Tyler Cowen on Effective Altruism

Uh, for those of you that don't know Tyler, um, he's kind of a big deal. He's professor of economics at George Mason University, and he's written tons of important articles both in economics and in philosophy. Um, he's the author of something like 15 or 20 books depending on how you count. Um, and not only is he one of the most influential economists, but he's, um, the founder of the popular blog Marginal Revolution. Which is one of the most highly rated economics blogs. And fun fact that I confirmed with Tyler is he's the only person ever to have co-authored a paper with Derek Parfit. So that's pretty cool. And today he's going to be speaking with us about the philosophy of effective altruism. So Tyler, whenever you're ready, please take it away.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming to this talk. Thank you, Theron, for the introduction. I find effective altruism is what people actually want to talk about, which is a good thing. So I thought I would talk about it as well. And I'll start by giving two big reasons why I'm favorably inclined, but then work through a number of details where I might differ from effective altruism. So let me give you what I think are the two big pluses. They're not the only pluses, but to me, they're the two reasons why in the net ledger, it's strongly positive. The first is that simply as a youth movement, effective altruism seems to attract more talented young people than anything else I know of right now, by a considerable margin. And I've observed this by running my own project, Emergent Ventures, for talented young people. And I just see time and again the smartest and most successful people who apply get grants. They turn out to have connections to the EA movement.. And that's very much to the credit of effective altruism. Whether or not you agree with everything there, that to me is a more important fact about the movement than anything else you might say about it. Unlike some philosophers, I do not draw a totally rigorous and clear distinction between what you might call the conceptual side of effective altruism and the more sociological side. I think they're somewhat intertwined and best thought of as such. The second positive point that I like about effective altruism is simply that what you might call traditional charity is so terrible, such a train wreck, so poorly conceived and ill-thought-out and badly managed and run that anything that waves its arms and says, hey, we should do better than this. Again, whether or not you agree with all of the points, that has to be a big positive. So, you know, whether or not you think we should send more money to anti-malaria bed nets, The point is effective altruism is forcing us all to rethink what philanthropy should be. And again, that for me is really a very significant positive. Now, before I get to some of the more arcane points of difference, or at least different emphasis, let me try to outline some core propositions of effective altruism, noting I don't think there's a single dominant or correct definition. It's a pretty diverse movement. I learned recently there's like a sub-movement, effective altruism for Christians. I also learned there's a sub-sub-movement, effective altruism for Quakers. So I don't think there's any one way to sum it all up, but I think you'll recognize these themes as things you see appearing repeatedly. So my first group of themes will be those where contemporary effective altruism differs a bit from classic utilitarianism. And then I'll give two ways in which effective altruism is fairly similar to classical utilitarianism. So here are three ways I think current effective altruism has evolved from classical utilitarianism and is different. Uh, the first is simply an emphasis on existential risk. Notion that the entire world could end, world of humans at least, and this would be a very terrible thing. I don't recall having read that, say, in Bentham or in John Stuart Mill. It might be in there somewhere, but it certainly receives far, far more emphasis today than it did in the 19th century. The second point, which I think is somewhat in classical utilitarianism, is this notion of legibility, the idea that your standards for where to give money or where to give aid should somehow be presentable, articulable, reproducible. People ought to be able to see why, for instance, you think investing in anti-malaria bed nets is better than, say, giving a lot of money, you know, to Cornell University. So maybe that's a sociological difference. It may or may not be a logical requirement. Of effective altruism. But again, it's something I see quite clearly in the movement, a desire for a certain kind of clarity of decision. The third point is what is sometimes called scalability. That is the notion that what you can do when its final impacts are scaled up might be of truly enormous importance. So, for instance, if we sidestep existential risk and keep on growing our civilization in some manner, you might decide that, well, 10,000 years from now, you know, we can colonize the galaxy and there can be trillions and trillions of individuals or cyborgs or whatever doing incredible things, and that there's this potential for scale in the highest value outcomes and that that should play a role in our decision-making. So the point of scalability being a third difference between current effective altruism and classical utilitarianism. You can actually find Sidgwick being concerned with scalability as something important. Parfit obviously was somewhat obsessed with scalability. But still, overall, I think it's a big difference between current effective altruism and what you might call classical utilitarianism of the 19th century. Now, here's— I'm going to get back to each of those. Here's two ways in which effective altruism to me seems really quite similar to classical utilitarianism. The first is simply a notion of the great power of philosophy, the notion that philosophy can be a dominant guide in guiding one's decisions. Not too long ago, I did a podcast with William MacAskill. You all probably know him and his work. And I think the main point of difference that emerged between the two of us is that Will has a very ambitious view for what philosophy can be, that it ultimately can in some way guide or rule all of your normative decisions. My personal view is much more modest. I see philosophy as one useful tool. I think there's just flat-out right personal prudence. There's managerial science. There's economics, there's history, there's consulting with friends. There's a whole bunch of different things out there. And in my view, true prudential wisdom is to somehow at the personal level, have a way of weighting all those different inputs. I find when I speak to Will or someone like Nick Bostrom, they're much more rah-rah philosophy, like philosophy is gonna rule all these things and they ultimately fall under its rubric., and you need philosophy to make them commensurable. And that, I think, is something quite significant in effective altruism. And that's one of the areas where I depart from what effective altruism, at least in some of its manifestations, would recommend. Another notion you find both in effective altruism and classical utilitarianism is a strong emphasis on impartiality. So the notion that we should be neutral across geographic space, people living, say, in Africa or Vietnam, wherever, they're not worth less than people living in our own country, that people in our own village are not worth more. Across time, we should be impartial, and a lot of different ways in which both effective altruism and classical utilitarianism suggest that most other perspectives, they're simply far too partial in the sense of taking someone's side and then trying to optimize returns for that side. And that again strikes me as quite a strong feature of most effective altruism. On that too, I have some differences. So let me introduce the kind of sequence of differences with effective altruism by starting with this notion of impartiality. My view is at the margin, if I may be forgiven for speaking like an economist, virtually all individuals and certainly all governments, they're far, far too partial. So the effective altruist notion at current margins, I think, is correct 100% of the time that we should be more impartial. I'm sure you all know Peter Singer's famous 1972 article, "The Child is Drowning in the Pond." You can save the child, it may soil your coat. Obviously, you should do it. You shouldn't just say, oh, it's not my kid. I don't need to worry about this. So at current margins, I'm fully on board with what you might call the EA algorithm. But at the same time, I don't accept it as a fully triumphant philosophical principle that can be applied quite generally across the board, or as we economists would say, inframarginally. Let me just give you a simple example. I gave this to Will MacAskill in my podcast with him.. And I don't think he had any good answer to my question. And I said to Will, well, Will, let's say aliens were invading the Earth and they were going to take us over in some way, enslave us or kill us and turn over all of our resources to their own ends. I said, would you fight on our side or would you first sit down and make a calculation as to whether the aliens would be happier using those resources than we would be. Now, Will, I think, didn't actually have an answer to this question. As an actual psychological fact, virtually all of us would fight on the side of the humans, even assuming we knew nothing about the aliens, or even if we somehow knew, well, they would be happier, you know, ruling over an enslaved planet Earth than we would be happy doing whatever we would do with planet Earth. That there's simply in our moral decisions some inescapable partiality. And this is a way in which I think David Hume, for instance, was by no means a pure utilitarian. He saw this impartiality as an inescapable feature of human psychology. I would go further than that. I would stress that the fact that it's an inescapable feature of human psychology means that the normative level there's just no way we can fully avoid impartiality of some kind, even though you might think, as I do, like in all of our current real-world decisions, we are far too partial and not sufficiently impartial. It seems to me there's always a big enough comparison you can make, an absurd enough philosophic thought experiment where when you pose the question, should we do X or Y? It is impossible to address that question without having a somewhat partial perspective. So that's the way in which I differ from effective altruism or some versions of it at a philosophic level, even though in terms of practical recommendations, I would say I'm fully on board at the margin. Now, it turns out that this view of impartiality, that you can't be fully impartial, it's going to matter for a number of our real-world decisions.. And let me turn to an example of where I think we cannot help but be partial. So when it comes to scalability, effective altruists stress the upward potential for these fantastic outcomes