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hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm here with will mccaskill who is one of the most important and influential philosophers period and august 16th is the publication date of his new and
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excellent book what we owe the future will most of all is known for being a leader perhaps the intellectual leader of the effective altruism movement well welcome thanks so much for having me on of all the inefficient things which is
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the one you love most of all the inefficient things i mean there are some uh amazing examples of inefficient charities that i love in the sense that they give me uh you know pleasure to think about um one of my favorites is a charity called scots care which was set up in the early 17th century and it's dedicated it's called the chavity for scots in london and it's dedicated to help people scottish people in poverty in london
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and you might think that's a pretty strange aim but it made more sense when the charity was set up in the early 17th century there was just recently the um personal union of england and scotland there was migration from scotland to london so scottish people were kind of uh poor immigrants um and so it made sense for there to be a chavity 400 years on perhaps doesn't make quite as much sense and uh you know i like it partly especially
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given that you know london is pretty affluent especially compared to many areas of scotland uh and so i like it as an example of what gets called the dead hand problem in philanthropy where the founding of non-profits can have a very specific mission and that mission can become increasingly absurd over time and i think it's a good and heartening lesson for um people who are trying to do good looking into the future too that you want to have like
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aims that can be sufficiently flexible that as in the environment where things change they still they still keep making sense does liking the inefficient mean that you are a pluralist and not a utilitarian uh well i'm not i think i'm neither a pluralist nor utilitarian a pluralist is someone who thinks that there are many sources of moral reasons a utilitarian thinks there's only one i say i'm not a utilitarian because
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though it's the view i'm most inclined to argue for in seminar rooms because i think it's most underappreciated uh by the academy um i think we should have some degree of belief in a variety of model views and take a compromise um between them but
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that is pluralism right no pluralism would be saying there is one true moral view and that view uh says there are multiple competing sources of reasons where true moral view can be a probabilistic assemblage of the
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different things you think might matter right so if you go just a little bit more meta with pluralism it encompasses what you think uh yes so that is that that is my view and it ends up looking very similar to
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what is known as pluralism because i end up paying attention to different sorts of moral reasons but i think that the the actual model truth might be quite simple where there's the pluralist in terms of uh first order model theorizing rather
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than the kind of meta theorizing that i'm proposing uh says that you know moral reality might be really very complex or messy if we're assessing the well-being of non-human animals should we use preference utilitarianism
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or hedonistic utilitarianism because it will make a big difference we're not sure all these animals are happy right they may live lives of terror but we're pretty sure they want to stay alive it makes a huge difference um i mean i
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think the arguments for hedonism is a theory of well-being where that's saying that well-being consists only in conscious experiences positive ones can't be positively negative conscious experiences contribute negatively i think the arguments for that as a theory of well-being and the theory of what's good are very strong and it does mean that when you look to the animal lives of animals in the wild i mean my view is just very non-obvious
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whether those lives are good or not um uh that's me being a little bit more optimistic than other people that have looked into this but the optimism is mainly drawing from just lack of i think we know very little about the conscious lives of fish let alone um invertebrates but yes if you have a different satisfaction view then i think the world looks a lot better because beings in general want to keep living and that's true when we look to
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the future as well i think if you says how good is the future going to be on a headness view well maybe it's quite fragile you could imagine lots of future ways that civilization could go where they just don't care about consciousness at all or perhaps the beings that we were not conscious but probably beings in the future uh will have preferences and those preferences will be being satisfied and so in general the kind of moral reality
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looks a lot more rosy i think if you're a preference satisfactionist but it's possible say in your view that human beings should spend a lot of their time and resources going around destroying nature since it might have negative net expected utility value i think it's a possible implication i think it'd be very unlikely to be the best thing we could be doing because uh but there's a lot of nature we have you know very effective bombs weapons we
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could develop animal killing weapons if we set our minds to it right uh that's right there's a lot of nature but there's far more future and so if we're willing to take philosophical reasoning far enough that where we'd be seriously considering you know removing nature then you should be taking much more seriously the fact that we can have this enormous impact over our long-term future um and i will caveat and say like i really don't know whether
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animals in the wild have lives that are good or bad it gets really determined when you look at the world as a whole it gets incredibly determined by where's the cutoff for conscious experiences because um uh you know is it
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ants conscious they have an awful lot of the total neutron count of animals in the wild and if they are do they have lives that are good or not i'm like i have no idea but i worry a bit this is verging into the absurd and i'm aware that word
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is a bit question begging but if we think about the individual level like what do you well value you value in part the inefficient it's very hard to give people just pure utilitarian advice because they're necessarily partial at the big macro level like the whole world of nature versus humans ethics of the infinite and so on it also seems to me utilitarianism doesn't perform that well so the utilitarian part of our calculations
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isn't that like only a mid-scale theory so you can ask does rent control work or tariffs good utili utilitarianism is fine there but otherwise it just doesn't make sense okay uh so there is what we might call the train to crazy town um
