How to improve global health and wellbeing in clear, direct ways | Alexander Berger

Hi listeners, this is the 80,000 Hours Podcast, where we have unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems, what you can do to solve them, and why it's great to get an offer for your kidney that you can't refuse. I'm Rob Wiblin, head of research at 80,000 Hours. One of the classic divisions within the effective altruist research community has been that between the folks who think we should explicitly aim to improve the very long-term trajectory of humanity, even if that means it's harder to tell whether we're doing so successfully, and others who think that we should try to make the world better today in concrete, observable ways, even if that means working on problems that are smaller in scale. The former school of thought is usually called long-termism, while the latter hasn't really had a name, but has sometimes, by contrast, been called near-termism. We've directly discussed long-termism on the show several times over the years, including in episode 6 with Toby Ord back in 2017, the second 80,000 Hours team chat with Benjamin Todd. That was in September of 2020. And in episode 90 with Ajeya Kotra in January of this year. But we haven't had an episode directly about this other broad school of thought, which cares more about having positive impact sooner and being able to tell whether what you're doing seems to be working. So Keiran and I asked around to see who would be a great guest to talk about this topic, and the word on the street was that we should talk to Alex Berger. Alex Berger has been a philanthropic grantmaker for 10 years and was recently promoted to lead all of Open Philanthropy's grantmaking under the global health and wellbeing umbrella. Which is Open Phil's term for non-longtermist approaches to doing good. Open Philanthropy, for those who don't know, is a major foundation which uses rigorous, effective altruistically-driven thinking in order to have more impact with their giving, the same way that 80,000 Hours tries to use that kind of thinking to figure out how people can have more impact with their careers. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, for a few years they've been 80,000 Hours' largest funder, though our grants don't fall under the global health and wellbeing umbrella that Alexander is involved with. I'm so glad we've finally gotten to addressing this topic. I'm very glad we chose Alexander to do it with. We had so much material to cover in this interview that it easily could have become a mess, but to my great relief, it worked out as we had intended it to. Alexander was also able to give a robust case in favor of near-termism, but then also later explain the arguments for long-termism that he finds most persuasive, which is a sign of someone who really knows their material. If you'd be interested to work on Alexander's global health and well-being team, he highlights some amazing job opportunities in that program in the last third of the conversation. We also talk at the end about his decision to donate his kidney to a total stranger and why we both think it should be fine to compensate those who offer a kidney to someone they don't know. All right, without further ado, here's Alexander Berger. Today I'm speaking with Alexander Berger. Alexander is co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, where he leads its global health and well-being work. The global health and well-being umbrella is a broad one, which includes causes across scientific research, policy advocacy, and global development. Right before that, Alexander worked as a researcher at GiveWell, where he was one of their first hires and was working on evidence reviews and cost-effectiveness analysis for potential top charities as early as 2011. In 2011, he also donated one of his kidneys to a total stranger and published an op-ed in the New York Times on why it should be legal to sell your kidney if you so choose. And before all that, Alexander studied philosophy and education policy at Stanford University. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Alexander.

Thanks, Rob. It's great to be here. I'm a longtime listener, so it's really a pleasure.

I hope we'll get to talk about the case for working on programs where it's more practical to demonstrate what impact they're having, as well as roles that are currently available at Open Phil. But first, what are you working on at the moment and why do you think it's important?

Yeah, so I'm the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, which is a foundation that currently gives away a couple hundred million dollars a year in a way that aims to maximize our impact. So it's probably familiar to a lot of your listeners from the effective altruism community because we're sort of part of that community. I currently lead our work on what we've recently decided to call global health and wellbeing, which includes giving to the GiveWell top charities, a bunch of work in scientific research, policy, and farm animal welfare, and also some of the new causes that we're exploring going into now and I'm hoping to talk about later. We're growing pretty quickly, and so a lot of my work is around managing a team that tries to find new causes for Open Phil to expand into as we're trying to give away our main donors' money over the course of their lifetimes. My colleague Holden, who I think has been on the show before, leads the rest of Open Phil's work, which is primarily aimed at making sure that the long-term future goes well, and we call that long-termism. In terms of why I think it's important, I think the global health and wellbeing work comes down to the idea that there's a huge amount of really cheaply preventable suffering in the world. And the idea that by applying some sort of basic analysis and putting resources behind it, we can do a lot to prevent that kind of suffering. So kids die from malaria for lack of a few dollar insecticide-treated bed net. Something like a billion people around the world are still living very close to subsistence levels, even as mean global income has risen by 100 times over the last 30 years. Couple centuries. And billions of people now lead middle-class lives while we have persistent poverty. And of course, billions of farm animals are treated horrendously every year in ways that are totally in principle preventable. It's not like we need farm animals to survive. And so I think all of these problems have interventions that are actually quite cost-effective. And so you can end up having vastly more impact on them than you might think would be possible if you were just sort of starting out naively. And we think that against these problems, we can make sort of concrete, measurable progress. And learn and improve over time in a way that can sort of set out a new model for philanthropy. And we see that as sort of an inspirational set of problems to put resources against where we can just make a lot of concrete progress.

So it sounds like Open Phil in the past, you've had all of these different problems that you're making grants towards solving, but they've been kind of mixed together in some sense, or all part of Open Phil. And now it's slightly fissuring into these two different umbrella groups, one which is focused on the long-term future and another which is focused on helping people in the here and now, which I guess you're in charge of.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable interpretation, although for us it feels a lot more continuous than that. For a long time, Holden has actively overseen the long-termist work, which includes work on artificial intelligence risk, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and our work to grow the effective altruism community. I've run a lot of our work on scientific research and policy and advocacy, and I manage Lewis, who runs our fundamental welfare team. So we've already had those structures, but I recently was promoted to co-CEO and we recently decided to name my part of the organization. Global health and well-being to better acknowledge that cluster of ideas rather than just define it against the long-termist cluster of ideas that hold in mostly overseas.

Yeah. So I guess you've got the global health and development stuff under you, as well as the famine and warfare and some scientific research and some other issues as well. What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis? Because there'll be so much going on, you probably can't track it on a detailed level.

Yeah. So in terms of the actual grantmaking work that most of our program officers work on, I'm not very involved at this point. We delegate a lot to the people who we hired to make those decisions, and we aim for them to have a really high level of autonomy. So in terms of Lewis's farm animal welfare work, Lewis is really the person who's coming up with our strategy there. And similarly for our science team, that's on Chris and Heather primarily and not in my head. A lot of what I have actually spent a lot of the last couple of years working on is managing this team of researchers that we're now calling the Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritization Team. It's devoted to finding the next causes for Open Phil to expand into. And so actually part of the reason why I wanted to come on today was that We're hiring for people to join that team, and I think it could be a really good fit for some of your listeners.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, we'll get back to that towards the end of the interview. Yeah, as I said in the intro, you started at GiveWell really in the early days before the term effective altruism was coined, and I suppose only a couple of years after GiveWell was founded.

Yeah.

How did you get involved so early on?

Yeah, I mean, I think like a lot of people, I sort of picked up a Peter Singer book in college, and I think I had a pretty— maybe not a standard for EA, but a pretty standard overall reaction to that, which was feeling like Wow, these arguments are sort of compelling, but I'm not inspired. I'm being beaten over the head with a stick. So I sort of wanted to resist them and say, do I really have these kinds of obligations? Am I really supposed to take big actions for the global poor that had sort of no real connection to my life? I wasn't sure how to think about it. I feel like I kind of had these naive ideas of maybe people who are living in poverty are actually just totally happy and they're not stuck with the concerns of modernity or something. So I felt like I sort of couldn't resolve that kind of question sitting in Palo Alto. So I took some time off from I went and lived in India for a little while. My experience there did show that there actually are a bunch of things that we can do to help. But the specific thing that brought me into effective altruism was every day on the way to the school where I was working, I would walk by these kids who were begging. I really wanted to do something to help the kids, but I knew that if I just gave them money, that would be an incentive not to be in school. So I was like, "Okay, what I will do is when I get back to the States, I'll find the best charity I can and give them a couple hundred bucks." I still have to talk about the kids every day though. I still felt really terrible about it. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to find what charity I'm going to give the money to because maybe if I focus on that, I'll feel better. And so I think I literally Googled best charity and I found the GiveWell— this would have been like 2010— and I found the GiveWell website on the first page of Google hits. And I don't know if— can I swear on this podcast?

Yeah, absolutely.

I remember just thinking, holy shit, this is exactly what I wanted. I really cannot remember another product where I've had that reaction of, wow, this was literally what I was looking for, but just better than I could have imagined. I remember I sent an email while I was still in India to a friend being like, holy crap, this would be my dream job. But I can't imagine, they had 3 employees at the time, I could never work there. I ended up when I got back to the States donating a little bit. And Ellie emailed me like, dear Mr. Berger, thank you so much for your generous contribution. And I was like, well, I'm a junior at Stanford, but I love you guys, could I volunteer? And so I ended up spending part of a summer adding footnotes to their website and adding page numbers to citations. And after college, I ended up joining. And I think when I joined, maybe there were 4 other people at GiveWell.

Yeah, you're not the only one to come in through searching for best charity and then finding GiveWell and then finding everything else. That's actually a surprisingly common origin story.

Yeah, maybe that'll come up more later when we're talking about how much of EA should focus on global health and well-being type stuff versus long-termism.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's a great data point. All right, well, we'll come back to more of the work that you've done over the years towards the end of the show, but let's push on towards the real meat of the conversation, which is talking about, I guess, the school of thought that until now has been called neotermism, but both of us probably are pretty happy to rename. So basically with this conversation, because you're in charge of this entire huge umbrella of projects at Open Phil, you seem like maybe the best person to talk to, to understand what do people who are focused on improving the here and now in the biggest way actually do? And what are the arguments for and against taking that approach to having a really large impact, as opposed to other ways that people try to get an edge? And there is a risk that this episode could get a little bit messy or a bit confused, because we're hoping to give an overview of, I guess, quite a broad intellectual tendency within effective altruist thought, which is kind of— one way of putting it would be it's everything other than long-termism. But of course, just as long-termism is a pretty broad school of thought and there's lots of motivations that people have for going into that, everything else, or near-termism, whereas I suppose global health and well-being is also a very broad score though, with a lot of factors going into it.

Yeah, I think that's totally right.

But that said, we'll do our best to, I suppose, make reasonable generalizations about this whole category. Yeah. With that warning out of the way, what do you actually think we should call this broad cluster or tendency within effective altruism?

Yeah, we just recently went through sort of a painful, long process of trying to come up with a name for it because sort of accidentally we had taken to calling it near-termism just by contrast to long-termism. Originally it had been short-termism, and that was even more of a slur. And so we'd gone from short to near and felt like that was a very marginal improvement, but we thought we could do better. And so we spent a long time going through a process of trying to brainstorm names and come up with a sense of what are we really trying to do? What do we think about the affirmative case for this? Not just what is it defined against? And we did a bunch of surveys of folks inside and outside of Open Phil and came away thinking that global health and well-being was the best option. We also thought about this phrase evident impact, which I noticed that you used in a tweet about this show. I think we came up with for our survey, and I think it was sort of like the third most popular. I think there is something sort of in the tendency that gets right, which is around the idea of feedback loops and evidence and sort of improving over time versus just the sort of broad utilitarian sort of feeling of global health and well-being. But I like that global health and well-being ends up being actually about what we are about, which is maximizing global health and well-being rather than sort of maximizing feedback loops or maximizing concreteness, which is a nice positive thing, but not the thing I see as actually core to the worldview or core to the project.

Yeah, I guess I think part of the reason why it's hard to give a name to this is because maybe there's kind of 3 separate factors that are going into people's decision making that happen to kind of agree on some potential decisions that people should make, but they kind of come in independently. So neotermism wouldn't be such an unreasonable name for, say, the moral philosophy position that it's better to benefit people sooner. And so if you can help someone today versus someone in 100 years' time, it's just better because it happens sooner rather than later. Or potentially, I suppose it could be a not unreasonable name if you think it's more important to benefit people who are alive now rather than future generations. But of course, there's lots of other reasons why people work on things like GiveWell and reducing poverty and so on.

Yeah. And it seems to me that nobody— I don't know. I think the philosophical position that is better to help people sooner rather than later does not seem to have very many defenders. And I certainly wouldn't want to sign up for that position, although I think probably there's some lay appeal to it. I think that that's part of the concern with near-termism, is that it seems to be more about maybe like population ethics or your view on temporal discounting, which is very much not how we think about it.

Yeah, it is interesting. It seems like in moral philosophy, the idea that sooner rather than later is better is not a very occupied position. Not many people will defend that, although some people do defend the idea that people who are alive now should be given extra weight. I think I've heard reports that people who've gone out and spoken to people who have no exposure to effective altruist thinking or really moral philosophy often do have this intuition that sooner is better or that Maybe it just doesn't matter what impact we have on future generations. But that seems to be an idea that the more they inspect it, the less they tend to hold it because they find that it's actually in tension with other commitments that they have.

I think that's right. I feel like there's two other clusters that are sort of in this bucket. Economists actually seem on average much more comfortable with pretty high rates of pure time preference because people behave myopically. And so I think sometimes there's a sense of, well, we should just read off people's true values from their everyday decisions. And I think philosophers and me are a little bit more skeptical of that. And then I think there's a second point, which is I actually think that there's a weird disconnect between the clean philosophical population ethics debates over the total view versus a person-affecting view and what you might want to call colloquial population ethics, which would say, for instance, the person-affecting view seems to have totally crazy to me implications that you don't want to put a lot of weight on. But I think a lot of people think it's important and good to have a higher average level of well-being in the future, even if they're not particularly into either shrinking or growing. The total population. And that intuition, it doesn't seem to cash out into clean philosophical positions, but I actually place some personal weight on.

Yeah. Okay. So that's kind of the moral philosophy angle. But I think actually maybe the dominant grouping is people who think that it's important to be able to really get to grips with what problem you're trying to solve and understand the nature of the problem, how it might be solved, and then measure to some degree whether you're actually solving the problem with the projects that you're funding or involved with. And that's That's maybe the motivation that evident impact captures really well. It's like, well, we want to be able to actually see something that's happening in the world that we can tell that it's working. And it's understandable that people have that idea, because if you can't tell whether what you're doing is working, there's a pretty high risk that you choose the wrong thing at the start and then you just keep doing it because you have no idea.

Yeah, I think that sense of feedback loops is an important sort of piece of the recipe here. But I also feel like, again, you wouldn't want to go all in on sort of maximizing feedback loops, right? It feels like it's an obviously sort of myopic goal. It's lacking some sort of terminal traction, I think. I think that the bigger thing in my mind is more like it's tied to a sense of not wanting to go all in on everything. And so maybe being very happy making expected value bets in the same way that longtermists are very happy making expected value bets, but somehow wanting to pull back from that bet a little bit sooner than I think that the typical longtermist might. Maybe a different way to put it would be, I think a lot of it is a matter of degree rather than kind. And another way I sort of try to get at this is to say it's like a lot more of the disagreement seems to be about epistemics and how to reason under uncertainty, as opposed to values or even things like how important is a feedback loop in order to ensure success probabilistically is something that I think in principle a longtermist could totally have a view on. And I don't think that our disagreements really come down to what parameter would you have for that.

Yeah, I think you're kind of gesturing towards the third intellectual tendency that I think drives global health and well-being, which is, I guess, I don't have a great name for this, but I've kind of categorized it as epistemic modesty in my notes here. And maybe some of the aspects of that are like wanting to follow common sense more than do things that other people think are really strange, wanting to learn from other people around you and generally have something that's kind of consistent with what broader society thinks is valuable. And also to spend less time thinking about philosophy and more time thinking about how do we make concrete changes in the real world. So more economics and social science and politics perhaps, and a bit less moral philosophy and epistemics and decision theory. And that sort of thing. Is there a way of wrapping up what this stream of argument is?

Yeah, so I totally think this is the crux. This is the main thing going on in my mind. I think I would call it cluster thinking. My colleague Holden, in I think 2014 or so, wrote a blog post on sequence versus cluster thinking. It's about a style of reasoning about cost-effectiveness and expected value. The idea of cluster thinking is not that you don't care about maximizing expected value. You might still totally care about that. But it's how do you seek the truth? And is the path there a series of linear arguments and a series of linear multiplying of things together, or a bunch of different outside views and heuristics and judgments and weights on different factors that you still might try to aggregate up into some form of expected value thinking? And you could still want to maximize expected value, but there's a question of when push comes to shove, how much are you writing down and multiplying through a bunch of assumptions? Versus saying, hey, maybe I don't understand all of this, maybe I'm confused, I want to pull back and put more weight on heuristics and priors. And outside view is going to be a fuzzy term that I'm not going to be able to defend, but things like that relative to a very formal explicit model of the world. Yeah.

So I guess from memory, I guess Sir Holden wrote this post about cluster thinking versus sequence thinking. And I suppose to give a brief explanation of cluster thinking, it's kind of not ever giving tons of weight to a single argument, no matter how kind of powerful it would seem if it was right. So preferring to have many somewhat compelling arguments than just one really compelling calculation that seems good. And I suppose yet that would lead to this kind of epistemic modesty idea, or caring about priors and caring about the outside view rather than just philosophical arguments that you can run through and claim you've proven.

Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe it's motivated by epistemic modesty more than it sort of causes epistemic modesty or something. But so I think that part of— you said at the top, like, this is going to be kind of confusing and hard to grapple with. And I think actually part of the A little bit of the global health and wellbeing perspective or worldview relative to the longtermist worldview is being a little bit more comfortable with pointing towards a cluster or heuristic and saying, "Yeah, I'm not totally sure I can give you a tight, concise philosophical defense of that, but I'm pretty committed to it relative to the practice of tight, concise philosophical defenses of everything." In terms of what I think is the main motivation for why do people work on global health and wellbeing, I still think the main motivation is the object-level case of you can do a lot to prevent people suffering and you can do so in really cost-effective ways. We treat animals really terribly and you can just actually make a lot of progress against that goal. The back and forth on epistemic modesty and cluster thinking, I think that might explain why people might not want to go all in on long-termism or care about these separate from long-termist kinds of philosophical problems. But why are people into global health and well-being? I think that the dominant explanatory factor is they see problems in the world that they can make progress against and are compelled to do so. And that is the first-order answer I want to give there, as opposed to, well, they have these complicated philosophical views about how you think about long-termism, which, yeah, sure, some people have. But I think the first-order answer is people care a lot and are trying to make the world a better place around them, and they see these as good ways to do so.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess there's a challenge where we're maybe constantly defining this set of ideas in contrast with the other options that people who've thought about this a lot are interested in. But of course, For most people, it's just like the object level argument that I could benefit people a ton. It seems like there's strong evidence that I can do that and that would be valuable. So that's what I'm going to do. Okay, so I think we've kind of captured the main streams of thought that feed into people wanting to work on global health and well-being. But let's try to be more concrete and maybe a bit less philosophical in keeping with global health and well-being mentality. Yeah, quickly, what are the global health and well-being cause areas that Open Phil focuses on?

