What’s important? I’ve got really good common sense.” And I think it’s possible that there are people who have better common sense, better intuition, better judgement than others. Yeah, it’s not even the choice set if you’re married, of course you should try. But the broader trend, are we doing better than we did 500 years ago, 100 years ago? Although it’s true that many political movements and political changes have outcomes that are difficult to measure, I don’t think the two distinctions line up quite so neatly. I know how to work together better with my family. Robert Wiblin: There’s a lot of different issues there. So let me try to suggest some things I find troubling about it. Does it form a natural country that can get along with itself? Obviously it’s a better world where women and people of different sexual orientation are respected rather than condemned or vilified or abused or oppressed, but it’s not obvious to me that the larger trends of human history are headed in the right direction. I have to say, I don’t know where I begin to start to think about that and how to actually achieve that. Disagreement from smart people who you otherwise often agree with tends to be especially valuable. I just mentioned in passing, I try to give 10% of my after income to charity. How do we deal with that? But if you want to get a taste of it, instead of babysitting, which gives you a little bit of a taste, you’ll be better off reading books about people who are parents. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. Didn’t like it so much, but by the time 20 years have passed or all these wonderful policies in place to make it easier to have kids or more pleasant to have kids and the world’s changed–. Robert Wiblin: Yeah. But of course, happiness isn’t all we care about. It’s not about comparing those two things. His kids won’t talk to him. I’m not even to be naturally prone to disregarding evidence that goes against my worldview. And that conclusion was based on a randomized control trial, one randomized control trial, and that randomized control trial came into question. William MacAskill (2018). I start to think, a lot of these studies that I didn’t believe, in fact, didn’t hold up when subject to replication and testing. You got to try to figure out who to hire and who to fire and that’s really hard, and figure out what products are worth making and what teams are going to work well together. But I don’t use recreational drugs. Everyone is equal and if one person has utility above the lowest, then it becomes unethical.” If you stick around until the end of the episode I’ll let you know how you can get a feed of my recommended top 100 episodes of the show to work though. But having said that, it might be the most important problem. Then people will eat that instead, and factory farming will become a smaller industry.”. I’m really interested in the 80,000 Hours project, so help me understand it better. So, if that person’s a stranger, if I meet a homeless person on the street with alcohol on their breath and who appears to be having a hard time, my ability to help that person is pretty small. Then you have the glorious highs, the wondrous things, the deep satisfaction, the emotional joy that you feel and delight in having children. I had to avoid it. Every human being. Was the case for deworming children oversold? Did they exclude anything? So I give him money. Russ Roberts: I’m not sure. Russ Roberts: Well, I think it’s all the above. Robert Wiblin: And I think that doesn’t suggest that things are going to go well. Perhaps you should become a meditator, a person who devotes themselves to mindfulness and self-awareness in how you interact with the present moment. Russ Roberts: I think about, “Oh, I don’t need to worry about the drug war. Oh, I wouldn’t have been fooled. That particular thing I think is probably, those are all good. I think it’s missing some of the hard problems. This week’s guest — Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast EconTalk, and author of a forthcoming book on decision-making under uncertainty and the limited ability of data to help — worries that might be a mistake. Are their parents not taking care of them? I agree with a lot of with the things you’ve said. But inevitably in a survey like that, it’s either often, not always, you can make it a little bit more nuanced, but it’s often a yes/no question. I cringe when people talk about charity as a scientific thing or choosing, like, “We know the best charity.” That’s kind of mad. Robert Wiblin: I guess the global health people, I think, would argue that the trade off that we actually face is something more like deciding whether to help a friend who has alcoholism or a stranger who really needs a measles vaccine. Russ Roberts: Nothing to do with the calculus. It’s partly because I don’t have the information I need at the national level to make it work. I don’t know how to think about that. I think every human being would. And by happier, by the way, what exactly do you mean by that? I’ve got really good common sense.” And I think it’s possible that there are people who have better common sense, better intuition, better judgement than others. Full transcripts are available on our site and compiled by Zakee Ulhaq. Russ Roberts: As a result, I won’t necessarily love what I get, but I wouldn’t like what I got in the other world either. Robert Wiblin: It’s not our fantasy about physics. That’s got many, many wonderful things about it, but to extend it infinitely far that I care about, say, the entire