80,000 Hours Podcast

Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is. As the author of the Substack Don’t Worry About the Vase, Zvi has spent as much time as literally anyone in the world over the last two years tracking in detail how the explosion of AI has been playing out — and he has strong opinions about almost every aspect of it. Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin asks Zvi for his takes on:US-China negotiationsWhether AI progress has stalledThe biggest wins and losses for alignment in 2023EU and White House AI regulationsWhich major AI lab has the best safety strategyThe pros and cons of the Pause AI movementRecent breakthroughs in capabilitiesIn what situations it’s morally acceptable to work at AI labsWhether you agree or disagree with his views, Zvi is super informed and brimming with concrete details.Zvi and Rob also talk about:The risk of AI labs fooling themselves into believing their alignment plans are working when they may not be.The “sleeper agent” issue uncovered in a recent Anthropic paper, and how it shows us how hard alignment actually is.Why Zvi disagrees with 80,000 Hours’ advice about gaining career capital to have a positive impact.Zvi’s project to identify the most strikingly horrible and neglected policy failures in the US, and how Zvi founded a new think tank (Balsa Research) to identify innovative solutions to overthrow the horrible status quo in areas like domestic shipping, environmental reviews, and housing supply.Why Zvi thinks that improving people’s prosperity and housing can make them care more about existential risks like AI.An idea from the online rationality community that Zvi thinks is really underrated and more people should have heard of: simulacra levels.And plenty more.Chapters:Zvi’s AI-related worldview (00:03:41)Sleeper agents (00:05:55)Safety plans of the three major labs (00:21:47)Misalignment vs misuse vs structural issues (00:50:00)Should concerned people work at AI labs? (00:55:45)Pause AI campaign (01:30:16)Has progress on useful AI products stalled? (01:38:03)White House executive order and US politics (01:42:09)Reasons for AI policy optimism (01:56:38)Zvi’s day-to-day (02:09:47)Big wins and losses on safety and alignment in 2023 (02:12:29)Other unappreciated technical breakthroughs (02:17:54)Concrete things we can do to mitigate risks (02:31:19)Balsa Research and the Jones Act (02:34:40)The National Environmental Policy Act (02:50:36)Housing policy (02:59:59)Underrated rationalist worldviews (03:16:22)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic ArmstrongTranscriptions and additional content editing: Katy Moore

Today’s release is a reading of our career review of AI governance and policy, written and narrated by Cody Fenwick.Advanced AI systems could have massive impacts on humanity and potentially pose global catastrophic risks, and there are opportunities in the broad field of AI governance to positively shape how society responds to and prepares for the challenges posed by the technology.Given the high stakes, pursuing this career path could be many people’s highest-impact option. But they should be very careful not to accidentally exacerbate the threats rather than mitigate them.If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here.Editing and audio proofing: Ben Cordell and Simon MonsourNarration: Cody Fenwick

"When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying to give them a really specific answer, like, 'I solved your problem.' What I’m trying to do often is give them other ways of thinking about what they’re doing, or giving different framings. A classic example of this would be someone who’s been working on a project for a long time and they feel really trapped by it. And someone says, 'Let’s suppose you currently weren’t working on the project, but you could join it. And if you joined, it would be exactly the state it is now. Would you join?' And they’d be like, 'Hell no!' It’s a reframe. It doesn’t mean you definitely shouldn’t join, but it’s a reframe that gives you a new way of looking at it." —Spencer GreenbergIn today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks for a fourth time with listener favourite Spencer Greenberg — serial entrepreneur and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast — about a grab-bag of topics that Spencer has explored since his last appearance on the show a year ago.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:How much money makes you happy — and the tricky methodological issues that come up trying to answer that question.The importance of hype in making valuable things happen.How to recognise warning signs that someone is untrustworthy or likely to hurt you.Whether Registered Reports are successfully solving reproducibility issues in science.The personal principles Spencer lives by, and whether or not we should all establish our own list of life principles.The biggest and most harmful systemic mistakes we commit when making decisions, both individually and as groups.The potential harms of lightgassing, which is the opposite of gaslighting.How Spencer’s team used non-statistical methods to test whether astrology works.Whether there’s any social value in retaliation.And much more.Chapters:Does money make you happy? (00:05:54)Hype vs value (00:31:27)Warning signs that someone is bad news (00:41:25)Integrity and reproducibility in social science research (00:57:54)Personal principles (01:16:22)Decision-making errors (01:25:56)Lightgassing (01:49:23)Astrology (02:02:26)Game theory, tit for tat, and retaliation (02:20:51)Parenting (02:30:00)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic ArmstrongTranscriptions: Katy Moore