where, you know, we colonize the galaxy, there's trillions of people, they may not even be people anymore, they might be uploads, or we're all transhumanist, or there's just some wildly utopian future. I'm not sure we're able to process that as a meaningful outcome. Doesn't mean I don't value the option on it or the possibility, but I'm not sure there's any kind of utilitarian algorithm where you can calculate the expected value of an outcome so different from the world we are familiar with. And let me bring this back to a very well-known philosophic conundrum taken from Derek Parfit, namely the repugnant conclusion. Now, Parfit's repugnant conclusion asks the question, which I think you're all familiar with, you're like, should we prefer a world of 200 billion individuals who have lives as rich as Goethe, Beethoven, whoever your exemplars might be, or should we prefer a world of many, many trillions, make it as asymptotically large as you need to be, Many, many trillions of people, but living at the barest of levels that make life worth living. Parfit referred to them as lives of muzak and potatoes. So in Parfit's vision of these lives, you wake up when you're born, you hear a little bit of muzak, maybe it's slightly above average muzak. They feed you a spoonful of potatoes, which you enjoy, and then you perish. Now, most people, because of Parfit's mere addition principle, would admit there's some value and having this life of muzak and potatoes compared to no life at all. But if you think through mathematics, if you add up enough of those lives, it would seem a sufficiently large number of those lives is a better world than like the 200 billion people living like Goethe. There's a huge literature on the repugnant conclusion. I'm not really going to address it, but I'll simply, simply give you my conclusion. I'm quite sure that no one has really solved the repugnant conclusion. There are different attempts to wiggle or worm or squiggle one's way out of it. But I think the, the actual answer to the repugnant conclusion is that the lives of, you know, all those muzak and potatoes entities, they're not really human lives as we understand them. If you consistently think through the existence of a muzak and potatoes entity, I don't think there's any particular animal you could compare it to, but again, it's not really intelligible in terms of our normal human existence. So in comparing the lives of the Goethes to the Musak and potato lives, I would just say we're comparing two different species. And when you compare two different species, I don't think there's a single well-defined unit of utility that enables you to say which one is better. So there's not an answer. I think the so-called answer, if you would call it that, some would call it a non-answer, but it's Hume's observation that we cannot help but be somewhat partial and prefer the lives of the recognizably human entities, you know, the 200 billion Gürtels, and so we side against the repugnant conclusion, and there's not actually some formally correct utility calculation that should push us in the opposite direction. I think you can say the formal utility calculation is not well-defined, and what we're left with is our particularistic siding with the human-like entities. And I think that reflects the actual intuitions we have in not rejecting Harfit's repugnant conclusion. But now, once you admit that, once you say that in a lot of these comparisons we are intrinsically particularistic and somewhat biased and have a partial point of view. I think when you look at issues such as animal welfare, you also have to wonder how much you can make formal comparisons. So my view on animal welfare is that at the margin, we are, you know, very systematically underinvesting in the welfare of non-human animals. And this is a terrible thing. At the margin, we should correct it. But I don't actually think there's some aggregate calculus that you can add up and arrive at an answer of, well, where— what exactly should humans do to maximize total well-being on the planet? You know, weighing off all human well-being against the total well-being of all non-human animals. So any view on that topic strikes me as intrinsically unjustified while admitting that at the margin, we're not doing nearly enough to take care of the welfare of non-human animals. I just don't think there's a natural unit of comparison. So I observe, you know, very large numbers of EA people being vegetarians, being vegan. If I'm going to meet an EA person, you know, for a meal, I don't even ask them. I just make sure, like, we go to an Indian restaurant. Where they can get some good food that's not just meat. You just assume, like, at least 50% chance they're vegetarian or vegan, and that's fine. I think at the margin it's a better way to be. But at the same time, the notion that in a world with about, you know, 8 billion humans, that we have taken up about half of all inhabitable land for our agriculture— and yes, we could make that more efficient, but, you know, by the end of the day, Once we start addressing climate change by putting in a lot more panels for solar energy, we're going to take up a lot more land, in fact, producing green energy under most plausible scenarios. So it seems to me, in any world with billions of humans, you end up doing something to a large number of species of animals which resembles extermination or near extermination. I don't think I have a normative theory that tells me how justified or not justified that is. I am pretty sure I have the partial perspective of a human being that just tells me, well, we're going to do it anyway. There's not an equilibrium where we like cede the land to the cockroaches because we realize they're a slight bit happy and you can fit more of them on my house than you can fit of me. Just not going to happen. So again, this notion that there's something there at the margin, but at the macro level, there's just not a meaningful comparison would be an area where I differ from a lot of effective altruists. Not all of them by any means, but I think a lot of them take these very philosophic, very utilitarian, very macro views of how we should make these decisions. This also relates to what I gave as one of the definitions of EA, that they're very concerned with moral decisions being legible. Again, I'm not opposed to legibility, but I think relative to most EA types I know, I see a large number of moral decisions— I mean really a very large number of important moral decisions— that simply will never be legible because they are intrinsically partial to some extent. So I sort of admire the quest for legibility at the margin. I think it's a good thing in the actual world we live in,. But I'm not quite as enthusiastic about it as a macronormative paradigm, the way some EA individuals would be. A big area of difference that I think I have with a lot of effective altruist types is the emphasis on existential risk. So just if you look at the EA movement, what you might call sociologically, I see two different, somewhat separate parts of it. They're intertwined in institutions. But the first part of EA, practically speaking, is the part of EA that does charity, invests, you know, in anti-malaria bed nets, tries to prepare the world for the next pandemic, and so on, doing very what you might call prosaic things, but trying to do them better and more rationally than pre-existing philanthropy had done. And I find I'm 100% on board with that, 110%. The second part of the EA movement is concerned with a whole series of investments in fighting existential risk. So very often this takes the form of worry that artificial intelligence will turn into some form of AGI that may pulp us into paper clips or destroy us or have its way with the world and end human civilization as we know it. It's an interesting question. Like historically, sociologically, why that's become intertwined with the anti-malaria bed nets. But it has. And I think actually for some decent reasons. But I would just say I'm in general more skeptical about the extreme emphasis on existential risk than a lot of effective altruism would be. One reason for that is simply how I diagnose the main sources of existential risk. So if you think the main existential risk worry is AGI, that would lead you to one set of actions. If you think the main existential risk is nuclear war or some kind of major war with other weapons of mass destruction, possibly in the future, it leads you to a very different set of actions. So I think nuclear war, just general warfare, is a larger risk than AGI is. So I would fully recognize the EA point that a major nuclear war is unlikely to kill each and every human being on planet Earth. But I think it would wipe out civilization as we know it, would set us back many millennia. And I don't think there's an obvious path toward recovery. And in the meantime, we're much more vulnerable to all these other existential risks, like a comet or asteroid might come, and we can't do anything to deflect it because we have something only a bit above a Stone Age existence. So I'm at least 50x more worried about nuclear war than at least some of the EA people I know who are more worried about AGI. But now let's look at the risk of nuclear war. Like, what now are the two major risks of nuclear war? At least plausibly, we don't know for certain. One would be the war in Ukraine. Where Putin has said he might use nuclear weapons. Possibly that could escalate. I don't think it's the likely scenario. But at this point, you have to see some chance of that. And the other major risk in terms of a significant war would be China attempting to reincorporate Taiwan within its boundaries. The US has pledged to defend Taiwan. You could imagine there's some chance of that leading to a major nuclear war.. But then if you ask the question, well, which investments should we make to limit the risk of nuclear war over Ukraine or Taiwan? I'm very keen on everyone doing more work in that area, but I don't think the answers are very legible. I don't think they're very obvious. I don't think effective altruism really has anything in particular to add to those debates. I don't mean that as a criticism, like, I don't think I have anything in particular to add to those debates. They're just very hard questions. But once you see those as the major existential risk questions, the notion that existential risk as a thing should occupy the central room in the effective altruism house, that just seems like a weaker conclusion to me. That yes, of course, we should worry about nuclear war. We should do whatever we can. More people should study it, debate it, whatever.. But it just seems like an ordinary world where you're telling people, well, think more about foreign policy, which I'm again all for. I don't think effective altruism is opposed to that conclusion. There's plenty of EA forums where people debate nuclear war and would say things I pretty much would agree with. But again, at the end of the day, I think it significantly weakens existential risk as the central room in the EA house. And EA just tends to dribble away into a kind of normal