Yeah, so there's a few ones that we've been working on for a few years and then some new ones that we're getting started in now. So the biggest one that we funded by far is the GiveWell top charities. That's been something like half of the total global health and wellbeing giving to date. And they do things like give out insecticide-treated malaria nets to prevent the spread of malaria. They will do sometimes direct cash transfers, other kinds of global public health interventions where there's a lot of evidence about what works and what's cost-effective. Farm animal welfare, you've had my colleague Lewis on to talk about that extensively, so I won't go too far into it. Scientific research, particularly in global health, I think there's just a lot of areas where there's not a sort of commercial incentive to do a lot. That public-spirited R&D can go really far to help solve some of the diseases of poverty. We've also done a bunch of work on US policy clauses, including criminal justice reform, some work around land use and housing, and macroeconomic stabilization. We're not currently planning to grow that work as much because we think we probably can find some better opportunities in the future. And so that gets to the new causes bucket. And so two that we just posted job postings for are South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. South Asian air quality is around air pollution, especially in India where it's a huge problem for health. And global aid advocacy is about the idea of Can we fund advocacy to increase or improve the quality of foreign aid? And we think that that kind of leverage might make it more cost effective than some kinds of direct services. The last area where we're sort of focused and growing right now is around that cause prioritization team that does the research to pick those new causes.

Nice. What are a couple of, say, archetypal grants from the Global Health and Wellbeing program?

Yeah, so I think the most sort of stereotypical in some sense would be some of the GiveWell top charities. So take the Against Malaria Foundation that distributes bed nets in African countries primarily where malaria is a big problem. And those bed nets are treated with an insecticide that kills mosquitoes. And there's a bunch of randomized control trials over decades that show that these work. AMF has actually contributed to some of those more recent RCTs on new generations of bed nets that help with insecticide resistance. And we continue to think that the quality of evidence and the cost-effectiveness of those opportunities is actually just really quite hard to beat, even if you become willing to take more risks and look at less evidence-backed interventions. And so that, that I expect to continue to be a big part of our portfolio going forward. In farm animal welfare, you know, my colleague Lewis has come on. I think a huge outlier opportunity has been corporate campaigns, especially around eliminating battery cages for egg-laying hens. There have been a lot of successes in the US, and I think in some ways a lot of the credit for those predates us. But taking some of those campaigns internationally, like with the Humane League, for instance, has been a major area of focus for us. And I think there's a place where we've had been able to have some impact. And then another big bucket of grants is in scientific research where a lot of our work's focused on neglected diseases of the poor where there's not necessarily a big market. A good example is our work on malaria where I think we gave $17.5 million a few years ago to a consortium called Target Malaria that's trying to develop a gene drive for mosquito. So a particular species of mosquito contributes to most of the malaria burden in Sub-Saharan Africa. And gene drive is a new biotechnology that could allow you potentially crash the population of that one species of mosquito in order to prevent the spread of malaria going forward. And I think that's a good example of a higher risk, potentially higher return activity that isn't necessarily— it's certainly not something that pharma is going to invest in.

So I think among people who are drawn to global health and well-being work, maybe one of the key splits is between people who are maybe more excited about the hits-based giving, higher risk stuff that comes with scientific R&D, or I suppose policy advocacy and so on, where causal attribution is a bit harder and it's far harder to estimate ahead of time, like, what are the odds of this grant really paying off? Because by its nature, policy advocacy and scientific R&D, it is super unpredictable. They require difficult judgment calls. Do we have any terminology perhaps for distinguishing, I suppose, the people who are most focused on the evidence-based stuff where they want to say to be distributing bed nets, where you can really demonstrate that this works, whereas people who are maybe they want to work on problems that you can understand and grapple with and see in broad terms whether they're being solved, but they're happy to use kind of a hits-based approach to to tackling them?

I don't think we have a super crisp description of that. I mean, we definitely think about the second bucket that you were just describing as the hits-based approach, but the global health and well-being team at Open Phil is very happy with both of those approaches. I think about it— one parallel I would draw is venture capitalists versus value investors. I think sometimes you might have people who are dispositionally closer to one or the other, where they're all about base rates and they're really about finding the beaten-down, neglected old company that's really going to slightly beat the market over the future versus the sexy new Facebook that's going to blow things away in the future. And we're really excited to make both of those bets. I think program officers and areas sometimes have a disposition or an approach that's more oriented for one versus the other. But I actually think you can have an analytical base rates sort of value investor approach even in relatively high-risk areas like policy advocacy or scientific research. And so I think a lot of it is like, it's a disposition plus also a leverage or risk assessment of an area. And there's not, I think, one sort of clean, tight distinction that I would want to draw between them.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, let's maybe for the purposes of this conversation, we'll talk about that stuff as hits-based giving. And I think it's slightly important to bracket that off because a lot of the things that you might say about distributing bed nets maybe don't apply to the scientific R&D hits-based stuff and vice versa. That's kind of an important division within this area.

I guess one interesting and potentially controversial view that I hold is that neither of those dominate each other. And so I think we might get to this later in the conversation, but I actually think that if you just try to be as rigorous as you can about where will the actual expected value calculations take you within that broad scientific research versus policy advocacy versus the GiveWell type charities, my actual take is I don't think one's going to come out purely ahead. And I think you're going to actually want to end up pursuing a mix of opportunities. But we can get into more of the reasoning for that later.

Yeah, that is a really interesting conclusion that kind of on average they can both be somewhat similarly effective, which means that you would then probably split your resources between them depending on what looks best. I feel like maybe that distinction looms large to me because I remember 5 or 10 years ago people would debate this distinction a lot. Like, should we go into science R&D or should we do the stuff that's really most rigorous and most proven to work these days? Maybe I don't remember hearing that so much anymore. It seems like more people involved in effective altruist thought kind of take this agnostic approach where they're like, yeah, maybe policy could be better, maybe it isn't. We're just going to have to it on a bit of a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, I think that's totally right. And I think, again, if you had more of a dominance argument where it's like, look, the returns to policy are just always going to outweigh the returns to evidence-based aid, then I think you would end up with more back and forth and debate between them. But when you see the arguments for cost-effectiveness actually ending up in the same ballpark, the same universe, it's just like, cool, we can all get along. People are going to sort into buckets that appeal to them or styles that work for them. Or interventions that they're more personally excited about. I think that's really healthy. And then when someone actually, like, the expected value type argument seems to lead you to think one of these is going to just totally destroy the other, that's where I think you get a little bit more friction and tension and debate sometimes.

Yeah, I think my intuition, and some of the arguments I've heard suggest that in theory you would expect policy and science funding to be more effective on average, although super volatile. We call it hitspace giving because most of the time it doesn't work, but then every so often it really hits it out of the park. Yeah, maybe we can return to that later because you wrote this really interesting blog post about this topic a couple of years ago that we can I guess we're going to spend some of the rest of this conversation kind of contrasting the arguments for working on global health and well-being versus long-termism. A slight challenge that I've had putting together the questions here is that sometimes these things really overlap, or it could be hard to come up with clean things that might only be justified on one grounds, because of course, people who are focused on improving the long-term future also care about health and well-being of people. That's kind of the whole motivation. They're just thinking about when might it cash out in that and thinking about doing it further in the future rather than directly in the present. But also, even for so many things that longtermists are spending money on, like pandemic control or preventing wars and all these other things, you could plausibly make a case that those things might be the best way of improving health and well-being in the present. It could get harder for some stuff that won't pay off for a very long time, or is perhaps the most speculative. But some of the projects that longtermists do these days are not that wacky anymore. Some of them have come to approach common sense a bit. And so maybe there's this kind of kind of middle ground in between the most philosophical perhaps, and the most out there longtermist stuff, and then perhaps the more sensible global health and well-being work.

Before we dive in there, I know your audience probably is pretty familiar with longtermism, but is it worth just giving a definition so that people have something to react to? Like, you should actually do it probably more than me.

Yeah, I guess in a nutshell, longtermism is the idea that when we're evaluating ways that we can potentially have the largest impact on the world, we should mostly think about what impact those actions are going to have quite far in the future, so potentially hundreds of thousands of years in the future. And the idea is there's so much potential benefit in future generations rather than just the present generation, that if you think about and try to estimate what impact it's going to have on all of that long-term future, then that kind of will end up dominating the most important moral consequences. And that should then end up usually guiding or determining your decision. Is that about right?

That sounds good to me. I was just going to say that I'm very like, sort of my own perspective on this, which is more personal than professional, is that I'm very sympathetic to the idea that ethical value is distributed that way and then vastly loaded out into the far future. I think the sort of follow-up claim that I'm a lot more skeptical or uncertain of is, "And that should guide our reasoning and actions." It just strikes me as totally plausible that our ability to reason about and concretely influence those things is quite limited. That's not to say I'm actually extraordinarily glad that Open Phil is I think by far the largest funder of long-termist initiatives in the philanthropic world. I think that's really important work. I'm really glad we do a bunch of it. But I think I would be pretty personally reticent to go 100% all in on that because I feel like there's just a really high chance that somehow we're confused or going to mislead ourselves if we try to tell a story where we can really predict the future super well.

Yeah. Have you noticed this kind of seeming increasing overlap where there's plenty of stuff that is a little bit hard to say, is this in the long-termism bucket or is this in the global health and wellbeing bucket? Maybe it's in both.

I do think that there are a bunch of things that you could potentially justify on either grounds. But I want to push back on this because I think that there can be an instinct to want to present long-termism as in practice a little less exotic than I think it actually is. I'm curious when you think about it, what do you think about what are the stakes of long-termism? Where do I, Rob, think about the impact of my career? What portion of your expected value of long-termist impact in the future is running through specifically artificial intelligence risk?

Me personally, I suppose a large fraction of it. I'm not quite exactly sure what the question is, but I suppose if humanity never creates machines that are smarter than humans, then it seems like the stakes of the future are just potentially way smaller because it would probably mean that we could never really leave the solar system and therefore most of the energy and matter in the universe is unavailable to us.

I think that's right. I also just, I think about Toby's book. When you look at the chart in Toby's book of What is his assessment of the various contributors to risk? I think AI and then secondarily risks from biotechnology are the dominant factors. And then everything else, my recollection is there's quite a steep drop-off. And so I sort of feel like it comes to a debate about a thick versus thin concept of effective altruism or long-termism. It's like the abstract statement of long-termism as caring a lot about the far future that should guide our actions. I think you're totally right. That could justify a lot of different kinds of work. A lot of different people could sign on to that abstract statement. But just the actually existing EA community is quite loaded on long-termism and the give-all top charities, in spite of the fact that we should try to do more good rather than less might be kind of an anodyne statement that a lot of people would be pretty ready to sign on to. I get nervous when it feels like people aren't totally owning the degree to which it loads on very specific views about particularly, I think, AI and biorisk.

Yeah, I mean, so in my own mind, I think AI is pretty dominant and we do talk about it a great deal. One reason that we don't just talk about it all the time is that there's lots of other people out there who want to do other things and not everyone is going to be suited to working on artificial intelligence specifically. So while 80,000 Hours should put some effort into that, should also talk about a wider range of things because it allows us to have more impact. But I guess I want to push back a little bit on thinking that it's just all in AI because as you're saying, so this biotechnology, But then I also think there's the risk of war or the risk of political collapse or a kind of permanent negative political state, or just of humanity adopting bad values that are really persistent.

I would be really interested in your sense of what portion of the actually existing effective altruism community is primarily working on those things. I think it's a very small portion.

Oh, that's interesting. I think among people who 80,000 Hours talks to, many people are interested in working on that. And I guess part of that comes from they don't feel like they have a good personal fit for working on artificial intelligence or bio, but also just many people think these are potentially really important issues, that they're risk factors or things that could ultimately have a big bearing on where humanity ends up going in the long-term future, even if maybe that ends up being mediated in some way by what happens with artificial intelligence in the long term. So I think we're not all in on working just on machine learning and related issues.

I think it's great that 80,000 Hours actually does have episodes on these other issues. I think I perceive 80,000 Hours as engaging in the project of trying to broaden longtermism a little bit. And I'm happy with that project, or at least interested and open to it. But my perception, and maybe it's just where I sit in San Francisco, the Open Phil longtermist team in fact works on AI, biorisk, and growing the EA community. And I perceive that as being the dominant three focuses of effective altruists who identify as longtermists. And so the idea that people are doing a lot of work on climate change and preventing war, to me, I'm like, I don't know the people you're talking about, which is not to say that they don't exist, but I don't feel like that is a dominant driver of my perception of longtermists as they exist in sort of my world.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think you might be getting a bit influenced by the location in San Francisco and the kind of connections that Open Phil has to the AI scene. I don't want to soft pedal this and say that AI isn't— I think it probably is the dominant stream or the number one concern if you had to list them within longtermism. But I think there are plenty of people who are thinking about governance and institutional decision making and international relations and these other things that perhaps are more positive or negative risk factors for how the future goes. Even if the era, say, when humanity creates AI that is capable of doing things that humanity can't do, that might end up being kind of the decisive era. But the circumstances in which that happens could end up affecting what the outcome is. And of course, there's other people involved in long-termism who don't really buy the AI story. They think it's going to happen much further in the future, or I don't think it's going to be such an interesting time.

Yeah, totally. And again, I could just be totally wrong. I think the 80,000 Hours perch of career advising might give you a much better cross-section of people who are motivated by this stuff than I have perception into. I guess from where I sit, it seems like there's a philosophical interest in defending the principles. And so people are interested in cashing out things like, what would patient long-termism look like? Or some of these other sort of ideas that are outside of the AI space. But I guess my view is just very loaded on Open Phil's own long-termist work, which is very focused. Focused on AI and biorisk. I mean, I think biorisk is kind of a good example where the bio team ended up doing some work on COVID, but it really is not their dominant priority to prevent things like COVID. They're really focused on how can you prevent pandemics that are 10 or 100 times worse than COVID. And so things that might have helped with COVID but would not help with a 10 or 100 times worse pandemic are actually not their top priority. And I think that that is a way in which— I don't think that's wrong. I think it's the correct assessment given the focus on the long-term future of humanity, which I I believe in. So I actually think we are making the correct all things considered judgment call there. But I sometimes worry that we sort of soft pedal the degree to which that's a controversial take when we say, "Oh yeah, longtermists, they're doing normal things like pandemic preparedness. And look, pandemic preparedness is such an obviously good thing to do." And I would just emphasize that I'm not totally sure about this, but it wouldn't shock me if in terms of dollars, the science team ended up spending more. On pandemic preparedness around COVID than our biosecurity team did. That could be wrong. I didn't run a report before this, but that is, I think, a relevant indicator as to sort of where, at least at Open Phil, where our long-termist motivations cash in.

Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I think on the COVID-19 one, I've spoken to people who both think that the important pandemic prevention work that you would do in terms of the long-term future is very different from what you would do if you want to control COVID-19. And also people who think, no, it's quite continuous with that, because anything that helps you help you control pandemics in general is going to help you control the very worst pandemics as well. So, yeah, there's kind of an active debate about that. I guess maybe it doesn't get publicized that much, or I haven't actually seen this written up publicly anywhere, but it's something that people disagree about. And I guess it's understandable that that's not going to be a super simple question to answer.

But I actually think there's an interesting case where the philosophical commitment to long-termism pushes you towards one side of that debate, because basically the more true it is that anything that you do to help with COVID is going to help with long-term biorisk, the more long-term biorisks actually start to look quite crowded and a lot less neglected. And so in that world, if you are motivated by long-termist biorisks versus preventing COVID-like pandemics, you're really going to want to lever up on whatever are the things that are going to matter for long-term risks but not COVID. So it's like you could totally rationally think most of the work to prevent COVID in fact does simultaneously reduce long-term risks. But given that everyone else is now excited about preventing COVID, the rational response is for us to go focus on the things that our COVID-like pandemics are not going to be addressed by, because the world's already getting its act together. I think that might be, again, a totally correct logical inference, but I think it points to the ways in which the philosophical implications of long-termism are a little bit more radical than you might sort of think upon just hearing the ideas.

Yeah, that does seem like it could be a reasonable interpretation. Or if you were previously focused on higher risk because of the long-term impact, and you thought that you didn't have to do anything unusual to deal with the worst-case scenarios, and now a whole lot of people are going to be diving into that, then maybe you think, well, we're going to be doing all of this sequencing and all this mRNA vaccine work, and it's probably going to work. So maybe the risk of extinction is now far lower than it used to be. I could imagine someone believing that. All right, maybe let's launch a little bit more formally into a discussion of the kind of cut and thrust on the arguments in favor of working on long-termism versus global health and well-being. I guess this is maybe one of the most well-worn debates within effective altruism, and we've outlined the case for long-termism many times on the show. So I want to spend some time letting you kind of elaborate on the arguments in favor of people who are listening, perhaps like going into careers that benefit global health and well-being rather than things that are doing more unusual long-termist work. Yeah. What's perhaps the key argument in your mind for working on global health and well-being instead of working on long-termist stuff?

Okay. I think arguments for global health and well-being are first and foremost about the actual opportunities for what you can do. So I think you can just actually go out and save a ton of lives. You can change destructive, harmful public policies so that people can just flourish more. You can do so in a way that allows you to get feedback along the way so that you can improve and don't just have one shot to get it right. And at the end, you can plausibly look back and say, look, the world went differently than it would have counterfactually if I didn't do this. I think that is pretty awesome and pretty compelling. But honestly, if somebody were coming to me and saying, I buy the Longtermist gospel, I'm all on board. I would super be uninterested in trying to talk that person out of it. I think that is great. I think there's not enough longtermists in the world. I think the idea that— I mean, I can go on a rant about this, but I really think that the idea that longtermism is new and small is totally crazy. It should be huge and it should be a really popular idea. The world is in sort of a crazy place that people don't understand and appreciate our position in the world, in the universe, and sort of how big the future could be. And so I get a lot of value from seeing sort of more concrete impacts on my work and trying to feel like I can work on problems where I can make progress. But I am not at all interested in talking people out of spending their career on long-termism.

Yeah, that's, I guess, good to know. But it'd be helpful to have you maybe lay out not so much a devil's advocate case, but maybe steelman the case in favor of working on global health and well-being. If there was someone who came to you who was kind of on the fence between doing something that was more unusually long-termist and something that was say, within your own umbrella of the work at Open Phil, and they said, what's the strongest case that you can offer for doing the latter rather than the former? What kind of arguments would you make?

Yeah, so I think I would make two cases. I think one big one, again, I don't think these are sort of like correct intellectual— I'm making air quotes, you can't see them— correct intellectual arguments against long-termism. But I think that they are things that would make it correct for a person to not necessarily choose to work on a long-termist career. I think a really central one in my mind is I think we just don't have good answers on long-termism. Maybe that's an argument that we should have. The long-termism team at Open Phil is significantly underspending its budget because they don't know where to put the money. When I think about what are the recommended interventions or practices for long-termists, I feel like they either become quickly pretty anodyne or it's quite hard to make the case that they are robustly good. And so I think if somebody is really happy to take those kinds of risks, really loves the philosophy, really excited about sort of being on the cutting edge, long-termism could be a great career path for them. But if you're more like, I want to do something good with my career and I'm not excited about something that might look like overthinking it, I think it's pretty likely that long-termism is not going to be the right fit or path for you.

Yeah, maybe you don't want to call out specific examples, but can you gesture towards cases where you think maybe things are either a little bit too anodyne or it's hard to make a case that something is really robustly positive?

