or to increase civilizational stability uh was to give you know a very large amounts of money from or to give away most of the income that you had to like very poor people who could earn like a greater rate of
return uh would you kind of advocate for people for people doing that absolutely I'm a big fan of private philanthropy there are quite a few very wealthy people who have pledged to give away most of their Fortune I'm a big advocate of that I'm not sure they're all giving it away in the right manner yeah and maybe you know they do have an obligation to think
more critically about how they're giving it so of course but keep in mind giving money to poor people does not always increase the rate of return uh sometimes wealthier people can earn yet more with the money and give more away later so it's not that you should always redistribute now yeah so another argument you make is that you want you
want to have like a strong grounding for human rights but it seems like on this long- termist framework uh it's it's possible that the you know the consequences of actions could be so vast that it would kind of dominate any any rights concerns then I guess you make this argument that kind of uncertainty about the consequences of our actions
kind of gives us a reason to uh like still respect human rights do you want to put that argument well let's give a concrete example right now in the Northwestern part of China the Chinese government is creating camps and detaining large numbers of people by some estimates up to a million now some people in the Chinese government say well this is going to help us in the
longer run we'll be more stable you know we'll grow more rapidly I'm very skeptical of that but you know you might say well there's some chance they're right think it's unlikely but but let's say you believe that there are gross violations of human rights when there's this deep uncertainty about the future you're not comparing directly well
detaining all these people versus The Brighter richer future it's like a lottery ticket and the lottery ticket is so uncertain it's easier to respect the human rights you just say well look these are gross violations of Rights there's really not a guaranteed payoff at all it's highly uncertain at best it may even be destabilizing and then I'll
just say just don't do it and your consequentialist conscience you know is not knocking on the side of your skull so hard yeah but it it seems like you've got like massive uncertainty kind of on both sides of the Ledger here when you're comparing you know the uh the thing where you like violate human rights but you get some massive uh you
know GDP gain versus the case where you don't and you don't get the GDP gain it's true that there's like massive like it's possible that both it's entirely plausible that both of the actions could be both very positive and very negative because the future is just so unforeseeable but I don't see why it kind of breaks in favor of the of of the
like human rights uh case rather than just like increasing GDP CU it's like better in expected value terms again if you think there's any case for deontology at all there's not an argument deontology can wield to overturn the consequentialist conclusion in consequentialist terms you're just stuck with don't do it so nowhere in the book do I try to outline how far do
those human rights extend it's partly beyond the sphere of my expertise also I'm genuinely uncertain but it seems to me that their sphere is not zero not so absolute that everything or even most things are about deontology yeah I wasn't sure whether to challenge you on this because I think I actually like I think it is good to promote the idea of
Human Rights and to and to lock those into law gets both for moral uncertainty reasons that it's possible that just like yeah violating human rights is just absolutely wrong and no no number of consequences can compensate and also just because it seems like a better rule to follow that in fact it will lead to a better future like because like GDP is
and everything to be like institutions matter a lot more and concerned for we as well and I fully admit I punt on the human rights issue that the book is about growth I just want to reassure people you don't have to go crazy and become an evil person to maximize growth but it would require another book actually a much longer one and a lot of
books should be organized around just you know one idea one key idea in the book you talk you say that you're in favor of kind of moral pluralism so there's like many different things that are some that are morally valuable and like trading off between them might be kind of hard and one thing that you mentioned is that you think that like great art potentially has like intrinsic
moral value regardless of kind of the the effects that it has on you know people's conscious States so I'm curious to know what would you think of a case where like say there was another Universe where you know there was no life there was no consciousness but then by some like crazy you know natural phenomenon there was a planet that ended
up covered with kind of the great artistic artworks from Earth but like no one ever got to see them but they just kind of arose naturally would that be better than like the the same universe but without that that that artwork on that planet arising naturally it seems to me it would be better there's more intrinsic value of some kind but I would
stress none of the arguments in the book depend on that no it's just another part of the bundle that might count as a positive I guess given that really you know all you can know is your own conscious States how do you get this knowledge that kind of art is intrinsically valuable given that you kind of can't perceive the like art directly it seems to me there's
something valuable about Humanity reaching its Highest Potential say through the works of classical music or some of the greatest painters that is not strictly reducible to the number of people paying money for it or enjoying it at any point in time and at some points in time that number may be zero so simply having achieved certain kinds
of semi- perfectionist Peaks to me is part of the pluralist bundle but again I think it's important that we have arguments robust to those who are skeptical that that should count at all yeah I agree that's ABS absolutely not not decisive in the book in general I thought you might say that the planet case is um not so useful because it
lacks the achievement aspect because it just arose through like erosion or something rather than through anyone actually accomplishing anything and and it's kind of the accomplishment that that you're valuing well both but if there are beautiful natural structures as there are there may be intrinsic value to the natural beauty above and beyond who is able to see them at any
point in time do you worry that kind of this Reliance on like intuitions about the value of particular things or you know how we ought to respond to particular cases is kind of vulnerable to kind of um evolutionary debunking arguments that you know it's like we think that streams are particularly beautiful or like you know fertile lands
look particularly beautiful it seems like we don't really want to say that like in some fundamental objective sense like all aliens for example ought to Value you know the appearance of like streams or painting paintings of natural scenes that seems like a very kind of idiosyncratic human thing rather than a fundamental Moral Moral principle what
what what do you make of that philosophers often overuse ethical intuitionism so sometimes I'll read a philosophy in public affairs piece and I'm always just wishing they would write down axioms and argue for or against the axioms but like here's one comparison they make and then another and you read through the piece there are 17 different
comparisons and you're all supposed to think about them a particular way because these intuitions are supposed to be obvious to us all and those intuitions evolve in a darwinian sense and we should be skeptical about a lot of them if you're trying to find what's the intuition you should be least skeptical about I would say it's lives that are like much richer happier and
full of these plural values to an extreme degree compared to other lives even there we can't be sure but that seems a kind of ground rock if you won't accept that I don't know how there's any discourse but kind of who should get the kidney or different pieces you know on abortion or redistribution all these results they seem to me quite
sociologically class specific in a way way the philosophers themselves are not willing to admit I guess there's this big trade-off in philosophy between kind of having A Simple Theory a parsimonious theory that only has a few pieces and then like being able to like match the common sense intuitions we have about kind of every case or about every claim
I guess I'm like in the field of philosophy specifically like in favor of parsimony and against kind of following common sense or like having very complicated theories in in other domains I think like we need to use common sense and like and accept a loss of parsimony where where do you fall in that Spectrum closer to Common Sense than you are so
may not have much metaphysical standing morally speaking but the world is ruled by Common Sense people behave in accord with common sense so it's probably counterproductive to stray too far from common sense so a good ethical Theory which has to has a practical component it should be in accord with a lot of common sense but revise other parts of
it and you need both and if the theory is either too much just matching the intuitions or totally overturning all of them I get suspicious and again this idea of revise at the margin it seems to me how we make progress in science in business so maybe it's how we should try to make progress in ethics too it has a pretty good track record in this book
kind of the influence of the um philosopher Derek parfett is like clearly really vast what do you think parfett was most wrong about and and and perhaps what what do you think he was most right about that's um unappreciated today not too long before he died parfit gave a talk I think it's still on YouTube I think it was at Oxford it was on effective altruism and he spoke maybe
for 90 minutes and he never once mentioned economic growth never talked about gains in emerging economies never mention China and I'm not sure he said anything in the talk that was wrong but that Omission strikes me as so badly wrong that the whole talk was misleading it was all about redistribution which I think has a role but economic growth is