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so uh we have these all of these starting model intuitions what i see is the project of moral philosophy is reconciling them using theory and careful reasoning to make kind of moral progress which often involves creating um
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simpler than explanatively powerful theories that move away from your common sense intuitions and then the question is how far are we willing to move very difficult kind of methodological question you brought up infinite ethics and uh
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that is something where i certainly in practice do not bite that bullet or follow that implication where for the listeners um the argument is that okay the utilitarian wants to maximize um the good understanding that's total well-being
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now perhaps you know in my book i argue there's enormous amounts of value at stake when we consider the long term so we should reduce the risk of extinction and promote good values so that we make the most of that um uh you know makes the most of all the value in the long term however someone could dispel the reply and say wow that's just piddling finite amounts of value um what about the possibility of creating infinite amounts of value
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because you know religious traditions say that one can create infinite amounts of value that heaven is infinitely good and uh you're a good bayesian you don't have clean zero in the idea of there being a god that could produce infinite amounts of value i would say no i don't and if so well tiny even if i put it 100 billion that there's such a god um multiply one in a trillion by infinite positive value then that overall expectation is
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infinitely great and that's what we should be focusing on and i will acknowledge i get off the train to crazy town before i'm at that point get off the train a bit earlier and just say well the utilitarian part of our calculations it's embedded within a particular social context like how do we arrange certain affairs of society but if you try to shrink it down to too small how should you live your life or to too large how do we deal with
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infinite ethics and all of nature that it just doesn't work and it has to stay embedded in this context universal domain as an assumption doesn't really work anywhere so why should it work for the utilitarian part of our ethics get off the train and stop too and not stop 17. that's that's 17. so i agree there's a heart there's a hard choice there and certainly uh as someone who you know takes action in the real world as well it's very
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notable to me how much you end up just infusing your action with common sense uh moral reasoning and it's always unclear like is that on sophisticated consequentialist grounds or is it just that uh one is acting pluralistically i think you should take it on a case-by-case basis i think that actually the wild the issue of wild animal suffering it sounds completely wild when you first no pun intended completely wild when you um first hear it
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but i think it's not that many steps away from common sense model reasoning so i you know i don't have a pet my friends have pets they care greatly about the lives of their pets that's like in their well-being and that's just a very non-like very standard common sense kind of moral view then next does that well-being of your pet change does the well you know does the model worth of a creature change whether it happens to be your pet
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or it grows born in the wild and i think good argument for thinking no and then um the question of okay well if you think it's good to invest some resources to improve the well-being of your pets then yeah maybe it's good to invest resources
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in improving the well-being of animals in the wild and then i think the reaction that people have which is like this is just so crazy partly it's not really thinking about it but partly also is just what he's about
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interfering with nature having negative um like backfiring consequences and i think those arguments are just good like maybe you think oh predation is bad so we're going to stop predators um but then that leads to other worst
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consequences i mean i think it is true that you're dealing with a environment that you know we don't fully understand so from the wild animal suffering perspective it may be very pro kind of more research or more thinking about this
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um i'd be kind of uh you know pretty wary of just paving over the jungle because on the basis of our very non-robust evaluation we think that animal lives are on average negative let me ask you the question i asked sam bankman freed let's say we take the known world of living beings however large that may be and a demon offers us a bet we can double that world with probability 51 but with 49 it all goes away and disappears and everything's gone
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now in expected value terms that's a good bet right should we do that sam said yes he's like i'm gonna bite that bullet i want to bite this bullet he said what's your view yeah so i mean one first thing is we've got to carefully um
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you know carefully state the question in the it's if you're just giving me like uh a doubling of the world as it is well i think again almost all value is um in the future it's to come and so instead you like the thoughts
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well that troubles too right the future everything so spell it out all carefully but it's a double or nothing bad at 51 odds i say no way should you do it yeah so i also admit like intuitively um i have like very rapid diminishing returns to value so intuitively i think that you take a galaxy and it's got you know full of bliss best possible galaxy 50 50 for that versus all accessible galaxies are like fluttershy and so on
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there's 20 billion of them and i'm like no don't want to take that bet and i also think that this is an issue there is there are issues for expected value theory um in general uh where i mean it comes in in particular with like low
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probabilities of large amounts of value um sure possible jersey peter exactly yeah we're getting into like all sorts of messes there and then in this case uh it's not an it's not an example of low very low probabilities very large
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amounts of value um you might even aren't you and then your view would have to argue that well the future as it is is like close to the upper bound of value in order to make sense of the idea that you shouldn't um flip 50 50. i think that actually that position would be like pretty hard to um defend is my guess and so my thought is that probably within a situation where any view you say ends up having pretty bad the implausible consequences
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your response sounds very ad hoc to me why not just say in matters of the very large utilitarian kinds of moral reasoning just don't apply they're always embedded in some degree of partiality the 51 49 bet is not great for our partiality toward