"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she’s willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics."Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don’t. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered." — Bob FischerIn today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer — senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals — about Rethink Priorities’s Moral Weight Project.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals — and the limitations of that approach.Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.The results that most surprised Bob.Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.And plenty more.Chapters:Welfare ranges (00:10:19)Historical assessments (00:16:47)Method (00:24:02)The present / absent approach (00:27:39)Results (00:31:42)Chickens (00:32:42)Bees (00:50:00)Salmon and limits of methodology (00:56:18)Octopuses (01:00:31)Pigs (01:27:50)Surprises about the project (01:30:19)Objections to the project (01:34:25)Alternative decision theories and risk aversion (01:39:14)Hedonism assumption (02:00:54)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

"The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well do my muscles have to work? OK, and then if that's true, what would they have to look like at the cellular level for that to be true? Then what do we have to do to make that happen? In my head, it's much more about agency and what choice do I have over my health. And even if I live the same number of years, can I live as an 80-year-old running every day happily with my grandkids?" — Laura DemingIn today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Laura Deming — founder of The Longevity Fund — about the challenge of ending ageing.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:How lifespan is surprisingly easy to manipulate in animals, which suggests human longevity could be increased too.Why we irrationally accept age-related health decline as inevitable.The engineering mindset Laura takes to solving the problem of ageing.Laura’s thoughts on how ending ageing is primarily a social challenge, not a scientific one.The recent exciting regulatory breakthrough for an anti-ageing drug for dogs.Laura’s vision for how increased longevity could positively transform society by giving humans agency over when and how they age.Why this decade may be the most important decade ever for making progress on anti-ageing research.The beauty and fascination of biology, which makes it such a compelling field to work in.And plenty more.Chapters:The case for ending ageing (00:04:00)What might the world look like if this all goes well? (00:21:57)Reasons not to work on ageing research (00:27:25)Things that make mice live longer (00:44:12)Parabiosis, changing the brain, and organ replacement can increase lifespan (00:54:25)Big wins the field of ageing research (01:11:40)Talent shortages and other bottlenecks for ageing research (01:17:36)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number one global risk over the next two years — ranking it ahead of war, environmental problems, and other threats from AI.And the discussion around misinformation and disinformation has shifted to focus on how generative AI or a future super-persuasive AI might change the game and make it extremely hard to figure out what was going on in the world — or alternatively, extremely easy to mislead people into believing convenient lies.But this week’s guest, cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has a very different view on how people form beliefs and figure out who to trust — one in which misinformation really is barely a problem today, and is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon. As he explains in his book Not Born Yesterday, Hugo believes we seriously underrate the perceptiveness and judgement of ordinary people.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.In this interview, host Rob Wiblin and Hugo discuss:How our reasoning mechanisms evolved to facilitate beneficial communication, not blind gullibility.How Hugo makes sense of our apparent gullibility in many cases — like falling for financial scams, astrology, or bogus medical treatments, and voting for policies that aren’t actually beneficial for us.Rob and Hugo’s ideas about whether AI might make misinformation radically worse, and which mass persuasion approaches we should be most worried about.Why Hugo thinks our intuitions about who to trust are generally quite sound, even in today’s complex information environment.The distinction between intuitive beliefs that guide our actions versus reflective beliefs that don’t.Why fake news and conspiracy theories actually have less impact than most people assume.False beliefs that have persisted across cultures and generations — like bloodletting and vaccine hesitancy — and theories about why.And plenty more.Chapters:The view that humans are really gullible (00:04:26)The evolutionary