Speaker 1: Pushkin back. In twenty twelve, when Sam Bankman Freed was
Speaker 1: an undergraduate in MIT, he learned about a movement called
Speaker 1: effective altruism or EA for short. The argument behind EA,
Speaker 1: very roughly is that philanthropy is broken. People shouldn't be
Speaker 1: giving away their money based on emotional attachments to certain
Speaker 1: causes or institutions. Rather, they should lean more on evidence
Speaker 1: and reason in order to do as much good as
Speaker 1: possible in the world. Sam Bankman Freed soon became one
Speaker 1: of the most famous proponents of EA. One of the
Speaker 1: things that interested me when I met him the first
Speaker 1: time was his interest in this. I found it curious.
Speaker 1: I had heard bits and pieces about EA, but I
Speaker 1: got the full throated version from him, And as I
Speaker 1: started to write about his world, I found his company
Speaker 1: FTX was filled with people who also considered themselves effective altruists. Then,
Speaker 1: of course, Sam's cryptocurrency exchanged dramatically collapse last year. He
Speaker 1: and FTX had been possibly the best thing ever to
Speaker 1: happen to the effective altruist movement, but the best thing
Speaker 1: quickly transformed into the worst. This is on background from
Speaker 1: Against the Rules, I'm Michael Lewis. Effective altruism is running
Speaker 1: through the background of my forthcoming book, Going Infinite. The
Speaker 1: movement started just a few years before Sam Bankmanfreed encountered it.
Speaker 1: I need to understand what effective altrus really believe and
Speaker 1: what it is about this movement the so appealing to
Speaker 1: smart young people, and also how these advocates are trying
Speaker 1: to pick up the pieces after ftx's collapse. So we
Speaker 1: found two college student who are leaders in effective altruism
Speaker 1: organizations to talk to me about this. Al Shin is
Speaker 1: a senior at Harvard studying statistics and Gabriel mccobe is
Speaker 1: a senior at Stanford studying computer science. I started off
Speaker 1: asking them how they'd explain effective altruism to someone who
Speaker 1: knows nothing about it. Gabe answers, first.
Speaker 2: We are like, at least I am like a person
Speaker 2: with a lot of privilege. I'm born in the US,
Speaker 2: I go to like a pretty good university. I'm a
Speaker 2: man who has grown up in a middle class family.
Speaker 2: Like I have a lot of privilege and resources to
Speaker 2: do change and impact in the world. And maybe you
Speaker 2: want to, like actually try to figure out what's the
Speaker 2: way you can have the best positive impact and to me,
Speaker 2: effective altriism is both like a framework for trying to
Speaker 2: think about how we might do a whole lot of
Speaker 2: good with our with our careers at our time, with
Speaker 2: our other resources, and then a community of people who
Speaker 2: are actually trying to put that into practice and actively
Speaker 2: like push their careers and the resources towards doing a
Speaker 2: lot of good.
Speaker 1: What kind of pushback do you get when you're talking
Speaker 1: to people your age about these ideas.
Speaker 3: H I think one possible avenue of pushback is this
Speaker 3: very cynical, almost nihilist view that you can't actually enact
Speaker 3: positive change. The actual level of suffering in the world
Speaker 3: is not going to be reduced. There's just not enough
Speaker 3: people working on this.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like what's under that objection is basic selfishness,
Speaker 1: that that I don't really want to have to think
Speaker 1: about the world this way. So if I can dismiss
Speaker 1: these arguments as saying as being preposterous, I can go
Speaker 1: about my selfish life.
Speaker 3: Certainly there's some people like that, and I would not
Speaker 3: say though, that everyone is like that. I think there
Speaker 3: is genuinely people who have some level of very cynical,
Speaker 3: nihilistic outlook as to what humanity can accomplish, and that
Speaker 3: bleeds into not taking people seriously when they tend to
Speaker 3: have a more hopeful, optimistic attitude. And even for people
Speaker 3: who are very involved in EA, at some point, these
Speaker 3: also just tend to be people who are philosophically inclined,
Speaker 3: and the philosophically inclined also tend toward nihilisa at some
Speaker 3: point in their lives. So maybe they'll come.
Speaker 4: Back around.
Speaker 2: And like about the point of like people being selfish,
Speaker 2: Like I don't know when I was like first, like
Speaker 2: thinking about the ideas, it can feel overwhelming. Sometimes they
Speaker 2: give about like oh wow, like maybe the default thing
Speaker 2: we're grown up with. As all said, is the world
Speaker 2: kind of beats into you that you're just a tiny
Speaker 2: little ant in this universe. You can't really do anything.