much better when you can get it so not knowing enough about some of the social sciences and seeing the import of growth is where he was most wrong I think where he was most important is simply being the The Walking living breathing embodiment of the philosopher who is obsessively curious and will plumb the depths of any argument to such an
extreme degree like has never been seen before on planet Earth he was just remarkable and that's why he and his work have influenced so many people I'm not sure which of his conclusions stand up or even what his conclusions are he's not about conclusions he's about philosophizing in the socratic sense and for that he was just such a Marvel I
wish more people could have like known and seen and heard him yeah uh it was hugely influential on me and and a lot of other people that's where sh he not not with us anymore I guess who do you see as his um kind of philosophical successes I I guess I think of kind of um Nick Nick Bostrom at the future of humanity Institute perhaps Nick Beckstead who wrote um this great
dissertation on the on the overwhelming importance of shaping the the long-term future are there other people who you think like we should now now look to in in in Lou of parfit I'm big fans of the two Nicks you mentioned I don't think of them as substitutes for parfit I think they're doing something quite different like Nick Bostrom has an engineering
mentality to his work that parfit never did like what can we do what should we do how do we apply resources maybe it's like the next step but like who is the next socres uh we will see probably it will be someone from quite an unexpected Corner perhaps you know I would also mention two influential figures nosic and RWS RWS influenced a lot of people
but when you read RWS on growth and the future it's incoherent so RWS is afraid of economic growth at times he seems to endorse a stationary State because like any savings makes the first generation worse off and they're the least well-off people that to me is a reductio on rs's argument the entire argument to me also and that should not have had as much
influence as it has had though it's a wonderful book you learn a lot from it and rs was a very impressive figure an noic I think his actual views which you see in his later works involve a clear understanding that economic growth is good but in Anarchy state in Utopia it's all about deontology and that doesn't work like the actual intuition that
drives the wilch Chamberlain example well poor people spend money on Wilt Chamberlain they enjoy it Wilt ears money is that that this is part of some broader process of growth that will Elevate many many people not just that it's good if you know some poor youth can pay money to see wit play basketball so he never brought out what really was
making his argument sck yeah Hassani had I think a much better version of the veil of ignorance kind of argument that advocated in favor of something like total utilitarianism and then I feel like it was ruined by rules but that that his Like rules Theory it turned out was like much more popular and got a lot more play what do you think's going on
there and do you agree with me like people should go back to the original H veil of ignorance I agree I I don't favor either veil of ignorance but RS was at Harvard RS was a professional philosopher he was connected in the right way his book came along at the right time when people wanted a rationale for a particular kind of social democracy the way in which Ry in
like the principles of Liberty and then maximan principle and like what can be good for everyone the way all those interact I I tend to think is not coherent and there are many slights of hand in theory of Justice not just the problem with economic growth in future generations and savings rates and it's a brilliant book how well he disguised
those it's a kind of Master Class in the philosophy of Disguise is how I admire the book so what's the the most likely way that the worldview that you're presenting in southern attachments would be fundamentally wrong if the pessimistic scenario is correct history is cyclical uh we're going to undergo some kind of retrograde process like
there will be some future we're not all going to but the amount of value in that future is not high enough for the option of continued growth through the future to be the dominant one deciding what it is we should do and there's a pretty good chance that's correct and I'm wrong yeah let's let's work to make that false what would Tyrone have to say about the book
well I think Tyrone would endorse the pessimistic view that the future is not so Grand and glorious uh it doesn't have the power the moral power I attribute to it and that we just ought to have more of a kind of Nichi and Scramble for the here and now and there is no final adjudicator of these clashing values and morality becomes not so much
deontological but for Tyrone it would become relativistic and almost nihilistic and that's what Tyrone said to me about this book and he bugs me all the time I try to shut him up uh but I can't do it yeah maybe we can get him on the 80,000 hours podcast sometime it seems like the the argument is like really robust though because even if there's like a 10% chance that the you
know the future will would be very big and glorious that that should still like Loom extremely large in our like Moral Moral Vision I agree but let me make another argument against myself and that's the Pascal's wager argument so let's say like sustained growth has a value approaching Infinity but the chance we can ever get there it's not
10% it's like 1% so if we're not persuaded by Pascal's wage or a small chance of a really large payoff and other context like whether or not we should believe in the deity maybe I'm offering the new version of Pascal's wager like Decay is really pretty likely the future doesn't extend that far there's like a 1% chance it does and I'm
trying to religiously preach to people to believe believe in that future make it self fulfilling get people to believe but I'm playing my own Pascal's wager game and I'm not saying Pascal's wager is always wrong but we know it's problematic it's not convincing per se yeah and if you're looking for problems in the book maybe that's another one
yeah I have an episode with the philosopher Amanda ascal where we talk about yeah problems with infinite ethics and pascar wer which we can stick up a link to it's like it rais a lot of issues that we don't really have time for here okay now in in the middle of these discussions there's usually a segment called overrated versus underrated I'll toss out the names of
some things I'm not sure whether you're aware of this but uh you're free to pass on any how does it work am I free to pass yeah maybe I know I'm metaphysically free to pass but won't won't it disgrace me to pass on one of them all right uh Chinese moral values well that's a big thing Chinese moral values if what you mean is like that China as a nation has invested a
lot in infrastructure that's gone very well for them if you mean the philosophy of Confucianism I think it's given them some periods of high political instability and some other periods Song Dynasty today of great success and it has a very mixed record Confucianism probably has done best in Singapore so uh I'm not sure what I should take
Chinese moral values to mean but China has been the world's leading civilization for several thousand years and we should definitely respect that the Deep State you mean how much it exists or how much I like it uh how good it is yeah I don't believe in a conspiratorial notion of the deep State now is it true that there are people say in the Washington area who work for
intelligence agency es who have outcomes they wish to come about and sometimes leak strategically to the media to help those outcomes come about or they might even trade intelligence to other people to shift at the margin political maneuvering I think there's some of that I don't think it's nearly the force that some people now are suggesting it is so
it's overrated by people who mention it probably underrated by the majority of Americans who aren't even really aware of it at all but I would have a pretty modest sense of what the Deep state is really about Tristan who the island between South America and and Africa I think it has the smallest permanent population of of any Island
since I didn't know about it it must be underrated I've never been there of course yeah uh NATO NATO has been underrated for a long time it's why it has frayed so Putin took deliberate pokes at NATO and indeed beat down NATO's credibility by seizing or disrupting various parts of territory that were not in NATO but NATO might have done more about and right now NATO
is alling Trump attacks NATO uh we would like to resurrect a feasible version of NATO I fear that maybe we can't but I view this as one of the great tragedies in the world today Americans don't seem to mind so I'll say definitely underrated intersectionality intersectionality is grossly underrated by people on the right so intersectionality I take to be the
notion that if you're a member of more than one either minority group or group that's discriminated against you're kind of multiple membership in discriminated groups creates problems for you in a potentially nonlinear fashion but the kind of social justice warriors on the left far overstate uh the problems of intersectionality so it's an idea that
ought to be considered important uh it should be embraced by the middle and not attacked or you know celebrated on the two extremes so the idea is not where it should be it's become overly politicized we need to resurrect a more sensible version of it Guamanian Cuisine uh I've never had Guamanian Cuisine there's a restaurant in San Francisco closing I'm
told in two weeks that serves Guamanian Cuisine and I've never been to Guam it's not that high in my list of places to go so it's probably underrated right because most Cuisine is pretty good if you get the right cook uh Gary con you mean who was in the Trump Administration yeah I don't know uh in general if you worked for the Trump Administration
early on you might have had the notion you can do a lot to make things better and I respected that Choice when people made it it seems to me now things were so chaotic and running in such strange unpredictable and often destructive directions I tend to think most people should not be working in the Trump Administration he signed on at a time