concern with global affairs that you would have found in the American foreign policy establishment in 1953, in a quite acceptable way. But EA then just isn't special anymore. I think there's a way in which EA people, they don't take existential risks seriously enough. So let's say you think in any year there's a chance of a major nuclear war. My personal view is that chance is really quite small. So I'm not in that sense a pessimist. I probably think it's smaller than most people think it is. But what I do do— and people hate me for this, I'm going to depress you all for the rest of your lives— is just ask the simple question: if we have a tiny risk in a single year, for how many years does the clock have to tick before that small risk happens? Right. This is a well-known problem in financial theory.. But basically, you know, within the span of 1,000 years, or maybe shorter, there's quite a good chance in my calculations that the world has something like a major nuclear war, or maybe the weapons are different by that point in time, but you get what I'm saying. And that even if you're optimistic for any single year, you shouldn't be optimistic over a time span of 1,000 years. This problem gets all the worse when you imagine that nuclear weapons right now, only a small number of nations can them. But the cost of producing those or other very powerful weapons is likely to decline if we continue to have technological progress. And so the number of agents who have the ability to destroy a big part of the world, just because they're pissed off, crazy, feuding with each other, whatever, that number of agents is really only likely to go up, not to go down. So once you think like the world as we know it has a likely time horizon shorter than 1,000 years, this notion of, well, what we will do in 30,000 years to colonize the galaxy and have trillions of uploads or transhuman beings, you know, manipulating stars, it just doesn't seem very likely. The chance of it is not zero, but the whole problem to me starts looking more like Pascal's wager and less like a probability that should actually influence my decision-making. So that whole strand of EA thought, I just feel I'm different from it. Again, I would fully recognize the EA people would agree with things I would say about nuclear war. I view them as a positive force raising consciousness about the risk of nuclear war, but just sociologically, the entities they have constructed around the issue of existential risk They just feel very, very different from how I would view that issue. Another way that I think how I view existential risk is different from how many of the EA individuals view it is simply I look at many, in particular artificial intelligence issues, from a national perspective, not a global perspective. So I think if you could wave a magic wand and stop all the progress of artificial intelligence. I'm not going to debate that debate now, but I'll just say I can see the case for just stopping it. If you can wave the magic wand, well, it's too dangerous, it's too risky, and so on. We all know those arguments. But my view is you never have the magic wand at the global level, right? UN is powerless. We're not about to set up some transnational thing that has any real influence over those decisions. Different nations are doing it. China is doing it. And the real question to ask is, do you want the US to come in first and China to come in second, or rather China to come in first and the US to come in second? It's just a very, very different question than should we wave the magic wand to stop the whole thing. Now, I don't want to debate that question either, but I'll just tell you my perspective, which is in part partial, as I discussed earlier. But in part I think just broadly utilitarian is I want the US to win. So I think we should go full steam ahead on AI. And I think that for reasons I don't hear sufficiently frequently from the EA community, namely that the real question is US gets it or China gets it. And you have to pick a side and you can pick the side for utilitarian reasons, or you might in part pick the side for reasons that are, you know, partialistic. But nonetheless, freezing at all is not on the table. I even worry that the people who obsess over AI alignment, I suspect their net impact to date has been to make AI riskier by getting everyone thinking about these scenarios through which AI could do these terrible things. So the notion that you just talk about or even try to do AI alignment, I don't think it's going to work. I think the problem is if AI is powerful enough to destroy everything, it's the least safe system you have to worry about. So you might succeed with AI alignment on, say, 97% of cases, which would be a phenomenal success ratio, right? No one, like, seriously expects to succeed on 97% of cases. But if you failed on 3% of cases, that 3% of very evil effective enough AIs can still reproduce and take things over and turn you into paperclips. So I'm just not that optimistic about the alignment agenda. And I think you need to view it from a national perspective, not like, where's the magic wand that's going to set all of this right? And in that sense, I think I'm different from EAers as I meet them. I can readily imagine a somewhat reformed EA that would say, well, when we consider all possible factors, we should really take something more like Tyler's view. But again, I think as you do that, this place that existential risk has as a central room in the EA house, that again tends to dribble away quite a bit. Uh, now I'm almost done. I believe no Zoom talk should be so long, and we have time for Q&A. But let me just say a few things about EA as a movement. And again, I don't think you can fully separate the movement from its philosophy. I think for virtually all social movements, I have a saying, and that is demographics is destiny. And you may like this or you may not like it, but it is also true for people in effective altruism. It's been true for people who are libertarianism. So if you look at early libertarianism, say in the 1970s, It had a very particular logical structure. But the actual descriptive fact of the matter was that a lot of libertarians were nerdy white males, and some other set of libertarians were non-nerdy, somewhat rural, kind of gun-owning, anti-authoritarian, very U.S. American white males who had a particular set of grudges. And what you end up getting from libertarianism is some evolution of those socioeconomic groups, which again you might like or you might not like. But if you're evaluating libertarianism, you have to think a bit, well, what are the natural constituencies? What will those demographics get you? Do you like all of that? And are you ready for the stupider version of the theory? So there's like the Robert Nozick, super smart, very sophisticated libertarianism, but of course that's not what you get. You get the stupider version. So you will have to ask with effective altruism, well, what is the stupider version of effective altruism and what are its demographics and what does that mean is its destiny? I have limited experience in the EA movement, but at least in the United States, and I would readily admit other countries may differ, in the United States, it's quite young, very high IQ, very coastal. Very educated, broadly people with a social conscience. None of that should be surprising, right? But I think the demographics of the, the EA movement are essentially the US Democratic Party, and that's what the EA movement over time will evolve into. If you think the existential risk is this kind of funny, weird thing, it doesn't quite fit, well, it will be kind of a branch of Democratic Party thinking that makes philanthropy a bit more global, a bit more effective. I wouldn't say it's a stupider version, but it's a less philosophical version that's a lot easier to sell to non-philosophers. Just so you end up telling people you should think more broadly about how you should give money. At the margin, you know, I agree with that. I'm fine with it. But it's simply another way of thinking about what effective altruism really is, just as it is with libertarianism, just to understand that demographics is destiny. I gave a talk to an EA group lately, and you know, I'm always like a troll when I give these talks. That's on purpose, but I'm saying things I believe, to be clear. I'm not making up stuff I don't believe. So I said to them all, you know, you EA-ers, you should be more religious, and a lot of you should be social conservatives. Because social conservatism is actually better for human welfare. I didn't mean that in the sense of government coercively enforcing social conservatism on people, but just people voluntarily being more socially conservative. I said, you know, a lot of you should do a lot more to copy the Mormons. Maybe now I would say, you know, the Quakers, other groups too. And what was striking to me was how shocked everyone was by this point. I'm not saying they should have agreed, not agreed, but they hadn't ever heard it before. When Nick Askle said this in his podcast with me, he said, oh, we're all social liberals. That doesn't really follow at all. It's something you can debate. But the fact that so many people took it for granted, to me, gets back at this point when it comes to EA demographics is destiny and the future of socially conservative EA is really not that strong, but it should be. And after my talk, a woman went up to me and she came over and she whispered in my ear and she said, you know, Tyler, I actually am a social conservative and an effective altruist, but please don't tell anyone. I thought that was awesome. And of course, I didn't tell anyone who she was, but the mere fact that she felt the need to whisper this to me gets back to demographics is destiny. So in part, when you think about EA, don't just think about the philosophic propositions, think about what it is, what it is becoming. And again, in the United States at least, it is a very specific set of sociological connections that will shape its future. I like many of those trends at the margin, but I would say not all of them. And just looking at EA that way would be another way in which I differ from a lot of the effective altruists themselves, noting that when I mentioned social conservatism, They just all were shocked. I don't think they agreed with me, but for me, the important point was that they were shocked that I would bring up such a thing. They just took it for granted that effective altruist people, you know, like, ought to be social liberals. Anyway, with that, I will end my formal remarks. I know we have a 5-minute break according to the customs of St. Andrews. That would be one of these customs that I think Coleridge would have approved of, St. Andrews being an endowed institution. And Coleridge being one of the great critics of the effective altruist movements of his own day. So we now take our break. When we come back, feel free to ask me really about anything, the talk, but anything else you might care to ask about. And I thank my hosts very much for having had me on and be back with you all very soon.

