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. The whining, the wailing, the tragedy, the wounds, the stitches. Literally we’re genetically, evolutionarily designed to be self-interesting. I think at 80,000 Hours, we’d be interested in trying to narrow down on some smaller part of the problem of kindness where we think perhaps it’s particularly tractable or people haven’t tried this one so much, or potentially the welfare impacts are especially large if we can solve this component of increasing kindness. But above all, for me, anyway, he’s the creator and host of EconTalk, a weekly podcast featuring fairly academic hour-long interviews. So there’s this–. 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. I don’t accept the argument that we can then aggregate across people in cases where it’s more complicated. And in particular, the real issue, the real place it gets hard is, if I execute this person in a public square in a really gruesome way that’s humiliating to them, but I give a hundred million people, a thrill watching it on TV, I think most of us would say, “That’s not moral,” even though the happiness and joy of the sadists outweighs one single person’s embarrassment in death. And so maybe that’s just a place where my sniff test was right as usual. Even though I understand that even at the personal level, my intervention with a family member might have unintended consequences and might damage my relationship with them. Maybe the tolerance for intervention like you’re talking about that makes even most of the time, yeah, pretty much a lot of people better off and only a few people a little worse off. So, you know, it’s hard to know. :2:4–7 Altruism refers to improving the lives of others—as opposed to egoism, which emphasizes only self-interest. It tends to lead to seeing people as the other, and we should make the case for atheism.” I think those are all interesting arguments. That was really an incredible achievement. I think that’s a no brainer. We’re living in a particularly pleasant time where democracy is fairly widespread and economic freedom is somewhat widespread. Robert Wiblin: Just be kind to my housemates. It’s uncertain about what you’re good at. There’s an enormous amount of evidence about what it’s like to be a parent in the world’s literature; in the poems, in the plays, in the fiction. But at the same time, I’m aware that maybe I kind of overestimate my sniff ability. Knowing that there’s a high probability that they won’t succeed, but that if they do make progress, that it would just be extremely valuable. But it seems like at the extremes, you can. As a result, you’re going to help enslave the world under the dominion of a criminal mastermind. Russ Roberts: So you started off by saying that the 80,000 Hours project, we talk about taking the most pressing problems, I think that was the opening example you gave. Robert Wiblin: Sure. One thing is you kind of forget the nuance and the subtlety, and you just remember the recommendation. And I’m going to cope with that by saying, “Well, it’s going to be imperfect. But then there’s other groups that start pushing it and perhaps they care less about bringing in all of the caveats and all of the uncertainty, and so people hear that message. 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. That’s the crucial question, right? Or I’ll split my money and give half to one and half to the other.”. It’s all very black and white. Or a stranger who has a bacterial infection and just needs antibiotics that are really cheap to buy for them. So those kind of crafts: golf, chess, they’re prone to mastery if you devote yourself in the right way. It’s a giant, in fact, a giant matrix. I mean, my first thought, it’s a great point to challenge because I’m not a big fan of smallpox, but I do think it’s interesting that a lot of people would argue, “You should be a farmer.” You should, for example, be close to your food. Because every dollar spent there is such a big bang for the buck. Russ Roberts: Rob, what do I do? Russ Roberts: I’m going to disagree on expanding the moral circle. The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris. In the second part selected details of the idea will be referred to in order to show the current state of development of this branch of utilitarianism. Reasonable people could disagree about what the most pressing problems are, right? So it’s not the case that effective altruists focus exclusively on things that are easy to measure. In the face of crisis, in the face of hardship, you just did your job. “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. And I suggest you go to YouTube and you… Rob, you can put up a link, I’m sure, to this actual experiment. There’s a whole realm of things like that. Those were careers that people talked about. Robert Wiblin: Okay, it is like physics. I think that people have become more moral over time, but we’ve also become technologically much more advanced. I think it’s true at some level. There’s a lot of negatives…the carpooling. We think that that would be a good thing if they spent more time thinking about how could they help others rather than just how could they have a career that’s enjoyable to them? Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I’m happy to say that I think we found that we agree on more than we initially thought, though that’s not true of every topic. Sometimes it seems like you suggest that just in principle, there’s no way of weighing these things up. And then thinking about it as sort of a personal thing, as an armchair theorist for myself, I certainly… It’s not like, “Oh, some days I’d rather be in a car accident than stub my toe.” So I agree with your basic point. But I have an idea of how to do that. And then the third one would be these kind of formal empirical research; just let the data speak. That’s a case where that kind of evidence about how, say what motivates a firm or how firms respond to changes in the environment. I’m a very dated vampire fan, by the way. What were you doing before out in the daytime all the time? You can’t really do randomized controlled experiments on most of these topics, you have to use different methods to figure out what’s effective and what works. I’m thinking you know… Because when you go over and watch video the second time, and you already know about what you’re supposed to look for, you see it right away. Especially catastrophes that are caused by human action, whether it’s malice or negligence. I actually have an idea. Before you’ve had kids, it doesn’t look appealing. Then you can ask the question, “Okay, let’s suppose you’re right. (Despite the five years I spent studying philosophy - before deciding that this didn’t actually help anyone! In the meantime, you do want to do follow up studies to try to see, “Is this one of the best buys in global health, or is it that initial study was mistaken for some reason? I wouldn’t know where to start. The marginal benefit to “humanity” of my child having a fancy birthday party, I’m not a fan of fancy birthday parties, by the way, but just the claim is that having a fancy birthday party is an immoral act because of the kind of moral calculus you’re suggesting we ought to embrace. We created the League of Nations. That’s maybe not the best policy to go for, but I think that’s why, in some sense, I was making fun of myself earlier about my biases causing me to assess data in a certain way. I think that’s wrong. I’m not even to be naturally prone to disregarding evidence that goes against my worldview. A lot of times that was just wrong. We’ve spent quite a bit of time on effective altruism and I think we’ve reached… Well we found that we agree maybe more than we thought. They had an incredible pride, at least the way it’s captured in the musical, and I think it’s true of many places, they had an incredible pride that that was what was appropriate and that they did that. Can we aggregate in this way? And that’s what I’m thinking about for what it’s worth. Russ Roberts: I like that point. I don’t have a nice suit really, but okay, we’ll pretend. Maybe I failed to read between the lines or the footnotes or whatever, but I remember it being more like, “This is a no brainer.” And it might not have been GiveWell that was making that, “no brainer” claim. And you hated this idea. Let’s turn to a different example, a more practical day-to-day example that people might be used to. And I said to my wife, “Have you seen the fan?” Because there were only two places to have it. It’s not like physics. But the scale of the benefit there, in terms of the number of people affected and how much they benefit, just is obviously a lot lower than preventing nuclear war. A scalar, a single number. But I think if you do have hundreds of people, thousands of people, then you can have some of them who spend their time thinking about, “What is it that we ought to do studying all of that history?” Who then, write papers or write blog posts that then guide the actions of other people who are more practitioners, who are more, in the government forming policy regarding China. That might be the biggest one. That’s really an interesting way to think about it. So I never want people to think that, “Oh, he just thinks anything goes.” It doesn’t. My memory might be wrong, but my memory’s that GiveWell said, “Here are the three charities you should give to.” Period. So I’m inclined with these policy decisions. In my head, I kind of have these different dials of the different kinds of evidence and I try to weigh them appropriately. But I think if I look at the big picture and I think how have human values changed over the last few thousand years, it just does seem to me that they are now more conducive to people being happy and having good lives, and not suffering horribly at the hands of other people. Poverty, clean water, clean air, climate, inequality, things that most people, not everybody, but most people would agree are things we wish were different than they are. Its impact is quite limited. 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. Trying to set aside rulers and people who you usually feature in history and just think about everyday life. I’ll just let the police figure that out.” Oh boy, is that a bad idea in my view? Robert Wiblin: Yeah. And it’s not obvious to me that that would have been possible in a world where we all were encouraged to think of ourselves as not being rooted, as not having an identity in, say, place. Like saying, “Well, maybe we should leave people alone unless there’s a really compelling reason not to.”