when maybe there was more promise so uh probably somewhat underrated but I don't think he was very effective choosing to pass on questions in overrated and underrated more people should answer underrated overrated ated rather than pass because you're not expected to give a final answer it's understood it's all about basy and updating and what small
piece of wisdom can you bring to bear on what others know so the idea that you can't give some perfect answer or you only want to talk about your specialty I think that's a copout no one in real life behaves that way so just because you have this artificial distinction between academic knowledge and practical knowledge that you don't want to say
something for fear you'll look bad uh I don't see why you know give it a shot what's the harm I guess yeah I I find overrated and and underrated somewhat frustrating at times because I feel like most things are just appropriately rated like the market is generally right uh and so but people very rarely rarely defer to that you guess almost never say
that things are appropriately rated do you think people should at least say appropriately rated more often once you consider diversity of opinion arguably nothing is appropriately rated right someone rates it appropriately but it depends whether you're asking an objective or subjective question it's ambiguous right but you always have the
option of threading out who over rates and underrates it and I tried to do that in some of my answers you know some things unemployment insurance is that appropriately rated like maybe that is but for the most part there's more you can say yeah all right being an intellectual dilaton it's begging the question to call it a dilaton I think Academia is not producing enough
generalists who produce information that a broader well-educated intelligent public can consume uh if someone wants to call them dilatant you know fine but I would say underrated okay so I guess being a journalist underrated underrated but of course I am a generalist but a generalist am is also a specialist uh I sometimes say I specialize in being a
generalist and it's a specialty too it's not different from specializing you're just specializing in different things okay uh let's push on to substantive questions that that on about the book what are one or two of the most important things that individuals could do to raise economic growth in your view listeners especially I think most people
are actually pretty good at knowing their weaknesses they're often not very good at knowing their talents and strengths and I include Highly Successful People you ask them to account for their success and they'll resort to a bunch of cliches which are probably true but not really getting at like exactly what they are good at so if I asked you like Robert wiblin what
exactly are you good at I suspect your answer isn't good enough so just figuring that out and investing more in kind of friend support network peers who can help you realize that Vision people still don't do enough of that what are one or two things of the most impactful things that uh individuals listening might be able to do do to uh you know
improve civilizational stability and resilience and you know make Humanity last for longer other than other than increasing the growth right well they can vote wisely of course innovate more in their careers is not an option for everyone but for many people in terms of abusive substances just stop doing them right uh even if they know their own use
is stable to set an example for others create a global norm and uh take Common Sense morality pretty seriously so you think kind of alcoholism like increases the risk of human extinction materially I would say it lowers our rate of economic growth uh lowers the rate of innovation in the long run we're much worse off so indirectly that leads to a
somewhat higher chance of the future collapsing I don't think directly it's going to have that effect guess given how much kind of conflict between China and the US looms is like an existential risk within the foreseeable future what about doing things like increasing immigration between those countries so trying to bring lots of you know Chinese
people into the United States to make it less likely that that fight or you know running scholarships to get the elite to move between these two countries so they're all friends and are less likely to want to go to war I favor both of those policies I'm not sure we know how they will affect existential risk or the risk of a conflict we've had many many
Chinese come to the United States many have gone back to China uh I'm not sure they advocate for onet policies that lower uh risk maybe because they're more educated some people in the United States are becoming paranoid about how many Chinese are educating I think on net a wealthier China even an unfree undemocratic China is in the interests
of the US I guess yeah so so one option is that you know migrants come here and then they go back and they talk about how nice the United States is in some ways or at least they like feel some relationship with it so it's not such a distant Place another option would just be you know having 10 million Chinese people living in the United States such
that the the idea of like attacking the us or you know having conflict with the US seems like it's also harming Chinese citizens what do you think of that I don't think that would affect the calculus of the Chinese government very much if it came to a a major war I think they would be willing you know to make sacrifices like that but I don't think
the Chinese government thinks at all about attacking the United States the real chance of conflict would be something to do with North Korea or the South China Sea or even India or Japan where there's a miscalculation and it might lead to weapons of mass destruction being exchanged but not that the Chinese are going to wake up like now's the day we
attack the United States far more likely the US thinks that about China if anything what about you know becoming a peace activist or something who you know Advocates you know that the South China Sea is just not worth destroying the world over uh like Advocates just being very reluctant to to have any significant war with a major power well
the Chinese have already had their way in the South China Sea we may have arrived at that outcome whether we wanted it or not I don't know how influential peace activists are on many issues they were influential in getting us out of the Vietnam War so there are clearly some cases of success but the emotions of Voters run so high in foreign policy and the elites
are so oriented toward other considerations I'm not sure a lot of Peace activism really matters much yeah do you think a lot of listeners should potentially go join Philip tetlock's research agenda as a way of like having more foresight about the problems we'll face and how we might solve them the people who have the talents where they can contribute to tatlock's work
absolutely yeah speaking of tlock are there any you know really important questions in economics or social science that like what would be your like top three questions that you'd love to see get more attention well what's the single question is hard to say but in general the role of what is sometimes called culture like what is culture how
does environment matter I'm sure you know the twin studies where you have identical twins separated at Birth and they grow up in two separate environments and they seem to turn out more or less the same that's suggesting some kinds of environmental differences don't matter but then if you simply look at different countries people who grow
up say in Croatia compared to people who grow up in Sweden they have quite different Norms attitudes practices so when you're controlling the environment that much surrounding culture matters a great deal so what are the margins where it matters and doesn't uh what are the mechanisms that to me is one important question a question that will become
increasingly important is why do face-to-face interactions matter why don't we only interact with people online teach them online have them work for us online it seems that doesn't work you need to meet people but what is it is it the ability to kind of look them Square in the eye in Meet space is it that you have your peripheral vision picking up other things they do is it
that sub consciously somehow you're you're smelling them or taking in some other kind of input like what's really special about face to face how can we measure it how can we try to recreate that through AR or VR I think that's a big Frontier question right now it would help us boost productivity a lot uh those would be two examples of issues I
think about how to make philanthropy better so everyone says measure results I think it's become a cliche it's trivial it's begging the question like what is you're measuring what counts as good what counts as bad might it not be the case Cas a lot of initiatives will do better by not trying to measure results and do better getting outliers
rather than homogenizing giving with everyone running after the same easy to measure kinds of results so okay if it's not measure results what is it then we need more philanthropic experiments and to think about them critically those to me are some of the frontier issues right now if the whole economics discipline uh came around to our view you having a
deep uh kind of concern for the long-term future like what negle topics do you think they might spend a lot more time on I don't think economists are the main problem I would like to see more economists speak to the public it's not really like a single issue but just take what they know and present it more often in digestible form and take greater care
to take in a broader set of inputs from others I do get that would involve them working harder but we've already decided that's their moral obligation so I'm happy to lecture them about that I think economics is one of the healthiest disciplines it's pretty scientific uh there's not that much fraud in it compared to most other parts of you know
science or semi science so overall I'm not a huge critic of Economics it's working pretty well compared to most things what fraction of academics if they were going to try to do as much good as possible uh would significantly change their their research agenda well they all would change it significantly is a tricky word uh I think a lot of schools people