Yeah, so I think this actually gets to a pretty big debate and I think it's worth having. On the anodyne side, you were alluding earlier to the fact that you're now counseling a lot of people who are interested in international relations and trying to make sure that there's democracy. I actually put that word in your mouth, you didn't use it. But I feel like sometimes this manifests as folks who are interested in improving societal judgment. And again, I made air quotes, I'm sort of skeptical that that's a thing. I would be really interested in seeing a concrete measure and a sense of what is that and how does it relate to the outcomes that we care about. But honestly, when I think about trying to move an amorphous, vague, hard-to-quantify measure like societal judgment versus just making people healthier and wealthier, which is what I think of as, in some sense, the core project of the Global Health and Wellbeing team. I'm like, wow, I'm so much more excited about making people healthier and wealthier because we know how to do that. That's a real thing. I think that there's a lot to be said for the historical association between those things and other good qualitative outcomes. And so the idea that because something is sort of branded or inspired by longtermism and presented in those rhetorical terms, I think it leads people to be a little bit too credulous sometimes about the long-termist impact being obviously better than just working on conventional global health and well-being causes, where we actually know a lot about what you can do and how you can improve the world. Now, obviously, that whole argument only works best if you generally think that good things are correlated. And the more that you think, actually, economic growth is terrible because it's going to accelerate the arrival of the singularity and end humanity, the more my advice to do generically good things is not going to appeal to you. But I'm also like, wow, you've gotten to a pretty weird place and you should really question how confident you are in those views.

Yeah, I guess so. Putting my very long-termist hat on, I guess the question that I'd ask there is, in terms of how you're trying to shift society in one way or the other in order to try to make the long-term future go better, is it more valuable to have people be richer and healthier, or is it better to, at least in theory, have people be more educated or more informed about the world as a whole, or better able to make collective decisions so that they don't do disastrous things? I guess one thing might be to say, well, the latter is just really hard to do, so you're not going to have much impact there. But it sounded like you were also saying, is there really ways of changing that meaningfully that particularly bear on how humanity goes in the long-term future? Or is it all just kind of washed out?

It's not that I think it's necessarily washed out. It's that I think, A, I'm very interested in better understanding the actual concrete measure that people are trying to increase and how correlated do they think it is with the outcome. You alluded to education. I think education is a good example. You can measure education, you can improve education, you can use standardized test scores. There's a lot of things that you can do to make that number go up and to the right. And then I'm like, A, literally, I think health investments might be the best way to do that. I don't think that's at all out of the question. And B, I'm pretty skeptical that that is necessarily going to do better for making the long-term future go well than anything else. It's just a very broad cluster. Another example that really sticks with me for this, and it's just a parallel, so it's not going to movie that much, but I did debate in high school and there's a really common argumentative style that would link everything's impact back to American hegemony and say, American hegemony is so important for the world, and if American hegemony decays, then the world's going to end in nuclear war. And so it was actually a very proto-long-termist argument. And my reaction was always just like, American hegemony is not a scale that you can easily quantify and say, did this move it up or down? And where it's like, oh, if it goes below a critical threshold, suddenly the world's going to have nuclear war. And similarly for education, I'm just like, the punitive connection with the long-term impact, I feel like, is so weak as to be meaningless. And the impact that you're trying to have there, I'm just not sure why it goes through education rather than wealth or health.

Yeah, I think by the time you're doing something as broad as just trying to improve education or wisdom across a broad swath of the population in general, then it does really seem like it's converged on— now you really are kind of using a very similar currency between, well, why don't we just make people richer? Or why don't we give them more spare time to think about things that are important to them or improve their health? I guess among serious longtermists who have tried doing things that are related to decision making and judgment, mostly they have— basically this happened because people got excited about the Tetlock forecasting work and his efforts to try to improve decision making within foreign policy and the CIA and organizations like that. Organizations that do seem more connected directly with ways that things go incredibly badly due to causing conflict or just having very bad policy decisions at the national level. And I think that stuff, there is a plausible claim that is more levered on the long-term future than just making people in America richer in general. But then people have struggled to find other stuff within decision-making, improving societal prudence that also seems both tractable and likely to affect the long-term future in particular.

Yeah. And I guess so Luke and I, my colleague Luke, who does Open Phil's work on this, and I think it's cool, interesting stuff, and I'm happy that we fund some of it, but we've gone back and forth on this a lot because I sort of am skeptical about the, again, I think when you use big words, it can feel like, "Oh yeah, those are probably connected." But when you try to actually specify what's the causal chain, it starts to just feel quite tenuous to me. If you look at the gains in Tetlock's work, there are gains, but I don't think that they're astronomically huge. The difference in Breyer score between people who are trained and are not trained is meaningful, but again, not astronomical. And the idea that making a random CIA analyst better at predicting the death of some foreign leader because they know how to use base rates. I'm just having a hard time buying the story where that is preventing the AI apocalypse.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure whether it would affect the AI stuff. I think people have a maybe broader view who are working on that.

I actually think a premise that I would grant and I would be really interested in, and I haven't done the work to find— and by the way, I think I sounded more anti this stuff than I am. I think it's cool, interesting stuff. But a premise that I'd be super interested in seeing more on is is instrumental rationality in foreign affairs actually correlated with peace? I think a totally core premise is that if people were better at making predictions, that would prevent conflict. I don't know why I would believe that premise. That does not seem at all like an obvious premise to me. According to realist international relations, I think it could go the other direction. Anyway, I don't know the literature on this. I could be totally wrong. But it strikes me as a good example of something where there's what I take to be a core premise for the argument that, as far as I know, no one has written down or argued about. And I'm pretty worried that if somebody's walking around thinking, "Okay, I'm having a really big impact in the world because I'm aimed at long-termist goals here," but a bunch of core steps have never been articulated or studied, I'm just getting pretty nervous that this is the right decision-making framework.

Yeah, I actually did put that question to Tetlock either in my first or second interview with him, or possibly both. I mean, I think people find it very intuitive that instrumental rationality is likely to reduce the risk of unintended disasters like wars, just because that kind of thing is undesirable to everyone. And so you would think people who are very incompetent and just blundering about making terrible mistakes, that's likely to lead to disastrous outcomes more often than people who are very prudent and have a good idea about what the consequences of their actions will be. But I agree, it's not completely obvious, because if you're better at predicting the effect of your actions, then you can potentially ride the line a bit more and be more aggressive and try to extract more from other countries. Because you think you can outfox them.

I think that's right. I don't know, if you look at current tensions around Taiwan and China, again, this is very much not my area, but my impression is that the US position is strategic ambiguity. And that if China had more confidence about how the US would respond, it might be more likely to invade Taiwan rather than less. And so again, I could be wrong about that model. This is very much not my discipline. This is not what I work on. But I worry that people are too willing to sort of load up on pretty abstract priors in these kinds of settings.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we've gone quite a bit down this track, but maybe we should back up. I think there's kind of been this attempted synthesis of longtermist thinking and maybe global health and well-being causes, which is sometimes called broad longtermism, which is this idea that we've kind of been talking about, which is, well, the best way to improve the long-term future isn't to do anything about some specific technology or some specific person or institution. Because it's too hard to predict what's really going to matter in the future. Instead, we should just improve society in a very broad way, and then that ends up not looking that different than what you would do if you were just working on the global health and well-being program with no particular concern for the long-term future. But it sounds like you think that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you want to think about the long-term future, you should be doing something weird, and there isn't this convergent middle position of broad long-termism.

So I'm not actually sure that if you care about long-termism, you should be doing something weird, but I'm somewhat skeptical that caring about broad long-termism should get you to doing something that is neither something that might look good according to something like global health and wellbeing, nor something that is going to be especially levered on the long-term existential considerations. And so I think things like broad international peace stand out to me as an example of this, where again, I'm just reporting a visceral reaction. I don't think I have any devastating arguments, but I'm both really worried about your ability to make traction on that. I think it might be quite crowded depending on your interpretation. So I'm not sure about neglectedness and tractability. And then when it comes to importance, yeah, the idea that we are better off because some people did some work on international peace and security rather than because some people did some work on economic growth or global health in the long run, to me is just a premise that really demands justification. Maybe that's a very negative version of the argument. The pro argument would be, If you imagine a much safer, more egalitarian world, or a set of parameters for the settings on the world that is more in that direction, and you think about what are the best things to do, I actually think that there are fairly plausible long-termist arguments for much more conventional stuff, like just saving lives. I think doing so probably grows the number of brains and that probably increases innovation a little bit. And I think that probably should flow through a little bit. And so when I hear people advocating for things that seem to me like much worse interventions with much worse feedback loops versus things that we know and think are good, I'm a lot less confident than I think people are that the idea that they're aimed distinctively at the long-term future is going to actually make them better at delivering on the long-term future. And so this struck me actually that you had a previous guest who I really enjoyed your conversation with, Christian Tarsny. I went and read his paper after the conversation. He has this argument that's like, look, long-termism should go through because in the worst case, if you spent all of global GDP on it, you should be able to reduce existential risk by 1%. That should really mean that the average cost of doing this actually looks really good when you count up a bunch of future generations. I'm actually just really worried about that form of argument because I think there's a ton of sign uncertainty where just doing GDP stuff might be better for the long-term future than doing a ton of stuff that's quote unquote, aimed at the long-term future.

Yeah. Could you elaborate on the argument that saving lives and making people richer plausibly does have significant positive flow-through effects to hundreds of thousands of years in the future?

Yeah. I mean, so one example, it's actually in Bostrom's original essay, Astronomical Waste. Yeah, Astronomical Waste. Yeah. So I think there's two kinds of arguments that you see people make for this. One that I actually feel sort of mixed on, and I think it ends up being more of an argument for what you might call sort of like medium-termism or something. But is just the impact of compounding growth. And I think this argument's interesting because I think it's super importantly right historically. And so if you look at what has caused economic growth over time, innovation has compounded in a really important way and population compounded along with it. And so if you saved a life 10,000 years ago, I actually think that the impact today is vastly bigger than the immediate impact on the life you saved 10,000 years ago, at least in expectation. And so that's because more people are able to come up with more innovations and are bigger markets and are able to do more trade. Those all feed economic growth and innovation. In some sense, all of history moves forward. And because history could be so big, that could actually be a really big impact. There's a more EA version of this from Nick Bostrom's Astronomical Waste essay about if we let a millisecond go by where we're not taking over the stars, the loss of that is actually really huge. So I think that the typical existential risk arguments against that are strong. And I actually buy that it makes sense to focus more on existential risk than on these broad growth cases if you're in the longtermist framework. But then I'm like, okay, if we're not going to focus on AI or bio and instead doing these kind of vague big buckets of things, I'm not so sure that we are doing better.

I see. Okay, so once you're out of doing targeted longtermist work that looks like it's especially levered on how the long-term future might go in some way that you're reasonably confident about, or you have a particular reason to think it has very high expected value, and now you're just doing general societal improvement, then you think it's not so clear that just making people richer, making them healthier isn't having a larger impact, I guess, either by speeding it up or just by improving society in all the ways that it's been improved over the last 200 years a little bit more. And that seems like it's been positive. That seemed like it's put us in a better position.

I think that's right. Yep. And so I think improving things does seem good. I think improving things, it's interesting, it might have made things sort of riskier from a technology perspective for a while, but eventually I think asteroid risk probably would, and other forms of natural risks would end humanity. And so having technology, if we manage our own risks in the meantime, could enable us to last vastly longer than we would if we were sort of roving bands of Neanderthals or whatever for a million years. I think that there is a sense in which in a very, very long-run way, technology in the next centuries or whatever might pose more existential risks than it's reducing. But if you think at the million-year level, I think it's really clear that technology is net reducing risks. That's an important recipe for why you might have a prior of good things go together. And if I have lots of good opportunities to just make things better, I should sort of expect that to, in a very vague, amorphous way, make the long run go better too. Yeah.

So this has been a slightly vexed issue over the years, this question of— I suppose one way of putting it would be, would humanity's long-term prospects be better if global GDP growth was 3.5% rather than 3%, or 3% rather than 2.5%? And I suppose at a first blush, it doesn't seem like the effect of GDP growth this year on the long-term future of humanity is that big. So we're talking probably about relatively small effects, but we can think of a bunch of them. Like, one is you were saying it speeds up innovation, it speeds up education, means that there's more smart people out there because we're reducing poverty, more people have an opportunity to contribute and so on. Then maybe you might think secondly, that the fact that China has gotten richer really quickly over many decades has potentially created the risk of a new Cold War. Maybe that could end up doing humanity in and we'll be better off with a unipolar world, or potentially we would want countries to develop more gradually so their culture shifts as they become more powerful. And there's a bunch of other things you could maybe put on this list on the pro and con side. I mean, I think the effect is probably positive, although I guess we probably both agree that the effect is relatively small.

Yeah. And I don't want to overclaim here. I'm not that confident that the effect is positive. Basically, my concern is I'm in favor of these sort of concentrated, specific bets on sort of specific global catastrophic risks because I think that they are big risks that are worth reducing. And it's sort of crazy how much they're underinvested in by society. And then when we get to trying to increase other vague aggregates for putatively long-termist reasons rather than what I think take to be more normally good vague aggregates, I think we might be in a sort of uncanny valley where we're not actually getting that much and we might be losing a lot in terms of optimization power, ability to evaluate ourselves, ability to learn and improve. Along the way.

Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. Let's maybe turn away from the improving broad aggregates, broad long-termist approach to thinking more about the targeted stuff, which I guess it sounds like you're more enthusiastic about. But if someone were choosing a career, say, between one of those more targeted things that works, I suppose, on pandemic prevention or preventing the worst pandemics or preventing the worst artificial intelligence outcomes, but they were considering taking a job maybe at Open Phil working under global health and well-being, it sounds like you think Both choices would be reasonable, but what could you say in favor of the global health and wellbeing approach?

One thing that I just think I would be interested in seeing more engagement from, and it relates to my previous point about signed uncertainty for long-termism between conventionally global health and wellbeing causes and broad long-termist causes, would be more engagement with signed uncertainty on some of the conventional long-termist work. And again, just like previously, I didn't want to argue. I think it's clear that improving health and economic growth is going to be a sign positive for long-termism or is definitely cost-effective from a long-term perspective or something. I just think it's an argument that's worth grappling with. I think if you have the opposite perspective and more think we live in a really vulnerable world, I think maybe an offense-biased world where it's much easier to do great harm than to correct against it, I think that increasing attention to anthropogenic risks could just be really dangerous in that world. Because I think not very many people, as we discussed, go around thinking about the vast future. And if it's like 1 in every 1,000 people who go around thinking about the vast future decide, "Wow, I would really hate there to be a vast future. I would like to end it." But if it's just 1,000 times easier to end it than to stop it from being ended, that could be a really, really dangerous recipe where, again, everybody's well-intentioned. We're raising attention to these risks that we should reduce. But the increasing salience of it could have been net negative. I think there's a couple examples from history that this reminds me of. Michael Nielsen is a quantum physicist who is popular on Twitter and is a friend of mine, who I think is one of the smartest people I know. He's tweeted about how he thinks one of the biggest impacts of EA concerns with AI X-risk was to cause the creation of DeepMind and OpenAI and to accelerate overall AI progress. I'm not saying that he's necessarily right, and I'm not saying that that is clearly bad from an existential risk perspective. I'm just saying that strikes me as a way in which well-meaning increasing of salience and awareness of risks could have turned out to be harmful in a way that has not been. I haven't seen that sort of get a lot of grappling or attention from the EA community. I think you could tell obvious parallels around talking a lot about biorisk could turn out to be a really bad idea.

Yeah, it's interesting that on both the most targeted longtermist work and on the broader work, I guess people talk about this term cluelessness, that because the world is so unpredictable, it's so hard to tell the long-term effects of your actions if you're focused on the very long-term future, then it's just plausible that it's almost impossible to find something that is robustly positive. As you say, on almost anything that you can actually try to do, some people would argue that you could tell a similarly plausible story about how it's going to be harmful as how it's going to be helpful. And I guess you could make similar arguments. Yeah, we were talking about how you can do the same thing with the broader work, like improving judgment. Maybe that's bad because that would just leave people to be more aggressive and more likely to go to war. I suppose if you put that hat on where you think it's just impossible to predict the effect of your actions hundreds of thousands of years in the future, where do you think that'll lead?

Yeah, I think it's super interesting and super complicated. It's actually been something I've been grappling with recently because I'm not much of a moral realist, but in practice, I think about myself as mostly a utilitarian. For me, the two uncertainties about utilitarianism that have always been most compelling to me— one I've had for a long time is I'm just not sure what I'm trying to maximize. Hedonism doesn't seem very compelling to me. Objective list theories don't seem very compelling to me. I'm sort of like, well, there's something sort of out there that is good and I want there to be more of it and we should have more of it. That seems good. I've always recognized that my sort of maximand is undertheorized. But the second thing that is very much coming out of the EA community that I don't think I had adequately grappled with before is this idea of cluelessness. I don't think it just cuts against long-termism. I think it cuts against basically everything and just leaves you very confused. But one place where I encountered it is, yeah, I mentioned earlier this idea that that if you lived 10,000 years ago and you saved a neighbor's life, most of the impact that you might have had there in a counterfactual utilitarian sense, at least in expectation, might have run through basically just speeding up the next 10,000 years of human history such that today maybe 100 more people are alive because you basically sped up history by a millionth of a year or something. That impact is potentially much larger than the immediate impact of saving your neighbor's life. I mean, it seems to be in some sense. And when that happens with very boring colloquial type things— and by the way, that argument is from a blog post by Carl Shulman that maybe we should put in the show notes or something.

Yeah, we'll link to that.

And if you have that for the most pedestrian kinds of things of just saving a life, the impact that you actually would want to care about maybe from my utilitarian ethics is this vastly disconnected future quantity that I think you would have had no way to predict. I think it makes you want to just say, wow, this is all really complicated and I should bring a lot of uncertainty and modesty to it. I don't think that should make us abandon the project, but it does make me look around and say everything here is just more complicated than it seems. I want to be a little bit more sympathetic to people who are skeptical of totalism and making big concentrated bets and are more maybe not even that interested in altruism, where they're just I'm just doing my thing. And again, I think it would be better if people were more altruistic. I don't think that's the right conclusion, but really genuinely feeling the cluelessness does make me feel more like, wow, the world's really rich and complicated and I don't understand it at all. And I don't know that I can make terribly compelling demands on people to do things that are outside of their everyday sphere of life.

Yeah, it's interesting. So you save someone's life and then that leads to 100 more people living over the next couple of centuries because of all of the children they have. Even there you can't be confident that it was positive even over that time, because we don't know whether people's lives are positive rather than negative. I guess especially when they were living in pre-industrial times, it's pretty arguable that the life of a typical person in the 18th century could have been net negative. Then you think about the effect that they have on other people, the effect they have on the natural world, animals. Yeah, it is just really humbling once you start actually counting, itemizing all of these different impacts and trying to put signs on them and seeing how they keep flipping over time as things play out. If I was going to give up on trying to improve the world, I think it would be concerns like this that would make me lose my spirit.