Speaker 2: They are all these big systems. It's pretty hopeless to
Speaker 2: actually do any change. And then EA is all like
Speaker 2: whoa people can have an impact, You can be like
Speaker 2: dispropersonally impactful, you can do all this stuff That feels
Speaker 2: like a lot of responsibility. It also feels like maybe
Speaker 2: a lot of pressure thinking about like, oh, do I
Speaker 2: actually want to change the trajectory of my career. I'm
Speaker 2: just like a young college student like I thought I
Speaker 2: was going to like do these other like fun interesting things,
Speaker 2: but maybe I actually want to like change totally what
Speaker 2: I would work on, and that can be kind of
Speaker 2: scary for me. I think I had some of that
Speaker 2: maybe cognitive dissonance when I was first getting involved and
Speaker 2: trying to think of like how much I wanted to
Speaker 2: trade off, like what I would otherwise do if I
Speaker 2: was like totally egoistic, versus what I wanted to prioritize
Speaker 2: in terms of altruism and helping others and all this.
Speaker 1: When I first heard the ideas, I had encountered them
Speaker 1: in a very casual way because people had told me
Speaker 1: about young people going to Wall Street to make money
Speaker 1: to give it away, and I thought that that was
Speaker 1: really interesting, what a curious subversion of Wall Street. But
Speaker 1: when I first got the full blast from the people
Speaker 1: at FTX, I remember thinking, this is so alien to
Speaker 1: anything I heard or felt, or any impulse I had
Speaker 1: when I was a college student, And I asked myself
Speaker 1: like why, And I think the answer that the honest
Speaker 1: answer was I didn't want to change the world. I
Speaker 1: liked the world just the way I found it. There
Speaker 1: was a kind of idiot happiness that I experienced when
Speaker 1: I was a college student that would have inoculated me
Speaker 1: against any kind of intellectual assault from an effective altruist.
Speaker 1: You probably don't really run across that as much. I bet.
Speaker 2: Also at Stanford there's like definitely a like people call
Speaker 2: it the Stanford bubble. It's easy to like feel like
Speaker 2: you're in this little utopia separated from the universe, and
Speaker 2: a lot of people just like, I don't know, life
Speaker 2: is good here and let's just go work in fintech
Speaker 2: or something. But also there are like quite a lot
Speaker 2: of people here who do recognize that the world has
Speaker 2: quite a lot of issues, and a lot of people here,
Speaker 2: I think do want to do things about that. Whether
Speaker 2: that's like I don't know, there's like a lot of
Speaker 2: people interested in climate change or social justice or things
Speaker 2: like this. I think it's very much the case that
Speaker 2: many young people now are at least very broadly in
Speaker 2: with helping others.
Speaker 1: After a short break, Gabe All and I get into
Speaker 1: what sets effective altruism apart from ordinary altruism on background,
Speaker 1: will be right back. I'm back with Harvard senior Al
Speaker 1: Shin and Stanford senior Gabriel Mukobe on background, I would
Speaker 1: love you both to explain to someone who's never heard
Speaker 1: of these ideas, like, what's the difference between effective altruism
Speaker 1: and just altruism ordinary philanthropy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, Peter Wldeford, who's one of the co founders
Speaker 2: of Rethink Priorities, has a recent.
Speaker 1: Post that I quite like.
Speaker 2: It's called eas three radical ideas I want to protect,
Speaker 2: and the three ideas are radical empathy, trying to think
Speaker 2: about the ways that society might be wrong in not
Speaker 2: extending moral consideration to others. The second is scope sensitivity.
Speaker 2: A lot of people are bad at actually estimating the
Speaker 2: amount of impact certain things will do. If you like
Speaker 2: survey people on like, hey, you could do this one
Speaker 2: intervention and it would like save a thousand chicken lives
Speaker 2: versus this other thing and it would save like one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand chicken lives. And you ask the people like, hey,
Speaker 2: how good is this thing compared to the other, and
Speaker 2: then they like, way to un upscale. The difference is like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's like goes from like a six to a seven.
Speaker 2: So like, emotionally, a lot of people have a hard time,
Speaker 2: like empirically or objectively evaluating the impact of things.
Speaker 1: Of the things they do right or the money they give.
Speaker 1: And EA is measuring this so that you have scope sensitivity.