Oh, well, let's thank Tyler Cowen for that really interesting and thought-provoking talk.

Alright, great.

If you have a question, please feel free to use the raise hand function. Okay, Paul.

Oh, let's see. Can you hear me okay?

I hear you great.

Fantastic. Well, firstly, thank you so much. That was both kind of very informative but also just really fun. I just really enjoyed kind of the, the style of it, the way in which you went through things, and it was very, um, yeah, very exciting to listen to. So thank you for that, first off. Um, I wanted to, to come back to this, um, this alien, uh, analogy, uh, that you had that you posed to Will McCaskill. So if I've got this right The idea was, was that if, um, say a whole host of aliens suddenly, uh, appeared in the air and, and started, say, attacking us or harvesting us in order to, um, I don't know, promote their own pleasure or something like that, um, the idea was, was that pretty much all of us would take up arms and defend the Earth and defend our species. And it seemed to me— and I could be mischaracterizing this— but it seemed to me that the idea behind this was that this, um, belied a certain partiality, right? So this was in the part where you were talking about partiality, and that at the very least we have here a partiality for our own species. And you then said that, say for example, if Wilma Caskill said, well, um, we would need to take a moment to understand a bit more about the aliens that, that perhaps wasn't a feasible response or wasn't a good response. Um, and I, I think I, I quite disagree. And, and I think that, I think that if it was like an emergency situation where we didn't have a moment to think, I think it would be intuitive to take up arms and say, you know, fight against the aliens. But if we had time to establish some facts about the aliens— so say, for example, it turns out they were very, very similar to us in terms of sentience, ability to feel pleasure and pain— then I think what this would actually become is just the more simple question for utilitarianism of, is it okay to, you know, harm people in order to promote the well-being of others? I think it's no different to a case of Russia attacking Ukraine, or any other case where it's um, it's, it's that question rather than the partiality question. So I don't know if there's something more you could say about that that really shows that it's about partiality rather than just, you know, um, that classical utilitarian problem of, you know, can we harm people to, to increase the pleasure of others? Did I—