Yeah. My colleague Ajeya Kotra came on the show a while back and she had this metaphor that I really loved and really stuck with me of a train to crazy town. And she had just gone super deep into the potential scale of how big human civilization or human-derived civilization could be. And it turned out that it seemed to depend on these considerations around what portion of their future resources would a civilization that that takes over the stars, devote to simulating our society right now. And she was just like, this is a really weird place to be. And it made her want to step back and say, wow, how confident should I be in all of this? And she's still a hardcore longtermist, but I feel like that sense of this is going in really weird places and I'm just not sure that I am very capable of reasoning very well about it. And that specific analogy to the train to crazy town has really stuck with me and made me want to just be like, a lot more modest about everything and a lot less confident that I can make good predictions about the world or even know what is good. And I feel honestly a little unstable about that. I'm not sure where I'm going to land.

Yeah, I think I don't get off the train to crazy town because it's crazy in particular, but I think the more you keep considering these deeper levels of philosophy, these deeper levels of uncertainty about the nature of the world, the more you just feel like I'm on extremely unstable ground about everything. Because if I kept thinking about this and I kept unveiling these new crucial considerations then that could just flip all of the things that I think now. And then at some point you're like, well, there's probably just all of these things, all of these considerations that I haven't thought about that mean that what I'm doing now is very naive. And so why would I even bother to do it? And I'm not intelligent enough to think them through and get to the right answer. So that could be demoralizing. And I guess it gets people maybe to want to try to cling to the hope that, well, maybe I can find some worldview that is hopefully reasonable and maybe I'm going to bank that this more common sense approach, or going down this line of reasoning to the point where I felt like I could actually understand what was going on and reach conclusions and then just stopping there. Maybe that's my best shot, even if there's a good chance that it's going to end up being wrong.

Yeah, I have two reactions to that. One, I sort of want to defend the caring about the craziness or the crazy town problem of maybe it's just a motivational defense. But I think once you're in the mode of, wow, everything's chaotic, I'm just giving up, I feel like there's something bad about that. There's some failure. Being able to say, okay, I want to simultaneously hold in my head the idea that I have not answered all the questions and my life could totally turn out to have caused great harm to others due to the complicated, chaotic nature of the universe in spite of my best intentions, I think is just true and something that we all need to own and acknowledge and learn how to inhabit. Sorry, suddenly this became the Buddhism podcast, right?

Yeah, this has gotten dark.

I think it is true that we cannot We cannot in any way predict the impacts of our actions. And if you're a utilitarian, that's a very odd, scary, complicated thought. But I think that in some sense, basically ignoring it and living your life like you are able to preserve your everyday normal moral concerns and intuitions to me seems actually basically correct. And again, I don't want to say that this is privileged normative terrain where if other people don't have the same conclusions I do, they're wrong about it. But my take is that kind of going back and saying, yeah, I'm going to rely on my everyday moral intuition that saving lives is good and I'm going to keep doing that even though I recognize the normative confusion of cluelessness, I think is actually just probably good life advice. I think it's kind of maximizable. I think if everybody followed it, it would be good. But I'm not saying that it's philosophically true.

Yeah, I mean, it's very practical and very appealing on a personal level. But of course, the problem is that the cluelessness bites there as well. You kind of can't escape because then you're doing this thing that you think is good, but then the whole point is that you have good reason to think that it will have significant effects, but then you don't really have very compelling reasons to think those effects will be positive.

I think that's right. And I think this came up actually in a previous podcast with you. It's like, you got to leave the house. And so in some ways, again, I think it's like this project of thinking it all through should destabilize you in some sense. And then it's just like, But actually, what are you going to do? I think it would be a mistake to feel like either you're on super high normative ground where you have found the right answer. I think the EA community probably comes across as wildly overconfident about this stuff a lot of the time because it's like, we've discovered these deep moral truths. Then it's like, wow, we have no idea. I think we are all really, very much including me, naive and ignorant about what impact we will have in the future. I kind of think practically, Finding a place that kind of works for you and then ignoring it is basically the right advice. Yeah.

All right, let's slightly change gear and change tone for a minute and maybe go back towards a more affirmative case for global health and well-being. What are some examples of valuable feedback loops that you've observed that have helped people to have more impact than they might have if they weren't able to see what was going on?

I think a really central one is just being able to see what works and then do more of it, which is kind of a funny low-hanging fruit. But I think often in other categories where you don't even know what intermediate metrics you're aiming for, you don't have that benefit. So for instance, the amount of resources flowing into cage-free campaigns in farm animal welfare has, I think, well over 10x'd because they were working. And it was like, oh, okay, we have found a strategy or tactic that works and we can scale. And I think that accounts for a very material portion of the whole farm animal welfare movement's impact over the past decade. But if you were somehow unable to observe your first victories, you wouldn't have done it. And so I think that there's something about literally this feedback loop of knowing if something is making progress is a really, really important one. And also on the other side, being able to notice if the bets aren't paying off. So we have a program that's focused on US criminal justice reform. We don't do calculations for every individual grant necessarily. We make big bets on Chloe who leads that program. But if after 5 years the US prison population was growing, we don't observe the counterfactual, but that would raise questions for us of, given our cost-effectiveness bar and the level of reduced incarceration we would need to be hitting to make this sort of pencil compared to other opportunities for us, being able to observe the state of the world and say, is the state of the world consistent with what it would need to be in order for these investments to be paying off, is an important kind of benefit that you can get in the the near-termist global health and well-being side that you can't necessarily get in the long-termist work, I don't think. Another one is just really boring stuff, but you can run randomized control trials that tell you, okay, the new generation of insecticide-treated bed nets is 20% more effective because the level of resistance before to the old insecticide was reducing it by 20%. You wouldn't have necessarily known that if you couldn't do the data and improve. And so none of those are necessarily order of magnitude kinds of things. But I do think if you think about the compounding benefits of all of those and the ways in which the long-termist project of trying something and maybe having very little feedback for a very long time is quite unusual relative to normal human affairs, it wouldn't shock me if the expected value impact of having no feedback loops is a lot bigger than you might naively think. That's not to say that long-termists have no feedback loops. They'll see, are we making any intellectual progress? Are we able to hire people? There are things along the way. A total empty space.

Yeah, long-termist projects are pretty varied in how much feedback they get. I mean, I suppose people doing really concrete safety work focused on existing ML systems, trying to get them to follow instructions better and not have these failure modes, in a sense, they get quite aggressive feedback where they say, have we fixed this technical problem that we've got?

Yeah, I think that work is awesome. My colleague Ajeya has written about how she's hoping that we can find some more folks who want to do that kind of practical applied work with current systems and fund more of it. And again, this is just a heuristic or a bias of mine, but I'm definitely a lot more excited to bet on tactics that we've been able to use and have worked before relative to kinds of models where it's like we have to get it right the first time or humanity is doomed. I'm like, well, I think we're pretty doomed if that's how it's going to be.

Yeah, this keeps turning into darkness again, but yeah, it is possible. You could imagine you're unsure, is this a case where we have to just get everything right the first time and we're not going to have any feedback? Or maybe this is one where we can cross the river by feeling the stones. We'll solve the technical problems as they come up. Even if you place 50/50 chances on both of those scenarios, you might just think, well, the first is a write-off. If that's the case, there's just almost nothing that we can do. So we should just bank on the second one and cross our fingers. In which case, you are again working in an area where you can get at least a reasonable level of feedback, I guess, within bio as well. Imagine many of the grants that the bio team at Open Phil is working on. They do get feedback on, like, well, were these policies implemented? Has this technology actually worked? Do the machines— are they being bought by anyone? There's a whole spectrum. I suppose the global health and well-being stuff tends to be stronger on the side of getting feedback.

Yeah. A lot of what I would point to is I think that's really right. The place where I think the feedback can be worse is when you don't observe whether you're progressing towards your intermediate goals. In biosecurity, maybe you could say, okay, we advanced the field of metagenomic sequencing and we're seeing more sequencers be used. But was your thesis that metagenomic sequencing was going to be able to reduce reduce risk, correct, is a thesis that I basically don't see how you make good progress on. And again, it depends a little bit on your type model. If your picture of the world is more like, in order to be more safe, we have to be able to be helpful in everyday use. And this goes back to the distinction you were drawing before between, do you need stuff that's only going to be helpful for existential risks, or is it going to be used every day? And I actually am pretty sympathetic to the, if it's not used every day, it's not going to be helpful kind of perspective. You might be able to observe, is the metagenomic sequencing apparatus that we invested in being used for everyday diagnostics? Is it detecting new pathogens? And so I think you could have a sense that at least that part of the bet was on track. But we never observed the base rate of existential risk. And so the fundamental question of how much of it are we reducing feels quite irresolvable to me.

Yeah. So I guess there's two stages of feedback. One is, did the project accomplish its immediate intermediate goals, kind of the ones that you plausibly can see? And then the second step of does that help, which is a whole lot less certain. And I guess with existential risk in particular, the problem bites especially hard because the only time you would ever— well, I guess you can't really know because you're not going to be around to see the case in which you fail, among other problems.

I mean, when we're all dying of the pandemic, we can recognize that we failed to prevent it.

But yes, stick that in our impact evaluation as our last I suppose the feedback loop case in its strongest form, you were saying, kind of relies on this compounding where, say, you work on two different projects and you notice that one of them is getting traction, it seems to be accomplishing its intermediate goals, and so you pile more into that, and then you start improving it based on the parts of that project that seem to be working really well. And then you see that those intermediate goals do seem to be cashing out in the ultimate thing. And so you go into that more, and then maybe you branch off something that's kind of similar but a bit different and see if it's better. So over time you get iterated improvement that maybe really does add up to being a primary concern, even if year to year it's not so central.

Yeah, much better put than I'd say it.

Do you think the considerations in favor of global health and wellbeing approach are different when you're trying to dispense money as grants? And I guess especially when you have billions of dollars to get rid of, as opposed to maybe when you're just planning out your own career and you're going to be there watching the whole thing over a 40-year period.

I do think it's different. In a lot of ways, the career case for long-termism seems better to me. I also think it makes sense for the EA community to be pretty invested in long-termism. One way I'd put it would just be, when I think about who are the major long-termist thinkers and what are the major long-termist institutions, I feel like a huge portion of them are all coming out of and motivated by the effective altruism community. Because it's in a lot of ways a weird, surprisingly new idea. So effective altruism is very important to long-termism. Altruism in a way that for global health and wellbeing, scientific research for global health and global health funding itself and policy causes, there's billions of dollars going into those things. They're already existing in large communities. And so I think that both gives you scaffolding for good ways to spend money today in really concrete, helpful ways. And I think that does matter when you're trying to give away a lot of money. But it also makes it so that in some ways, I think global health and wellbeing needs effective altruism. Effectual altruism a little bit less, especially in terms of sourcing people for careers, then I think long-termism sort of needs effective altruism and needs EAs. And so I think that's a pretty important argument for as an individual, I think if you have a career you're excited about, that would be long-termism. I think that could be a really good pro. And when it comes to money, I think there's just a lot more opportunities that are able to absorb a lot more money in some sense on the global health and wellbeing side. And so I think that's an important place for Open Phil to diversify in.

Yeah, I was thinking one way in which maybe long-termism is a bit more easy to implement in your career is that you don't have kind of the same principal-agent issues perhaps that Open Phil has offering grants. So inasmuch as we're very concerned with the challenges of figuring out whether anything that you're going to do is actually going to be useful, Open Phil might have a lot of trouble, say, figuring out what's a grant that's going to improve international relations or reduce the risk of a war between the US and China. But of course, if you could become someone who was deeply embedded in the State Department and was focused on exactly those issues related related to China. Of course, you would have decades of experience by that point where you've learned to try to hopefully understand the system and maybe be able to have some predictable positive impact there. And you can then actually just apply that knowledge and you'll be getting feedback from your own work and seeing what impact your actions have in a way that it's very hard for a grantmaker. It's very hard for them to say, then give that knowledge back to a grantmaker in order to convince them that they're having a predictably positive impact. Does that resonate?

I think that's right. But there's a couple sort of countervailing factors that I would sort of want to weigh on the other side in my mind. One is that careers are just really long and the more specialized your career is, I think the higher risk that you face that basically long-termist thinking will leave you behind. And so right now maybe people are interested in international relations, but the probability that in 20 years people still think that's one of the top career paths for long-termists strikes me as just given our maturity and where we are in the intellectual development and thinking through all all these crucial considerations that we talked about, quite low. And so if you think that career capital in something you're going to develop is highly specific and the only case for it is a pretty contingent long-termist case, I think that would make me really nervous because a career is just a long thing and it's yours. And so it feels something to me where it's like I'm a little bit more reticent to make it one big expected value bet with my career relative to money where in my career I have to keep I have to keep feeling enthusiastic. I have to keep going to work every day. And so it also feels to me like personal taste is going to do a lot more work in career decision-making than I think you necessarily need it to do in donations, where A, it's obviously easier to diversify donations and so you can do some of both, but B, I think people over the length of a career are pretty likely to flame out if they're not motivated reasonably intrinsically by the work that they're doing every day.

Yeah, I think I agree with that. I mean, the argument relies on you potentially advancing your career to the point where you're a greater expert in the area than, say, Open Phil is when it's picking grants, which means that you have to stick with it for a long time, which is why I think we pretty rarely recommend that people go into some path that they're not excited to be in. So I guess I think of that as like a slightly orthogonal issue. One really important consideration that plays into Open Phil's decisions about how to allocate its funding and also really bears importantly on how the effective altruism community ought to allocate its efforts is worldview diversification. Yeah. Can you explain what that is and how that plays into this debate?

Yeah, I think the central idea of worldview diversification is that the internal logic of a lot of these causes might be really compelling and a little bit totalizing, and you might want to step back and say, okay, I'm not ready to go all in on that internal logic. And so one example would be just comparing environmental welfare to other human causes within the remit of global health and well-being. And one perspective on environmental welfare would say, say, okay, we're going to get chickens out of cages. And I think, I'm not a speciesist, and I think that a chicken day suffering in the cage is somehow very similar to a human day suffering in a cage, and I should care kind of similarly about these things. And I think another perspective would say, I would trade an infinite number of chicken days for any human experience. I don't care at all. And if you just try to sort of put probabilities on those views and multiply them together, you end up with this really chaotic process where you're likely to either be 100% focused on chickens or 0% focused on chickens. And our view is that that seems misguided. It does seem like animals can suffer. It seems like there's a lot at stake here morally and that there's a lot of cost-effective opportunities that we have to improve the world this way. But we don't think that the correct answer is to either go 100% all in where we only work on farm animal welfare, or to say, "Well, I'm not ready to go all in, so I'm going to go to zero and not do anything on environmental welfare." We're able to work on multiple things and the effective altruism community is able to work on multiple things. A lot of the idea of worldview diversification is to say, even though the internal logic of some of these causes might be so totalizing, so demanding, ask so much of you, that being able to preserve space to say, "I'm going to make some of that bet, but I'm not ready to make all of that bet," can be a really important move at the portfolio level for people to make in their individual lives, but also for Open Phil to make as a big institution.

Yeah, it feels so intuitively clear that when you're to some degree picking these numbers out of a hat, you should never go 100% or 0% based on stuff that's basically just guesswork. I guess the challenge here seems to have been trying to make that philosophically rigorous. And it does seem like coming up with a truly philosophically properly grounded justification for that has proved quite hard. But nonetheless, we've decided to go with something that's a bit more like cluster thinking, a bit more embracing common sense and refusing to do something that obviously seems mad.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think part of the perspective is to say, look, I just trust philosophy a little bit less. And so the fact that something might not be philosophically rigorous, I'm just not ready to accept that as a devastating argument against it. And so the intuitive appeal of saying, look, there's no one worldview where this is the right reaction, but in some sense it is a good way to compromise across kind of incommensurate sorts of worldviews or incommensurate sorts of goods. I think there's something that's correct about that intuitive appeal, even though I don't think I have a devastating argument about the reasoning there. But hopefully, even if you're a longtermist who's ready to be all in on longtermism, the appeal to how should we think about the fundamental welfare case might motivate you to see, oh yeah, I get why some but not all is a desirable place to be able to end up, even though the internal logic of any of these positions is going to say, going to be very greedy. I'm going to say, I want all of it and I round your thing to zero. We want to do a bunch of these things that we think are really cost-effective, really high-impact ways to help the world, but we don't want to say, and everything goes to zero.

Yeah, to some extent we don't have to go through everything to do with worldview diversification because fortunately we covered that in quite a bit of detail with Ajeya Kotra back in the episode that came out in January of this year. So people can refer back to that if they want a lot more information. I guess it seems like Open Phil has 3 main worldviews that it embraces. One is human health and well-being, and then there's animal welfare, and then there's long-termism. I guess an interesting question is, why not add more? Like, what's the limiting principle on this worldview diversification?

Yeah, I think that's a really hard question. And I would say I'm a relative partisan of fewer is better, where I think that there's a lot to be said for having a unified metric where you can compare things in one term and optimize optimize and say, I might not prioritize education because I think health is just consistently more valuable. And if you're so obsessed with worldview diversification or you're so ready to diversify it at any choice point, then I think you end up just recapitulating the diversity of the world and you're not able to have a perspective or an edge really. So where do you draw the line between too much or too little worldview diversification I think is a really tough problem that I don't have any good first principles answers to. And I actually think we end up in some pretty post-hoc places in some interesting ways. One of the things that the Causal Prioritization research team has been thinking through recently is how should we think about the value of economic growth? Because I think there's a community around progress studies and that thinks about the value of economic growth that says that's actually the key thing for humanity historically. It's the thing that has made the world go well and we should be really excited about accelerating more of it in the future. And when we've tried to analyze how good are the policies that could accelerate more economic growth, I think our current take, and my colleague Tom has been working on this and is planning to hopefully publish it later this year, is that you can actually end up very much in the ballpark of normal global health and wellbeing kinds of priority areas where it's like, probably there's advocacy that you could do around economic growth that looks like it could compete with the GiveWell top charities according to these estimates, but not necessarily beat them. So it's in the mix, I think, according to where our estimates are landing. And I think that's a kind of attractive place On the other hand, if you had a value that came out of that process that was astronomically higher, where it's like anything you could do for economic growth is worth a million times saving one life today, I think we could be having a worldview diversification conversation about it and say, okay, maybe we want to give economic growth 20% of the portfolio or something like that, where it's between the fundamental welfare and the long-termism amount or something. Obviously that 20% is totally made up and uncertain. I don't have a rigorous philosophical defense of it. But I think that when you end up with your optimizations, your comparable units are getting you to an answer that seems reasonable, then you sort of don't need the worldview diversification. But sometimes the worldview diversification feels really necessary if one consideration is threatening to swamp the whole calculation seemingly out of proportion to the stakes. I guess one other point in this, and I promise I'll shut up and let you talk eventually, is that We actually think we are making a pretty big contrarian bet even on the global health and well-being side where I think most people, their central worldview is they care about their family, they care about their community, they care about their nation. Even the starting point of the GiveWell tab charities being cosmopolitan and saying we value lives all around the world and not just in our local community, I think is actually quite a contrarian expected value flavored bet relative to the world. We have 3 worldviews that we compare internally but not externally between. I think it's very, very far in the reductive, EV-maximizing, calculating direction relative to philanthropy at large, which is how most people think about the world. Yeah.