Speaker 2: Measuring or like at least just trying to be aware
Speaker 2: of this effect and trying to actually do things that
Speaker 2: seem to have more of an impact on others rather
Speaker 2: than just like more impact on how we feel good
Speaker 2: inside of our heads about us doing things. And then
Speaker 2: the third thing is scout mindset. And this is the
Speaker 2: idea of like thinking of your arguments and the ways
Speaker 2: you approach the world, not as like soldiers. Like a
Speaker 2: lot of people argue with each other as soldiers. Their
Speaker 2: arguments are soldiers is the term, I guess where you
Speaker 2: are on the right side. You're like fighting for your
Speaker 2: kingdom or whatever, and you're going to say the things
Speaker 2: in order to win the battle. This is different from
Speaker 2: how scouts approach the world, where you don't know about
Speaker 2: the territory and a landscape and you're trying to maintain
Speaker 2: uncertainty over different possibilities and taking different evidence and try
Speaker 2: to figure out what the truth is. Maybe this is
Speaker 2: just a better way of approaching thinking about the world
Speaker 2: that can enable us to be closer to the truth,
Speaker 2: more honest and more objective and hopefully mess up less
Speaker 2: when we're trying to do a lot of impactful things.
Speaker 1: A can I ask you the same question, just like
Speaker 1: if you're just explaining the difference between general do goodism
Speaker 1: or philanthropy and effective altruism, how do you go about it?
Speaker 3: I think effective in effective altruism is not to contrast
Speaker 3: it with ineffective altruism, but to make it seem like
Speaker 3: this is altruism that is really focused on the effects
Speaker 3: of what we're doing, that isn't about how the do
Speaker 3: gooder necessarily feels about the actions that they're doing, but
Speaker 3: what amount of good do those actions put into the world.
Speaker 1: How big a part of your life is it? Is
Speaker 1: there anything you've done differently with your life because this
Speaker 1: movement exists?
Speaker 3: Hmm? I think it has altered the course of what
Speaker 3: I chose to study. I mean I basically change from
Speaker 3: some interest in computer science and machine learning and protein
Speaker 3: folding coming into college into getting a more broader statistical
Speaker 3: and probability base that could be generalized to more problems
Speaker 3: depending on what seemed more urgent at the time, which
Speaker 3: is forever changing. So I thought, like a more broad
Speaker 3: probability basis would be good for that. I think there
Speaker 3: is some reasonable limit you have to impose on your
Speaker 3: self before you find yourself over optimizing to doing the
Speaker 3: most good and ending up not necessarily operating like a
Speaker 3: human being, but just like a little ball of stress
Speaker 3: that is constantly tormented with the amount of suffering that
Speaker 3: you're putting into the world. This is something that the
Speaker 3: effective Altruism movement is trying to discourage among especially young
Speaker 3: people who get involved, because again the philosophically minded, in
Speaker 3: addition to going through a nihilist phase, also go through
Speaker 3: like several neurotic phases in their life.
Speaker 1: Probably what would be going too far with effective altruism
Speaker 1: in your mind?
Speaker 4: Hmm?
Speaker 1: What line when someone crosses it in the movement do
Speaker 1: you think I wouldn't do that?
Speaker 3: Something like if you're forcing yourself to do something that
Speaker 3: you hate, like absolutely despise, because of some abstract reasoning
Speaker 3: that this is the most good that you, in particular
Speaker 3: can do. I think sacrificing a lot of personal happiness
Speaker 3: for like very uncertain future outcomes when there are options
Speaker 3: that like you could do that you would be happy
Speaker 3: with that aren't bad. It's like not impossible that someone
Speaker 3: hears that, oh, this particular uh, like biosecurity or pandemic
Speaker 3: preparedness or bio risk is a really important cause area,
Speaker 3: and then they force themselves to go work in the
Speaker 3: wet lab even though they hate lab work. They absolutely
Speaker 3: despise it. They don't like the like PPA, they don't
Speaker 3: like the protocols, they don't like working with chemicals or organisms,
Speaker 3: et cetera. But for some reason they have decided based
Speaker 3: on their reasoning, and this is the most important thing
Speaker 3: that they can do. I would say that, like, this
Speaker 3: extreme sacrifice of personal happiness and ability to enjoy the
Speaker 3: work that you do is probably indicative that you like.
Speaker 3: This is not something that the movement wants to induce
Speaker 3: in people who are exposed to its ideas.
Speaker 1: Right, gave, let me ask you this same question, like
Speaker 1: how it's affected your life, your actual decisions you've made
Speaker 1: or things you've done that you would not otherwise have
Speaker 1: done if effective altruism didn't exist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, now I'm for my career, I'm like primarily
Speaker 2: considering working in AI safety or policy or field building.