should not do research at all and should devote more attention to teaching that would probably be the single biggest change so they would significantly change their agenda by abolishing it that has to be a significant change right yeah go from K to zero in percentage terms it's a big change how do you know if you're the kind of person
who should do teaching or focus on teaching I think most people actually already know but there are incentive structures where a lot of schools who should not be requiring Publications for tenure are requiring it and people you know trod Through the Motions of doing their dutiful like seven Publications in lower tier journals and I think they
know that system screwed up so I don't think figuring it out is problem it's fixing the incentives of the schools who want to try to like punch above their weight and it ends up being a zero or negative some game How likely is it the case that uh the most important thing to track is not the global economic growth rate but rather uh the relative growth
rate of you know countries that have the best moral values versus those that have like relatively worse moral values that is kind of a more manikian vision of of of the future where it's like the right people have to have like power and influence it's a very good question I don't think we can say which countries have the best moral value
a lot of people will tell you that's the United States but our longer run history is a pretty brutal one and we've treated a lot of disadvantaged groups uh very badly if you look at a lot of smaller countries they've done a lot less wrongdoing but they also were not in a position to so to kind of glorify them as the model to copy I think is begging
the question because if they had more power well what would they have done we don't know so I think of it more in terms of strand or Tendencies we want to encourage in all the countries and the so-called like bad evil countries so many people can be so good or good at heart or maybe even partly because they're in a bad country like in the former Soviet Union bonds of friendship
often were stronger so I think we need to unpack the whole notion of like the better and worse countries and mostly be a lot more self-critical about our own country whichever one that may be do you think that people overstate or understate kind of the differences uh both like morally and otherwise between people in in different countes I think
they overstate the differences uh most people are selfish in a wide variety of situations and their environments change they can be much better or much worse but to really say like these are the bad people uh I'm pretty reluctant to do that so we should be more willing to kind of defer and uh you know just give a free free birth to to other countries
and less less interested in you know conflict to contain them well I don't think that follows I guess I agree with what you're saying uh but the mere fact that the ordinary citizens and some country might be better than it seems doesn't itself mean we shouldn't intervene if you look at what NATO did in former Yugoslavia it seems to me that
was actually a good intervention it worked out well and you can think that was a good idea without thinking they were all evil people which I don't think at all I've been to all of those countries but Montenegro and like have had a lot of fond connections with people who lived there and were alive at the time so I'd say it's pretty separate
questions yeah so looking back from today uh people often say that you know one of the most important things in the 21st century was that the United States developed nuclear weapons before uh you know the Nazis did and that it was like it could be of like very great long-term significance that the US developed nuclear weapons first and then the
Soviet Union um next rather than some other group of countries looking forward you know 500 years from now you know How likely is it that we might look back and say you know the details of how some like really important technology developed like who got it first and how they applied it early on was kind of like the the decisive issue of you know
how the 21st century went in the scheme of things there's a very good chance that matter matters and as you know China and actually also Russia are experimenting pretty furiously with many new kinds of weapons cyber weapons United States is probably ahead of them in most cases I'm not even sure we always want the United States to be ahead yeah expend on that if you take uh
say cyber weapons uh we don't know how much damage they can do but it could be that some weaker but kind of quote unquote more evil countries having more powerful cyber weapons could bring about a sense of balance I think one of the big trends in the world today is that the superp powerful countries are much weaker compared to kind of mid-level
emerging economies than they were 30 years ago so a place like turkey or Saudi Arabia kind of in total net military and geopolitical terms those countries have much more clout than they did not long ago and that makes the United States China also Russia quite a bit weaker people don't talk about this much but you have many more Regional Powers with
a lot of sway maybe that's stabilizing I don't know it seems more likely that it would be destabilizing to have a more multipolar world with like lots of different actors that you know cuz like any one conflict can be extremely dangerous and he've got like more more uh connections between the different actors that matter but you might be more
robust so the old story is like two polarities of power versus many and then the two looks pretty stable right deterrence USA USSR but if it's three compared to a world with many centers of power I don't know that three is very stable didn't SRA say like three people as hell or like seven is seven a stable number uh we don't know very much so it
could just be once you get out of two-party stability you want a certain flattening and maybe some parts of the world will have conflicts uh that are undesirable but nonetheless by having the major Powers keep their distance that's better maybe so the world seems more resilient today uh in in that it's richer and so we have like we can like
lose a lot of GDP without starving on on the other hand it seems less stable less resilient uh because we're all interconnected such that a disaster anywhere like a disease can can spread everywhere very quickly and there's nowhere that's protected from it if we could potentially uh like bif the world into two totally separate like halves that that barely had any contact with
one another or you had to go through a quarantine in order to get to the other half would that hypothetically be a good idea in order to increase you know sustainability if you could start off with there being two separate planets operating independently and half the population on each that would be better but given where we're at I don't think
there's a way for that divorce to go amicably and even in a much earlier time so smallpox does spread to the new world it's true it kind of spreads slowly but it still kills millions of people so prevention of pandemics also spreads more quickly and it's striking we haven't other than HIV had a major pandemic of the flu or smallpox kind in some time and maybe that's because a
number of positive things have spread it may just be good luck M yeah we've had a had a few near misses but it does it's unclear whether the risk is greater or lower it might be lower so it could be how is the economics profession kind of directly and significantly improved the lives of people on Earth over the last 75 years what are the most important
breakthroughs public health is the biggest Breakthrough by no means is at all or even mostly economists but economists and economic ways of thinking have played a big role in allocating resources the general notion that economies should be relatively free and capitalistic economists have been the major carrier of that notion maybe some
sides of that have been overrated but on the whole it's been a massively positive development that you've had a Hong Kong and a Singapore and a Japan and a South Korea is because of the longer term influence of economists uh and in turn those led to having a China just the general level of expertise in emerging economies Again by no means is it all or
even mainly economists much higher than it was a few decades ago and those are much better run places foreign aid is better allocated so General technocratic means of thinking economics being a part of it it's had a very very strong track record over the last century yeah uh you mentioned earlier the fact that particular matter from coal and cars uh
kills way more people than than than we imagine or than most people think and and causes like all kinds of other other health issues and kind of my view is that you know the US should be like racing to eliminate coal even setting aside climate change just because of the public health gains why doesn't that happen why why are people shouting in
the streets about this yeah most people don't care most people don't know about it it's not a politically divisive issue where there's one side motivated to do a great deal for it but also where most of the deaths come are in poor economies and it's hard to substitute away from Co and a lot of it is indoor burning of fuels uh there is a great amount of low
hanging fruit there limiting that but it's not easy for anyone to sort of get their paws into manipulating those decisions so I don't think it's an easy problem if it were an easy problem we would have a much stronger movement to fix it now the way you do with some of the public health issues like let's Stamp Out malaria polio polio has gone
further than malaria but I think malaria will come about as well it's I wouldn't say it's an easy target but it's easy to identify you more or less know what you have to do we're mostly doing it yeah Uber ran rough show over laws all over the place but in the process increased GDP a lot on on balance should we think that Uber is good or bad of course it's
good right and we use it if Uber had had to ask permission it might never have happened it might have been oh you can do a thousand trial vehicles and 20 years later we'll re revisit this but they just did it it was wonderful it was amazing it's the kind of behavior I think we should have more of as I've argued in several places and like you