let's say it was literally little green men but they were sentient and they could feel something akin to our pleasure and pain, uh, and they were attacking us. You might, for deontological reasons, simply oppose that attack. I'm fine with that. But then you're moving away from what I take to be effective altruism. Uh, what I think— I'm all for learning more about the attacking aliens, right? That's a good idea. —no matter what your moral stance. But the notion that we would sit down and seriously debate whether they could do something with planet Earth that was better than what we were doing with it, I really don't think would be or could be a factor. And that is a way in which my analysis would differ from that of classical utilitarianism and at least many branches of effective altruism. Now, what I've noticed in very recent effective altruism is people keep on making the EA theory more and more pluralistic. They're worried about bad publicity, worried, oh, what did SBF do to us? So they're all talking about virtue ethics, your obligations, Kant, this, that, and the other. I mean, fine, those are a part of my personal views, but at the end of the day, I think it's watering down the core propositions. And just turning into a pretty normal set of pluralistic views, the core commitment to utilitarianism, I don't think very well survives the empirical fact that very few of us would attempt a serious trade-off analysis of whether the little green men could do something better with Canada than, you know, what we're doing. Oh, the little green men say, "Canada, it's so empty," and we're little green men, we love the cold. 'Let's take it from them. Trudeau, goodbye. You know, we're going to settle our colonies here,' and, you know, whatever. So that's where I think there's a difference. I'm not saying there's nothing in the theory of just warfare that could be applied to such an attack.

Um, Saron, is it okay if I respond, or how does this work?

Or would it be all right if, um, we move to someone else? Yeah, just go to the end of the queue, um, if that's okay. Just raise your hand again, basically. Okay, so let's go with Catherine now.

Hello, can you hear me? Yes, yes, thank you. Okay, thank you, and thank you, I really enjoyed that, and like Paul, I enjoyed your frank delivery. I agree with you very much, your critic of charity sector, but I struggle to see how effective altruism can avoid at least some of the problems in the charity sector, and I wanted to zoom in on two particular aspects. I mean, you said demographics are key, but I think alongside that, money, which is intertwined with demographics, is key, and I wonder, well, on the one hand, you know, obviously you have a certain number of high-profile people whose charitable donations are bigger than their tax payments, and therefore, you know, their support for effective altruism can be significant in that way. For the vast majority of people though, we actually give more money in taxes than we do in charity. So I wondered if you have any thoughts about the interactions between public spending and effective altruism, the ways in which public bodies and effective altruists measure, evaluate the impact, the effectiveness of their spending. The other question, query I have is the tension in this notion of effective, because on the one hand you can, I think, be more confident of your impact if you're small-scale and local, but as you said, scalability is one of the themes of effective altruism that to my mind is an off-putting theme, because I think the scalability frankly is more about ego than it is about effectiveness. But you may have a completely different view anyway. I would just be interested to know how you think effective altruism answers these problems of either charitable spending or public spending. Those are two very big questions.

And I would just stress, like, I'm not the representative of effective altruism. I'm not sure anyone would be., but I'll try to give you what would be my answers, like speaking for them. My personal view is at the margin we should do much more scalability, that you look at charitable donations, they are remarkably centered in individual nations. So Americans tend to give to American causes, Canadians overall tend to give to Canadian causes. Now there's some argument for that based on proximity, But I just think there's a lot of good evidence, sometimes based on randomized control trials, that some things we can do at a distance, mostly with money and with not too much bureaucracy, are quite effective. And if you look at public health advances in Africa, I find them astonishing relative to what I would have expected not just 30 years ago, but 20 years ago. It seems to be they're mostly working. It seems we're now going to have an actually effective antimalaria vaccine and antimalaria monoclonal antibodies that will likely help Africa more than anywhere else. Of course, there are still delivery issues. And it seems to me we should be doing much more of that. There's something kind of a general— what was originally a Christian principle of charity, which was quite cosmopolitan, that we underinvest in compared to our own communities. But that said, I only favor scalability up to some margin. I feel we're not at the margin where I want to raise my hand and say stop, but I don't think we're close to that margin. Now, in terms of public and private sector, this is a very difficult comparison. So I once read a study that said of all governments, the Australian government was the one whose policies were most directed toward helping the poor. That seems plausible to me. Maybe it's a little hard to prove.. But if you look at, say, the United States, so much of our governmental expenditure is sent to the elderly and the elderly are on average wealthier than the non-elderly. Now, that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. I think countries like the United States— we're hardly the only ones in this position— what we're doing is, in essence, we have governments which purchase the votes and support of the elderly in order so that we may continue as a stable government. And the odds of us continuing as a stable government, because they're higher, that's like good for the whole world in some very deep, very indirect set of ways. But that said, at the margin, it seems pretty clear to me we should spend less on our own elderly and more, say, on foreign aid, especially public health interventions, whether it's the public or private sector. And most people just don't want to do that. If you poll people, foreign aid is about the least popular part of the budget, and at least some segments of it are effective. And the other thing— this is now United States in particular. I don't think it's really true for any other single government, but our biggest form of effective altruism, I would say, is our military budget, keeping a lot of the world unconquered by less favorable powers. And that's hard to evaluate at the margin, but it's not something Australia does or can do. So, you know, the full comparison would need to involve that. So should we have less charity, higher taxes, and more military spending? I don't know the answer to that question, but to me it's a more useful question than just comparing public and private sector in the abstract.

Thank you.

Okay, Darren's next.

Hi, can you hear me? There you go. I hear you, but you're a little faint, so be a little louder, please. Yeah, of course. No, I'm having a little trouble with my internet, so I might turn the camera off. I have a question which maybe stems a little bit from the previous one. I loved your demographics as destiny catchphrase. I think that's really good. And I just wanted to ask maybe a little bit more about this because you talked about how the demographics of the effective altruist movement as it, you know, being predominantly social Democrat or kind of social liberal. I was curious about how you think other aspects of the demographics of that movement maybe also weigh in. So, you know, I know it's sort of been charged with being, you know, predominantly white or predominantly male or predominantly affluent. So, you know, how do these other demographics or characteristics that maybe dominate the movement? How do you think that these might also interact with, you know, what the— not the stupider version, but, you know, what it actually ends up being?