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ourselves and we just can't go there so it's not that there's some other theory that's going to tie up all the conundrums in a nice bundle but simply that there are limits to moral reasoning and we cannot fully
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transcend the notion of being partial because moral reasoning is embedded in that context of being partial about some things uh i think we should be more um uh yeah i think we should be more ambitious with that than that with our model reasoning where um i think if we did model reasoning many times in the past that were um simply simply saying look there are many of these different considerations like it's all kind of pluralist at some
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point just even though i can't give it a good argument you know the uh utilitarian-esque reasoning that um you like seem so compelling when you're talking about saving like one life versus 10 and we think oh clearly the 10 is more important including like 50 50 chance of saving uh 10 lives um versus one it's like okay you should still you should go with the math like over time that would save more lives uh and then you say oh no at some scale
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that sort of reasoning um that sort of reasoning breaks that's what seemed that's what seems ad hoc to me so if you're saying oh well these arguments um pushing you in a certain direction but then at some scale i mean what exactly is the
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scale is it a thousand lives a million lives a billion lives then i'm suddenly you know it seems like nothing qualitatively different has happened whereas the thing that i want to say is a qualitative difference has something
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to do with when we're juggling probability against um value that's where um okay maybe the pure just like multiplication uh or like there's something going wrong with expected value theory and i can kind of constrain the issues to that whereas if i'm just saying in general when think the scales get big drop kind of utilitarian-esque reasoning that seems like unmotivated to me but i don't think it's just probably to
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question so you're very familiar with the repugnant conclusion you know we haven't solved it there's nothing probabilistic there it just seems to be another case where when you stretch the limits far enough nothing works and that
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you have pascal's wager the 5149 gamble the repugnant conclusion many other paradoxes and moral philosophy they all seem to to kick in and in my view that's not an accident there's no reason to ad hoc try to address everyone
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we just need to downgrade where we think a certain kind of consequentialist reasoning could apply okay i mean i think these paradoxes show something much more further going than an issue for consequentialism so uh we'll take um
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also just briefly on the um 5149 because of the pluralism that i talked about although again it's kind of meta-pluralism of putting weight on many different moral views uh i would at least need the probabilities to be quite a bit wider um
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in order to take the gamble because again i can give you 90 10. you can give me the nine to ten but we play it 200 times right uh yes um yeah i was kind of wanting to clarify that for the listeners more than um i
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was i was i didn't say it earlier because i was quite aware that you could pull me back with just okay give me some probability or something but then i think it starts to get more defensible um uh okay anyway yeah so there are these paradoxes
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so take the paradoxes of population ethics um again for the listeners any view that you have in population ethics has extremely unintuitive implications and that's actually been formally proven uh the repugnant conclusion is the idea
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that uh a world consisting of a very very very very large number of beings all with lives that are just barely above zero just barely worth living that because it has more aggregate well-being is better than 10 trillion
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lives of like wonderful bliss um it turns out actually that's like in my view the least bad of the bullets that you have to bite within population ethics and sometimes this is taken as a problem for consequentialism and that's what you're suggesting but every moral view has to have a view on population ethics every moral view has to decide what's um what under what conditions should we think it's a good thing to bring someone
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bring a new like flourishing life into existence not just consequentialist moral views and so the view you'd have to be promoting is something much more further going which is just that there's limits to moral reasoning perhaps that we
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should be okay with just inconsistent moral views um i'm not quite sure exactly what your view would be there but it's not just that we have to throw consequentialism out the way it's like we actually have to throw like moral
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consistency out the window or something should the ea movement be anti-abortion uh i don't think so why not if i look at hedonistic utility if you have more people we're not at repugnant conclusion margins you'd have somewhat more people not that many more right uh yeah so i think um a few things so the first is if you think that it's good to have more happy flourishing people um and i think like if people have sufficiently good
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lives then i think that's true i argue for it in what we are the future then by far and by overwhelming amounts uh the focus should be on how many people might exist in the future rather than now where perhaps you have like a really good fertility program and you can increase the world population by 10 that's like an extra billion people or so but the loss of future life and future very good life if we go extinct that's being
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measured in the trillions upon billions of lives and so the question of just how many people should be alive today is really driven by well how would that impact on the long term flourishing of humanity um that being said like all things considered i think there's you know there's this norm there's this idea at the moment that uh it's bad to have kids because of the carbon footprint um i think that only looks at one side of the ledger like yep
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people emit carbon dioxide and that has negative effects but they also do a lot of good things they innovate and there's an intensive benefit too they have happy lives well if you can bring up people um to live good lives uh then they will you know flourish and that's making the world better they also might be like model change makers and so on but then the question so even suppose you think okay yeah like larger family sizes are good
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um what's the best way of achieving that would seem very unlikely to me that uh banning abortions um or like very heavily reflecting women's reproductive rights is the best doesn't go about that it doesn't have to be the best way of achieving that it might be the 37th best way but if it were still positive expected utility value at least in your framework like you're fine with subsidizing births right uh yeah so taxing non-births just seems