universe and not so much about my family, which by the way, is very much a thread in modern utilitarian thought. It’s not like, “Oh, was it worth it?” All those diapers you changed, the vomit you cleaned up. Instead, we’re more likely to look for comparatively neglected policy areas — for example, what to do with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Our ability to do horrible things has increased much more than say, has our wisdom or our kindness. The term Effective altruism is questionable at best; however, their message does make a lot of sense. Russ Roberts: And yet somehow, when the minimum wage goes up, they don’t respond. We’re at the end of August in 2020, having this conversation, and the two biggest things going on in the United States right now in the public eye, obviously you’ll understand I could argue that the biggest thing going on in my life right now is my relationship with my wife, given the way we’ve been talking. Like saying, “Well, maybe we should leave people alone unless there’s a really compelling reason not to.”. I want to come back to the part that I know you’re very focused on, which is career change and career path and thinking about how analytically or not we should think about our careers. Those are the negatives, okay? That is, they’re very sensitive in this worldview to the wages that they have to pay. But let’s say I’ve got, if I’m lucky, 10 good years ahead of me, 65 to 75 years old. If I had devoted my life to helping 25 students a class and maybe 100 students a year to become deeply devoted to the fiction of William Faulkner or to the poetry of Alexander Pope, would that have been an inferior life or a better life to the life I’ve chosen? That’s why we have the state department, the United States, that’s their job.”. There was one study early on, from the nineties, early 2000’s, that showed extraordinarily positive results from deworming on income and educational achievements. Others would say racism. I mean, would it really have been so much worse if… I mean, I happen to like economics now, but at the time I also liked fiction. They’re the source of activism of people who are passionate about change, about improving the world. Don’t I have a moral imperative to be kind to her? It’s a bit hard to quickly sum up 80,000 Hours’ advice, but I guess some of the key aspects are we suggest that people try to contribute to a particularly pressing global problem, which I guess we have various rules of thumb for trying to figure out what global problems are especially pressing, like how many people are affected by the problem and how much, how many people are already trying to solve the problem, so is it neglected and might there by low-hanging fruit still there? Some good things, mostly bad. What are the main things that you enjoy doing now?” Or, “Do you already enjoy being around kids?” If one of those had a really strong correlation with then how much people liked having… How much they enjoyed having kids ex-post. It can come from secular, again, I don’t mean to suggest religion’s the only source of it or that national pride is the only source of it or regional pride, but it is part of our human makeup evidently to be motivated by that kind of force, and that was glorious. I like penicillin, antibiotics also. :4–5:12 Effectiveness refers to It’s not your job. They’re like, “Well, it made my life better in some ways and I really value my kids, but there was also some significant downsides.” But before we go to that, in the interview with L.A. Paul, you said this, “Not everyone should have children. Okay. Sometimes it was self-centered, the kind of corruption I’m implicitly talking about here. That list has been doing the rounds for a few years and many people have told me they really appreciated its existence. There’s a certain kind of, inherent complexity. Robert Wiblin: Yeah. One thing that’s interesting is I feel you pick on the empirical research a lot and I’d be interested to hear you talk more about doubts that you have about theory and about common sense and maybe try to weigh up the weaknesses that all of these different approaches have, rather than focusing on just the weaknesses of empirical research in particular. I’ve noticed in people in their late 70s, they start to get a little slower, their brain doesn’t fire quite as rapidly, they’re not quite at what level they used to be, but they can still be pretty effective. When it comes to politics, there’s no reason in principle why effective altruists shouldn’t get involved. So I’m going to devote my life to improving that. Whether you’re a totally self-centered person who just wants to have as satisfying a life as possible, or whether you’re an incredible altruist, or in between, you’re somebody who gets satisfaction from being generous to helping other people. Other people might say violence against women. Seven on a scale of one to 10. It’s just not obvious to me that we can be effective… In other words, I might be much better at giving charity in that world, but I might be a really bad dad. They’re things that legislation gets passed to try to improve. Russ Roberts: I think it’s really good to help other people. There’s a fourth way we used to make decisions and it’s out of fashion, which is tradition. That doesn't have to be the case for Altruism. I think there is a survey, it’s called ‘Literature’. Those topics have come up on EconTalk a few times over the years in your interviews with Will MacAskill and Peter Singer and L.A. Paul somewhat recently, and Paul Bloom a couple of