say it maximizes growth of GDP it fits my standard so of course I'm going to endorse it don't you worry that there could be significant downsides for reducing respect for the rule of law and that that kind of institution well as I understand what Uber did in the United States it was not against the law simply no one had thought to write a law Banning ride sharing because it hadn't
occurred to people so if there's a kind of empty legal space and you do something that's permitted I think that's fine should you always have to ask permission for anything you do uh that would be a tyrannical regime so when like local governments ban just ordinary economic activity do you think people have kind of any reason to follow
those laws if if they can get away with it or or are those laws just unjust and in fact they don't give us any reasons for Action uh the laws are unjust but I don't in general Advocate people breaking the law I think they should work to change laws there are some laws where the rights infringement on individuals is so great you are justified in actually rebelling against
the law but but opening a taco truck isn't isn't as severe as that correct so if taco trucks you know are banned in a city and that's a bad law as it usually is that everyone goes Rogue I think has some negative longrun consequences so I don't think that's the best strategy arguably immigration restrictions are the greatest human rights violation or
among the greatest human rights violations should then people be willing to violate immigration law if they can get away with it well there's different layers of immigration law there's the law that's on the books and that's not the law which anyone intends so the law is put on the books with the understanding that there will be a
certain level of illegal immigration and this is desired and tolerated so I think you have to understand the law often is something richer and more complex than what's written and uh the margins of illegal immigration we have had in the United States I do not in general object to there may be particular cases you know a murderer came to this country and
so on but uh you know what the law says has some ambiguity to it all right let's talk about animals for a moment you almost certainly think it's wrong to to cause animals to suffer no no I don't I don't think suffering per se all else equal I don't think all else can be equal I think it's wrong to raise animals and factory farms and design
large scale efficient institutions to torture them I would say that's wrong but animals live in a malthusian world they don't have these cones of sustainable economic growth and a lot of their lives are just suffering anyway and if we're kind of of making them suffer in our preferred way at the margin I don't think that's necessarily wrong but but you think that the
suffering that we're causing animals systematically in farms is is wrong absolutely least intelligent animals uh so in light of that like is abstaining from eating meat like a Mor moral diet all else equal sure yeah and it helps with climate change if Humanity continues for another thousand years do you think we'll take significant steps
to improve the welfare of wild animals a thousand years is a hard time Horizon for forecasting I don't see it on any Horizon that I can imagine I think humans are programmed to to kill and eat animals and they were programmed to see that it's not that wrong and the sociological concentration of vegans and vegetarians is quite striking and even
most of them actually eat meat no matter what they may claim so my best guess is it won't change for a very long time if ever yeah over that kind of time scale though uh you know if if economic growth continues we'll be fabulously Wealthy by that point in time so like we'll be able to afford doing even things that we have kind of weak inclinations to do and we
might also you know have become either much better at philosophy ideas might have changed ideology might have changed we might also have the ability to kind of change our like inclinations our everyday inclinations to bring them more in line with our reflective moral values does any of that cause you to kind of uh change change your assessment of the
probability no I think people are programmed to enjoy meat and that biology is stronger than the changes you mentioned again a long enough time Horizon all sorts of things can change if we simply invent something better than meat right yeah of course people will change for selfish reasons and at some point that may well happen but I
think you have to get to that point yeah and I mean i' I'd be shocked for us to still be eating like animals the way that we produce them now in a couple hundred years cuz I suspect that we'll produce like meat in a much more efficient way that doesn't involve torturing animals that's certainly possibly true but the adventures I hear about going on now seem to me quite
overrated and I don't think they're really close to catching on but in the long run you think there's a good chance they will over some very long run yes yeah yeah uh but but setting aside the meat thing it seems like there's kind of two two questions here like one thing would be that yes we want to eat meat and we'll be eating meat in some form
regardless but nonetheless we might think oh it's like it's terrible all these animals in the wild are like suffering they they're like dying because of parasites they have these horrible diseases or they're starving to death and so we might take kind of some action if we're incredibly wealthy to to improve their welfare I don't think we
will you know we engineer nature somewhat right now so we manage your populations you might keep Coyotes out of a national park as we get richer we'll do more of it uh but again I think we're largely indifferent to what I'm calling nature and maybe the fundamental and indeed insoluble problem of philosophy is how to integrate the claims of nature with the claims of
culture and they're so they're such separate spheres but they interact all the time and you know the final appendix B of my book I talk about this problem like how do you weight the interests of humans versus animals or creatures that are very little to do with human beings and I think there's no answer to that the moral arguments of stubborn
attachments they're all within a kind of a cone of sustainable growth for some set of beings and comparing across beings I don't think anyone one has good moral theories for that but it seems like on your view you should think that while we don't know what the correct like moral trade-off is between humans and animals that there like is a correct
moral trade-off it's just very hard to figure out what it is I'm not sure what we would make reference to to make that tradeoff so there's some intuitionism like gratuitous cruelty to animals even not very intelligent ones people seem to think is bad that's easy enough to buy into but but you you support like you know interpersonal aggregation across
humans and then it just seems like uh there should be like a similar principle though more difficult to apply in practice that would apply to you know a chimpanzee and a human we're very far from knowing what it is but chimpanzees are pretty close to humans uh that strikes me as quite possible but if you're talking about bees and humans you
know what if another billion bees can exist but one human has to have ongoing problems with migraine headaches my best guess is we will never have a way of really solving that question using ethics yeah I I agree that the Practical problem gets very severe when you're comparing humans and insects but I think like in in principle the the solution
you know follows the same the same kind of process as as when you're comparing humans and other humans in gyms I'm not sure the Practical problem is different from the conceptual problem I think it's a conceptual problem not a practical one we could hook up all the measurements to those bees we want and at the end of the day whether a billion of them is worth a
migraine headache for a human but but you say you're a moral realist like should shouldn't there be an answer then I don't think what there's an answer to every question under moral realism yeah is it possible that murdering non-human animals might be morally prohibited in the same way that like because of Human Rights it's kind of morally prohibit to
to murder another human yeah and even if that's kind of unlikely and sounds like you think might not be that unlikely like just because of moral uncertainty because it might be morally prohibited and might just be really terrible we should like abstain from murdering animals as much as we can yes yeah all right let's talk about uh discourse more
broadly so in general when writing your approach seems to be to kind of canvas like many different considerations without feeling kind of a strong need to really like settle any issue definitively or like take a really strong stance or you know stick with one Topic at Great length is that just kind of your comparative advantage in the scheme of things or do you Advocate that
more people people kind of tread lightly of a topics like that it's my comparative advantage I guess if I'm saying more people should be generalists more will be doing that but I would also stress you know the arguments in this book and my other books I typically address a lot of the points at greater length in journal articles or subsequent
blog posts or responses to reviews or even in podcasts like this one so knowledge is more distributed and the idea that some of your products are somewhat short and Compact and reach a larger audience and you fill out the points of details and other media I think that's often an efficient way to proceed and that's what I try to do yeah
uh when I interviewed tlock he said that it's kind of good not to publicly commit to kind of what what your sincere views are because then it makes you much more flexible you don't feel like there's any loss of face when you when you seem to change your views do you think that that's that that's something that you do uh no I try to put out a great number of
views on the table but be very willing to revise them so if I put forward a view like it is a sincere View and then to sort of show people later on you're changing your mind is one of the the value things you can communicate May more valuable than the view itself yeah well how much it seems like with perhaps like effective altruism and