Speaker 2: I think, like most directly, probably it's like accelerated my
Speaker 2: like thinking of this and trying to critically analyze the
Speaker 2: trajectory I want to set my personal career on and
Speaker 2: what I should be doing to get there. So maybe
Speaker 2: it's more of like a speed up effect than like
Speaker 2: a drastic turn. I think it's been useful to have
Speaker 2: both like this framework, this intellectual thing and the community.
Speaker 2: And the community has been like really helpful and I've
Speaker 2: made a lot of friends, and I'm like very thankful
Speaker 2: to have a lot of people who are supporting me
Speaker 2: and can talk to to discuss these very hard questions.
Speaker 1: But this must come up in the community, Like where
Speaker 1: do you draw the line? Yeah, yeah, definitely, And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking not just like choice of career, but how about
Speaker 1: a question like do you have kids? Is it a
Speaker 1: selfish and ineffective pursuit having kids? I mean you hear
Speaker 1: people talk about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. I hang out with people who are like
Speaker 2: mostly too young to be having kids right now.
Speaker 1: So what you're thinking about you But it's gonna come
Speaker 1: up someone.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's certainly, like a lot of people writing on
Speaker 2: the forum dot effective ulstulism dot org. There's one post
Speaker 2: they had decided not to have kids, and they're like, wow,
Speaker 2: this is this is just the rational thing to do,
Speaker 2: like it's it would be selfish for us to do
Speaker 2: as and they like committed to this, and they were miserable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the argument argument is, you have you'll have
Speaker 1: less of an impact on the problems that threaten humanity
Speaker 1: and less of an impact on totally human happiness if
Speaker 1: if you have to spend so many hours raising a child.
Speaker 2: That was the general idea, the or like at least
Speaker 2: the naive utilitarian idea perhaps, But it turns out they
Speaker 2: were miserable. They like really didn't like it. So they
Speaker 2: talked about it and decided like, yeah, it's actually, like
Speaker 2: IL said, this is something we actually care about a lot.
Speaker 2: That's like really integral to our personal happiness and to
Speaker 2: our life satisfaction. We do want to have kids, And
Speaker 2: they decided to have kids. And I think now they
Speaker 2: have kids and they're much happier. They're also like more productive,
Speaker 2: they said, and like this has actually been an increase
Speaker 2: to their productivity and they're like self reported ability to
Speaker 2: do a lot of good. So certainly, like people think
Speaker 2: about this a lot and try to talk about it,
Speaker 2: but it seems like there are no clear answers. Universally,
Speaker 2: a lot of this stuff just depends on the individual.
Speaker 1: Perhaps, how do you have anything to say about having kids?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say on the flip side of this problem,
Speaker 3: probably a lot of people have kids for the wrong
Speaker 3: reasons too, like social pressure, familial pressure, et cetera. And
Speaker 3: maybe being an effective altruism makes them more likely to
Speaker 3: identify like these pressures that are causing them to make
Speaker 3: a decision that wouldn't be good for them, either in
Speaker 3: terms of personal happiness or even in terms of their
Speaker 3: Do you solve the problem?
Speaker 1: Do you all have these discussions about kids?
Speaker 3: Not really?
Speaker 1: Not really? What about kidneys? What about giving a kidney?
Speaker 1: So the first my characters had big talks about kids
Speaker 1: and mostly came down on the side you're not supposed
Speaker 1: to have them. They were arguing, that's where they settled. Mostly.
Speaker 1: The kidney question was another one, like do you have
Speaker 1: an obligation to give away your kidney? Yeah?
Speaker 2: It seems like there's like a lot of discussion about
Speaker 2: this several years ago in the EA community, at least
Speaker 2: like what I've read online. I was not involved, Like
Speaker 2: back then.
Speaker 1: You were your post, you're a post.
Speaker 2: Post kidney yeah post. A lot of people were thinking
Speaker 2: about this and it seems like there is like quite
Speaker 2: a compelling case. Maybe like a lot of people just
Speaker 2: die from being on the kidney wait list, and like
Speaker 2: there aren't enough kidneys, and uh, seems like generally it's
Speaker 2: somewhat safe to survive on one kidney for a lot
Speaker 2: of people. Maybe this just like is a very direct
Speaker 2: way to mostly kind of factually save someone's life. So
Speaker 2: I think that's like, I don't know pretty any strong case.