argument against humans being gullible (00:07:46) Open vigilance (00:18:56)Intuitive and reflective beliefs (00:32:25)How people decide who to trust (00:41:15)Redefining beliefs (00:51:57)Bloodletting (01:00:38)Vaccine hesitancy and creationism (01:06:38)False beliefs without skin in the game (01:12:36)One consistent weakness in human judgement (01:22:57)Trying to explain harmful financial decisions (01:27:15)Astrology (01:40:40)Medical treatments that don’t work (01:45:47)Generative AI, LLMs, and persuasion (01:54:50)Ways AI could improve the information environment (02:29:59)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20% of young people are working through anxiety or depression that’s seriously interfering with their lives — but nowhere near 20% of people in their 20s have severe heart disease or cancer or a similar failure in a key organ of the body other than the brain.From an evolutionary perspective, that’s to be expected, right? If your heart or lungs or legs or skin stop working properly while you’re a teenager, you’re less likely to reproduce, and the genes that cause that malfunction get weeded out of the gene pool.So why is it that these evolutionary selective pressures seemingly fixed our bodies so that they work pretty smoothly for young people most of the time, but it feels like evolution fell asleep on the job when it comes to the brain? Why did evolution never get around to patching the most basic problems, like social anxiety, panic attacks, debilitating pessimism, or inappropriate mood swings? For that matter, why did evolution go out of its way to give us the capacity for low mood or chronic anxiety or extreme mood swings at all?Today’s guest, Randy Nesse — a leader in the field of evolutionary psychiatry — wrote the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, in which he sets out to try to resolve this paradox.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.In the interview, host Rob Wiblin and Randy discuss the key points of the book, as well as:How the evolutionary psychiatry perspective can help people appreciate that their mental health problems are often the result of a useful and important system.How evolutionary pressures and dynamics lead to a wide range of different personalities, behaviours, strategies, and tradeoffs.The missing intellectual foundations of psychiatry, and how an evolutionary lens could revolutionise the field.How working as both an academic and a practicing psychiatrist shaped Randy’s understanding of treating mental health problems.The “smoke detector principle” of why we experience so many false alarms along with true threats.The origins of morality and capacity for genuine love, and why Randy thinks it’s a mistake to try to explain these from a selfish gene perspective.Evolutionary theories on why we age and die.And much more.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Dominic ArmstrongTranscriptions: Katy Moore

"I think at various times — before you have the kid, after you have the kid — it's useful to sit down and think about: What do I want the shape of this to look like? What time do I want to be spending? Which hours? How do I want the weekends to look? The things that are going to shape the way your day-to-day goes, and the time you spend with your kids, and what you're doing in that time with your kids, and all of those things: you have an opportunity to deliberately plan them. And you can then feel like, 'I've thought about this, and this is a life that I want. This is a life that we're trying to craft for our family, for our kids.' And that is distinct from thinking you're doing a good job in every moment — which you can't achieve. But you can achieve, 'I'm doing this the way that I think works for my family.'" — Emily OsterIn today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Emily Oster — economist at Brown University, host of the ParentData podcast, and the author of three hugely popular books that provide evidence-based insights into pregnancy and early childhood.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:Common pregnancy myths and advice that Emily disagrees with — and why you should probably get a doula.Whether it’s fine to continue with antidepressants and coffee during pregnancy.What the data says — and doesn’t say — about outcomes from parenting decisions around breastfeeding, sleep training, childcare, and more.Which factors really matter for kids to thrive — and why that means parents shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.How to reduce parental guilt and anxiety with facts, and reject judgemental “Mommy Wars” attitudes when making decisions that are best for your family.The effects of having kids on career ambitions, pay, and productivity — and how the effects are different for men and women.Practical advice around managing the tradeoffs between career and family.What to consider when deciding whether and when to have kids.Relationship challenges after having kids, and the protective factors that help.And plenty more.