cryptocurrency in one case you were like positive about effective alism then like became like more negative about it once perhaps other people had appreciated its virtues you feel the important thing is to is to say now this is maybe overrated with crypto when people were talking about how great it was you said it was bad and then kind of Vice Versa did do
you see kind of see that role where you want to push in the direction that you think people's views ought to change uh yes and you see what people are saying and what points are missing and that's where you can add the most value people sometimes will think you changed your mind more than you have but you know just emphasizing a different side of the
same view yeah why do you allow comments on marginal Revolution it seems like you put in all this effort into building up a huge audience and then kind of random people can hijack it and get very large numbers of your readers to read whatever random thing they put in well Anyone who reads the comments does so voluntarily uh some of the comments are
quite good many are bad but the comments create context for the post so I love writing a post where I just tell the person where my mind is at and I really don't give them any background and a lot of people need the background and they get that background from the comments including the stupid ones even the stupidest comments can indicate like who is offended who should
be offended who shouldn't be offended and they're more valuable than they might look yeah and if I didn't have the comments and I to well here's the Wikipedia page for this and be more didactic and lay out the whole argument I would be a worse writer it would be a higher tax on me so I think the comments are great even like the bad comments are
in a funny way underrated uh the offensive ones I really do think are very bad uh people shouldn't do that they should be morally obliged like not to try to hurt others that's like really very bad and I you know you do what you can yeah uh I feel like there's kind of a self-control issue for me here where I always read the comments even though I
feel like I'm being harmed while I'm doing it or at least on reflection the at maybe they are useful to you right maybe I'm just wrong about what I think I want I want if you have the self-control to work in a nonprofit 80,000 hours that does all this good and you follow the obligation for your maximally do good in career probably
your decision on reading the comments is also the right one doesn't mean everyone should read the comments most people don't yeah the Atlantic had comments until I think six months ago and then they shut it down because they're saying these are two low quality but there were just worthless right I don't think it gave people any context and their
articles they're written like mainstream media articles they start off with an anecdote and they give you all this context and readers like me or maybe bored till paragraph 17 ah here's the part I didn't know and that's fine if they do that that's their model I respect it Atlantic is great but it's not my model my model is Jump Right In with the new Point kind of screw the
reader you have no idea what I'm talking about cackle haha hope you enjoy it anyway yeah it was just odd that I I would always read those comments even though I thought they're bad and I was so glad when they took that option away from me so yeah what topics do you most prefer to avoid discussing and why well I'm an employee of George Mason
University so there are a lot of matters where my University like speaks for the University they do not in any way censor or limit what I say but it feels feels to me appropriate that I should let them be the spokesperson for all sorts of things that happen on campus uh I'm an employer so there's a lot of issues related to employment that I feel I
shouldn't comment on and I don't those are the two main areas and I think in both cases I'm doing the right thing do you ever shy away from kind of controversial topics to not like spend Capital that you want to reserve for other more important issues uh sure but usually you know those same topics I'm kind of bored with them or so there's a
lot of like social justice issues people cover in great great detail like how wrong or not wrong was the latest thing Trump did or said people cover in great detail like obviously that's important he's president I shy away from them you could say it's you know to preserve Capital to some extent but like mostly I'm I'm sick of that discussion so it's
kind of overdetermined why I don't do more on a lot of those issues do you have a worry that you um like shy away from important topics perhaps because they're not like intellectually challenging enough in in that way of course like I you know I'm pretty selfish but I Do cover like a lot of topics it's possible I've written about more topics like than any Economist
who's ever lived so if the charge against me is I'm not doing enough topics like I might be guilty but surely there's like better criticisms to me than that one right right yeah so uh let's say that you were like a little bit more aristic so you're a bit more willing to sacrifice your your welfare to to do some more good what would be
like one of the most efficient changes you could make in your life to do that well one possibility we don't know what would be for me to take like one topic and devote my whole life to it Peter singer's a version of that he's more than one topic but it's kind of All in One Direction and he's had a lot of impact by repeating the same message over and over in different forums
different ways and that would bore me I don't think I'd be that productive but if I were kind of you know more of a man I could summon up the will to do it and just suffer through but I can't I don't want to I don't feel I'm about to try and that's selfish I've heard that some academics find it frustrating that you're so uh like very famous and you've
done that by addressing ing that the public directly rather than going through kind of papers in econometrica do you think that more people more more academic should should copy your example well there are different ways you can view what my example is so I spent more than 20 years of my career almost all my energy publishing papers and journals I
have you know five or six papers in like top three journals people may or may not agree with those papers but I'm very glad I did that training and have that background but it seems like your like most of your Fame kind of came later sure yeah it's uh a different kind of Fame so I would say people who want to be public intellectuals to do some
version of Something rigorous early on for quite a few years if you can I recommend that I don't recommend that people try to avoid it but situations will differ some people they're just like bad at school they don't even have a college degree they can be significant public intellectuals Michelle Dawson I interviewed her she uh worked as a male
carrier does not even have a ba brilliant woman has had a phenomenal impact and like I should tell her you know she should have done something else no way so you know I'm all for diversity and credentials are overrated so uh you know rigor is important but rigor and credentials are not the same thing yeah I think in terms of uh people who are extremely good at providing
valuable links to read I think there like you and maybe uh Dennis Dutton who did arts and Letters Daily that's his name yeah uh like who else do you would you put on that list as a like really good sources for good content for year after year after year Robert catrell who runs the browser and he is the browser uh a lot of people love the browser I
don't think as many people know it's this one person Bob catrell very very nice man brilliant widely read deeply Read Super underrated I would say he's who comes to mind it seems like kind of standing at that Nexus between what people read and kind of what what you want them to read gives you actually like substantial influence so like why
don't more people try to like you know get get that get that kind of power by becoming someone who people refer to to figure out what to read I was just wondering this last night it seems to me there's Market room uh for like very good they don't have to quite literally be blogs but blog-like entities also podcasts some media companies are
clearing out of the podcast space it may or may not make money but it's a great way to reach people uh maybe it's that the demands on those who do it are just really quite High kind independently wealthy or something to afford it and even if you're independently wealthy uh you need to invest a lot of years of compound learning and stick with it and
then if you're talented maybe you could earn more money doing something else but I'm surprised how few people do it actually I still can't figure this out there a market cap do you have a hypothesis no I guess I I did I did this to some exent I did this to some extent so I'm not sure why there's not more competition but please please don't join
and compete with us um so years ago uh you wrote that in kind of in order to like enforce a level of epistemic humility on yourself which you think is appropriate you you try to be like extremely reluctant to move your credences out of the range of kind of 40% to 60% on on like a controversial issues at least and I found that that that really stuck in my head for like
many years and kind of became a bit of a rule of thumb to me that like when I see like my credences moving out of the 40 to6 range I have to like stop and really pause and think about whether the evidence is strong enough do you still like try to follow that principle and kind of if if so how do you go about it I try all the more so I think the best
way to go about keeping epistemic humility is to try to write out the arguments of the side you disagree with and in part I use marginal Revolution as a vehicle for that it's like a selfish use for me and when you try to write out someone else's argument or even just present it orally it's like your own ego forces you to produce the better version
you don't want to sound or come across like an idiot but as you produce the better version you become a bit invested in it and that's irrational that you're invested in it but it's countering your other irrationality of not liking it so much and you're setting off you like one passion against another to use madonian language and I think that mostly works