. Robert Wiblin: It’s all about aggregating lots of different pieces of evidence. It asks you… Many listeners would have read about this or actually seen it. Subscribe by searching 80,000 Hours wherever you get your podcasts, or click one of the buttons below: So if you said to me, “You should devote the rest of your life to getting better at being the father of your children.”… I have an idea of how to do that. It’s interesting. Come From Away is the story of what happened on 9/11 when American airspace was closed right in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers. But to go back to the minimum wage. Robert Wiblin: Am I in the reference class of people who say that they are super glad that they had kids and they have no regrets? So I just want to mention that, because I just think that’s interesting. But, in practice, I have multiple factors like you’ve laid out, how do I go with the trade-offs between this? So I’ve recently been listening to this lecture series called The Other Side of History, where it goes through from tens of thousands of years ago to what was life like just for an ordinary person? That would be an interesting way to solve that problem. Our ability to do horrible things has increased much more than say, has our wisdom or our kindness. You have to watch a bunch of people playing basketball and they pass the basketball around among themselves and you’re supposed to count how many passes they make. We have better data and I would argue that’s probably not true, but I think there’s an interesting case to be made that the minimum wage question is more open than it was, say, in 1970, when I think it was “open and shut”. Russ Roberts: Can’t be against it. They’re the experts they’re really good at it. 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. What other interventions does it justify? Robert Wiblin: All right. I know how to work together better with my family. These are my initial reflections on the topic, intended as a launching point for discussion rather than a comprehensive survey. Now I play it about once a decade, and that’s a stretch. I want to worry about the worst outcomes, not just say the average outcome. We used to say, “Should I have a child or not?” Most of human history would say, “That’s not a decision. And let’s say you think I’m making a mistake staying at the Hoover Institution and doing this EconTalk thing, or I’m worried I’m making a mistake and I come to you and I say, “Rob, I want to make sure that the last 10 years of my life have the greatest impact that they could possibly have. They’re things that legislation gets passed to try to improve. A lot of times, I see empirical work and I go, “That doesn’t even pass the sniff test for me.” And the sniff test is kind of like common sense, right? I just mentioned in passing, I try to give 10% of my after income to charity. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Chapter 6: Utilitarianism in Action. The minimum wage has a big negative effect on the employment opportunities of low-skilled workers. To pick on a particular psychological study that I thought never passed the sniff test. One on each side of the ideological divide. Robert Wiblin: I think that’s kind of a reasonable way to make decisions. I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the human enterprise. I don’t know how to do that. 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. How do I know which of those is the right way to go? 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? We’re doing better economically, financially. Effective Altruism (EA) is both a philosophy and a movement. I’ve got to decide whether to have kids myself. It tends to lead to seeing people as the other, and we should make the case for atheism.” I think those are all interesting arguments. Please contact us if you wish to redistribute, translate or adapt this work. Others would say racism. Yeah, it’s not even the choice set if you’re married, of course you should try. We created the League of Nations. That would be an interesting way to solve that problem. I would love to. The Norton Introduction to Ethics, Elizabeth Harman & Alex Guerrero (eds.). Robert Wiblin: And, I guess my mind revolts at that idea. I’m going to let you be autonomous, have agency and responsibility, even though you may not use it in a way that I think is good. Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>, © 2001-2021 Blogarama.com   |   All rights reserved. I think there is a survey, it’s called ‘Literature’. It’s not to be mastered. 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: The show is quite moving. Robert Wiblin: I think the real problem is people trusting something too much and then they’re let down when it can’t deliver on these excessive promises. In addition to all the above we also discuss: Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. It’s about who you’ve become. They built a big airstrip there for large airplanes, and that airstrip was still there even though planes had gotten larger range and didn’t need to stop there anymore. But I think the deeper problem is that… And the reason is, I think a lot of these utilitarian calculus issues is a bit of a red herring. And does that justify progressive taxation of a confiscatory sort? 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