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Back in December we spoke with Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — about the speed of progress towards AGI and OpenAI's leadership drama, drawing on Nathan's alarming experience red-teaming an early version of GPT-4 and resulting conversations with OpenAI staff and board members.Today we go deeper, diving into:What AI now actually can and can’t do, across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robotics, weapons — and what the next big breakthrough might be.Why most people, including most listeners, probably don’t know and can’t keep up with the new capabilities and wild results coming out across so many AI applications — and what we should do about that.How we need to learn to talk about AI more productively, particularly addressing the growing chasm between those concerned about AI risks and those who want to see progress accelerate, which may be counterproductive for everyone.Where Nathan agrees with and departs from the views of ‘AI scaling accelerationists.’The chances that anti-regulation rhetoric from some AI entrepreneurs backfires.How governments could (and already do) abuse AI tools like facial recognition, and how militarisation of AI is progressing.Preparing for coming societal impacts and potential disruption from AI.Practical ways that curious listeners can try to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.And plenty more.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2021.You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it. If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box. To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?”You think briefly, and decide you should bet your eternal soul on tails. The fact that you woke up at all seems like pretty good evidence that you’re in the big world — if the coin landed tails, way more people should be having an experience just like yours.But then you get up, walk outside, and look at the number on your box.‘3’. Huh. Now you don’t know what to believe.If God made 10 billion boxes, surely it’s much more likely that you would have seen a number like 7,346,678,928?In today’s interview, Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — explains why this thought experiment from the niche of philosophy known as ‘anthropic reasoning’ could be relevant for figuring out where we should direct our charitable giving.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.Some thinkers both inside and outside Open Philanthropy believe that philanthropic giving should be guided by ‘longtermism’ — the idea that we can do the most good if we focus primarily on the impact our actions will have on the long-term future.Ajeya thinks that for that notion to make sense, there needs to be a good chance we can settle other planets and solar systems and build a society that’s both very large relative to what’s possible on Earth and, by virtue of being so spread out, able to protect itself from extinction for a very long time.But imagine that humanity has two possible futures ahead of it: Either we’re going to have a huge future like that, in which trillions of people ultimately exist, or we’re going to wipe ourselves out quite soon, thereby ensuring that only around 100 billion people ever get to live.If there are eventually going to be 1,000 trillion humans, what should we think of the fact that we seemingly find ourselves so early in history? Being among the first 100 billion humans, as we are, is equivalent to walking outside and seeing a three on your box. Suspicious! If the future will have many trillions of people, the odds of us appearing so strangely early are very low indeed.If we accept the analogy, maybe we can be confident that humanity is at a high risk of extinction based on this so-called ‘doomsday argument‘ alone.If that’s true, maybe we should put more of our resources into avoiding apparent extinction threats like nuclear war and pandemics. But on the other hand, maybe the argument shows we’re incredibly unlikely to achieve a long and stable future no matter what we do, and we should forget the long term and just focus on the here and now instead.There are many critics of this theoretical ‘doomsday argument’, and it may be the case that it logically doesn’t work. This is why Ajeya spent time investigating it, with the goal of ultimately making better philanthropic grants.In this conversation, Ajeya and Rob discuss both the doomsday argument and the challenge Open Phil faces striking a balance between taking big ideas seriously, and not going all in on philosophical arguments that may turn out to be barking up the wrong tree entirely.They also discuss:Which worldviews Open Phil finds most plausible, and how it balances themWhich worldviews Ajeya doesn’t embrace but almost doesHow hard it is to get to other solar systemsThe famous ‘simulation argument’When transformative AI might actually arriveThe biggest challenges involved in working on big research reportsWhat it’s like working at Open PhilAnd much moreProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2021.Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.But the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster.According to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk — it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.The key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. A back-of-the-envelope version of the argument runs:The US government is willing to pay up to $4 million (depending on the agency) to save the life of an American.So saving all US citizens at any given point in time would be worth $1,300 trillion.If you believe that the risk of human extinction over the next century is something like one in six (as Toby Ord suggests is a reasonable figure in his book The Precipice), then it would be worth the US government spending up to $2.2 trillion to reduce that risk by just 1%, in terms of American lives saved alone.Carl thinks it would cost a lot less than that to achieve a 1% risk reduction if the money were spent intelligently. So it easily passes a government cost-benefit test, with a very big benefit-to-cost ratio — likely over 1000:1 today.This argument helped NASA get funding to scan the sky for any asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth, and it was directly promoted by famous economists like Richard Posner, Larry Summers, and Cass Sunstein.If the case is clear enough, why hasn’t it already motivated a lot more spending or regulations to limit existential risks — enough to drive down what any additional efforts would achieve?Carl thinks that one key barrier is that infrequent disasters are rarely politically salient. Research indicates that extra money is spent on flood defences in the years immediately following a massive flood — but as memories fade, that spending quickly dries up. Of course the annual probability of a disaster was the same the whole time; all that changed is what voters had on their minds.Carl suspects another reason is that it’s difficult for the average voter to estimate and understand how large these respective risks are, and what responses would be appropriate rather than self-serving. If the public doesn’t know what good performance looks like, politicians can’t be given incentives to do the right thing.It’s reasonable to assume that if we found out a giant asteroid were going to crash into the Earth one year from now, most of our resources would be quickly diverted into figuring out how to avert catastrophe.But even in the case of COVID-19, an event that massively disrupted the lives of everyone on Earth, we’ve still seen a substantial lack of investment in vaccine manufacturing capacity and other ways of controlling the spread of the virus, relative to what economists recommended.Carl expects that all the reasons we didn’t adequately prepare for or respond to COVID-19 — with excess mortality over 15 million and costs well over $10 trillion — bite even harder when it comes to threats we’ve never faced before, such as engineered pandemics, risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and so on.Today’s episode is in part our way of trying to improve this situation. In today’s wide-ranging conversation, Carl and Rob also cover:A few reasons Carl isn’t excited by ‘strong longtermism’How x-risk reduction compares to GiveWell recommendationsSolutions for asteroids, comets, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, pandemics, and climate changeThe history of bioweaponsWhether gain-of-function research is justifiableSuccesses and failures around COVID-19The history of existential riskAnd much moreProducer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2021.If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil from pipelines.The resulting oil spills damage the environment and cause severe health problems, but the Nigerian government has continually failed in their attempts to stop this theft.They send in the army, and the army gets corrupted. They send in enforcement agencies, and the enforcement agencies get corrupted. What’s happening here?According to Mushtaq Khan, economics professor at SOAS University of London, this is a classic example of ‘networked corruption’. Everyone in the community is benefiting from the criminal enterprise — so much so that the locals would prefer civil war to following the law. It pays vastly better than other local jobs, hotels and restaurants have formed around it, and houses are even powered by the electricity generated from the oil.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.In today’s episode, Mushtaq elaborates on the models he uses to understand these problems and make predictions he can test in the real world.Some of the most important factors shaping the fate of nations are their structures of power: who is powerful, how they are organized, which interest groups can pull in favours with the government, and the constant push and pull between the country’s rulers and its ruled. While traditional economic theory has relatively little to say about these topics, institutional economists like Mushtaq have a lot to say, and participate in lively debates about which of their competing ideas best explain the world around us.The issues at stake are nothing less than why some countries are rich and others are poor, why some countries are mostly law abiding while others are not, and why some government programmes improve public welfare while others just enrich the well connected.Mushtaq’s specialties are anti-corruption and industrial policy, where he believes mainstream theory and practice are largely misguided. To root out fraud, aid agencies try to impose institutions and laws that work in countries like the U.K. today. Everyone nods their heads and appears to go along, but years later they find nothing has changed, or worse — the new anti-corruption laws are mostly just used to persecute anyone