Speaker 2: I've not thought about this a lot. I've not given
Speaker 2: a kidney. I don't know anyone else of like my
Speaker 2: ea friends who has. It seems like for for various reasons,
Speaker 2: this is like falling out of favor in the in
Speaker 2: the conversations. It's also just like a very extreme kind
Speaker 2: of commitment, Like it's it's a very bad recruiting strategy
Speaker 2: to be like, hey have you heard of effective autism?
Speaker 2: By the way, can we have your kidney? This is
Speaker 2: this is like I don't know, it's not the best
Speaker 2: way to like approach people, I think, And yeah, maybe it's.
Speaker 1: Really this it's kind of a second date conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to give it a little time to do, perhaps, right.
Speaker 3: I've had some friends bring up the discussion of kidney's
Speaker 3: it still seems mostly like I throw away philosophical argument
Speaker 3: then necessarily a direct moral imperative. I don't think there's
Speaker 3: ever been a instance where someone who's like, I'm going
Speaker 3: to donate my kidney unless someone gives me a good
Speaker 3: argument to stop me.
Speaker 1: Right now, I'm curious, are there still debates with NEA
Speaker 1: about focusing on immediate suffering versus focusing on big, long
Speaker 1: term existential threats, current lives versus lives in the future.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, definitely, definitely.
Speaker 1: Is it kind of still an urgent top of your conversation, Anya.
Speaker 3: I would say yes, but it's not stopping people from
Speaker 3: doing work in either of those areas. While the debate
Speaker 3: is not settled, certainly people are still pushing forward and
Speaker 3: no solving or alleviating tuberculosis burden versus working on these
Speaker 3: like accidential threats that might happen in the future.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a break here. When we return,
Speaker 1: Gave and Al talk about effective altruism and the idea
Speaker 1: of the bank Shop. It's interesting to me because after
Speaker 1: my main character in the book, after Sam Bankman freed,
Speaker 1: he does collide with THEA and in its very early incarnation,
Speaker 1: and in its early and its first incarnation, it really
Speaker 1: is about like taking some of your salary and giving
Speaker 1: it to an effective charity, that is, you know, saving
Speaker 1: the most lives in poor countries. And a year into it,
Speaker 1: there's a kind of intellectual revolution inside of the in
Speaker 1: the minds of the very people who who brought him EA,
Speaker 1: and they are starting to argue that actually the more
Speaker 1: impactful thing to do is try to prevent humanity from
Speaker 1: being wiped out by some pathogen or by you know,
Speaker 1: unaligned AI or or whatever it is. And I'm just
Speaker 1: kind of wondering how alive that debate still is, or
Speaker 1: if it's just kind of a dead letter, or if
Speaker 1: it's affecting the way you're thinking about what you're doing
Speaker 1: with your lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a big unsettled question here is being
Speaker 3: able to prioritize these very different moral responsibilities we have
Speaker 3: around harm. So I think this is something Elizabeth Ashford
Speaker 3: introduced a few years ago, this idea of like primary, secondary,
Speaker 3: and tertiary moral responsibilities. Primary is you personally don't do harm,
Speaker 3: Secondary is you prevent other people from doing harm to others,
Speaker 3: And third is if someone has experienced harm you work
Speaker 3: to alleviate that harm. So in terms of this, it's
Speaker 3: really a very difficult prioritization scheme when you have all
Speaker 3: these different responsibilities toward harm. And if one of these categories,
Speaker 3: which for example, would be like alleviating as I mentioned before,
Speaker 3: tuberculosis burden that affects millions of people, is still a
Speaker 3: leading infectious disease killer versus preventing a pandemic from being
Speaker 3: engineered that could kill everybody, it's very difficult to see
Speaker 3: where the moral prioritization lines up in terms of what
Speaker 3: you should personally work on. And it's also something that
Speaker 3: like might not necessarily be solvable with doing like a
Speaker 3: probability calculation, because like moral responsibility is not necessarily something
Speaker 3: that you can like boil down to numbers.