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to be the opposite of that right it's like the duel yeah i mean again you've got to um fully take into account like different role perspectives where um [Music] in the same way like i think it's good for people to donate to charity i think
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that makes the world a better place but having that view is like a far cry from saying therefore we should go and like lock people up who don't donate to charity that could easily be um like very bad counterproductive
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and i think that's probably very similar could be said about early stage abortion for example if there are smart sentient space aliens out there say in pretty large numbers should we then worry much less about existential risk on earth like someone will continue the tradition maybe they don't live beethoven but yeah you know 400 years from now maybe people won't anyway it's a great question and among people i know views to fight divided on
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you know should you think that a human originating future is going to be better than an alien um originating civilization uh my honest view is more like it's a toss-up um i don't see a particular reason for thinking that
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a civilization that comes from human beings is going to be like you know much greater than value than for aliens uh whether this undermines existential risk though is dependent very crucially on whether we actually expect aliens to
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uh you know come and build a flourishing civilization and i think the best guess from the fermi paradox that is the paradox that we don't in fact see advanced intelligent life is that probably we're just alone at least in a very very large section of space so as an empirical fact i think it's really quite likely that if humanity dies off no one else will take our place to build some flourishing civilization just contingent on the space aliens
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being out there if just someone asked me to bet well which side in the war would will mccaskill fight on like i would bet a thousand to one you'd fight for the humans but in your moral theory the humans being better than the aliens
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it's kind of a toss-up and this notion that you can't actually escape some pre-existing degree of partiality in the normative framework seems to resurface and i think you want to have it both ways unless you feel my bet on you to
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fight for the humans is wrong like is there really a 50 chance you'll fight for the aliens so well here's the argument i mean either so i have two kind of moral perspectives that i'm putting some weight on one says it's just you know aliens have as good a chance of producing a great civilization as humans do the second is like the more partial view which would weigh humans above aliens uh if i'm putting weight on both of them
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which again i think we should i don't think you should be super confident in any modern model world view then that will favor to some extent favoring the humans i think it would be a mistake to favor the humans by like you know ten thousand to one supposing you could do some very risky thing that could like wipe out both um you know it's 50 50 chance of wiping out both aliens and humans but uh 50 chance of saving the humans and
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that increases your odds of humanity surviving then i'm like no don't do that thing um but do we give would i give some extra weight to human originating civilization all things considered then yes now you're super influential i'd say
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you're one of the five most influential philosophers in the world which is great does that mean you should personally give up having children wow what a great question um and i want you to to be clear but i'm asking what you think
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uh so it's obviously something i've thought uh deeply about um and i do want to say that like people um in general should you know make their own reproductive choices i think in my own case like it is pretty striking that i am now engaged in like all of these projects that uh bring me very large amounts of meaning and then when i think about like would i have uh the like argument the reason that many people i think are drawn to having kids
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is like to have additional meaning in their lives um is not something that like appeals to me and so it's like like like really motivates me and so i think i do have this like extra responsibility when thinking about major decisions
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in my life as to like if i have kids like what was the impact of that on the world on the one hand it would like take time away from other things i could be doing um on the other hand perhaps it's good you know i do think
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it's good to have a family perhaps that's a good signaling thing um i do think those are relevant considerations um in my own case it's like at least having a family is like never something i've been like particularly drawn to or excited about
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and so it's currently not my plan and i think the fact that like that will help me do more good in the world is like a benefit too so here's a very simple practical question let's say i'm a skilled lawyer and i'm
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more or less a generalist i could do a lot of different things and i want to do some pro bono work for effective altruism what should i actually do if you're a skilled lawyer skilled lawyer in the united states okay yeah um then um i think it is there's two obvious options i mean there are volunteering opportunities like high impact nonprofits um both within the effect of altruism um organization organ effective altruism organizations
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uh or organizations we recommend like malaria consortium the worm the world uh but the alternative is to work overtime and donate the profits as well and uh but i could sue someone right so i i don't have to do malaria work or give
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well or bed nets i'm a lawyer i could try to change laws by suing people right i have the special leverage oh yeah so what should i target uh so i think people potentially doing dangerous um like uh biotechnology research things
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that could have like large negative externalities i don't know about the law there um people who are patent trolls seem like that's like particularly harmful it seems to me um you know like slowing down innovation um perhaps kind of legal work there could be very helpful as well uh i'm kind of curious on this is a little bit more theoretical but um and depends on the nature of the lawyer but you know it's plausible to me that at
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some point in our lifetimes there will be a world government set up uh that world government will have a constitution very little the conforming of the constitution of the united states was enormously impactful from a very long-term perspective and yet was done over the course of about four months so you know we can think in terms of these plastic moments that have a real impact over the future i think that whoever is writing the constitution of