Yeah, I suspect the core driver here is that effective altruism is quite analytical as a set of ideas.. And John Stuart Mill early on pointed this out about Jeremy Bentham, right, in one of the classic early essays on utilitarianism. So matters which are highly analytical, for whichever reason, whether you think it's, you know, socially constructed or somewhat intrinsic or some mix of both, they tend to be more male. They tend to skew more educated, which in most countries is going to favour white. Now there are more and more countries where that is becoming like white plus Asian in some way. And I think what's driving it is being analytical. Now, I suspect in a number of other countries, these properties of who is an EA person is different. So I know a woman doing EA work in Nigeria. I know a number of people doing EA work in India. I have not been debriefed by them on this question at all.. But I would, you know, stress the point that this is all culturally specific. But my guess is EA will, you know, stay not narrowly white, but the groups of people, whoever they may be, who are represented at, you know, top 10 or Ivy League schools, that will be the EA movement. And I think another reason it's a youth movement is more and more young people are uncertain about what careers to choose. There's more and more smart young people. Because the internet and education has spread. I get an email like this almost every day. It'll be, "I don't want to go into finance. I'm not well suited for tech. Academia seems like tortured and boring, but I want to do something with ideas that will also be meaningful work and help the world. What should I do?" I'm never sure I have a good answer, but the EA movement, I don't know that it promises you an answer, but it's a bunch of other people at least asking the same question.. And I think that's very attractive for smart young people because in fact, their diagnoses of how many of these other jobs can be boring are mostly correct. Right. And so they want something else. And here's the one, like, market response to that quest for a better job. Again, I don't think EA has to pretend to have the answer, but it's a place you can go and ask all the other people there, like, hey, what's your answer to this question? And I think that's a big driver of its popularity. And that will stay like sociologically a part of what EA is, mostly in a good way, in my opinion. I'm sure there's other demographic correlates here, but those would be a few remarks I would make.

Okay, great. So I'm next in the queue and I just want to reiterate what some other folks have said that, yeah, I really enjoyed that and it was a lot of fun and super thought-provoking talk. So thanks very much. Tyler Cowen: I wanted to, I guess, raise a question about the relation between the sociological side of effective altruism and the philosophy, because I'm sympathetic to the demographics drive destiny kind of slogan. But I wonder if kind of from the beginning people have thought of the philosophy as being non-consequentialist, or at least not essentially consequentialist, even though most of the people involved are consequentialist or utilitarians, you know, much like Singer's 1972 argument is not founded on consequentialist premises, even though he's a consequentialist himself. But I wonder if, like, now that the movement's growing and people are becoming more aware of intellectual diversity issues in the movement, there will be a kind of a drive from recognition of what the core philosophy is to change in the demographics. So, I mean, there are more conferences now in EA that explicitly focus on non-consequentialist approaches, and there are more and more non-consequentialists getting involved. So I just— yeah, I wonder if you think there could be a kind of like, I don't know, effect in that direction.

Well, you know, I think that would move EA more in the direction of my actual views. So in that regard, I'm quite sympathetic. I once in a book described myself as a two-thirds utilitarian. Someone asked— it was like 5 years ago— someone asked me if I changed my views since then. And I said, well, I think by now I'm down to 63% and not at two-thirds anymore. And I was joking, but also not joking. But that said, I find the sharper versions— you can almost call them the more dogmatic versions of effective altruism. The most effective. If you just smush everything into the big jumble of pluralistic values, it's just another movement doing a bunch of charity, which I'm fine with. But I think there's something sharp and legible about wanting to apply the utilitarian calculation to every decision that I find very useful and invigorating, even though it's not actually my own view. So I don't think I'm actually rooting for effective altruism to become more like my views. I want it to stay more different from my views. In that sense, I want there to be this greater intellectual diversity. And I think it's been effective precisely because it's been somewhat extreme and somewhat forcing. And again, a lot of this is a reaction, an understandable reaction to SPF and those issues. But people saying, oh, we need to speak up and show we care about all these values and this and that. And I agree with that, but I'd actually rather hear people say, well, is there some chance that by, you know, defrauding everyone and giving away the money for a short period of time, he did more good than harm? I'd much rather have people debating that question. I think that's the kind of sharp question that's actually needed at the margin, not how do we all become a kind of goody-two-shoes who embrace all values in response to any bad publicity that pops up.

I think I have more to say about this, but I don't want to break my own kind of precedent of not allowing follow-ups. So I think, Paul, you're next.

I just thought I would ask on, on the FTX collapse and everything there with Sam Bankman-Fried, um, from what you've, kind of looked at on that topic, do you think that, uh, there is— that it highlights some fundamental issue with effective altruism? Or do you think, kind of like with— like, I was listening to Sam Harris the other morning, uh, not that I align with his views or anything like that, just to be clear, but, um, but he was claiming that this FTX collapse was absolutely nothing to do with EA and ultimately the core kind of tenets of EA are not threatened in any sense by this. I just thought it'd be interesting if you could weigh in on that.

You know, I have a podcast with Sam and I actually knew him or know him, however you would put it. And in the podcast, this was all like 6, 7 months ago, I think. I asked him if you could play double or nothing with the world, Like we double the well-being on Earth or Earth perishes, and the odds are 51-49. Doesn't utilitarianism require you to accept the bet? I thought it was a reductio, but he bit the bullet. He said yes. And I go, how about double or nothing? And he's yes. And I'm like, double or nothing again. I say, Sam, you're gonna blow up the whole world. And he says, ah, but there's a very small chance we create something of enormous value. So that to me was a very revealing exchange. I think we need to hold in our mind two apparently semi-contradictory ideas at the same point in time. One is that whatever happened with Sam and FTX, it shouldn't change your views on the substance of effective altruism. That I strongly believe. But there's another view also true that says every movement has its crooks or frauds, and the way in which they're crooked or fraudulent does in some way reflect the intellectual defects of that movement. EA is in no way unique to this. It's true of Marxism. It's true of libertarianism pushing some, like, scam crypto coin. Might be like the libertarian fraud. And that too is true. You can't say there is no relationship. And Sam himself said in his dialogue he would love to keep playing double or nothing. And in a sense, he did and lost, right? So both of those things are true. And in semi-Hegelian fashion, the ability to keep both of them in your mind and embrace both of them, I think, is the way to get to a right answer on what you're asking.

Just to be clear, the Sam that was Double or Nothing was Sam Bankman-Fried, not Sam Harris, right?