who challenges the country’s rulers.As Mushtaq explains, to people who specialise in understanding why corruption is ubiquitous in some countries but not others, this is entirely predictable. Western agencies imagine a situation where most people are law abiding, but a handful of selfish fat cats are engaging in large-scale graft. In fact in the countries they’re trying to change everyone is breaking some rule or other, or participating in so-called ‘corruption’, because it’s the only way to get things done and always has been.Mushtaq’s rule of thumb is that when the locals most concerned with a specific issue are invested in preserving a status quo they’re participating in, they almost always win out.To actually reduce corruption, countries like his native Bangladesh have to follow the same gradual path the U.K. once did: find organizations that benefit from rule-abiding behaviour and are selfishly motivated to promote it, and help them police their peers.Trying to impose a new way of doing things from the top down wasn’t how Europe modernised, and it won’t work elsewhere either.In cases like oil theft in Nigeria, where no one wants to follow the rules, Mushtaq says corruption may be impossible to solve directly. Instead you have to play a long game, bringing in other employment opportunities, improving health services, and deploying alternative forms of energy — in the hope that one day this will give people a viable alternative to corruption.In this extensive interview Rob and Mushtaq cover this and much more, including:How does one test theories like this?Why are companies in some poor countries so much less productive than their peers in rich countries?Have rich countries just legalized the corruption in their societies?What are the big live debates in institutional economics?Should poor countries protect their industries from foreign competition?Where has industrial policy worked, and why?How can listeners use these theories to predict which policies will work in their own countries?Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

Happy new year! We've got a different kind of holiday release for you today. Rather than a 'classic episode,' we've put together one of our favourite highlights from each episode of the show that came out in 2023. That's 32 of our favourite ideas packed into one episode that's so bursting with substance it might be more than the human mind can safely handle.There's something for everyone here:Ezra Klein on punctuated equilibriumTom Davidson on why AI takeoff might be shockingly fastJohannes Ackva on political action versus lifestyle changesHannah Ritchie on how buying environmentally friendly technology helps low-income countries Bryan Caplan on rational irrationality on the part of votersJan Leike on whether the release of ChatGPT increased or reduced AI extinction risksAthena Aktipis on why elephants get deadly cancers less often than humansAnders Sandberg on the lifespan of civilisationsNita Farahany on hacking neural interfaces...plus another 23 such gems. And they're in an order that our audio engineer Simon Monsour described as having an "eight-dimensional-tetris-like rationale."I don't know what the hell that means either, but I'm curious to find out.And remember: if you like these highlights, note that we release 20-minute highlights reels for every new episode over on our sister feed, which is called 80k After Hours. So even if you're struggling to make time to listen to every single one, you can always get some of the best bits of our episodes.We hope for all the best things to happen for you in 2024, and we'll be back with a traditional classic episode soon.This Mega-highlights Extravaganza was brought to you by Ben Cordell, Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2021.Today’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!).The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it’s rare for people to offer detailed insight into their thoughts and struggles — and even rarer for someone as perceptive as Howie to do so.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.The first half of this conversation is a searingly honest account of Howie’s story, including losing a job he loved due to a depressed episode, what it was like to be basically out of commission for over a year, how he got back on his feet, and the things he still finds difficult today.The second half covers Howie’s advice. Conventional wisdom on mental health can be really focused on cultivating willpower — telling depressed people that the virtuous thing to do is to start exercising, improve their diet, get their sleep in check, and generally fix all their problems before turning to therapy and medication as some sort of last resort.Howie tries his best to be a corrective to this misguided attitude and pragmatically focus on what actually matters — doing whatever will help you get better.Mental illness is one of the things that most often trips up people who could otherwise enjoy flourishing careers and have a large social impact, so we think this could plausibly be one of our more valuable episodes. If you’re in a hurry, we’ve extracted the key advice that Howie has to share in a section below.Howie and Keiran basically treated it like a private conversation, with the understanding that it may be too sensitive