so always try you know steel Manning not straw Manning but put yourself in the position of having to pass the ideological touring test can I express this as smartly as possible yeah I think uh from memory and super forecasting that was perhaps the most important characteristic for making accurate forecasts was uh that you had gone through the step of arguing actively for
the for the other side from the one that you already believed yeah another post that you wrote in the past that like really stuck with me to to this day is to say that um people don't want to acknowledge the messiness of life and decision making that when they're asked a question like you know why are you doing what you're doing today they give
this like kind of neat narrative where it's like it seems inevitable that they ended up where they are but in fact it was just a total mess that like they were making all these decisions and kind of by some random chance of ended up where they are and to like to to this day when people ask me for to to like give a narrative like that I just kind
of reject it and like I refuse to do it because I don't believe the story that I'm going to tell them is that like as as important a post to you as as it was to me uh we're overly invested in narratives that's the theme of uh my TED talk but narratives are also impossible to avoid so we're always living with this contradiction and then economists
have this dual problem they have simple theories and the world's always more complex so kind of my personal program is to stay connected to the humanities to remind me of that complexity to keep on reading fiction take an interest in anthropological kinds of issues uh the whole notion of culture which no one is even sure what the word means but it's
reminding you all the time how much what matters is something that's hard to pin down or have a simple theory about so if you're both overly invested in narrative as a human and your main field is economics which has simple theories you need to take these counter ailing steps if we received a message from aliens uh what do you think are the chances that
it would be designed to kind of disable us as a competitor civilization in in in the race to colonize the Universe I would assume that aliens have some kind of decentralized society and a lot of different kinds of messages are being sent out as indeed would be the case from planet Earth it seems like on on your view that that actually shouldn't
be the case because all of the decentralized ones will destroy themselves I would think the decentralized ones would be more robust if you look at the most robust societies today uh North Korea is highly centralized I suspect it's not very robust so if the aliens have spread to other planets if they're able to reach us with messages they'll have some
technology uh they'll have a lot of groups people institutions sending messages so what we're most likely to get is some kind of advertisement I think some kind of semi- propaganda maybe a religious message exhortations I don't think it's likely to be that dangerous there may be some worm sent our way but like what are most emails
right they're they're kind of crap right yeah well like in as much as they're like promoting their moral values to us like with much better technology than we have in a sense that is to disable us as a competitive civilization it's to get us on board with like their mission so we'll like go and do what what they want because they'll be so persuasive but
odds are the messages intended to raise the statuses of some group within alien society and it will be pretty harmless you don't think that like even with like the fullness of like maturity of technology and you know this this uh these aliens hypothetically have like probably colonized a large part of the universe that they'll still be playing
status games that that will still be like a big part of their activity that's what motivates them to colonize the universe right something has to what about just like moral values ideology they want to like generate value by like uh you know getting matter and compiling it the way they think is best well it's overdetermined as it is with humans
right but incentives are always going to matter status incentives are not the only one but if you have decentralized incentives you're going to have money and status and just propagation of ideology mattering and then the broadcasters will tend to be those overinvestment and maybe it's those who just show up with no message that we should be worried about like they just
zap us we never even know what hit us yeah the message to me is slightly reassuring it's kind of like the knock on the door as opposed to you know the bullet in the back of the head so it seems like you're pretty skeptical of world government appearing anytime soon absolutely and absolutely so am I but it also seems like there's a
long-term Trend as as Robin Hansen has pointed out towards like more greater and greater concentration that the units of governance are getting larger progressively over time from you know like Villages now to like enormous countries and do you think it's like possible that like gradually over hundreds of years we could like Converge on uh like having more of a world
government if not a full world government I think you're always going to have rival blocks of some kind because the notion of having unity and no enemy doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium to me but I'm not even sure the trend toward larger units is continuing right now so you have brexit a Scottish secession it lost the referendum but the movement really
actually hasn't gone away a catalonian secession which to me logical terms makes no sense that hasn't gone away it may even happen so there's at least a chance there's some fragmenting of power at the margin although both Scotland and uh Catalonia wanted to do that in part because then they would still be part of this like broader EU in their view that would like
give them any of the benefits of being part of a large state but the EU itself probably will become less powerful over the next 10 years uh as you have say parts of Eastern Europe not following all the strictures and to keep itself together it'll be more of a thing on paper I could see that that going either way it seems like the long either way
but the think there's some Trend it's just toward more and more centralization not necessarily yeah not necessarily but you think there's like some chance that we'll like end up with like like the the UN or some like successor group or like you know a Hedon of multiple different countries joining together like having a lot of power that that's a possible
future possible future but it's not my modal prediction if if the United States could uh double its rate of economic growth in exchange for adopting wholesale kind of Chinese moral values is that something that that it ought to do well again what are Chinese moral values most Chinese moral values are the same as American moral values so it
sounds like yes is the answer are there some ways in which they're making good decisions and we're not absolutely uh but we have a more responsive flexible system I don't want the Chinese system of government in the United States I think it would destroy us even if it's doing okay for them so Chinese values Lock Stock and Barrel I say absolutely
no but mostly they're the same as our values yes so I mean that seems like a really important point to me I guess we're slightly returning to to conversation we were having earlier but if it is just the case that like most Mor values are pretty similar then then there's like no reason for countries to be fighting over over resources they
should just like you know try to get along as peacefully as possible that would prevent human extinction in the future will be about as as as good as it possibly can be well mostly they do right but it's these unlikely events that can arise through miscalculations so you still struggle over things at the margin in part precisely because things are peaceful
you feel you can struggle at the margin most of the time that goes fine but you have miscalculations or you think missiles are coming in when they're not or you know someone sends the wrong signal or you have a an emotionally volatile leader again let enough time pass these things are going to cash into some real conflict what what do you
think is more likely to destroy civilization accidental use of nuclear weapons or kind of deliberate use of nuclear weapons where where like accidental means like some kind of false alarm some kind of false alarm it might even be partially Justified but not what you want to have happen and second strike capability often means giving commanders some autonomy and that's
dangerous and they probably have subst autonomy today in most of these countries and we're not even sure how much right if only because of imperfect systems so autonomous commanders making risky decisions and maybe some are good but some will turn out to be very bad that to me seems a lot more likely than just kind of mad Evil leaders pressing
buttons and screaming you know die you enemy pigs yeah do you have a favorite uh like nuclear near Miss uh story well there's the stories we know about you know that the Soviet commander who aborted the return launch and it turned out to be a mistake Cuban Missile Crisis of course so we've come closer than we ought to have a few times and how much
those systems are improved I don't personally know but I would take such improvements to be a major priority so both of us agree that it's pretty unlikely that climate change is going to lead to human extinction or even probably you know collapse of civilization but we can imagine you know a very similar world where uh like the climate responsiveness to uh greenhouse
gases is say three or four or five times as large such that what we're doing now would like lead to really radical changes in the climate that that would probably you know lead to if not human extinction at least like the collapse of civilization as we know it if we were in such a like severe and unfortunate world do you think that countries would be
able to coordinate to stop it or would we just be screwed I think we'd be screwed I think the greatest risk of climate change even the less drastic scenarios is our own response to it so you know in the London report I think they estimate 3 to 4% of global GDP is lost through climate change and they are not denialists that strikes me as oddly