If you think that's contrarian, I've got some people you should meet, Alexander.

I feel like that's the theme of this podcast. I'm weirder than 99.9% of people, but not quite as weird as the Yeah, it's the, I guess, the pettiness of small differences.

Although it is interesting that these quite small differences lead to such different conclusions, which I guess is the whole issue that the conclusions are so unstable based on, like, are you— do you go 99.9 or 99.99?

I think that's another consideration that should make you sort of want to meta say, like, I actually think it's fine to sort of, like, follow your passion, follow, like, whatever feels compelling to you. I'm actually quite open to people, like, prioritizing that and going all in on it and not trying to sort of, like, hedge themselves in some big way, but I do want them to sort of hold it a little lightly. And I feel like, yeah, it goes back to our conversation earlier about cluelessness.

Yeah. Okay, we'll come back to worldview diversification as part of wrapping up on this section. But a few more small points. I guess there's some folks who decide not to focus on long-termism in part because they think humanity surviving for millions of years or ever having effects outside of the solar system is just wildly unlikely and kind of can be dismissed. Do you have any sympathy with that position?

I have shockingly little sympathy with that position, especially the millions of years idea. The idea that it's wildly unlikely seems totally crazy to me. Lots of other mammal species survive millions of years. I think humanity now is way, way more widespread than a typical mammalian species. And so the idea that it's just in principle impossible seems totally crazy to me. And I find this idea actually extremely inspiring. Humans are a very young species. We've only had modern economic growth for a couple of hundred years. So what we think of as history is just so wildly short and the future could be unbelievably massively large. And so I think there's something really beautiful about contemplating the scale of what is possible and how good it could be. And so yeah, it's funny going back to our tools conversation, I do think we have huge uncertainty. We don't know what we're doing. We're really naive in some very deep sense, but also we're in this crazy position in the universe. And I would be really sad if Open Phil wasn't able to simultaneously put a lot of resources into improving lives in concrete, obvious ways and trying to make these really high-stakes bets on how to make the vast future of humanity go a lot better.

Yeah. Okay. To wrap up this section on arguments in favor of global health and well-being, Let's talk a bit about some of the instrumental reasons why it's worth Open Phil or the effective altruism community putting additional resources into global health and well-being beyond what they might just based on kind of the expected value of the direct impact of that work. Yeah. What kind of indirect or instrumental benefits of having that approach in addition to others kind of stand out to you?

Yeah, I actually wanted to get to this earlier because when we were talking about what's the case for worldview diversification and what's the case case for not just going all in on long-termism. I said one part of that case is some skepticism that you really want to bet everything on one brittle expected value argument. I think we just want to stop and step back and say, "Let's not go that far." And then the second case is internal to the expected value thinking, actually just thinking that something like global health and well-being is just really justified on long-termist grounds. One part of that case was saying, I think there's a lot more assigned uncertainty on long-termism than people think. I think in some ways, actually just saving lives and doing pedestrian good things today could be really good and could be actually better according to long-termism than things that are branded long-termism. I don't think that's true for AI risk. But again, then you have the concern over sign uncertainty and maybe some of the things that we might do on AI risk could actually be increasing it rather than decreasing it. So that's all about the long-termist side. But then I think that there's these practical benefits of the global health and well-being work that I actually think can just add a lot of value by the long-termist lights because of those practical benefits. So a lot of these arguments are in our original post on Worldview Diversification from several years ago. One of them is just optionality. If we think we are going to go through a lot of different causes over time as our thinking changes, and I think that's pretty plausible, global health and well-being gives us a lot of knowledge and opportunity to build up experience in causes that might turn out to be relevant. So we know a lot more about policy advocacy in the US than we did 5 years ago when we were getting started. And that doesn't primarily come from the work on long-termism, even though it might turn out to really significantly benefit the work on long-termism. Work on long-termism. A second practical benefit that I think makes a big difference is around feedback loops. We talked earlier about some areas of just being able to see concretely what is working. I think we can learn lessons about just what kind of grants go well versus don't. I think there's sort of generalizable lessons there. And a third example is these very concrete relationships and grantees that have been able to move from one side to the other. There's an organization that we fund called Waitlist Zero that primarily worked on advocacy around allowing compensation for living kidney donors. And during the pandemic, the person who had started that was able to pivot with some of our funding to start this organization One Day Sooner that was working on allowing human challenge trials for COVID vaccines. And if we hadn't been funding the work on Weightless Zero, I don't think he would've been in that position to start the work on human challenge trials. I think that's one example. Another example is a grantee from our macroeconomic stabilization portfolio has ended up turning out to be really helpful for a bunch of policy work in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. And it's something I think we wouldn't have necessarily expected a lot of in front at the beginning. And there's just even more pedestrian stuff like recruiting and fundraising. Eventually we think Open Phil will be a lot more conventionally successful and attractive if it's like a 50/50 long-termist and global health and well-being organization versus if it's like the only thing we work on is AI risk. We think we would be leaving a lot of value on the table there.

Yeah, I mean, I think all of that makes sense. The reason I put this in fairly late is that I feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea of advocating for doing this 'big program' and spending all of this money just because it incidentally benefits this other program. There's something about that that feels uncomfortable. I guess you want to put the affirmative case for it first rather than just say, as a side effect, it benefits the long-termist work.

I think that's right. And I do think that the affirmative case is first. The affirmative case is like, you get to do a lot of good, right? I think that's why people do it. I think it's why people are interested in it. And it's like all this other stuff is sort of like the third thought. But I don't actually think it's that crazy as a consideration because basically the longtermist view should just be a lot more comfortable with this because the longtermist view is kind of like everything is these weird bank shots to influence the distant future. So anything that you might do to help somebody today according to longtermism is fundamentally towards the terminal goal of their distant impact on the far future. And so if what you think is that most of the moral value is in the far future and we should act accordingly, you're sort of committed to all of these weird bank shots because there's nothing else in some sense. So I think if people were cynical about it and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to pull the wool over people's eyes," I think that would be really unfortunate. But I think being honest that we worry that we might have gotten a little bit crazy seeming here and we like to do concrete good things because that helps people understand that we are motivated by concrete good action. I think there's something about actually making your appearance in line with your true deep values there where you're like, that's not deceptive, that's just honest and correct. And I find that totally compelling.

Yeah, I think part of my discomfort is the idea that some of these arguments can get a bit close to ones that might lack integrity. So you can imagine what if nobody at Open Phil actually thought that this work was very effective and they clearly thought that this other umbrella was much better, but nonetheless they were doing it just because it kind of looked good or brought positive attention or got people to take them seriously. If that was the way that things were, then I think that would raise serious integrity issues to me. And I'd think, well, maybe even if that's good in some narrow sense, do we really want to be willing to engage in this let PR dominate what we're doing to such a degree. I guess the fortunate thing is that there's lots of people who do think that this really is the most justified thing on the merits, or at least that it should absolutely be part of the thing. And then you can make the argument that everyone else should be pretty happy about that because it happens to benefit everyone and makes the pie bigger.

I think that's reasonable, but I actually don't totally agree. So one thing I think would be really objectionable about your story is if there was a pure cynicism to it, right? So if people were like, we're wasting this money, how could we possibly 'Hey, spend it this way.' But we're trying to buy good PR. I totally agree that would be a really undesirable, inauthentic place to be. That's not what we're into. But I think about my own case where I think of myself as ethically pretty comfortable with long-termism. I get some real comfort that I think that the work that I can do at Open Phil both has these concrete impacts of, I think, making people's lives better today and helps further the work of our long-termist team. And I guess if in my mind it was like the only reason I do the work was because of the longtermist work, I feel like I'd be a little bit more sympathetic to the, "Okay, that's one thought too many." But again, because longtermism has in some ways, I think, a shortage of good things to do, the idea that actually just concretely helping people today because that will help mainstream longtermism, I don't know. I don't think that would be a necessarily terribly objectionable mindset unless the view was like, oh, I'm going to dupe people. And then I'm like, yeah, okay, that seems like a very undesirable framing.

Yeah. So your take is more, I like long-termism, I like global health and well-being, and it turns out that working on global health and well-being gets me a pretty good outcome on both of these worldviews. So that's just a bonus. And that doesn't seem really objectionable or lacking integrity.

Yeah, exactly right. If I was like, oh, I waste my days because of this work, I think that would lack integrity, and I think that would be really objectionable. But if it's I think I get to do good stuff and I have a lot of moral sympathy for this other view. And the fact that I think that the good stuff also could in some sense further that other moral view is all to the good in my mind.

Yeah, something that I'd feel incredibly icky about is kind of misleading people about my actual views. It's possible maybe in my role in particular, that is kind of a big no-no because you want people to take seriously what you're saying and not think that you're just running some ploy in order to get them to do what you want. I guess I suppose that's not what's happening here because there is just different people who have different views and I suppose people are exposed to people who have these different opinions and then realizing that there's a debate within effective altruism and within Open Phil about how to approach these really difficult questions.

I think that's right. I think part of the tension or the feeling of inauthenticity might come from a view that the actual motivation for global health and well-being and long-termism are very different. If you thought of global health and well-being as being motivated by a person-affected view of population ethics, then you might think, "Oh, you're doing violence to that work because you're actually motivated by the total view instead." there's some fraud going on. My view is it's a lot less about different values and a lot more about epistemics and uncertainty and reasoning. So it's not like I'm pretending to care about people dying. I super care about people dying and want to prevent it. And then I also have some sympathy for this view that's like, wow, the long-term future could be huge. And the fact that my position helps allow me to marry those things rather than treat them as polar opposites is something that I actually think is cool and good and unobjectionable. I think that your point of trying to be honest about this is actually really interesting and challenging because my perception, I was pressing you on this earlier, is that for the people who I perceive as most deep in the EA community, and again, I have a biased sample sitting in San Francisco, I think a lot of people are super, super focused on AI. I perceive 80,000 Hours as trying to diversify that in some sense. But I think if you had the most representative sample of your sense of the risk space or thing. You might end up with 9 out of 10 podcasts being about AI, and the podcasts are actually quite weighted towards AI, but maybe at 30%, or I don't know what the ratio is.

Yeah. One of these instrumental arguments that I'm a little bit skeptical about is the idea that we'll kind of learn from experience within some domains, and then that will kind of carry over to us being able to have more impact in other areas because of the lessons that we learn. I guess I guess there's two reasons. One is, how much do the people who are working on AI at Open Phil really learn from the experience of grants from other areas that are very different, like animal welfare? I would kind of expect that the crossover lessons would be pretty weak just because these are such different disciplines. And then the other thing is, if you wanted to learn from experience in philanthropy or in trying to do good, it seems like there's a wealth of other people who you could study who aren't within Effective Altruism specifically or aren't your specific colleagues. And so running programs with the goal of learning from those experiences would seem somewhat wasteful relative to just going in and reading existing histories. What do you make of that?

Yeah, I think those are both really interesting points. Let me answer them in reverse order. On the second point, we have invested a lot in the history of philanthropy and we think that we can learn a material amount from those successes and that we should try to do more. I think that is cross-cuttingly applicable and it's something that we think is really valuable and we're glad to do. I also think sometimes it's hard to learn from history and you make your own mistakes. We're run by a bunch of people and so I do think people learn more from their own colleagues, their own experiences than they do from from books a lot of the time. And if that weren't the case, that would be really cool. But I do think there's a real difference there. And then on your first question, I think it's true that I don't want to overstate the degree of cross-cuttingness of lessons, but things like how do you do policy advocacy, philanthropy really well, there's a lot of stuff at that level of abstraction on tactics that I think actually are quite cross-cutting and where now the longtermists are trying to draw on some of that knowledge, trying to draw on some of those experiences. Sometimes we're trying to draw on literally the same people or firms that we've used. I think that they are quite happy to have those experiences to draw on. Another way you might put it would be, if you thought that every dollar of long-termism was an undifferentiated equal level of cost-effectiveness, maybe you wouldn't want to trade any of it off. But I actually think within long-termism you should expect quite steeply diminishing returns where the marginal dollar is vastly, vastly worse than the average, potentially orders of magnitude so. And so the long-termist actually might be quite willing to give up the last 10% of their money to have some lessons that are going to make their average or frontier grant better. And so I don't think this would get you to a 50-50 split between long-termism and global health and well-being, but I think it might get you to, I don't know, 10-20% of the portfolio should be on global health and well-being, even if you only had the, in the long run, we want humanity's future to go well in mind.

Yeah, I mean, depending on what catastrophic risks you think are most serious, it seems like the effect of further work could become negative relatively quickly. These are very sensitive areas potentially where you really want to know what you're doing if you're going to go and meddle in them for reasons that you've given earlier. And I think that's one reason why you don't want people who aren't actually really interested in the topics or don't have suitable skills to be going in, because it's not as if it's like a really absurd tail risk to have a negative impact. It seems like that's entirely possible. And that's one reason why you might not want to just go in with billions and billions of dollars that you're trying to give away as quickly as possible. Because you just end up funding things that are neutral or harmful.

Yeah, I think we think that a lot of things might be harmful and there's a lot of scientific uncertainty over specific stuff. And so that's part of why, well, let's just throw money at anybody who says they have these values, would probably not be a very good strategy towards the goal. And I think it's surprising sometimes how big these considerations can be, especially if you have a little bit more of a fragile worldview. I was surprised recently to go back and understand that Carl Sagan had written about this in the '70s when there was discussion over detecting asteroids and potentially being able to redirect them if they were coming on a path towards Earth. And he made this argument that it's fine to invest in detection, but we should really not build the technology to be able to redirect an asteroid's path because the base rate of risk is so low that it's just vastly more likely that if you had that technology, you would use it to extort richer countries or something, or just threaten the world with a doomsday cult rather than be able to prevent the base rate. And I think that when you think about analogs to biorisk and arguably maybe just some forms of AI, these might be weird enough, esoteric enough kinds of considerations that even just raising the alarm could end up sometimes being net harmful. That's something that my colleagues do think a lot about, but I don't know that it has necessarily trickled down into the rest of the EA community. I think that the way in which that will interact with an expected value calculation, where uncertainty will make you want to regress your estimates, I think can help you understand why expected value-wise you could still end up thinking that a lot of global health and wellbeing might be might be desirable because of just how much uncertainty you have.

Yeah. All right, I want to now turn to arguments against working on global health and well-being. I had a bunch of arguments that I was potentially going to make, but I think it seems like you just have such a balanced perspective and you're aware of the arguments on both sides that I'm kind of actually just curious to probe your thinking. And especially here, earlier you were saying it sounded like you were kind of skeptical about the broad longtermist work, but that you're more excited about some of the targeted longtermist work. So I'm keen to hear kind of the affirmative case in favor of that, given the things that you know from your work?

I'm really very glad that Open Phil does some work on AI risk. I always worry that this is not my area, I don't understand it, I could just be terribly painfully confused. But the fact that we're able to spend some of our resources, and also my colleagues do know way more, on this looming change that's coming seemingly very plausibly this century to the vast future of the universe, to me feels like a huge, huge deal. I'm really glad that we're able to devote work to it. I think the big question is, what can we do to make it go better? I sometimes feel like there's a little bit of some disassociation between the big philosophical case for why we care so much about it and why the stakes are so high, which I buy. And then in practice, somebody's like, "Yeah, I'm going to train a language model to reliably not swear." And I'm like— and it's not to say that there's no deep connection. I think it's just hard to have the same, "Wow, this is the world's most important thing," when you're training a language model to not swear. That's not to say it's not. I don't know. But part of what I like about the diversity of our work is that it lets you feel like you can do some of that and some of these other things and still be making concrete progress.

What stuff are you most excited about that's outside of the global health and well-being bucket? It sounded like some of the targeted AI work you think could just end up being incredibly important to how things go.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really glad that we're able to do it. We also invest a lot in growing the EA community, and I think those are good investments. I feel I feel pretty good about that community. I think that the idea of being able to get people to take impact seriously in their careers and donate more are things that I actually see a lot of value in and I would like to disseminate more. And then the biosecurity work, I am a little bit less up to speed on and so I don't feel like I have as good of a picture of. But again, coming out of COVID I think that the case for why this might be high expected value work feels like a very intuitive idea to people. And so honestly, yeah, we talked about this earlier, The biggest thing on longtermism is like, I totally buy the appeal and it's just the cluelessness that makes me uncertain about it. And I think that also makes me somewhat uncertain about a bunch of the global health and well-being stuff too.

Yeah. So setting aside AI and bio for a second, I guess earlier I slightly put you in a corner where you were strongly encouraged to diss kind of the other longtermist concerns like international relations or decision making. Is there anything in that kind of more general world improvement or other longtermist interest areas that you think kind of is promising and you're you would like to see people explore whether there's something great to be done there?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm nervous about some of the fuzziness aspects of some things like improving human judgment or improving international relations. I think that that might end up in a sort of bad part of the solution space according to me. But I'm super excited about long-termism as an idea. I think trying to come up with really concrete, robustly good proposals for other long-termist ideas that are beyond AI risk and bio risk is a really promising, interesting area. One issue is that I don't have enough of a view on the risk profile myself to say, on the margin, should even more x-risk motivated people be going into AI than currently are? But I think that the case for Open Phil to spend more money on longtermism might actually be a little bit stronger if the set of problems that the longtermists are working on was a little bit wider or more diverse. Because the more it's one or two concentrated bets on AI and bio, the more it feels like, okay, we want to put into these bets, but we want to hedge those bets. We want to do some other things first. But if it were like, actually, there's 10 different uncorrelated causes for long-termism that all look like they're good and some of them you can make concrete measurable progress, I think that the case that you don't want to just bet on this one worldview would get a little bit weaker because you would have a lot more internal benefits of diversification where you'd be learning lessons, you'd be recruiting different kinds of people, you'd be meeting different people in the world. So I like the idea of long-termism sort of growing and being a bigger tent as a community. I think those are good. It's just I kind of feel like the things that get classified as broad long-termism right now often feel to me like they're just so fuzzy that I'm not sure how to engage.

Yeah, it was a little bit depressing earlier, but let's re-engage with the cluelessness concern briefly. I feel like maybe I didn't back long-termism enough earlier because I was just letting you lay out your view. But if we take cluelessness quite seriously, if we try to put that hat I suppose what could we then do? What hope can we grab onto? And it seems like one approach would be to say, I'm going to bank on the idea that a really crucial time is coming quite soon. And so I'm going to be able to understand that situation and actually influence it because it's actually happening. Most of the decisions are going to be made now. And this is kind of the AI story where you're like, well, the future at some point is going to become more regular and predictable. And what if that is going to be put into motion quite soon? Soon, then I might know the people or the organizations that are involved, and I can try to influence that in the normal way. I suppose you have unintended consequences there, even when you're just operating in normal life, but they might not be so grim as trying to create a series of consequences that play out over hundreds of thousands of years. Another approach might be to— and I think Bostrom has this really excellent presentation on this from, I think, back in 2014 or something, which I think we'll summon all the time. And maybe we just haven't managed to actually advance this research agenda very much, but he was basically saying cluelessness is this really big problem. But what we need to do is find some guideposts, find some things that we can improve about the world now that we can measure now that we think correlate as well as is possible, as well as is practical with good long-term outcomes for humanity as a whole. And there you have a reasonable list of things that could be on there, like, are countries reasonably democratic? How violent are people by nature? How well do we understand science in general? And in all of these cases, you can come up with stories under which improving that kind of guidepost could be positive or it could be negative. But the philosophy was like, surely we can find something that we can influence, some measure about the nature of the world and how humanity is doing that is more likely to be positive than negative, even if we're still going to be quite unsure. And then that's the thing that it will be most impactful to push on from a broad point of view. And so I don't know exactly what that best guidepost or the best thing that we could change about the present world now in order to influence the long term would be. But I would be surprised if there wasn't something in that category where I would say, yes, I think it's more likely than not to be good to change this thing. What do you make of that kind of line of argument?