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the world government uh that is going to be a very influential moment and so you could be one of the weird lawyers who are working on this that no one is currently working on but would turn out to be very impactful if it did occur or not over
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the next century now you have a phd from oxford right last night given how much innovation comes out of top schools why is it crazy to make big donations to them but i see ea people criticize this fairly often like oh
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don't give your money to harvard give it to bed nets but given the power of innovation including your own right peter singer yes been connected to all these schools uh why not make big donations to top universities yeah i think two things one is that um yeah the standard line of criticism of like donations to big universities um i don't actually think that's like among charitable gifts uh i don't really think that's one of the ones we should
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be criticizing for being enormously ineffective um compared to i don't know scott's care or uh you know things that are uh promoting the opera or something or the us golf society um on the other hand like if i'm going to promote the search i think a generic gift to harvard um is going to look pretty unleaved like i don't think universities are in general in a great state in terms of how they could promote research compared to say independent
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research focused organizations and in particular when you're donating to these universities with these enormous existing endowments uh looking at the kind of you know what in principle happens there where maybe even you're trying to target the donation to some like focused thing now sometimes that can work and then it's good um and we have funded a bunch of things that research institutes at major universities including oxford
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but if you're just giving like a generic gift then probably you're just giving to like harvard as a whole and like that's fine um i do think the universities have produced enormous amounts of value but probably you're
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missing out an opportunity to do something more focused um that pays off sooner as well we'll take gifts to the opera which you mentioned why should we not build monuments to what has been our greatest and most profound creations just to show people
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like we did this this is really important we still think it's important right there's it's a kind of elitism but nonetheless isn't it important to keep those traditions alive and highly visible um yeah it could be important um is it going to pass the benefit cost test i mean at least you know i'm open to anything you've got to just show me the numbers ultimately um but they're not going to be numbers right we're just kind of guessing well you
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hear beethoven in the symphony do you do something great 30 years later we're not going to have an rct on that right well we're not gonna have an rct but you can still at least say like okay um at best this will
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this message will reach this many people at best this message reaching people will let's say increase the impact of their lives by a certain percentage um and then you could at least get kind of upper bound where you think okay with the most
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optimistic assumptions how much benefit would be being created by this extra run of the opera and uh i think even with those optimists my guess my guess would be that even with those optimistic assumptions it would not look
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comparable to other good things that one could be doing but it's like par if it's paradoxes and moral arithmetic right so the single action doesn't seem that important if you're a single marksman in a firing squad well you didn't kill the
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person but in a way you still did so no single performance of a great opera is really going to matter much in my view but the fact that we have a network of operas performing the magic flute fidelio keeping alive these 18th 19th
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century ideals of liberty freedom you know the sonic temple uh glorious music the importance of the exalted and the divine that seems to me intuitively a super high return though i don't ever think i'll be able to measure it
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so i actually think that um if if you think that even an expectation your additional project let's say of one of the author is not making a difference then that actually suggests that this class of projects is being overfunded you should just take that at face value you the value doesn't get inherited from the fact that it's already done like um uh a lot of um has done like a lot of good so taking another example of voting let's say
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there's kind of evil candidate and good candidate will suppose uh should i vote in the election if i think like oh maybe it's like actually could go either way then i think often the answer is yes because there's some chance that your vote will be decisive that's worth enormous amounts of um and worth you know enormous amounts of value if however it's already kind of 95 towards the good candidate in terms of votes and you're just absolutely sure
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that voting for the good candidate will not make a difference then i think the main argument and by far the main argument is kind of under mind because um you know it's already over determined that this good thing is going to happen and so you adding your extra weight uh is not making the world any better how should it matter if for our moral calculations if we think we might be living in a simulation uh i think it potentially matters in a lot
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of ways it gets into very um what seemed like esoteric topics in decision theory so two different views of decision theory causal decision theory and ever non-causal decision theory causal decisions that says i care what i cause
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about i can't i should care about what i cause uh if so then if i'm living in a simulation the argument for taking the very long-term future seriously uh gets you know a massive penalty at least because those people in the future who
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are simulating us who um you know are interested in how did things go down at this crucial moment in history when human level artificial intelligence gets built and so on uh once they've got that information it's much less likely that they're going to keep simulating things like things might get things will get like a lot more boiling and computational computation is expensive uh so if we're living in a simulation the
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future is probably going to be a lot shorter um and therefore the causal impact of my actions is much lower if however you've got a non-causal decision theory where i don't take into account just the causal effects of my
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actions but also um what evidence do i get about how other people will behave then i should think well even if i'm in a simulation if i do such and such thing that is also giving me evidence that the will who is in the real world the