Speaker 1: It's also hard to make probability calculations about a lot
Speaker 1: of the existential threats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like certainly it's probably like harder than you're
Speaker 2: like more likely to be wrong than like a randomized
Speaker 2: control trial of malaria interventions. Right at the same time,
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people can make pretty good
Speaker 2: educated guesses, perhaps based on the evidence we have and
Speaker 2: the reasoning we have about things like a lot of
Speaker 2: people in the EA movement perhaps predicted something like COVID
Speaker 2: before it happened. A lot of people are like raising
Speaker 2: the fire alarms of we should have much better pandemic
Speaker 2: preparedness and monitoring and rapid vaccine development programs, and then
Speaker 2: they like, for various reasons, messed up and weren't listened
Speaker 2: to and COVID happened. Anyway, Maybe like similar things are
Speaker 2: happening with with AI risk now too, where if you
Speaker 2: survey like leading machine learning experts who are like not
Speaker 2: focused on these risks and are just like people publishing
Speaker 2: top papers that some of the top machine learning conferences.
Speaker 2: The result from the most recent AI impact survey was,
Speaker 2: like the median respondent gives like a ten percent chance
Speaker 2: that the development of AI will like destroy everyone, like
Speaker 2: results in catastrophic outcomes, including human extinction.
Speaker 1: They're real things, They're possibly real.
Speaker 3: I definitely agree with Gabe on this point that the
Speaker 3: difficulty and maybe the lack of clarity on an exact
Speaker 3: number of people that might be killed by AI in
Speaker 3: the future is not a counter argument to the fact
Speaker 3: that this could be a really big problem. Like the uncertainty,
Speaker 3: isn't that like there's a super super super high probability
Speaker 3: that nothing is going to happen. There's definitely lots of
Speaker 3: fairly fairly good analysis on things that may come to
Speaker 3: pass if we don't do anything to regulate or do
Speaker 3: solve certain issues.
Speaker 1: The characters in my book did this bank shot that
Speaker 1: effective altruism kind of dreamed up They all earned to
Speaker 1: give idea that you go do a job that you
Speaker 1: might not necessarily do to maximize the dollars you make
Speaker 1: that you can then give away to people like you
Speaker 1: so you can do what you're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so certainly a lot of early EA stuff was
Speaker 2: kind of focused on, hey, we're just a very small movement,
Speaker 2: maybe we should like figure out ways to more effectively
Speaker 2: direct philanthropic funds towards more impactful organizations. Over time, as
Speaker 2: the community has grown, as people have engaged in these
Speaker 2: ideas further, now people are like, hey, what if we
Speaker 2: are the philanthropic organizations, what if we actually do this
Speaker 2: direct work and try to have more of an impact.
Speaker 2: There's certainly like a lot of current issues, like a
Speaker 2: lot of perhaps global health and developments and animal welfare,
Speaker 2: things that can just benefit from a lot of money.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's where a lot of this funding still goes to.
Speaker 2: But certainly they are like a lot of within there,
Speaker 2: within those fields and within other causes, there's like still
Speaker 2: a very big need for people doing direct work, and
Speaker 2: so it's maybe more of the current focus.
Speaker 1: Is that true, it's Harvard too, ol I would say so.
Speaker 3: Certainly we do have some aspects of even our introductory
Speaker 3: fellowship that is more of this classic If you have
Speaker 3: like spare money and a lot of people would benefit
Speaker 3: from donating it, then you probably should and you should
Speaker 3: make sure it goes to highly effective charities that can
Speaker 3: make that money go as far as possible and save
Speaker 3: the most people. What we don't really encourage is making
Speaker 3: lots of money and then expecting people to donate it
Speaker 3: for a lot of the same reasons that Gabe has outlined. Generally,
Speaker 3: like the people who are coming into Harvard EA tend
Speaker 3: to have like very specialized skill sets and ability to
Speaker 3: acquire like lots of really really cool cool skills basically,
Speaker 3: and if it we didn't like direct them to doing
Speaker 3: like the very best things that they could do with
Speaker 3: like these very specific and unique talents, then this would
Speaker 3: also be like quite a quite a waste.
Speaker 1: It's a interesting because it's very different from what was
Speaker 1: being pitched by the leaders of effective altruism back when
Speaker 1: Sam Beckman Free was MT he listened to speech where
Speaker 1: it was really encouraging the audience to go to Wall
Speaker 1: Street or go into some high paying job and channel
Speaker 1: the dollars. You know, instead of being a doctor in Africa,
Speaker 1: you could pay for ten doctors in Africa. And that's
Speaker 1: that idea is not kicking around in the same way.