Yeah, I guess I'm open to that. I'm skeptical that we can really reason well enough about the future that we can get to more than 50+ epsilon percent directional confidence, sort of. I don't want to be a nihilist about it. I think the future of humanity is so important and so big, or hopefully so big, that people making these crazy bets about how they try to influence and make it go better is a really good thing. And I don't want to talk your listeners out of doing that. I think there's a ton morally at stake. And if people feel like they can have good meaningful lives trying to pursue these probabilistic bets, I think that's healthy. And then I guess it's almost an attitudinal thing. I want people going into that with a sense of, It is vastly, overwhelmingly likely that the channel through which I imagine impacting the far future is totally misguided. That's not to say that they shouldn't take the action. I actually think maybe people should even be willing to make vast personal sacrifices to take those kinds of actions because the expected value could be so high. But I think that there's something attitudinally around really inhabiting and recognizing how overwhelmingly likely to be wrong and naive we are when we try to shape the future a million years in the future. That makes me want to say, not that we shouldn't try it, but that we shouldn't bet everything on it and that we should bring the right attitude of modesty and uncertainty to that work. Because I just feel like if you looked back and tried to play forward, how much can you predict history? I think you'd be really bad at it. I think we're really bad at predicting international relations. I think there's just so much contingency Not to say we shouldn't do things or that they always end up being worth zero, but that appreciating that contingency, I think, will push back against a bunch of forms of fanaticism.

Yeah, it is a view that lends itself to more modesty and much less to fanaticism, because the whole thing is like, wow, it's such a struggle to find anything that's going to improve the future. But yeah, I don't feel as hopeless about it as it sounds like you do. I mean, if you think about What about reducing climate change? Is that more likely to make the future go better, or is it more likely to make the future go badly? I mean, I suppose you could spend a lot of time analyzing that, but my guess is you'd end up concluding that it's more likely to make the future go better. If America ceases to be a democratic country, is that likely to make the future go better or likely to make it go worse? Those things don't seem, say, super levered, where one person is going to have a massive influence on that and then have a massive influence on how humanity plays out in the long term. But there are a lot of things where I'm like, you know, 55-45 or 60-40, that this is more likely to be good than bad.

I just feel like most bets about what you would actually do, A, they're counterfactual, could also be good. And so there's more trade-offs in both factors on each side that you need to weigh. And B, the actual thing in front of you is many, many of those bets together where it's like each one might be 55-45. Maybe the US becoming an autocracy is bad for the future. Sure, that sounds like maybe more than 55-45, right? But it's also like, is that a meaningful thing? Saying there and how bad in expectation is the badness for the future? Is it 1 in a million or 1 in a trillion? And is that a kind of question that I can actually form a reasonable coherent view on? It's something I'm really uncertain about. Going back to your climate change point, I agree that climate change seems directionally worse rather than better for the future. But is climate change worse rather than better in a way that saving the life of a random kid born in rural West Africa is better or worse in the future. Is it differently so? Is, I think, the claim that longtermists actually need to win. And I'm really uncertain of that. And I feel like uncertainty— again, I'm not saying it's better. I really don't want to imply that I know it's better. I'm just saying uncertainty should make you want to hedge.

That seems like a very open question. Yeah. What do you think of this argument? I don't think I've ever— I thought of this a few times and then never actually told it to anyone. But you can imagine, say we're 50/50 unsure. Whether the world is predictable and understandable and influenceable in a way that humans can actually do. So then you might think, well, there's a 50% chance that it's just— this is a hopeless enterprise, that the world is just such a crapshoot and so chaotic and so unpredictable, what effects your actions have, that in that case, it's basically a write-off. And I'm just going to say, well, if that's the world we live in, then too bad, and I can't really do anything good. But there's a 50% chance that it is somewhat predictable, that you're more likely to do good than bad if you try to make things better. And so then in expectation across these two worldviews, you have a positive influence. And also you should kind of bank on the idea that you're in a positive world. I think the way that this wouldn't work is if there was a third equally likely possibility where when you do things, you're likely to make them negative, likely to make them worse. But I find the idea that when people are trying to produce an outcome, they're more likely to make it happen than to reduce it by an equal degree kind of reasonable.

I think it's a good example of a prior that seems like very reasonable in normal situations and when you're worried about anthropogenic risks to humanity, an extremely bad prior, honestly. But just to be clear, I wanted to go back and agree with your first two points where I'm on the one hand very glad that people do a lot of long-termism, even though I think the right attitude is deep, deep uncertainty and self-skepticism. And I really don't want to expect the value over the claimed impact where it's like, I feel like long-termists will often sort of gesture towards these claims of Well, if we're right, then it's like 10 to the 40 stars that we're going to take over and populate in the future. Once you start to try to reason about that in an explicit expected value kind of way, that number just so dominates everything else in a way that I think is actually perverse because all that happened is somebody said something. There's no deep truth tracking to these sorts of claims. I don't want to be so deflationary about it that people walk away and are like, like, wow, nobody should be longtermist. I'm like, I think longtermism is great. I think more people should be longtermists. But I think that the uncertainty that we have about this is in some sense deeper and sort of more cluster-thinking-y, such that not that we shouldn't do some, but that the sort of totalism that will be implied by typical or basic expected value thinking seems like that's kind of where I want to get off the train.

Yeah. All right, let's wrap up this part of the interview talking about global health and well-being versus long-termism. I suppose to bring it all together, it would be good to put together, I suppose, the competing weights of arguments here with the worldview diversification issue, which it sounds like to you is a really kind of primary concern, I guess. Yeah. Doing that, where do you come down on kind of how much should Open Phil or the effective altruism community kind of allocate to each of these different umbrellas?

Yeah, I mean, I think more about the Open Phil question than the effective altruism question. I feel like something in the ballpark of 50% to long-termism and 50% to the global health and wellbeing portfolio makes sense. I think that's also probably where we're expecting to end up. It could be broadly between a 30% to 70% range either direction. We'll try to do more to figure that out in the coming years as we get a better sense of what opportunities are available to us, where can we cost-effectively spend money, and also maybe more philosophical progress on how to think about things. Worldview diversification in a reasonably compelling, coherent way. I really wish we had better sort of principles for allocating and figuring out what is the right amount there, but I really don't think we do at this point.

Yeah, it's interesting. I saw this survey from last year that was aggregating a bunch of different sources on giving among effective altruists, and I think it concluded that about two-thirds was going to global health and well-being and about one-third to long-termism. I'm not sure whether that's I don't know if that's so much a conscious decision necessarily, at least on Open Phil's part. It seems like the limiting factor on the long-termist grantmaking is actually finding things that you're confident are good on long-termist grounds, which is even if you tried to go all in on long-termism, it sounds like you might struggle to actually give away all of the money that you have within any plausible timeframe.

Yeah, both sides of Open Phil are still growing and are well short of where we should be spending, sort of given our planned budget allocations. We're overall trying to figure out where can we spend most cost-effectively going forward. And that's true on the global health and well-being side and the long-termist side. But I think global health and well-being is closer to where it needs to be in some sense, whereas long-termists have a lot more growth ahead of them that I expect to be associated with trying to figure out more about the world. They also think, I think plausibly, that they're going to learn a lot more in the next decade or two about the future of technology. Whereas for global health and well-being, we actually think probably with every passing year, our opportunity set gets a little bit worse. Have a little bit more of a stronger incentive to get going. And so that's a lot of what my team is focused on these days.

Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like the baseline is something around 50/50, but it could go 30/70, 70/30. What kinds of things could you learn or could Open Phil learn that would potentially shift that one way or the other?

Yeah, I think a couple of things. So one would just be, are we finding good opportunities on either side? If neither side feels like they can spend their portfolio in a reasonable fashion, that's a pretty strong argument to give more to the other side. In practice, I sort of expect global health and well-being to be able to find more large-scale ways to spend money just because it's more aligned with the way that most folks in the world currently think. So that could definitely be a factor. Another factor could be if the longtermists just came up with a really scalable way to spend money that they thought actually had a good, more robust chance. Maybe that would argue for more rather than less. And maybe if there were more longtermist causes— I don't know if Holden necessarily agrees with me, and so this would be something I'm freelancing a little bit here, but I could imagine if there was more internal diversity to the longtermist side where it didn't feel like all of longtermism was one bet on a very, very specific expected value play, then I could also imagine that being a case for marginally more rather than marginally less. But I think that would be a tweak around the edges, not a fundamental change to that ratio.

Yeah, I guess an interesting phenomenon that's different between grantmaking versus career planning is that if you kind of set out to have a career that has an effect on the very long-term future, in a sense, you're doing something that is going to develop over 40 years' time. So you have potentially quite a while to see this space grow and to rely on later research on what's going to be useful. But that doesn't really help us help Open Phil make grants right now. That maybe suggests that the program as a whole might flourish and find more really useful ways to allocate grants in coming decades. But maybe kind of the fact that the area is young is more challenging for present-day grantmaking than it is for long-term career planning.

I think that that's probably right, although I think of it as also a big problem for long-term career planning. So you might have more insight as to how to do that well than I do. I worry that we're starting off so early in this, we don't know so much. And so I guess it just makes me really— if I were planning my own career and I were a dyed-in-the-wool long-termist, I think I'd be really emphasizing optionality and just trying to do things that would be relatively robust and scalable because I personally, as Alexander, really expect the long-termist's best recommendations to change. So I think doing something that's somehow going to be robustly useful for long-termism or a skill set that would allow you to be useful in the future feels to me like something that's at stake there. It's harder to do as a funder because it's like, what is robustly useful? We try to invest in research.

I guess keep the money in the bank.

Yeah. Which is implicitly what you do when you're not spending it. Money yet.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's push on and talk quickly about this blog post that you wrote in 2019 called GiveWell's top charities are increasingly hard to beat. Do you mind if I give kind of a brief summary of how I read this post and then maybe my main question about it?

Yeah, totally.

Okay. Yeah. So as I understood it, basically it was saying Open Phil has been making grants to reliable, proven GiveWell charities for a while, things like the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed bednets, but it's been hoping to maybe find things that are better than that by using science and politics and maybe other methods to get leverage. And so it's been exploring these new approaches, trying to find things that might win out over helping the world's poorest people. And you'd been doing that by working on scientific research and policy change in the United States. But the leverage that you'd gotten from those potentially superior approaches was something like 10 to 1,000, probably closer to 10 than 1,000. And that wasn't enough to offset get the 100x leverage that you get from transferring money from one of the world's richest countries to the world's poorest people. Is that kind of right?

Yeah, I think that's a great summary.

Yeah. Okay. That kind of raises the question to me, if you were able to get even 10x leverage using science and policy by trying to help Americans by improving US economic policy or doing scientific research that would help Americans, shouldn't you then be able to kind of blow Against Malaria Foundation out of the water by applying those same methods like science and policy in the developing world to also help the world's poorest people?

Yeah, so let me give two reactions. One is I take that to be sort of the conclusion of that post. I think that the argument at the end of the post is like, we're hiring, we think we should be able to find better causes, come help us. And we did in fact hire a few people and they have been doing a bunch of work on this over the last few years to try to find better causes. And I do think in principle, being able to combine these sources of leverage to sort of, I think of it as multiplying 100x's, you should be able to get something that I think is better than the sort AMF-type GiveWell margin, but I don't think it blows it out of the water by any means. This sort of prefigures the conclusion in some ways from some of our recent work. I think we think, A, the GiveWell type charities, like AMF, is actually 10 times better than the GiveDirectly type cash transfer model of just moving resources to the poorest people in the world. So that already gives you the 10x multiplier on the GiveWell side. Something that is a multiplier on top of that. I actually think that's quite a bit harder to do because that's a much more specialized, targeted intervention relative to the relatively broad, generic, just give cash to the world's poorest people, which is a little bit easier to get leverage on. So I do think we should be optimistic. We should expect science and advocacy causes that are aimed towards the world's poor to be able to compete with the kind of 10x multiplier of of cost-effectiveness and evidence that GiveWell gets from AMF to GiveDirectly. But I'm uncertain to skeptical after a few years of work on this that we're going to be able to blow it out of the water. And so I think about it as it gets you, with a lot of work and a lot of strategic effort, into the ballpark. And so we have a couple of these new causes that I could talk about where we think we're in the ballpark of the GiveWell top charities, but we haven't found anything yet that feels like, oh, it's super scalable and in expectation 10 times better than the Against Malaria Foundation. We think we're kind of like, we're working hard to find stuff that's in the ballpark.

Yeah, it seems like if distributing bed nets is something like 10 times as good as just giving people the equivalent amount of cash, shouldn't you then be able to get leverage on top of that by lobbying governments to allocate more aid funding to malaria prevention, including distributing bed nets, or doing scientific research into malaria vaccine, which I guess it seems like there's a pretty good candidate that's come out recently that might really help us get rid of malaria completely. Why don't those kind of in addition help you get further leverage and have even more impact?

I mean, you sort of see the issue with infinite regress, right? It's like, well, why can't you go one layer more meta than that and advocate for people too? And so I think the answer is that, A, in a weird way, the problems in the world actually just will not support giving at that scale. In a super cost-effective way. So I think this is kind of an interesting point that I wish effective altruists would pay a little bit more attention to. I haven't done a good job articulating it, so it's not something that people necessarily understand. But I think the GiveWell Top Charities actually set a very, very, very high bar in terms of spending at large, large scale. And so one way to put it would be, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, They compiled the Global Burden of Disease report. They try to say how many life years are lost to every cause of death around the world every year. And they estimate that there's something like 2.5 billion DALYs lost to all causes every year. And I think GiveWell— this is off the top of my head, so I could be wrong— but I think GiveWell thinks they can save a disability-adjusted life year for something like $50. And so if you were trying to spend just $1 billion a year, which is like 3% of the NIH budget, less than 0.3% of US philanthropic dollars every year on stuff that's as cost-effective as that, then you would need to be reducing total global life years lost from all causes everywhere by just under 1%. I think that if you sit with that number, that's just really, really high. Amongst other things, it just shows that if you were trying to do that at a 100 times bigger scale, you literally couldn't because you would have already solved all health problems. And so I don't know where the curve is of declining marginal returns, but I would guess it sets in pretty steeply before even 10 times bigger than that. And so I think people sometimes underestimate the size of the opportunities when they think about, oh, we can make a leveraged play that could be 10 times better. And it's like, maybe an individual donor could, but Open Phil, that will need to eventually be giving away a billion dollars a year, maybe more. That is actually not the relevant benchmark for us. We're giving at a scale where it has to be able to absorb more resources.

Okay, so there could be particularly good grants in science and politics that do this, but it's just they're not going to be able to absorb nearly as much money as you need to be able to give away. So you want to make those, but then it's also going to be very important to find other things that can actually take billions.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, that's super interesting.

One other observation is just that when we've tried to look at through history of what are other grants other people have made, when we tried to analyze our own grants, we typically see things that look more like 10x leverage than 100x leverage. I think we almost never see 100x, even from hits. The more what you are pursuing seems idiosyncratic, I think the harder it is to even get 10x leverage because the leverage operates through these intermediary forces in the world that are like, in science, they're driven by academic scientific incentives. In advocacy, it has to go through Congress or there are just limits for the level of alignment you can push when you're trying to lever these bigger systems.

It's interesting that you think of distributing bed nets as having leverage over cash transfers, so GiveDirectly. What is the source of leverage there? Is it that you know that bed nets are maybe better than the recipients realize, and so you're willing to pay more for them at Rizvi than they are?

I think that's a really great question, and I don't think people ask it enough. I remember when, I think in my first year at GiveWell, I wrote a blog post about this. How should you think about bed nets versus cash transfers? And I think there's a few things. One is the idea that people are doing expected value calculations when they buy bed nets or don't buy bed nets, I think is just not an accurate description of human affairs, and they would be really bad at doing them if they tried. I don't think people are good at making that kind of judgment. Also, the beneficiaries are mostly kids, and so it's not like they can be self-interested and invest in their own future. It requires altruism. And actually, I think people think that something like 50% of the benefits of bed nets are externalities because they're insecticide-treated. And so you actually kill mosquitoes, you don't just prevent them from eating you. And so the typical public goods services argument for providing goods with externalities I think applies there and would make you want to invest in bed nets and not just cash transfers. But yeah, I think of that sort of like— GiveWell is broadly showing that basically trying to do evidence-backed and having a really intense lens around cost-effectiveness can kind of get you, roughly speaking, a 10x gain. And then I think going from the rich world to the poor world can get you, roughly speaking, 100x gain. Gained. But I do think that's an interesting parallel to keep in mind when you think about things like, for Effective Altruists, is your edge philosophy and values, or is your edge more analytical, evidence-based reasoning? And I think in a lot of ways, actually, often it feels like the edge is more the values.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I know some people are really skeptical of the idea that experts at an organization like GiveWell could be smarter about spending money than the world's poorest people spending their own money on themselves. And I think if they were trying to spend a large fraction of their budget, that would be very well-placed skepticism. But I guess the bar here is, can we find anything that these people are significantly undervaluing where it would be really good if they got the product rather than just the equivalent amount of cash with a significant research team that's relying on all this kind of other research that's been done? So it's a big effort just to find something that costs $5 per person or $5 per household that these people have undervalued. And that seems like a more plausible bar to clear.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I have some personal sympathy for the people who love the autonomy case for just get cash, but I really do think that when it comes to it, you actually can just find opportunities that look a lot better, I think.

Yeah. Okay, let's push on and talk about jobs at Open Phil and I guess the new problem areas that you're potentially moving into. Yeah, you mentioned these briefly at the beginning, but let's recap. What roles are you hiring for at the moment or potentially in the near Yeah, so there's two big clusters.

So one is a couple of new program officers in new areas, South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. And then a second is folks to work on cause prioritization on the global health and wellbeing team to basically pick new causes just like we just did with South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. And if you're up for it, I'd be pretty interested in talking through a little bit of the case for, like we do South Asian air quality. I think it's pretty interesting. Open Phil's first new cause area in a long time. And I think it sort of gives you a sense of what would the work look like? What kinds of things would you be thinking about?

Yeah, I was so excited to see this in your notes. I'm fascinated to learn about what's the case in favor and how did you end up pushing the button on it?