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non-simulated will with all of this important you know huge consequences in front of him he will do such and such an action too and so for non-causal decision theory it you know makes much less of a difference now i'm someone who tends to prefer causal decision theory so uh i think that i guess i think two things one if we're in a simulation kind of all bets are off because like who knows now like what implications you're having
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but secondly maybe you also just are much more likely to favor near-term actions rather than long-term actions because you know helping the simulated suffering person now okay well that's a good thing that you're doing um trying to positively impact the long-term future is not something that will actually occur because the simulation is kind of likely to get shut off but couldn't it be this convex returns to time that the simulation might be
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likely to run for much longer at least in terms of subjective time than like if all we have is the so-called real physical universe and you should care about the long run much more but there's this insuperable epistemic problem you
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don't know what the simulators want or even people in other simulations and there's quite possibly lots and lots and lots of them so you're paralyzed for this other reason just you don't know anything and what you want seems to now
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be smaller than if like it's just us mars and venus yes so i think that's pretty plausible this if you're in a simulation is just like i said all bets are off and we don't really know and maybe that means that no matter how confident you are that you're in a simulation you should act as if you're not because 99 you're in a simulation it's like nihilism it's like well who knows what the impact of any of our actions are one percent that you're not
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in a simulation and then act on um you know you just do the kind of things that seem best um on this issue of like oh maybe it's convex so maybe the simulation goes even longer that's in this kind of category of things that um again feel to me like the kind of low but also like extremely speculative probabilities that feel like crazy town so because it's not just the kind of simulation ones that are uh other you know other thoughts you might have
40:02
and we've mentioned infinite ethics as well other thoughts you might have that um [Music] would lead to even more value in the future um but seem like extremely implausible so here's another one which is uh you know you are in favor of speeding up economic growth because that has many benefits um for not just now but like many centuries to come uh my kind of response to that would be well at some point economic growth would plateau
40:31
um you know not in a few centuries but certainly by ten thousand years time we can't just keep growing and so the more important thing is to either change the values that guide the future or ensure that we have a future at all because that's a different difference that really persists for all time but here's a response you could make tyler which is well we shouldn't be confident we shouldn't be certain not 100 certain that economic growth will
40:57
plateau maybe it just keeps going forever and ever and ever until 100 trillion years when the less stars burn out and what's more that's where all the value is because if economic growth can keep going for so long then that's huge amounts of value way more than uh if we merely get a few thousand years of growth and my response to that is man this just seems like super brittle low probability um because it seems so impossible to me
41:27
that we could get hundreds of trillions of years of you know technological progress and improving well-being and so what about the simple response the higher economic growth today gives you better institutions and that also serves
41:41
to minimize existential risk you look at the countries with poor growth records none of them seem to have the institutions to fight off a real threat to humanity right so okay yeah a simple argument for growth being a priority
41:54
okay so there's a yeah different argument then i would focus less on growth per se but there's something that um i do buy and at some margin i think it is what we should be doing and i've done a bit of it so far which is just like
42:13
okay it's hard to predict the future we're going to get lots of you know unexpected events there are some things that just correlate that you well we're onto a good thing like yeah improved yeah technologically delivering growth
42:27
um good institutions democracy liberalism more cooperation higher trust in societies these are just genetically good i mean innovation and let's just like from the sheer to that record of how helpful these have been over the last 200 years um let's just kind of keep pushing on that um that's the kind of view that i think i'm most sympathetic to in terms of the kind of progress more progress studies worldview um because i do think that's like good
43:03
for the long-term future and it's kind of like can you beat the market um and i think probably we can actually but at some at some margin um that's what i think long-termism turns into it looks kind of more common sensei like um building a flourishing society now i'm going to use the word hingey to describe the quality of living in a time that is highly influential where that influence may very well persist for a long period of time
43:33
do people in their own eras know when they are living in especially hingy errors or are they clueless uh i think we know a lot more now than we did in the past so i think people in the past would have been pretty clueless uh they didn't have a good sense of how long i mean the fact that the universe is so truly enormous so big and yet uninhabited is actually a very recent idea like a little over 100 years um that we've really appreciated that
44:06
so people in previous times may have thought that they were living in extraordinarily hingy times the early christians extraordinarily injury time kingdom was going to come and it was one or two generations oh you think they were right and we've just been like no but christianity has proven extremely important and it's still with us right it's funny okay uh yeah i think they were you i actually i do agree they were very hingy time
44:32
just not for the reasons they thought but that gets at the epistemic problem do people ever know like people in 1720 how many of them were sitting around saying well we're on the cusp of an industrial revolution right that was a huge event i'm not sure the founding fathers were aware so um john adams has this great quote of uh the ins is of the last importance that we build the institutions of america um correctly because they may well not wear
45:00
out for thousands of years and if they are uh built incorrectly then they will not return except by accident to the right path so i think they actually did seem to be aware of the importance of what they were doing but i think this is so i think two things one i think that should give us a lot of humbleness or humility in terms of taking actions today i think perfectly plausible to me maybe even more likely than not that in a hundred years time
45:28
people would look back and say oh wow these are the people they cared about ai and worried about bio weapons in the same way as i look at back at john stuart mill at the end of the 19th century who was fighting for future generations by keeping trying to keep coal in the ground because he thought that we were going to run out of coal very quickly and that would impoverish future generations you know i think that's actually quite likely
45:53