years ago. We care a lot about ourselves, inevitably. In that case, it just seems far more tractable to try to help the person who you already know. And I think that’s important to keep in mind in the background. And after you have kids, it looks pretty good. Russ Roberts: Rob, what do I do? And I said to my wife, “Have you seen the fan?” Because there were only two places to have it. That you need to leverage the knowledge and wisdom of other people. In general, we can’t have the same sort of robust evidence base that we’re used to in global health interventions, for example. Russ Roberts: I have a lot of trouble… I’m a pretty educated person. We’d all agree that on many of those, maybe not every single one, but on many of those, some progress would be a good thing. Since then, it’s more mixed but there are a lot of studies that say, “No, it doesn’t hurt them hardly at all, if at all.” And now the questions is, do I say, “Okay, why is that change different? Robert Wiblin: Development of new weapons. You can’t perfect it. What other interventions does it justify? Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that advocates using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. Improved on if you can. If you ask me right now, “How glad are you that you have four children?” Actually I’d say 11 on a scale of one to 10, but some people might… If they were honest and that’s one of the challenges of survey data, are people really going to be honest to the surveyor? I don’t know how to do that. But most importantly, they’re not the only way we learn about the real world. Modern utilitarian thought, I am told that I should be ashamed of having a fancy birthday party for my four-year-old because that money would be better spent. Russ Roberts: One other thing I want to add is that I don’t think randomized control trials are the only measure of efficacy or evidence. What do you do? It’s a giant, in fact, a giant matrix. Effective altruism is built on the simple but unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good one can. And empirical information is also kind of bad,” and then you’re like, “Well, I guess, I’m giving equal weight to all of them, and the end result is I’m going to be pretty agnostic because I’m just not going to be able to figure this out because all of these sources of evidence are too unreliable.” You’ve brought down the empirical research thing. Yeah. The idea of effective altruism is deeply rooted in philosophy, hence to understand it better an attempt will be made to reconstruct and present the philosophical framework of Effective Altruism. Trying to think about how your game could be improved. And I just did that. I try to talk to her every day. I think I would completely agree with you in the case where you’re comparing helping a family member or a friend who’s struggling with alcoholism versus a stranger in your country who’s struggling with alcoholism. A lot of times that was just wrong. I wouldn’t try to push it on you or justify it, but I’m a big fan of decentralization. I think there’s not one reason. Seven on a scale of one to 10. Robert Wiblin: Yeah. One could argue that the essential challenge of the good life, for the world around us, is to temper that self-centeredness to be kinder to the people around us: our family, our friends, our colleagues at work. People involved in 80,000 Hours or the effective altruism community would be comfortable recommending the latter. But, in practice, I have multiple factors like you’ve laid out, how do I go with the trade-offs between this? Russ Roberts: Well, as it turns out, I’m writing a book on these issues, the question of how do we deal with uncertainty and to what extent does data help us make decisions? I have four children. I have to confess, I hadn’t thought about your point. Russ Roberts: I don’t know how to get there from here. Now, in that situation, I’m trying to flesh out the way I’ve been thinking about information in our conversation. Is that, if you just left people to themselves, they would have to do all of this research for themselves upfront to try to figure out, “What are the most pressing problems in the world and which ones are solvable and which ones aren’t?”. Then the second one might be kind of careful theorizing and reasoning about a problem: kind of microeconomic textbook reasoning. I think this creeping utilitarianism is a bad thing, and should at least be made explicit. Or maybe I’m wrong about that. That if you want to have the biggest impact with your money, you should be giving it to these things only. I think we’ve seen some improvements in kindness, but our ability to destroy the world through nuclear war, it’s just something that’s completely unprecedented, completely different than what we had before. It gives you lots of experience in those areas. It’s a variation really of expected value theory to me. And then I guess maybe another distinctive idea or something that we talk about quite a bit is that especially early on in people’s career, they should focus on building up career capital, try to think a lot about improving their skills and improving their network and figuring out what they’re good at because they’ve got decades ahead in their career to potentially use those skills and that knowledge that they brought up. Robert Wiblin: That is one reason or one angle on why it is that I’m especially interested in global catastrophic risks and trying to improve the institutions that we have globally for dealing with catastrophes and trying to foresee them and prevent them. They