Yes, Sam Bankman-Fried. And my podcast with him, it's online. There's a transcript. You know, you can listen or read word for word what he said. But he said a number of revealing things in that podcast that reflect both EA styles of reasoning and what actually went wrong there. But I would stress the point also, like, every movement has its version of its crooks and frauds that reflect parts of the movement's ideas, and EA is in no way unique in this.

Okay, so it's back to me now, and now I'll follow up, I guess. Um, so I see what you mean about the value of having a really sharp kind of extreme view, um, animating effective altruism, basically utilitarianism. And I think I agree that there's some value to that, but I also think there's some value lost to that. Um, I think not taking as seriously deontological constraints might be one of the major things that is a problem there. And so I just, I guess I would also push back a little bit about how, like, how distinctive the rejection of deontological constraints is as far as, like, characterizing what EA is. I would have thought it's more kind of central to, or interesting about EA, you know, the idea that we help in a cost-effective way, you know, that we're efficient with the resources that we have. Not that we like lie or cheat or steal or harm people to get them, but just that, you know, when, when it comes to altruism, we do it effectively. And also that we, you know, we take into consideration the needs of people that are far away and, you know, kind of like expanded concern. I would have thought those things are more like core to EA than anything to do with like disregarding constraints.

They might be more core, but as I'm sure you already know, we're faced with the Sidgwick dilemma of if there's a conflict between well-being and deontology, what standard do we inject to resolve that conflict? And if the standard you inject to resolve that conflict is well-being, you're back to being a pure, at least consequentialist at some meta level.. And if you don't have any other standard to inject, you just don't have an answer. And no one really has done very well solving that problem. And if you just say to me, well, if someone earns some money, maybe it's not theft, but say they traded on inside information, they earned $1 billion, they gave it away to poor regions and saved thousands of lives. Is that so terrible? I don't want to start by assuming it's so terrible, right? I don't have the answer to the question, but I'm very uncomfortable with the view that is quite conformist, takes ordinary morality as given. It's the thing you're supposed to believe. Oh, I read in the newspapers, like, these people are bad. Uh, I think we need an actual standard to resolve the issue, and the mushier EA gets, I think it will move further from resolution, not closer, even though my own views, as I said, are pretty mushy and pluralistic.

I mean, I could keep talking with Tyler. I'm sure there's a lot for us to discuss, but okay, I'll just keep going. And if people, other people want to talk, just jump in. So, Tyler, can I ask about this debate that you had with Will McCaskill about the kind of like importance of philosophers. I just want to be like sharpen up what the disagreement is between you and folks like Will. So I mean, I like, for example, I'm very sympathetic to what you said, that practical wisdom and like disciplines other than philosophy ought to inform, you know, our decision-making. It can't just be philosophy for sure. But then I'm not really sure Will would disagree with that either. And I wonder if where he's coming from is like wanting to highlight the comparative importance of philosophy, like compared to like what most people would take its significance to be. And, you know, hey, let's look at Singer. Look how, how much of an influence Singer's had. And so philosophy really can make a difference. Isn't that more the spirit of his view? Or I don't know, help me, help me see what the disagreement is.

There's a lot of variation within the EA community on the value of philosophy.. But I think there's a large and especially influential segment of it that on a scale of 1 to 10 would put the value of philosophy at least at an 8. And I put Will in that camp. I would ask myself a very like practical question. Say you needed advice. I know it depends like what kind of advice, but just advice. Whom would you actually ask? I wouldn't actually— I hope I'm not insulting anyone here. I wouldn't actually dream of asking a philosopher. Once I think I wrote a blog post on this. I said for a lot of these questions, the person you should ask is a rabbi. I'm not Jewish, but if you think, well, I'm educated, rabbis on average have well-educated congregations, maybe a rabbi is the answer. Other times I think the best person to ask is a CEO or maybe a COO. They deal with human problems all day long from a diverse set of people. Again, I'm not sure what the answer is, but philosophers would be really pretty low on my list. And I think that's a difference in view between Will and myself. I mean, you should ask Will as well. I don't want to speak for him, but I think it's a big and very significant difference because it really shapes what are the inputs that go into your judgments.

Okay.

Sabina, I think you're muted. I don't hear you.

I am muted, or I was. So you spoke a lot about utilitarianism, which of course people associate with the birth and ongoing effective altruism.. But like the earlier questioner, I'm skeptical about the rejection of deontological ethics. So I read Singer's Famine, Affluence, and Morality when I was 19, and I began tithing 10% as soon as I made money. And it wasn't until later that I read about the effective altruism movement, particular in giving— in, in particular, and giving to malaria prevention and things like that. But I was already moving in that direction with my giving. But I'm not convinced that utilitarianism would explain much of what I was doing. I mean, certainly the greatest good for the greatest number, but not at the expense of, in any way, corrupt means for better ends.. And I don't know that giving what one can in inefficient ways necessarily stems from a kind of technocratic rationality. And effective altruism is very closely linked to the rationalist movement. I mean, in the contemporary sense of the Silicon Valley rationalists. But I'm thinking that a lot of people who including the young people I've met who are committed to effective altruism, I'm not sure that it's working really from that kind of reasoning. I wonder if it doesn't work a little bit more the way forgiveness works, that if you use your head and rational thought, you won't forgive. One forgives with one's heart. And your mention of Quakers interested me a lot. I became a Quaker when I was 13. But one thing that Quakers are deeply committed to is living in the realm of ends, that one will wait to take action or make rational decisions if it doesn't mean living today in a realm of ends that would never treat people as means to ends or So I think there's sort of a conflict between, or there's something that's being left out in thinking about effective altruism in such utilitarian terms. So I wondered if you could speak a little bit about rationalism and utilitarianism and deontological ethics with that in mind, in terms of what's at, what, how it's actually motivating people.

It's a very good question. I would stress that I don't think either you personally or the EAers out there are actually motivated by utilitarianism. I think hardly anyone is. Again, in this sense, I'm Humean. I think what we're motivated by is partialistic considerations. So I don't think it's deontology either. What worries me about deontology is how it ever makes decisions at the margin. So you were tithing 10%, and if someone asks you, well, why not 11%, why not 20%? Uh, there are reasons, but they seem to collapse into non-deontological reasons. So I'm never sure deontology is that powerful as an explanation of behavior. I tend to think of it as people for partialistic reasons wanting to be a particular kind of person along with particular other kinds of people, and that's what puts them at the margins they end up at. Neither utilitarian nor deontological reasoning. Like, you wanted to be a Quaker and became one.