um i think that gives a good argument for trying to build up uh do much more robustly good actions or trying to build up resources that will be very useful in 100 years time increasing the number of impartially concerned and altruistically motivated and carefully reasoning thinkers for example but i also think we have much better evidence than those people in the past we have like a much better understanding of physics a better understanding of
46:19
social science of probability even of ethics and uh i think that's a foreign policy like we can't predict anything i don't know anyone good at predicting foreign policy outcomes those are the maybe the most important issues in the world so if we
46:33
can't predict foreign policy two years out like how well can we understand our own hinginess uh well i think one reason so here's a general argument for thinking that we're at least plausibly at a very influential
46:47
time and i think this argument works um i don't think it means like well at the most influential time that's like a substantially harder argument to make but it's just that level of technological progress is very
47:00
high compared to history and also very high like the late technological progress and very high compared to what will happen in what must happen in the future and the argument is just that if we had economic growth of 2 per year for 10 000
47:16
years then uh we would be producing 10 to the 87 world's worth of economic output um and that doesn't seem and not only yeah sorry we'll be producing that there are 10 to the 67 atoms in within 10 000 light years so we would be producing um about a trillion trillion uh civilizations worth like current civilizations worth of economic output for every atom um within 10 000 years and that just seems like okay that can't happen so
47:54
economic growth technologically driven economic growth is going to have to decrease when we look to the future um and so that actually suggests we're living at a time of unusually high technological change and this is actually a very tiny window 10 000 years so it's only been like 200 years that we've gotten anything close to this level of tech progress 10 000 years also very tiny window compared to hundreds of thousands of years that
48:20
we've been around so far in the millions billions or trillions of years we could be around um in the future that just seems like a really pretty good reason for thinking okay we might like there's at least decent probability for thinking with an
48:34
at a unusually hingy time again maybe not the most influential time but something that's like pretty distinctive if you kind of tell the story of the whole of civilization not just the past but also the future
48:47
now on this question i'm looking for a sociological answer it's really striking to me how many very smart young people right now are attracted to the effect of el true as a movement i think way more than a lot of outsiders realize i'm sure you've seen this why is that the case and the mere fact that you all might be correct i do not consider a satisfactory answer to be clear because in general it's not the case that the correct movements are
49:10
always attracting the smartest people so why is this happening now um i was absolutely gonna say well maybe we've just got the best arguments um i think okay fine i've got to give an entirely sociological explanation um one is i think there's just there were just was like an untapped market of altruistically minded people um i think that especially like this kind of you know effective altruism is much broader than consequentialism but
49:48
consequentialism flavored um uh ethical views i think correlate with being you know very high educationally performing uh i think it's also the case that like something that correlates with being high educationally performing is just
50:06
being kind of secure about your material needs um whether that's because you come from a better family or but also because you're like career prospects looking pretty good i think of kind of altruism like a luxury good so
50:20
the more secure you are the more you can focus on that um and so one thing is just we've tapped into this market that i think wasn't otherwise being tapped into um then i think a second thing i could say is just that the topics are just
50:35
very intellectually interesting um you can and like you know a very unusual um intersection of like intellectually interesting and extremely impactful and important for one's own life and in fact how the world should be
50:53
so uh you know you're making arguments about paradoxes and population ethics and moral philosophy and that what the resolution there is like really going to make a difference to what you um what you should do so perhaps that's kind of
51:09
more attractive to the nerds of the world too let me make a sociological observation of my own if i think about making the world a better place i think so much about so many things being downstream from culture that we
51:22
need to think about culture this is quite a messy topic it's not easily amenable to what you might call optimization kinds of reasoning and then when i hear ea discussions they seem very often to be about optimization so many chats online in person like how many chickens are worth a cow the bed net versus the anti-malaria program and i often think that this is maybe my biggest difference with ea that ea has the wrong emphasis
51:52
pushing people into the optimization discussions when it should be more about improving the quality of institutions and management everywhere in a way that depends on culture which is this harder thing to manage and this may even get back to you know subsidizing mozart's magic flute but there's something about the sociology of ea that strongly encourages especially online what i would call the optimization mindset what's your response to that
52:17
uh i think i'm going to surprise you and agree with you tyler um where yeah there's i'm not sure it's about optimization but here's a certain critique that one could make of ea um in general or traditionally it's like hey you're a bunch of nerds you want to kind of stem people you attack you like the way your brains work will be inclined to focus on like technology or technological fixes and not on mushy things like institutions and culture but
52:46
they're like super important and i can't yeah i'm at least i at least think that that criticism has like a lot going for it and one of the things i mean i don't want a wholesale endorsement because often you
53:02
just can't have technological fixes to what are the even sociological problems where um you know the risk of a engineered pandemic causing you know killing hundreds of millions of people that is in part a sociological or political problem because
53:19
it's going to be an individual that builds it and does it we could just solve it with technology though early warning detection systems for uvc lighting that kind of sterilizes looms so there doesn't need to be a match between
53:32
political or sociological problems and political or cultural responses but i do think that culture is just enormously important that's something i've kind of um changed my view on and appreciated a lot over the last few years so
53:48
just as i started to learn more about history about the cultural evolution literature um about joseph henrik's work and our understanding of um humanity as a species uh so nathan nunn actually it's one of my favorite and most underrated articles is by nathan dunn it's called history as evolution so i think it's extremely good yes and actually my understanding of like human beings a lot of them like homo economists uh which are like you know
54:13
mainly motivated by self-interest you understand that in terms of income at least when you're looking at much broader scale i think we're more much more like homoculturalis where people have a view of how the world should be and they go out and try and like make that vision happen um and i think that can have like yeah hard to measure and very long run but important effects um and i actually see effective altruism as a whole as kind of cultural