to release. But, after getting some really positive feedback, they’ve decided to share it with the world.Here are a few quotes from early reviewers:"I think there’s a big difference between admitting you have depression/seeing a psych and giving a warts-and-all account of a major depressive episode like Howie does in this episode… His description was relatable and really inspiring."Someone who works on mental health issues said:"This episode is perhaps the most vivid and tangible example of what it is like to experience psychological distress that I’ve ever encountered. Even though the content of Howie and Keiran’s discussion was serious, I thought they both managed to converse about it in an approachable and not-overly-somber way."And another reviewer said:"I found Howie’s reflections on what is actually going on in his head when he engages in negative self-talk to be considerably more illuminating than anything I’ve heard from my therapist."We also hope that the episode will:Help people realise that they have a shot at making a difference in the future, even if they’re experiencing (or have experienced in the past) mental illness, self doubt, imposter syndrome, or other personal obstacles.Give insight into what it’s like in the head of one person with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome, including the specific thought patterns they experience on typical days and more extreme days. In addition to being interesting for its own sake, this might make it easier for people to understand the experiences of family members, friends, and colleagues — and know how to react more helpfully.Several early listeners have even made specific behavioral changes due to listening to the episode — including people who generally have good mental health but were convinced it’s well worth the low cost of setting up a plan in case they have problems in the future.So we think this episode will be valuable for:People who have experienced mental health problems or might in future;People who have had troubles with stress, anxiety, low mood, low self esteem, imposter syndrome and similar issues, even if their experience isn’t well described as ‘mental illness’;People who have never experienced these problems but want to learn about what it’s like, so they can better relate to and assist family, friends or colleagues who do.In other words, we think this episode could be worthwhile for almost everybody.Just a heads up that this conversation gets pretty intense at times, and includes references to self-harm and suicidal thoughts.If you don’t want to hear or read the most intense section, you can skip the chapter called ‘Disaster’. And if you’d rather avoid almost all of these references, you could skip straight to the chapter called ‘80,000 Hours’.We’ve collected a large list of high quality resources for overcoming mental health problems in our links section.If you’re feeling suicidal or have thoughts of harming yourself right now, there are suicide hotlines at National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US (800-273-8255) and Samaritans in the UK (116 123). You may also want to find and save a number for a local service where possible.Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel

OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everything. Should the world trust them to do that safely?That’s the central theme of today’s episode with Nathan Labenz — entrepreneur, AI scout, and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript. Nathan saw the AI revolution coming years ago, and, astonished by the research he was seeing, set aside his role as CEO of Waymark and made it his full-time job to understand AI capabilities across every domain. He has been obsessively tracking the AI world since — including joining OpenAI’s “red team” that probed GPT-4 to find ways it could be abused, long before it was public.Whether OpenAI was taking AI safety seriously enough became a topic of dinner table conversation around the world after the shocking firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman as CEO last month.Nathan’s view: it’s complicated. Discussion of this topic has often been heated, polarising, and personal. But Nathan wants to avoid that and simply lay out, in a way that is impartial and fair to everyone involved, what OpenAI has done right and how it could do better in his view.When he started on the GPT-4 red team, the model would do anything from diagnose a skin condition to plan a terrorist attack without the slightest reservation or objection. When later shown a “Safety” version of GPT-4 that was almost the same, he approached a member of OpenAI’s board to share his concerns and tell them they really needed to try out GPT-4 for themselves and form an opinion.In today’s episode, we share this story as Nathan told it on his own show, The Cognitive Revolution, which he did in the hope that it would provide useful background to understanding the OpenAI board’s reservations about Sam Altman, which to this day have not been laid out in any detail.But while he feared throughout 2022 that OpenAI and Sam Altman didn’t understand the power and risk of their own system, he has since been repeatedly impressed, and came to think of OpenAI as among the better companies that could hypothetically be working to build AGI.Their