Speaker 2: I think it's also much harder perhaps now to be
Speaker 2: like really successful at earning to give compared to some
Speaker 2: of this other stuff. Like maybe earning to give is
Speaker 2: much more heavy tailed in the sense that it's just
Speaker 2: the very few people who make like, like the very
Speaker 2: extreme amounts of money who can like pay for a
Speaker 2: lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's funny because he earn to give idea originates with
Speaker 1: Toby Ord doing it himself, and he's a He's on
Speaker 1: an Oxford professor's salary and arguing and making the point
Speaker 1: that just by donating an oversized chunk of his salary
Speaker 1: not so much that he couldn't survive, that he would
Speaker 1: save like eighty thousand children from likeness in Africa, and
Speaker 1: it's that idea was intoxicating to Sam and to the
Speaker 1: people around him, but it doesn't sound like it's really
Speaker 1: it's as infectious with you all. The reason that's odd
Speaker 1: to me is that you're both sitting in institutions that
Speaker 1: are pipelines to very high paying jobs in tech and finance,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of like that it would be a
Speaker 1: it would be a natural step.
Speaker 2: So I wouldn't say it's like gone away, but I
Speaker 2: would like distinguish that kind of earning to give from
Speaker 2: like the oh, let's actually try to like get into
Speaker 2: the very tail end of the highest paying jobs, particularly
Speaker 2: not through the thing you're going to do otherwise, but
Speaker 2: do the thing that earns the most money as possible
Speaker 2: and donate. And that seems like much much harder to
Speaker 2: me to succeed at compared to like directing people to
Speaker 2: direct work in fields that they might be really competent at.
Speaker 1: For a brief period, Sam Beckman Freed made it look
Speaker 1: very easy, And I'm wondering when FTX blew up, if
Speaker 1: it reverberated around your organizations and people talk about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was definitely a lot of shock waves that
Speaker 3: went through every organization affiliated with Effective Altruism in some way,
Speaker 3: some more than others. It really did cause a lot
Speaker 3: of people, including college organizers, to step back and just
Speaker 3: feel like, did why did this happen? Basically in terms
Speaker 3: of like how how responsible should the EA community as
Speaker 3: a whole be for making this happen? As like one
Speaker 3: guy who got affiliated with EA and is like now
Speaker 3: in a position of huge monetary influence, felt empowered to
Speaker 3: make a lot of like very very very poor decisions.
Speaker 1: Gabe, do you have some thoughts on this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, certainly like that resonates a lot there if
Speaker 2: you especially, like look online, So people in EA really
Speaker 2: like the scout mindset thing as like a part of
Speaker 2: that is considering where you might be wrong, and so
Speaker 2: maybe affect Rautism more than a lot of other communities
Speaker 2: really likes to criticize itself, try to think of ways
Speaker 2: are wrong in order to improve our our like our
Speaker 2: strategy and framework and whatever. So there certainly, like has
Speaker 2: been a lot of online discourse about this, a lot
Speaker 2: of people, especially like older people in the community discussing
Speaker 2: like whoa is this our fault? Like all said, did
Speaker 2: did we go wrong? Is this eas fold? Or is
Speaker 2: Sam just a bad person and we like missed him
Speaker 2: or something. Certainly, like like the online discussion within the
Speaker 2: EA community seems to have been like even larger than
Speaker 2: the media discussion of this. Like I don't know, maybe
Speaker 2: the new cycle just moves fast and people move on
Speaker 2: to new things, but like it feels like still they're
Speaker 2: like every couple of weeks or something, the new community
Speaker 2: posts about like hey, how could we have prevented the
Speaker 2: FTX situation? But among like college students, it seems like
Speaker 2: that's quite different. They're like some of some of our
Speaker 2: like new EA intro fellows who are like doing the
Speaker 2: fellowship in the fall when this happened, I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: so you did you hear about the news about FTX
Speaker 2: and SBF What do you think about that? And they're like, Oh,
Speaker 2: who's Sam Bigmanfreed?
Speaker 1: Have you heard anybody in these forums or anybody in
Speaker 1: your groups try to justify Sam's behavior, saying that actually
Speaker 1: this was he's Robin hood, that we don't mind him
Speaker 1: having tried to take taken this risk with depositors' money
Speaker 1: because the money was going to go to these other
Speaker 1: things and it could have worked out. Don't blame him.
Speaker 2: People in effective Elshism seem to want to always try
Speaker 2: to consider both sides of any kind of situation and
Speaker 2: try to like yep, as all said, like think about
Speaker 2: a thing and then immediately think about the current arguments. Certainly,
Speaker 2: when FTX first happened, there's I remember seeing some comments
Speaker 2: about like, oh, maybe maybe this was because of X
Speaker 2: reasons and why, or at least like we should be
Speaker 2: like cutting Sam some slack because he must feel like
Speaker 2: really shitty right now, which is probably true. I think generally,
Speaker 2: now the sentiment has changed a lot, and everyone's like, Wow,
Speaker 2: you're really messed up. This seems like very clearly bad.