can provide us with some knowledge and guidance, but you don’t want to trust them too much. “Are you glad you had kids?” Or, “On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you if you had kids?” And I would argue that the sterility of reducing something as complicated as being a parent to a number, it’s not so much trying to measure, it’s that what you’re trying to measure is so much more complicated than a point estimate like that. But there’s some really heroic police offers, and some really villainous drug dealers, just like in real life. Let’s turn to a different example, a more practical day-to-day example that people might be used to. I have no idea. Christian Barry and Holly Lawford-Smith, "On Satisfying Duties to Assist", in Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer eds., Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, Oxford UP (forthcoming) Optional: Elizabeth Ashford, "Utilitarianism, Integrity, and Partiality" , The Journal of Philosophy 97 (8): 421-439 (2000) Robert Wiblin: It’s all about aggregating lots of different pieces of evidence. It’s weird that that’s the thing that we’ve relentlessly focused on. At least we can have some confidence that we can save lives in the developing world or increase people’s incomes, just by giving them cash. Much more uncertainty than baseball, for example. Robert Wiblin: I would love to. And she said, “Well, I think it’s over there.” And you know what “over there,” was? John Gray, for example, refers to ‘utilitarian effective altruists’, and in his critique does not distinguish between effective altruism and utilitarianism. I mean, they’re important, but they can be misleading. That wouldn’t be an easy thing for me to do as a classical liberal, but I might do that. It’s an experiment about counting. Robert Wiblin: The first of those is effective altruism and 80,000 Hours as a career advising project, which I think you admire in some ways, but also have some reservations about, as you mentioned. Robert Wiblin: Whereas if I go for the nuclear war thing, well, the benefit is very large, but it’s extremely uncertain what is going to be beneficial. Russ Roberts: So I think this whole human longevity generational thing is kind of nontrivial. Reply [-] drethelin 7y 1. Initially it was most people only cared about white men, then women, then people of color, we got rid of slavery; you’ve had a kind of expanding circle of moral consideration. You’re not super keen on the minimum wage. This part is intended to show the development of utilitarian thought that led to Effective Altruism. There’s also cool kinds of consequentialist arguments that one could give for why this is a bad path to go down even if in some narrow sense, it seems like it’s raising welfare just during the period of this television program. We don’t take responsibility for any loss that results from the use of information on the site. I understand the good part of it, certainly the move toward less racism, less sexism, less sexual judgment. You should just spend your time serving those people you live with. It’s collected in her collection. What should I do?”. So let’s take alcohol. I guess I have a somewhat pessimistic take, which is that we should trust it less than most people think, but I think you have maybe an even more pessimistic take. And a meta analysis of deworming started to suggest that actually maybe it doesn’t work so well. Perhaps you should become a meditator, a person who devotes themselves to mindfulness and self-awareness in how you interact with the present moment. To me, those are the harder questions and those aren’t going to be adjudicated, measured in any successful way. One is the donating and the other is using data to figure out how that money can go the furthest. Although you could makes a lot of headway as an individual nation and maybe even a little bit of headway as an individual. I could argue that it’s the most pressing problem, the lack of kindness in human relations. March 22, 2017. It’s either on the back porch or it’s in office. Yeah, I think it really has shrunk as a fraction of what people are focusing on, and 80,000 Hours doesn’t put any effort in, or we don’t do any independent research on what charity’s most effective or anything like that. Robert Wiblin: Just on the deworming one. Trying to find something like that, that’s a good fit for you. Robert Wiblin: Not to be facetious, but it seems like most people through history were also farmers say, and many of them got smallpox and things like that. And so maybe that’s just a place where my sniff test was right as usual. It’s very easy for your actions to backfire and make things worse. I might do it against their will if I loved them and thought enough about my own confidence that this was good for them. Want to listen later? To pick on a particular psychological study that I thought never passed the sniff test. Russ Roberts: I’m 65 years old. So the people who tend to think that the minimum wage is a really good idea and will argue that the empirical work supports that claim because it shows that firms don’t respond as negatively as often, you might think. Inherent complexity such as global poverty and injustice intact her every day a launching point for discussion rather a... We often suggest that things are important this was good for more people I. Of that decision forget the nuance and the other things suggest that actually maybe it a! How do we decide how to live better lives of many people have me! 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