It's less, um, first of all, I'll say that the 10% went up when I had more money. It can always go up. But I think that that focus on identity is missing something. Like, that focus on identity is not only missing something, but somewhat at odds with— well, I mean, I guess that makes just the altruism. Altruism is not— it is substantively different from the kind of egoism that has to do with the kind of person you are or see yourself to be.

I tend to think one usually arrives at a margin where what matters at that margin is egoism. So like, I knew Sam, Sam Bankman-Fried, 8 or 9 years ago, he had a trader's salary, which was very high, and he gave away all of it and lived off $30K and had a roommate in Manhattan. Now, why did he live off $30K and not $29K? It's still quite virtuous to have done that. But I think he didn't go down to $29K for egoistic reasons at the margin, which is fine. It's amazing what he had done at the time.

Maybe we should go to Katherine, and Sabina, if you have follow-up, we come back to you. Is that all right? Okay.

So Katherine, you go ahead. Actually, I was going to sort of jump in to Sabina's questions, I think, continuing the conversation, because it strikes me— I'm finding this really, really interesting because I think it's getting at something I was trying to think about, and I don't know if I'm just playing with words here, but I wonder if it's interesting, the movement from the term charity, meaning love, and so focused on the mental attitude of the giver, to this idea of effective altruism, which is, you know, effective, it's all, it's mathematical and numerical and calculated, and then altruism, it's focused on the other. Whereas I think actually in both cases I still think that the truth lies somewhere between the two. That there is— I mean, I agree with Sabine, I think there is something else there. And also Tyler Cowen, you talked about the young people who are expressing and want to do something that feels worthwhile. I can see there is clearly an altruistic element in that. I think there's also an element of self realization. So I think these terms like altruism, which sort of divide the self and other, are almost a distraction from the fact that we are our interactions with others. And I may be slightly going back on— going down this path because I was recently reminded of the medieval morality play coming up to Christmas of Everyman, and good deeds, which are the only thing that can accompany him to, to death. And that again, it sort of connects with this focus of effective altruism on, on looking beyond our own lifespans. And I think there's actually something quite human and emotional, not rational, in that desire to do deeds that reach beyond our own lifespan.

I've made the point elsewhere, though not in this talk, that when it comes to obligations to others and also obligations to animals in particular, that I find a lot of religious ideas more useful than utilitarian ideas. And I'm not— A, I'm not religious, and B, I don't even believe in God. But just as an intellectual matter, what you and Sabine are getting at, I think in general I agree. And I would like to see the super secular world of philosophy, parentheses, demographics or destiny, take on a lot more religious ideas on these issues, including Christian.

Maybe we should go back to Sabina then. Yeah. Oh, I think you're mute again.

Maybe, maybe the perspective, your perspective on effective altruism would open a little bit if you didn't use the word intellectual or rational, because the altruistic part is perhaps not rational. That there are human leadings that are not personal. I mean, that's the religious insight, and it doesn't have to be God-based. For Quakers, for many Quakers, it's community-based, where our discernment is beyond the individual and not fully rational. There's a trust in goodwill and the power of attention, a group attention to anything that does not— we're not really waiting for rationality to come through. We're waiting for insight. And I've appreciated your considering our views, but you kept using these words about rationality and intellect that I'm not sure get at the point of the effective altruism movement or what it could be if it didn't dilute itself. Because I think part of it is the altruism comes from something that's not fully rational, and then the effectiveness is an attempt to be rational. It's an attempt to use that altruism in efficient ways.

I am happy with your point, but we do all need to recognize, say, the EA Quaker movement is truly a tiny sliver of the overall EA movement, and the EAers I meet— now, this may be a selection issue that reflects more on me than them— But the EAers who present themselves to me, so to speak, are highly rationalistic, or at least pretend to be as a group. Now, I would very much take on the philosophic point that those who pretend to be more rational very often are not. Nietzsche, you know, wherever you want to take that from. But that said, I would be happy if Quaker-like ideas were more prominent in EA than they currently are. But descriptively speaking, I don't see that the EAers as a group are at where you are at now.

I wish they would learn from— you know, I'm not sure that the Quaker EA movement is a whole lot beyond me and my close circle of friends, but I wouldn't mind if we had more influence.

Um, so there's 3 minutes left. Um, if no one else has a question, I'll just throw in— I don't know, this might be a small question, but I don't know. Um, when you were talking about, um, uh, you know, evaluating the lives of animals and aliens and AIs and stuff, you spoke about, um, partiality. And, um, I mean, I wondered if one potential response there is that, you know, we could be like fully impartial. It's just that at least like at an ethical or evaluative level, it's just that we can't really imagine properly what it's like to be an AI. So it's really just an epistemic gap or epistemic kind of partiality issue. But if we could see, you know, what it's like to be these things, then we could kind of like put those values on the scales. I mean, it might be there's incommensurability, wide incommensurability and stuff, but we wouldn't be like disregarding them for any kind of like moral partiality or anything like that.

I think it's more than just epistemic. So say we think about octopuses, like I won't eat octopus. I'm not sure my reasons are rational,, but I don't think I would make the world better by eating octopus, so let's just not do it. I don't really even like eating octopus, right? So it's just easy for me not to do. I don't think there's some natural unit where we can measure my happiness from the eating, if indeed I liked it, versus the pain suffered by the octopus from being farmed or whatever happens to bring it to my plate. I just don't think there is such a unit. So it's not, oh, the unit is out there, but we haven't sent down enough little naval probes to tap on the brain of the octopus. I don't even know what we would try to measure that could then be compared to what's in my brain. So when there's no natural unit, I tend to think the problem is more in kind. There's some very rough comparison we can make. So if someone said, oh, Tyler Cowen is happier than a termite, there's no natural unit there either. But I feel on okay ground saying I'm happier than a termite. There's some very gross value judgment layered on top of the fact that I live much longer and have this greater diversity of experience and a more powerful brain. But I think it's much more than just epistemic, the problem.

I mean, but that— but everything you said there is compatible with, like, full impartiality. Like, none of that has to do with partiality, right?

Well, but the value judgment we layer on top of me versus the termite, me and the octopus, I don't think it's fully impartial at all. I don't think it can be. It has to come from human frameworks, right? Well, we humans have a certain sense of what a brain is, what happiness is, what a meaningful life is. The termite sense of a meaningful life, maybe it's about chewing up buildings, right? May or may not be. That's an epistemic problem. But still, I don't see that there's commensurability.

Well, this is an interesting place to end with what it's like to be a termite, I guess.

I'll never know.

Well, that was a lot of fun, and thanks so much to everyone for participating, and special thanks to Tyler Cowen for the really excellent talk, really thought-provoking. And yeah, I look forward to talking with you about this stuff more. Thanks very much. Nice to meet you all.

Thank you.