Speaker 1: This was hugely useful to me, more useful than you know,
Speaker 1: And I really appreciate you giving me the time. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you too, Thank you so much for chatting Michael.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all right, bye bye. Al Shinn is a
Speaker 1: senior at Harvard and Gabriel mccobe is a senior at Stanford.
Speaker 1: Let's end today with a letter we got from a
Speaker 1: listener about a little snippet of conversation I had in
Speaker 1: the previous episode. I was chatting with Molly White, the
Speaker 1: noted crypto critic. Molly got her start in public life
Speaker 1: at the age of thirteen when she edited a Wikipedia
Speaker 1: article about unicycles. At the very end of the episode,
Speaker 1: we tucked in the little exchange that I had with Molly,
Speaker 1: mainly because my producers thought it was funny. We call
Speaker 1: this an easter egg. It ran after the episode's credits,
Speaker 1: so probably a lot of you didn't even hear it.
Speaker 1: What did you edit on the unicycle Wikipedia page?
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure that I added information about the existence
Speaker 4: of other types of unicycles. You know, so there's like
Speaker 4: the very standard unicycle, but there's also ones that like
Speaker 4: arement for going off road, and there are ones that
Speaker 4: have like really big wheels that let you go long distance.
Speaker 1: You know, an off road unicycle is is is to
Speaker 1: cycling what bitcoin is to money. It's sort of it's
Speaker 1: sort of like a solution in search of the problem.
Speaker 1: Absolutely well. Listener Chris Holme heard that, and she wrote
Speaker 1: in her professional title is writer in chief at Chris
Speaker 1: Holme Unicycles Limited. Chris writes, I think Michael might need
Speaker 1: a bit of context on mountain unicycling. It is hardly
Speaker 1: the Bitcoin of mountain biking. Even if he doesn't find
Speaker 1: the sport interesting. I suspect he might find it intriguing
Speaker 1: to find the reality of the sport so very different
Speaker 1: from the perception. Well, Chris, I want to apologize, because
Speaker 1: I never want to offend anybody. But actually, when I
Speaker 1: said that, the response I got was even more disturbed
Speaker 1: than yours was from bitcoiners who didn't want bitcoin to
Speaker 1: be seen as off road unicycling. So I had got
Speaker 1: it from both sides. I obviously should not have made
Speaker 1: this connection. Obviously, like off road unicycling is dicycling with
Speaker 1: something else is to something else, but not bitcoin is
Speaker 1: to money, And one day, if I summon the nerve
Speaker 1: I might get on an actual unicycle. I kind of
Speaker 1: doubt I'm ever going to get to the mountain unicycling,
Speaker 1: and I kind of doubt that I'm ever going to
Speaker 1: have a reason to actually explore the reality of the sport.
Speaker 1: So I apologize. I apologize for being so cavalier about
Speaker 1: something that is obviously important to other people. If you
Speaker 1: have a question, I'd love to hear it. You can
Speaker 1: contact me with it by clicking on our show notes
Speaker 1: or going to ATR podcast dot com. On Background is
Speaker 1: hosted by me Michael Lewis, and produced by Catherine Girardeau
Speaker 1: and Lydia gene Kott. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our
Speaker 1: engineer is Sarah Bruguier. Thanks to our SVP of production,
Speaker 1: Greta Cone, our show is recorded by Toper Ruth at
Speaker 1: Berkeley Advanced Media Studios. Our music was composed by Matthias
Speaker 1: Bossi and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet. My old
Speaker 1: friend Nick Brittel composed our theme song. On Background is
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
Speaker 1: listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts, and if you'd like to listen ad
Speaker 1: free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to
Speaker 1: sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at Pushkin dot Fm,
Speaker 1: Backslash Plus or on our Apple show page. Al I'm
Speaker 1: going to be at your graduation? Oh be cause you're
Speaker 1: cause you're graduating with Quinn. Have you seen her around?
Speaker 3: I have not used a career dance studio recent, which
Speaker 3: is where I would most likely see Quinn. When Quinn
Speaker 3: knew me in the first year arts program, I had
Speaker 3: not started dancing. I started breakdancing in the fall after
Speaker 3: the program.
Speaker 1: Do you consider yourself an effective breakdancer?
Speaker 3: I think this falls squarely in the realm of things
Speaker 3: that I'm not optimizing in my life.