low so if the global economy is growing at 4% a year it just means you get to where you're going a year later now that's a lot of lost resources but it in that context sounds entirely manageable but I think that's a misleading context if you look at how we've responded to say Chinese competition or certain immigration problems we weigh over
respond or we Panic or we take the wrong measures in response I believe the biggest costs of climate change will be the own stupidity of Our Own respons aners to the real problems we have but we'll make them much worse because we're not always good at dealing with emergencies do you think that in the next 100 years there's any chance that we'll mine asteroids and use their
resources on Earth I don't feel I have the expertise to answer that question but I don't know of any reason why we couldn't interesting okay uh I thought thought it doesn't sound like a high value activity to me but I don't know what's on the asteroids I'm not sure how much we know it's just an area I haven't read much about yeah so I've read uh
several kind of engineering oriented papers that say that colonizing you know other planets is like a relatively straightforward thing technologically speaking not right now but like it's very foreseeable that we'll have the technology uh to to do that in future what do you think is the chances that those papers would would convince you
that we might go to space if the question is will we have a colony on Mars I would bet yes if the question is will Mars become a you know a populated planet in civilization in some way a to Earth I would bet know if we ever do develop a kind of machine intelligence that's like similar to humans wouldn't that make it a lot easier to to go to
space and potentially colonize places very far away so the scenario is that we send Ai and AI carries genetic material and terraforms no no there's no need to run kind of reconstitute humans it's just that like the life that that travels there is like a technological one on Silicon or whatever is the future equivalent of silicon and so humans
don't go but like intelligence does leave the solar system I wouldn't think of that as life so we could send really good cash registers to Jupiter and Saturn right now actually we do sometimes uh I'm fine with doing it but I don't think it is necessarily self-aware okay so you think it's like not possible for like computers in some configuration to be self-aware the way
no it must be possible because you and I are computers right and we're self-aware but it seems to me very far away and the directions AI is moving in where it's had a lot of success are very powerful cash registers which is wonderful but not self-aware yeah so I agree that the current technology isn't going to produce self-awareness but it seems to
me like there's some chance like in the next couple hundred years will have computers that are um like both as smart as humans maybe more so and that they will probably or that we there's at least a good reason to think that they might have conscious experiences the way that humans do uh and that ultimately like once we can make those uh like
intelligences like quite small uh it would be possible to like send them to other solar systems and then they can kind of take actions but if you think materials really matter and I do it could be that self-aware entities have to be biological in some sense and that thus they're going to be relatively fragile so we how to build more human
beings right it's even a pretty fun technology doesn't cost that much so self-aware AI is always competing against that the notion that you have humanlike beings augmented cyborgs I think will outcompete the notion of robots in the Isaac azimoff sense that they're like walk like a robot but they're self-aware and have all the smarts of AI I would be surprised by
that but it it seems like you were saying just just a minute ago that like humans are conscious because they're computers so it seems like should be in principle possible but and it's like in as much as we can do computations like on some other system uh like you don't think there's a good chance that they that they would feel something I just
suspect the materials really matter and biological materials have some properties that silicon and metal don't and we have plenty of biological computers will do wonderful things enhancing them like we've already done but again I don't once it's biological it becomes higher cost to send it elsewhere and maybe the model that you send genetic material and try to
terraform and set up col by setting processes of evolution in motion and try to skew them toward producing vaguely humanoid like beings that to me sounds more likely though maybe still unlikely than what you're suggesting okay yeah some kind of pania right what mood do we feel to little and uh what like stimulus could we use to induce it we feel too little tolerance
and the fact that you can see what other people think on Twitter makes you downgrade the other side more than you ought to so we feel too much frustration and uh too much that oh now I see you know what's really wrong with the other side that's the mood that's become a lot more common in the last five years and it's dangerous I agree yeah uh which
conspiracy theory is most likely to be true I think almost all of them are false I blogged once the notion that some major sporting events might be fixed for reasons related to betting and Corruption I don't know if that even counts as a conspiracy theory but it's some kind of conspiracy uh I would be surprised if that were not more true than we realize but that's a pretty
minor league forgive the pun conspiracy so you think that there's the many plural values is it nonetheless possible that the that the best future would involve just like maxing out on one of those values because it's more efficient to produce that value than than the other ones you can get more bang for buck I think that's possible and that
value would just be numbers so it could be there are just limits on how much better we can make lives at some margin like people can only get so happy even with some kind of biological genetic engineering and then we just max out on lives I think at some point that's how it will be do you think that calling the repugnant conclusion the repugnant
conclusion kind of begged the question and in fact like it's maybe not as repugnant as people think I don't think parfit in naming it the repugnant conclusion was himself begging the question he was trying to draw people's attention to it with a vivid word I think he fully well understood it might not be repugnant but if you think about
a life in the repugnant conclusion well you're alive for a few minutes someone feeds you a potato you hear some musac and you pass away well isn't that better than nothing in my view those are not human lives as we understand the terms even if they they look like humanoid beings so it's getting back to the question of like comparing a billion
bees to one person having a migrain headache that I just don't think we can do it that moral realism can't handle utility comparisons across very different kinds of beings yeah I feel like a weakness of the repugnant conclusion kind of thought experiment is that it ties together multiple issues so one thing that people don't like about it is the blandness or the stability of
the welfare that people have in that world if you imagine where we could be in a repugnant conclusion kind of world where like humans we like have ups and downs kind of on net though Our Lives May maybe only weekly positive but people don't say it's like terrible that there's like more people that have lives of of the kind that we do or that like
it's not worth not desirable for like Civilization to continue just because like our lives could be much better in principle we could you we could imagine beings that have you know a hundred times the welfare that we do over their lives so so by comparison to them like this world is kind of the repugnant conclusion basically that's right we
have intuitions across a lot of different features of the utility distribution and some of them I suspect are implanted in us in a false way and not really valid for moral theory yeah I suspect another problem there is that people worry whenever the welfare is too close to zero because they feel that it's going to go negative and like
negatives weigh like negative experiences weigh very heavily in people's minds if they were certain that it would be positive maybe uh people's intuitions would would go a bit differently and even understanding what's the zero point that defines what's a positive or negative utility uh thinking on that to me is very backward yeah do you think it will be possible to
make a stable coin cryptocurrency possible is always a tricky word possible yes desirable no speculative pegs tend to be broken I don't understand the value of a stable cryptocurrency why not just use dollars and in general crypto faces this problem you know what problem is it trying to solve that we can't solve better through other means like more effective Clearing
Houses better use of dollars use of databases in Venezuela maybe does it solve that use case it would be like a very valuable product in economies that are completely tanking so it's not the best business model but can't they just use dollars Ecuador Al Salvador and Panama use dollars it works fine for them yeah it's like harder to track I
guess would be the argument that like you know that those countries often try to like prohibit dollarization but it's all black market anyway in Venezuela uh maybe some people are sent to jail for Black Market crimes but I don't think using the dollar is you know the main political risk there all right if you want to finish with perhaps like one
like stirring message to people to go out and and improve the long-term future what would you say don't look for stirring messages think about things more than once thank you for listening to the podcast and if I have a stirring message it's uh you know continue to follow the career of Robert wiblin uh I'm very grateful to him for all the
time and energy he's put into uh being the interviewer in conversations with Tyler yeah so the book is stubborn attachments it stubborn attachments published by strip press the subtitle is a vision for a society of free prosperous and responsible individuals it it deals with the uh most important problems of our time in my view and it
is what I really think absolutely people should go out and buy it okay thank you very much thanks so much Tyler thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show