Yeah, pulling the trigger. Well, we haven't yet, right? So we need to hire and see if we can get somebody good to come join us. But the South Asian air quality, I think, is a really interesting example where, you know, you know this, but your listeners might not. We have these 3 criteria that we use for picking causes: importance, tractability, and neglectedness. And in importance, I think this is sort of a crazy case. So I mentioned earlier IHME, who produces the Global Burnout Disease Report. They estimate that almost 3% of all life years lost to all causes globally are lost due to air pollution in India. And that's a mix of indoor smoke from cooking and outdoor air pollution from burning coal, from cars, from burning fuel Drops. And in some ways, I think it's appropriate when you hear numbers like that to be skeptical and to say, should I really believe these? And you have to rely on some social science to get figures like that. You can't really run randomized control trials where you expose people to a lifetime of air pollution, thankfully. And so as with all social science literature, I think there's some reasonable concern or question of, is the magnitude that we're getting right? But I don't think it's going to make you want to downweight that by a lot. Maybe it's a factor of 2 or something. And so you're starting from such a high base. That the importance just ends up continuing to be huge. And then on the neglectedness criteria, it gets a really small amount of philanthropy right now. So the best report we've seen on this, I think estimated something like $7 million a year of funding for air quality work in India. And that's just for something that's causing so much of all of the health problems in the world. That's a trivial, trivial fraction. And a lot of those funders are actually motivated by climate. And climate will get you some of the benefits that you care about in air pollution. But they can come apart. And so I think there's a lot more to be done there. The last criteria honestly is the weak point on this one, where tractability is a challenge. Funding in India as a foreign foundation is hard and frankly getting harder. And air pollution has a bunch of different causes and there's no one silver bullet policy that's like, okay, if you could just get the legislature to pass this, then you would be okay. But a bunch of things from trying to encourage modern stove usage to getting coal power plants to adopt these units that remove small particulate matter from the air to changing emission standards for new vehicles all seem like they would have a reasonable shot at this. And so basically, again, to show that we're comfortable with some forms of explicit expected value thinking, if we did something like quadruple the funding in the field, we would only need that to reduce air pollution in India by something like 1% relative to the counterfactual in order for that to be more cost-effective than the GiveWell top charities. And I really don't think that's trivial. I think that's actually a hard, high bar, but I think it's probably doable. And so maybe that's an example of something where You're like, why can't you beat the GiveWell top charities by like 10 or 100 times? And I'm like, well, I have something that's like a huge, huge problem that gets no other philanthropy, and I think I can make progress on it, but I really don't think I can make enough progress on it that I'm going to be able to be 10 times more cost effective than the GiveWell top charities.

Yes, it's so interesting to hear those numbers laid down. I don't think I'd fully appreciated just what it would imply to be able to massively beat the GiveWell recommended charities. So it's good to take a minute for that to fully sink in. Yeah, I guess regular listeners will know that this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, that people just don't seem to appreciate how severely damaging air pollution is. How much did you spend time critiquing these papers? Because I guess my understanding is that people have come at this from different fields using different methods, and kind of they just keep finding that serious air pollution, especially for children, it tends to— well, it causes people to live less long, and it also seems to cause serious problems with education and productivity, that people find it harder to work and get things done when there's air pollution all around them.

Yeah. So we have not gone deep on the education and productivity and sort of intellectual cognitive literature. We really came at it from a health perspective. And I think that there's, like, especially for acute health problems, there's just very, very good evidence from a ton of different settings showing that especially young kids and older adults suffer from acute problems when air pollution is really bad. It's harder to get good evidence on the chronic problems because you just don't have the same high-frequency variation. And so how bad is it to be exposed to 70 of these particular matters versus 10 over decades is a hard problem to study. But our read on the research from, again, a bunch of different sources is that it looks consistent with the numbers that basically the Global Burden of Disease type report is using. One challenge, one area that I wish there was a little bit better work or was a little bit more compelling is animal models. It really does feel like you should be able to just basically expose rats to a lot of particulate matter and see if they die more. And my impression is that that had been done in an older generation of literature and they had not found necessarily big lifespan effects. I don't think you should think of that as decisive because rats aren't humans. Our lungs are actually different.

As I understand it, that's even true of cigarettes. This was actually one of the defenses used, was that it seems like cigarettes don't harm rats as much as they harm people.

Oh, that actually makes me feel a lot better. So I'm glad to know that. Thank you for telling me that. I did not know that.

I'll go chase that up. But remember, listeners, smoking is very bad.

But you do see a bunch of animal evidence that it causes specific problems like atherosclerosis, like lung problems. And so even if you're not seeing animals recapitulating the lifespan effects, I think we do see some biological evidence that these are plausible. Channels. So I think overall the case just looks really strong. You see some of this research from the US where strengthening air pollution standards actually more than paid for in a regulatory sense a bunch of Obama-era climate regulations because it was just like coal plants kill a ton of people and we place a high weight on the value of a single life.

Yeah. Just quickly, what kind of grants could you imagine them making?

Yeah, so this is where the hire becomes really important. We want to hire somebody who knows more about this field and is better connected than we are. So we don't totally know yet. But the one grant we made so far is to pay for a lot better low-cost monitoring, these relatively cheap sensor systems that can be deployed across India and give people just a very rough, quick sense of what's the weather like outside. I think they're literally from— I'm blanking on the name of the website, but it's the same website that I would check during the fires in California to see what are the cheap sensors that my neighbors have. So it's an academic partnership with some Indian universities and UC Berkeley. Perfectly. And so that monitoring is one aspect of the problem. Then there's a bunch of trying to source, breaking down all the different causes of this so then you can try to have relevant policy solutions. Actually paying for these scrubbers for coal plants, I think it'd be unlikely that we'd literally pay for them, but you could advocate for the enforcement of the actual existing regulation that says they're supposed to have these that prevent coal emissions. And so there's just a bunch of things like that. A lot of it would end up being advocacy, technical assistance, training, monitoring. And it's a tough multifaceted problem, so I don't think it would be trivial to make progress on it, but it seems like a swing worth taking to us.

Yeah. The other new program you're probably going to launch is Global Aid Advocacy, right?

Yeah, that's right. And the basic idea there is very much inspired by this leverage point. It's to say, look, we think we've been able to sometimes influence state legislators on criminal justice policy. We sometimes been able to move macroeconomic policymakers, let's focus on trying to get more and better aid spending from rich countries. I think exactly the logic you were pushing earlier is the logic here. The Gates Foundation funds a lot of stuff in this space, but we're not sure that they've necessarily exhausted all of the options. We do think that there's room to grow and room to do more. That's a space where it is a bigger space in the world. There's probably a couple hundred million dollars a year of spending from philanthropic spending to try to do this kind of advocacy. And we don't want to just focus on the US necessarily. I think Europe— I mean, obviously there's been a fairly active debate recently in the UK about this, and some maybe emerging donor countries like South Korea or Japan where there's less history could all be interesting places to try to fund advocacy for more and better aid.

Yeah, I love to see it. I love both of these programs. It's interesting. I've spent all of this— we've slightly had this thing where I have to act like I'm not excited about global health and well-being. Stuff. But whenever I see breakthroughs in this work, like, yes, they're going to send a whole lot of aid on really good stuff. Or I was just so happy about the malaria vaccine breakthrough earlier this year. And also just the fact that there's so much damage done by this pollution and no one's doing anything about it drives me crazy. So seeing someone go into it, I'm just like, yes, humanity, finally.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that's a lot of the heuristic that is partially driving us of like, we should be able to make progress on things. The malaria vaccine one is super interesting, by the way, where I think some of the people we've talked to are pretty nervous about how scalable the vaccine that recently made headlines was. It requires 3 doses. I think it's pretty hard to scale. There was something with the way it was tested that was maybe the ideal time to test it. So I'm not actually sure that that one is necessarily going to be a huge breakthrough. But from what we've heard, mRNA vaccines basically, as have been developed for COVID and have had a huge impact and been de-risked, people are pretty optimistic and they think you might be able to make some next generations of vaccines that will just be be vastly more effective. And I think it's like, what a cool synergy and breakthrough that COVID will have accelerated that new technology to have such a big impact.

Yeah, absolutely. Just while we're on these two new programs that you're probably going to launch, I guess one of the most requested audience questions was like, why doesn't Open Phil fund X or Y or Z? My favorite thing, maybe the most common one that I've heard is why doesn't Open Phil fund more work on mental health? I guess most speculatively, perhaps things to do with psilocybin or cutting-edge treatments that might really be valuable for treating serious mental health issues. Yeah. Do you have any comments on that?

Historically, Good Ventures actually had done a little bit of work on psilocybin and MDMA and funded some relatively early research and some of the clinical trials that folks have done there. I actually think that field has just advanced a ton and now there's a lot of commercial funding. And so I think on the margin, it's less obvious to me that a ton of philanthropic funding is needed going forward. That's not to say there's not stuff to do. We haven't kept up with it actively, but I think it is a case where it's pretty interesting to see the progress. I think it's a pretty cool example of progress that has happened. On the mental health, I think it's on our long list. And so if anybody wants to join our cost prioritization team to help us work through more things, I think that there plausibly are good opportunities there. I guess the one thing I would gesture towards is basically, yeah, again, bed nets are really, really cost effective. And so if you can save a life so cheaply, it can be hard. Mental health is often just not as well understood. The interventions often not super effective, sometimes quite expensive. And so the relative cost to improve things relative to just letting somebody live and grow up and take a shot can often be pretty high. So that's not to say that we shouldn't do more on mental health. We're interested in doing more. We're interested in understanding more. But I'm not super optimistic that we're going to find stuff that we think is more cost-effective than the GiveWell Hub charities there.

Yeah, interesting. So it has to be perhaps apps that can be delivered at massive scale for almost no marginal cost, or I suppose if SSRIs work reasonably effectively, they cost cents per day, I think. So maybe you could get some traction there. I guess some people kind of make the case that depression is actually significant, or severe depression is significantly worse than death, at least on a per-day basis. And then maybe that will give it a slight edge.

So I think that last case is actually kind of what you need to make things pencil, is my impression. And so, yeah, if you have a moral theory that allows value to go very negative, Similarly, I think you can think that pain is really bad, and so you might want to make sure that people have access to opioids if they're suffering from bone cancers. There are people who work on this stuff and know a lot more about it than I do. We funded a little bit of relatively basic work on pain and non-opioid painkillers on somewhat similar grounds. That's another kind of diversification that you could do, and I think it's not crazy.

Yeah. All right. So it sounds like there's 3 roles that you're potentially hiring for: the South Asia Air Pollution Program Lead, a lead for the global aid advocacy, and then I guess also people to join the course prioritization team where they could consider questions like, is mental health going to be competitive with GiveWell top charities? Yeah, maybe let's just go through them one by one and maybe could you explain the kind of person who would be a great fit for it? So either if there's someone in the audience or someone in the audience knows someone who would be suitable for it, they can pass it on.

Yep, that's awesome. So on global aid advocacy, we're looking for somebody who probably has a lot of experience in India— or sorry, I said global aid advocacy, but I meant South Asian air quality. We're looking for somebody there who has a lot of experience in India, probably on either policy around something like air quality. So if it's not air quality, maybe climate or a related topic, or somebody who has a lot of air quality experience but maybe not as much policy background. And then that's sort of the background. And then we're also looking for somebody who's relatively open field-ish in their outlook and strategic thinking. Comfortable with explicit expected value thinking, trying to maximize, trying to have as much impact as as possible and not just do some of everything and to be very analytical about their work. And so I think that's going to be a really hard role to fill. And frankly, if we don't end up finding somebody for it, we might just not actually enter the space because we always think that having the right program officer is just a really key ingredient to being able to do the work. And so that's not to say we definitely wouldn't. Maybe we'd try to reallocate somebody or hire somebody else, but that person in that seat for us is really, really crucial. Global Aid Advocacy is a pretty similar recipe where we're looking for somebody with a lot of experience in that field. That field is significantly bigger, and so I think there's more potential people to draw on. It could be sort of anywhere. We could imagine somebody who's more focused on Europe or somebody who's more focused on the US. And it could be somebody who has a background around advocating for more aid or working in the legislature or something like that, or somebody who's more focused on effectiveness and how do you make aid dollars go further and has more that perspective. Again, looking for somebody who's really quite analytical, quantitative, comfortable with thinking through, okay, what is the expected value of a different strategic approach or different grantee in that world? And then on the cause prioritization side, we actually have two different roles. So in the past, we've only ever hired for this research fellow role, which is a little bit more academic, a little bit more focused on social science. But we're also hiring for the first time a new strategy fellow role. A lot of the work will be the same, reviewing reports, talking to experts, doing some of these back-of-the-envelope calculations. But the research fellow is more focused on research skills and social science and really trying to interrogate complicated academic papers. While the strategy fellow role is more on engaging with practitioners and experts and doing quicker, more assumption-driven calculations. I think in terms of background, it's pretty likely that the research fellow has maybe some graduate training in economics or at least could have gone that direction. And the strategy fellow role might be more folks who are coming out of consulting or buy-side finance or maybe some think tanks where they're more interested in spending some time talking to people but also comfortable thinking in spreadsheets and things like that.

Yeah, great. I guess normally we would spend a bunch of time talking about what's the office culture, what's distinctive about Open Phil, but people who are interested to hear that can probably go back and listen to the interviews with Louis Bollard, Ajeya Kotra, David Rudman, and Holden Karnofsky, I think back in 2018. So we have quite a few interviews with people from Open Phil, so maybe We've got that covered.

I'm glad to be able to join the crowd. And full disclosure, aren't we one of 80K's largest funders?

You are. And I will say that in the intro. Is there anything you want to add maybe that's new or a different take you have on who would be a good fit for Open Phil?

No, I think the roles that we're hiring for are very much loaded on sort of overall Open Phil culture. For the global health and well-being cost prioritization team, it might be a little bit more econ-y and a little bit less philosophy by background. But a lot of the folks that we've hired in the past have been sort sort of like EA adjacent, but we'd welcome folks who've never heard of EA and have no idea, or folks who are diehard fans. So I think, yeah, a lot of people could do really well.

Yeah. What are some of the kind of biggest wins that you're most proud of from the global health and wellbeing program? Because I guess you've been involved in some sense in this over the last 10 years. There must have been some really exciting moments.

Yeah, a few things stand out to me. So one is just, I think that the work on cage-free campaigns and especially taking them has been really impressive. A lot of the work in the US, I think a lot of that success was baked before we came along, but I think we came in and saw that and helped really scale things to the next level. And I think that's a huge testament to Lewis and his work and to a bunch of the grantees like the Humane League and a number of others that have done really impactful work to just change how chickens are treated around the world. And there's just astronomical numbers there. Another example is, this is one that probably is a little bit weirder for your audience, but we've funded for several years around macroeconomic stabilization policy. I think the Federal Reserve and macroeconomic policymakers in the US have really moved our direction and adopted a lot of more expansionary policies and more focus on increasing employment relative to worrying about inflation. I think it's really hard to attribute impact, so I'm not sure how much of that has to do with our funding, but it's an area where I think the world has really moved our way and we might have played a small role in that. And the stakes I think are quite high in terms of human well-being there. So I see that as a big win. One of our grantees there has actually been able to go on to help other open-field focus areas think about how to prevent the next pandemic. I see that as a good example of the kind of synergy I was talking about earlier. One more interesting example from science is a broad-spectrum flu vaccine that's now in phase 1 human trials with the NIH. I think it could mean that eventually people wouldn't have to get seasonal flu shots anymore, and it could also help reduce future pandemic risk. That's phase 1, that's still really early, but it's actually a good example of how— I think we funded that work almost 5 years ago. Growing. Science just takes a long time to play out. And so it'll be interesting to watch that sort of evolve over the coming years and see if it does end up getting into humans and making a difference.

Yeah, some pretty big successes there. This raises the question, to what degree can you successfully empirically quantify the expected value of these science and policy grants against GiveWell's top charities, given that in this kind of hits-based business where you fund a research project and it may have had massive impact or probably it'll have no impact, the whole portfolio could be paid for by a single success. You could imagine that you'd funded hundreds of science research projects and they were all busts except for this mRNA vaccine one, say, and then suddenly the COVID pandemic happens and then it pays for all of it and then a whole bunch more. It seems like our estimates of kind of the expected value ex ante of these projects is always going to be incredibly uncertain.

I think that is extremely correct. One bias I have, and again, this is more of a bias than I think a true view is that there's more things that force your ex ante expected value estimates up than down. And so that makes me usually think that they're probably biased up. And it's just you never give yourself a negative expected value, you just wouldn't make the grant. These are hard things to do. They're done by program officers who want to make the grants. So I think there's a lot of structural forces that make you more likely to overestimate cost-effectiveness ex ante. And so we don't do cost-effectiveness estimates for every We want to be able to do things where it's a structural argument or it's sort of much more like cluster thinking rather than sequence thinking. But yeah, we do think about this and we do think if a whole portfolio according to our own estimates is not looking like it's as good as the GiveWell top charities, that is a reason to step back and say, is this actually justifying the work?

Yeah, it's interesting that on the macroeconomic stabilization stuff, and I know that the listeners to this show are obsessed with macroeconomic stabilization, so let's dwell on it a a bit. It seems like the kind of groups that you were funding have totally won the argument, or there's been a massive sea change in macroeconomic policy regarding fiscal policy, monetary policy. And yet this is kind of one of the programs that you're kind of winding down, or at least you don't make many grants to anymore. Is that maybe just because you spot an opportunity where there needed to be a change and now that change has kind of happened and now you're just not sure in which direction you want to push macroeconomics anymore?

Yeah, so we're not totally sure about the future of that program. We're not actively winding it down, but we haven't been doing a lot more. And we have been thinking about pivoting a little bit bit more to work on Europe there, where if you just compare the EU policy response to the Great Recession to the American one, I think there's a huge gap. And also frankly, the recoveries to the Great Recession, as much as I complained about the US policy response, the degree of self-inflicted wounds by European monetary policymakers is I think genuinely somewhat astonishing. And so obviously there's concerns. We're an American funder. We don't know as much about policy in Europe as we do about the US. And so there's there's risks there and we try to be cognizant of those. But I think we might continue to do a little bit more in that space and focus more on Europe. Or at some point we might say, like, I don't know if it would be literally declaring victory, but we'd say, like, we're not sure that actually there's a ton more that we need to do here. The case doesn't look as good as it did before. Why don't we step back?

Yeah, I guess in the US I slightly worry that possibly the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, that people always respond to the last thing that went wrong. And now perhaps we've overlearned the lesson from 2008. But in the EU, it doesn't seem like people have learned the lesson from 2008 all that that it seems like the EU would basically go and do exactly the same thing again, which is strange.

I agree, it's strange.

All right, let's push on and talk about a really interesting and unusual thing that you did, which is just volunteering to hand over your kidney to a total stranger in order to save their life. Yeah. Could you tell us a bit about what that experience was like and what motivated you to do that?