54:38
innovation it's creating this new subculture a culture of people who are impartially impartial and altruistically motivated extremely concerned about the truth and having accurate beliefs and that is a way in which um i think effective altruism could have a big impact in the same way as kind of you know the scientific evolution was like primarily a cultural revolution i think i shouldn't use that term um primarily of evolution in culture
55:09
uh where people suddenly started innovating and they started to think in a certain way it was like oh we can do experiments and we can test things and we can tinker so i actually see effective altruism as like a cultural innovation that could
55:24
drive great kind of moral progress in the future uh yeah and then like should we be doing more in terms of cultural change i guess one thing i'll say is like people are doing quite a lot of it in terms of i mean
55:37
myself promoting concern for future generations um in this book what we are the future is doing that an awful lot of people are going to promote cultural change around attitudes to non-human animals um it is hard to measure uh but i think there's a very big difference between having an optimization mindset to do the best and having a mindset it's like therefore we always need to be able to measure what we're doing and have some method that
56:08
we're optimizing towards where that latter thing i think is a bit of a slow man against ea will the ea movement avoid conquest second law namely that institutions not explicitly designed to be right-wing end up becoming left-wing uh all these major foundations right rockefeller forward pew you can go all the way down the list whether you like that or not right it seems to be an empirical regularity so will it happen to ea yeah i think
56:36
i'd be curious about what the underlying mechanism is there for those other foundations it's not something i know about um it's interesting that if you look at the demographics and political views of um people in effective altruism even though we've really not been selecting for that at all we've been selecting people who care about you know things like does it make sense to spend your money to pay for bed nets to save lives in poor countries
57:14
um that's not you know certainly not a politically hot button issue there does tend to be a systematic tendency towards being very socially liberal and being kind of economically moderate or something and there's still obviously like a range um in on both of those cases um but there certainly is a particular tendency my guess is that that's the bigger factor um and like inertia would like keep effective altruism broadly in that category um
57:46
but perhaps you could convince me otherwise if i understood like what's the mechanism by which these other foundations are shifting left wing for our final segment do you have time for a quick round of underrated versus overrated of course
57:59
okay bishop barkley the philosopher overrated or underrated um underrated because uh idealism in general i think is underrated as a metaphysical view and that's related to thinking we might be living in a simulation or not yeah
58:16
just in yeah or in general the fact that it's our experiences that we have direct awareness of and the idea that like well maybe there's no external world i think there's more on the table than maybe modern philosophers give it credit for you're from scotland adam smith's theory of moral sentiments as a book over or underrated uh i'll have to confess i haven't read it um my guess is that it's underrated because well some people i
58:43
know i respect they think of it very highly so quine the philosopher over or underrated overrated i'm afraid why um uh he two dogmas of empiricism for example is his most famous um article he has this and you know there's the analytic synthetic
59:06
distinction um views that are true and virtue of uh meaning views that into empirically and he's like i don't believe in this distinction his argument is just well can you define what it means for something to be true
59:21
in virtue of meaning and he's like this the definition is circular this definition is circular i don't think it's a very good argument um i think you can clearly have arguments that are um you know you can clearly have positions
59:35
that involve primitive concepts without being able to define them in non-circular terms and that was his like you know that's regarded as one of the great papers of analytic philosophy over the last century and i think the arguments are
59:48
pretty weak um and then more generally he has this tendency of uh writing these articles that where the arguments aren't very good but he lead he ends with some like vivid uh yeah vivid picture or metaphor and people don't really understand the arguments because they're often quite technical um but then really like the metaphor and people think oh he's great bildering overrated or underrated and you need to tell us what it is
1:00:18
building is also known as urban climbing so it's where um just basically climb buildings in urban environments it's something i used to do as a younger man and it is very dangerous and so i'm going to say it's overrelated in the book i talk about how i nearly killed myself doing that and so a lesson from that to the long-term future of humanity thus we need to worry about existential risk exactly last question to close this out what is
1:00:48
it you will do next but just to remind our readers what we owe the future will's new book excellent one of the most important books of the year will is one of the most influential and important philosophers in the world so please do buy it and read it but tell us also what will you do next great thanks so much tyler so i have a few options on the table i've been helping sam bankman fleet uh launches foundation the future fund um
1:01:13
which has been going well and we've been uh able to move a lot of money about 140 million dollars uh this year uh possible i will keep working more on that that's one option second is just doubling down on books and promotion of ideas uh that's why you know truly love i enjoy having back and forth with people like yourself and there's plenty more i'd be interested in writing another book that's kind of a follow-up to doing good better that is um
1:01:42
really explaining kind of what is the effect of altruism community and actually taking a more an introduction into that that's less from abstract principles and arguments and more just via what actually the people
1:01:55
in that community what they're doing and then a final option that um i consider is um some sort of new uh college or university so really trying to take some of the brightest people from all around the world uh especially in countries um
1:02:14
where very bright promising morally motivated people are being missed so if you're you know you could be extremely intellectually talented in rural india and it's maybe you can get maybe you can make your way out but it's it's a challenge at least and then just trying to give the kind of very best kind of all-round education possible um hiring people who are dedicated as teachers rather than having their attention split between
1:02:48
the search and teaching which is the standard university model model and also using certain techniques within um that we have kind of discovered that aren't very widely used within education to try and accelerate
1:03:04
people's learning as fast as possible and if that worked well in this one instance then perhaps it's become a much wider a much wider idea will mccaskill congratulations again on the book and thank you very much okay thank you so much taylor