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a funny story because I got interested in it while I was still in college. I think I was I was a college senior who was about to join GiveWell, and I think I emailed Holden and Elie to say, "Hey, by the way, I'm already kind of far along in this process. Can I take a month off at some point to go donate a kidney?" I think they were like, "Oh God, who did we hire? Who is this person?" But my motivation was actually pretty normal, I think. Pretty typical utilitarian considerations. The benefit to the recipient is pretty big. I think you can extend somebody's life by about 10 years in expectation. I ended up donating to start a chain of basically basically people who had somebody who wanted to donate to them but who's not a compatible donor. I think my chain had 6 steps. In expectation, I think that probably only translates to maybe 1 extra donation, but still I think that's an increase in the expected value. And then the risk to the donor in surgery is small. It's roughly a 1 in 3,000 risk of death in surgery. I actually think that the long-term health risks are probably an order of magnitude higher there. I think I remember when I first heard about this and I remember just thinking, being like, wow, these donors seem really weird. I do not understand the appeal of this at all. And there was a New Yorker profile that Larissa MacFarlane wrote. I remember reading it and being like, these people seem so weird. And then somehow I came across it separately later on and it was in a separate context and somebody was just writing about other people who donated and the fact that it was really safe. And I was like, oh wait, so this is not a crazy decision. It's just like you run a very small calculable risk to yourself and it can benefit other people a ton. And I was like, oh, okay, that makes a lot more sense to me. That might seem like a good decision, like a very reasonable way to help other people. And I like to think about what are lots of reasonable ways to help other people, not just like one.

Yeah. So just to get the numbers out here, did you say it was a 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 risk of death as a donor?

So I think the numbers are like 1 in 3,000, and that's basically like the death rate of surgery. And if you're relatively healthy, it's lower. And then I think that the long-term risks to your health, they're harder to track because it's hard to do the 20-year follow-ups. And frankly, living donation is actually relatively— it's not an ancient phenomenon. And so there's not millennia of data there. But I think that the long-term increase in your risk of kidney disease might be something like 1 percentage point, I think. And so that's significantly bigger than the 1 in 3,000 risk of death in surgery. I'm a bit of a techno-optimist. I think that eventually we'll be able to get kidneys for human transplantation from pigs, probably, or be able to grow them in a vat or whatever. And also they jump you to the top of the waiting list if you're actually a kidney donor. So I'm not too worried for my own sake. Okay.

Yeah. So I actually don't understand why people think that this is so strange, because a 1 in 3,000 risk of death is like, it's not absolutely negligible, but people take that kind of risk all the time in other jobs that they take in order to benefit other people, or even just they use more than one third of their life doing something highly unpleasant because they think it benefits others and it probably has less of a benefit than saving multiple people's lives. So what's going on?

Yeah, totally. And it's actually even worse than I think. People do that all the time for fun. I think the risk of death from climbing Everest is significantly higher than that. And so if you could climb Everest—

admittedly, I do think that is a bit nuts.

Okay, fair enough. But I think it's like an order of magnitude or two higher. So, yeah, fair, right?

Yeah.

The other thing I use is I think it's around the same as the risk of death in giving birth, which is a totally— I mean, people do it all the time, right? And yeah, I don't have a good sense. I think it's honestly not about the risk of death. I think it's like the bodily integrity thing is doing a lot of work in people's minds. And I'm a relatively more like, I don't identify that much with my body. I'm a little more in my own head or something. And so for me, that just wasn't a huge obstacle.

Do some of the people who think that it's a really odd thing to do maybe just massively overestimate how dangerous it is?

It's totally possible. And obviously people are terrible about reasoning about small risks. So that seems like a very plausible idea. But I don't actually think people think that it's deadly. I think people think it's weird in some sense. So I don't think that they think you're running a risk to yourself. I think they're like— it's almost like they're just like, you're agreeing to surgery. So it's like, even if you were definitely going to live out of it, there's a sense of which giving something of yourself up in a fairly costly way, right? I took a few weeks off work. It's moderately painful. I think people are weirder about that sacrifice than they are about literally the risk of death. But I could totally be wrong. This is folk psychology. Yeah.

All right, we'll come back to that in a second. But how does this fit into the broader ethics of your life? Do you think it's comparable in impact to your work at GiveWell?

Yeah, personally, I really am interested in trying to be a good person from multiple perspectives or in multiple magisteria. I'm not that interested in in that question. I actually think soon after I donated a kidney, I got into this back and forth with Jeff Kaufman, who's an effective altruist in Boston who I really like. And he was sort of saying, "Look, it doesn't seem that rational to donate a kidney. The benefits are only as good as saving a life. And if I give to GiveWell, I can save a life for something like $5,000. And I would definitely rather not donate my kidney than spend $5,000. And so I face this choice and I would rather give $5,000 more to donate my kidney, so I'm just not going to donate my kidney." donate a kidney. I don't think that that's literally wrong, but I guess I want to deny that you face that choice. It's like you have a choice about whether to donate a kidney and you have a choice of whether to donate more money. I'm pretty happy with those being separate reasonable choices that you can think about within their own framework rather than driving to everything to be in totally comparable units and having only one overall decision where you think about your donations in exactly the same way as you think about your career in exactly the way that you think about whether to donate a kidney. Another thing that comes to mind for me on this is that I have a 1-year-old daughter, and I think that having kids is a remarkably pro-social, good thing. Not the EA best thing you could do, like this is the most cost-effective way to help other people, but just normal, run-of-the-mill good. I think it's a good thing for the world, not a bad thing for the world. I think it would be good if more people did more of it. So I actually see this as a weakness of the EA community, that it feels like because of effectiveness, we're so focused on our main advice being the biggest things, really cost-effective uses of money and big uses of your career. But I actually think having other suggestions for people to consider as part of what it means to be a good person or an altruistic life would actually just be good. People might do them and that would be good. And then also I think it could help with community growth.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment that I think it's really dangerous for people's life to just become focused on one thing and also just only having kind of one goal. And I guess occasionally you see that with effective altruism. People want to justify everything in their life in terms of the impartial impact that it has. And I just think that's kind of a path to nowhere, often leads to people to be kind of unhappy. And it's much more practical as a real human being to have multiple different goals in multiple different parts of your life that you each kind of optimize and you put some resources into because you care about all of those goals intrinsically for different reasons. I might push back on a little bit of that, though. If I was talking to someone who was trying to decide, should I work to make money to save a life by giving to GiveWell, or should I give my kidney kidney and say their salary was high enough that over the course of a week they could make enough money that it would save more lives and say they would rather go to work than have their kidney taken out, then it does seem like you can kind of make a dominance argument that it saves more lives and is more pleasant for the person.

Totally. And I'm really open to that dominance argument and I think it's correct in some cases. But I don't know, Geoff works at Google and Google will give you a month off if you donate a kidney. So the concrete trade-off is not forced. And also, I don't actually think his view is crazy. If you were trying to always be perfectly scrupulous about every decision that you would make, you would go crazy. So some sense of triaging or prioritizing, I actually think is totally correct and healthy. This was in the space of decisions I felt like it was big enough and interesting enough and I felt good about. It was a concrete way to help people. But if you were like, yeah, just like, I don't know, not everybody's vegetarian because people make different trade-offs, I don't think that that's crazy.

Yeah. And they focus on having a positive impact in different aspects of their lives where I guess it's kind of a trade-off between the impact that it has on the world and how much it matters to you to make that change. Let's come back to this question of people think that it's so strange to give your kidney. I guess I just cannot put myself in the mentality of— it sounds like you're saying people have this intuition that bodily integrity is somehow extremely important and that ever losing anything from your body is just pro tanto extremely bad, or you shouldn't do it except for the most extreme reasons, which I guess even saving someone's life doesn't rise to the occasion of being a sufficiently extreme reason. can you put yourself in that headspace better than I can?

No, I'm too much of a utilitarian.

But not even a utilitarian, just a pragmatist.

Yeah, I really don't get it. Around the time when I donated, I actually wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that we should allow people to basically have a government compensation system for people who want to donate, because there's just an addressable shortage where you can donate and live a totally good life. Very risky, this is fine. There's a government system for allocating kidneys to people who need them the most, and it would actually literally save the government money because people are mostly on dialysis, which is really expensive and it's very painful and you die sooner. So giving them a transplant saves money, it extends life, and just not enough people sign up to do it voluntarily. So if we can make it worth their while, and similarly to how we pay cops and firefighters to take risks, I don't feel like this is some crazy idea. But I think that the reason it doesn't happen is actually opposition from people who have a sense that they're both worried about coercion and a sense of bodily integrity as something inviolable. I can't say that word.

Inviolable.

That makes them feel like there's something really bad here. Honestly, I think the Catholic Church is actually one of the most important forces globally against, in any country, allowing people to be compensated for donation. And yeah, it's very interesting because I just do not share the intuition. I mean, if you think about it as treating people as a means to an end, I could imagine it. If you thought it was a super exploitative system where the donors were treated really badly, I feel like I can get myself on the same page.

But then it just seems like you could patch it by raising the amount that they're paid and treating people better.

Yeah, it's like you treat people better. One of the things I said in my op-ed, I think, was, look, we should pay people and treat them as good people. A little bit like this paid surrogacy. I think people have bioethical qualms about it sometimes, but by and large, people think of surrogates simultaneously motivated by the money and good people doing a good thing. And I think we should aspire to have a similar system with state payments for people who donate kidneys, where it's like, you did a nice altruistic thing and it paid for college or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, I have strong feelings about this topic. It's one of the ones that drives me to become a frothing-at-the-mouth person, is extremely frustrated with the people that I'm debating. With. I mean, I have looked into this a lot and considered a lot of counterarguments. And as far as I can tell, the arguments against allowing people to sell their kidneys voluntarily under a suitably regulated system are all terrible. I think there's actually no good ones, basically. And obviously this isn't the most pressing problem in the world because the stakes are like tens of thousands of lives in America, say. I guess globally it would be hundreds of thousands of lives potentially. So there's bigger issues. But it is just astonishing that just through not being willing to do moral philosophy properly or not being willing to get over our disgust and think about things sensibly, we're not only allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die globally, we're forcing them to. We're using state-backed violence to prevent people from taking voluntary actions that would save their own lives and cure their diseases. So I think of these as kind of like government-backed killings every time someone dies because they weren't able to buy a kidney in time before they die. And I just think it's pretty appalling. I don't know whether we want to go through the various back and forth of the arguments here.

You agreed with me too strongly. Now I have to take the other side.

Okay, go for it.

I guess one of my professors in college has written on this, Deborah Sacks. And I think her perspective is she's really worried about the egalitarian implications of allowing payments in the sense that if you give people offers that they can't refuse, or if you allowed people to collateralize their kidneys, which you might if it was genuinely a pure market, it, you could end up with people in very bad situations, even though ostensibly you were trying to widen their choice set. I will admit I don't find this argument myself, and I probably didn't do the best job rendering it also, so you might want to go check out her book. But I don't find this super persuasive, just given the stakes of the lives at stake. It feels like too much weight on that kind of concern to me. I also feel like if you're really worried about poor people donating under duress, you could only allow rich people to donate. I feel like there's very valid corner solutions for the kind You could have a long waiting period. You could make people take mental health evaluations. You could only allow people to use the money for very prosocial things. Charity might not be incentive enough, but maybe college or whatever. So you could imagine systems that work here to solve the problem and not cause the social harm that people are worried about. But I find it frustrating also, and it strikes me as the kind of thing where it's not the world's biggest problem, but it is a frustrating own goal. Policy actually is a big part of the problem. And if you just got out of the way a little bit more, people could just flourish.

Yeah, I think I said they're either all bad or they're all solvable. And I guess I don't know exactly what I think about people borrowing money against their kidney. I also feel nervous about that. That doesn't sound so great, but it seems like you can just ban that and say you can never collect someone's kidney, you can never force them to give up their kidney. If you try to do that, we'll stick you in prison. So there's almost always a much narrower a solution to these problems than banning it outright. And on the idea of an offer you can't refuse, I think the notion there is that the price would be so high that someone would feel like they can't say no. But I would love someone to offer me a price on my kidney that's so high that I can't imagine saying no. The only thing worse than an offer you can't refuse in this context seems like not getting an offer that you can't refuse, because almost by necessity, it's so much money that you value the money much more than you want the kidney.

So I'm pretty sympathetic to that and to the argument, the background argument for autonomy. That makes me wonder Should I try to trigger you by, like, do you want to talk more about your feelings towards bioethicists as a profession? Because I feel like some of the COVID stuff too, it might have come up and it seems like a related argument.

I have a lot to say about that, but I think maybe we'll have to save that for another episode. I have been trying to line up someone to discuss bioethics as a potentially important area of policy reform. Fingers crossed we'll manage to get an episode out in the next year or two, and I'll have to do my best to maintain my calm, I think, during that recording. One just final thing is people worry alternatively about the price for kidneys being too low. But I mean, you might also worry about the price for labor being too low, people being paid too little. But with that, we realized that the answer isn't to ban work or to ban jobs or people ever being paid for doing stuff. We think that the answer is probably a minimum wage or unions or something like that, or just, yeah, I mean, government top-ups, right?

And I think similarly on, like, even if the market clearing rate for a kidney was only $10,000 or something, like, if you're worried that's not not enough for people to take the risk reasonably. It is worth it just from literally a health system savings perspective to pay up to like $100K. So there's so much surplus to go around here that I'm like, we can make this work.

Yeah. One more thing I'll say is I've been astonished by people who I kind of normally think of as being very thoughtful and analytical, how they'll give in to their feelings on this one, where they just feel revolted by the prospect of someone selling their kidney. I guess, especially maybe if they think it's not enough money or whatever other reason. But I think it's just so important in these cases where the stakes are many people's lives to step outside of that and not allow yourself to be guided by disgust, which has just been historically an atrocious guide to moral behaviour. People used to think it was blatantly obvious that homosexuality was grossly immoral because they found the idea disgusting. I don't think anyone accepts, or at least I can imagine very few people in the audience accept that that is a legitimate argument now. But similarly, the fact that people find the thought of someone selling a kidney kind of distasteful, I just think is no moral guide to whether it's good or bad.

I agree with that. And I also think people had the same concerns about living donation originally. There's these weird Freudian analyses of—

About IVF.

Yeah. How you would have to be messed up in order to voluntarily sacrifice yourself for a sibling or something. And so a funny thing, though, is that nobody says that to me because they're like, oh, that's so perverse. How could you do that? People say nice things to me. So I don't get this argument as much as you might get when it comes up.

Yeah. All right, I guess let's wrap up on the kidney section. If anyone didn't like what I said, you can send your complaints to podcast@80,000hours.org. I guess the only thing I'll add is that, yeah, I think it's fantastic that you gave your kidney, Alexander. It made me think a lot more of you at the time, and it still does today. Thanks. We've been keeping you for quite a while, so we should let you get back to managing this enormous program at Open Phil. I guess you've been around for 10 years, though, so I'm curious to know whether you have any kind any kind of great, entertaining, or interesting stories from the earlier and no doubt far more scrappy days of GiveWell back in 2011, 2012, 2013?

Yeah, totally. I think when I joined, there were 4 other people and we worked in a coworking space in New York. And we would just argue with each other loudly about population ethics and the cost per life saved for different charities. And my recollection is that the graphic designers who worked at desks around us were I was just like, who are these people? What is going on? And another sort of fun early small GiveWell moment was I think at one point in that first year we went bowling and GiveWell paid for a pitcher of beer. And I think we realized it was the first time GiveWell had ever paid for alcohol for a staff event. And I think we ended up sending multiple donors a photo of the receipt to show that we're growing up, we're becoming legitimate, and look how we're spending your money. I guess a slightly more The curious one is just that I have this memory of a highlight from early on, which is Holden staying late one night to argue with me, trying to convince me that the way I had thought about taking the job at GiveWell was totally wrong. And he convinced me actually. And I came away thinking that while I might have been thinking about it wrong, I had definitely ended up in the right place because it was somebody who was able to engage really deeply with my weird marginal value argument that had gotten me to GiveWell and say, "You're totally wrong." and in a very interesting, convincing way, but also made me think, like, okay, but I'm here for the wrong reasons.

But I want to be around these people.

This is really where I should be. And obviously I've been really lucky over the last few years to grow a lot with GiveWell and then with Open Phil as we spun out.

Was Holden arguing against you coming to GiveWell in effect? Or was he saying coming to GiveWell isn't as effective as you were claiming it was?

Not that it wasn't as effective as I was claiming it was, that my thinking on it had been wrong. I had been trying to decide between GiveWell and a nonprofit organization that consults for other organizations, bigger and more established at the time. I thought, well, look, if they don't hire me, they're going to hire somebody else just like me. They get 200 applications for every job. Whereas at the time I was like, oh, GiveWell, if they don't hire me, they're not going to hire anybody. So I get sort of full counterfactual credit for my contribution at GiveWell, whereas at the other organization I would have only gotten a very small portion of my counterfactual credit. I thought because they were bigger and more established, that cut the other way. Holden convinced me that I was thinking about it wrong. I was only thinking about one step in the chain of displaced jobs. If you think more rigorously about all the subsequent displaced steps in the job chain, under some assumptions you can come back to thinking that the first-order impact of the job is actually a closer estimate of your impact than the difference between you and the next person in that job. Those are controversial assumptions. I don't think that this is obviously correct, but I think it's a good example of how sometimes the first step towards EA thinking can be misguided actually. And if you go deeper and deeper, sometimes it comes back around to the common sense approach. And that's definitely been part of my journey over the last few years.

Yeah, I can't tell whether Holden is terrible at recruitment or an absolute recruitment genius. Maybe it made you stay.

Yeah, I definitely feel like I was in the right place. I know you want to end on that, but I guess I'll just end with a final plug for people to check out our jobs page because we'd be really excited for folks to apply and we think it's really exciting, high-impact place to work.

Yeah. Just one final thing I was going to say is your story of talking about population ethics and all of these bizarre moral considerations around graphic designers looking askew at you. I mean, I think I had exactly the same experience when I moved to Oxford to work at the Centre for Effective Altruism and suddenly was surrounded by constant talk about what's going to be effective. Things were so new and there's all of these constant froth of exciting ideas coming out. Of course, we were sharing an office at the time with the Future of Humanity Institute. So I think almost nothing that we could plausibly say or fund would make them think anything anything strange about us. If anything, probably we were the normal ones in the office. Maybe that's influenced my intellectual trajectory in a way I haven't fully appreciated.

I'm sure it has. Yeah.

Well, I really hope that someone in the audience can either fill one of those roles or find someone else who can. I'm going to be so sad if the South Asia air pollution thing doesn't get off the ground. I would just love to see that program flourish. So best of luck filling all of those positions.

Thanks so much.

My guest today has been Alex Alexander, thanks so much for coming on the 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Alex Berger, it's been a pleasure. I'm glad I'll get to listen to myself and I'm sure feel great pain over my own voice.

A few months ago, we launched a compilation of 10 episodes of this show called Effective Altruism: An Introduction. We chose those 10 to cover the most core material that we could find to help listeners quickly get up to speed on where in broad strokes effective altruist research stands today. We're going to actually substitute this interview into that series to cover the topic of global health and well-being work, which we hadn't had a really good reference episode for when we launched that compilation. I've been excited to see a regular flow of new listeners starting Effective Altruism: An Introduction, even though we haven't kept actively promoting it, which suggests that people are sharing it with other people that they know. If you'd like to see what other 9 episodes we picked out and get them all in a list so that you can listen to them in a convenient way, just search for Effective Altruism wherever you get podcasts. And if you'd like to introduce someone to the show, maybe just let them know that that compilation of key episodes is out there waiting for them.

All right.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris. Audio engineering is by Ben Cordell. Full transcripts with plenty of links to learn more are available on our website and produced by Sophia Davis Vogel. Thanks for joining. Talk to you again soon.