efforts to make GPT-4 safe turned out to be much larger and more successful than Nathan was seeing. Sam Altman and other leaders at OpenAI seem to sincerely believe they’re playing with fire, and take the threat posed by their work very seriously. With the benefit of hindsight, Nathan suspects OpenAI’s decision to release GPT-4 when it did was for the best.On top of that, OpenAI has been among the most sane and sophisticated voices advocating for AI regulations that would target just the most powerful AI systems — the type they themselves are building — and that could make a real difference. They’ve also invested major resources into new ‘Superalignment’ and ‘Preparedness’ teams, while avoiding using competition with China as an excuse for recklessness.At the same time, it’s very hard to know whether it’s all enough. The challenge of making an AGI safe and beneficial may require much more than they hope or have bargained for. Given that, Nathan poses the question of whether it makes sense to try to build a fully general AGI that can outclass humans in every domain at the first opportunity. Maybe in the short term, we should focus on harvesting the enormous possible economic and humanitarian benefits of narrow applied AI models, and wait until we not only have a way to build AGI, but a good way to build AGI — an AGI that we’re confident we want, which we can prove will remain safe as its capabilities get ever greater.By threatening to follow Sam Altman to Microsoft before his reinstatement as OpenAI CEO, OpenAI’s research team has proven they have enormous influence over the direction of the company. If they put their minds to it, they’re also better placed than maybe anyone in the world to assess if the company’s strategy is on the right track and serving the interests of humanity as a whole. Nathan concludes that this power and insight only adds to the enormous weight of responsibility already resting on their shoulders.In today’s extensive conversation, Nathan and host Rob Wiblin discuss not only all of the above, but also:Speculation about the OpenAI boardroom drama with Sam Altman, given Nathan’s interactions with the board when he raised concerns from his red teaming efforts.Which AI applications we should be urgently rolling out, with less worry about safety.Whether governance issues at OpenAI demonstrate AI research can only be slowed by governments.Whether AI capabilities are advancing faster than safety efforts and controls.The costs and benefits of releasing powerful models like GPT-4.Nathan’s view on the game theory of AI arms races and China.Whether it’s worth taking some risk with AI for huge potential upside.The need for more “AI scouts” to understand and communicate AI progress.And plenty more.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Milo McGuire and Dominic ArmstrongTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Lead is one of the most poisonous things going. A single sugar sachet of lead, spread over a park the size of an American football field, is enough to give a child that regularly plays there lead poisoning. For life they’ll be condemned to a ~3-point-lower IQ; a 50% higher risk of heart attacks; and elevated risk of kidney disease, anaemia, and ADHD, among other effects.We’ve known lead is a health nightmare for at least 50 years, and that got lead out of car fuel everywhere. So is the situation under control? Not even close.Around half the kids in poor and middle-income countries have blood lead levels above 5 micrograms per decilitre; the US declared a national emergency when just 5% of the children in Flint, Michigan exceeded that level. The collective damage this is doing to children’s intellectual potential, health, and life expectancy is vast — the health damage involved is around that caused by malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV combined.This week’s guest, Lucia Coulter — cofounder of the incredibly successful Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) — speaks about how LEEP has been reducing childhood lead exposure in poor countries by getting bans on lead in paint enforced.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.Various estimates suggest the work is absurdly cost effective. LEEP is in expectation preventing kids from getting lead poisoning for under $2 per child (explore the analysis here). Or, looking at it differently, LEEP is saving a year of healthy life for $14, and in the long run is increasing people’s lifetime income anywhere from $300–1,200 for each $1 it spends, by preventing intellectual stunting.Which raises the question: why hasn’t this happened already? How is lead still in paint in most poor countries, even when that’s oftentimes already illegal? And how is LEEP able to get bans on leaded paint enforced in a country while spending barely tens of thousands of dollars? When leaded paint is gone, what should they target next?With host Robert Wiblin, Lucia answers all those questions and more:Why LEEP isn’t fully funded, and what it would do with extra money (you can donate here).How bad lead poisoning is in rich countries.Why lead is still in aeroplane fuel.How lead got put straight in food in Bangladesh, and a handful of people got it removed.Why the enormous damage done by lead mostly goes unnoticed.The other major sources of lead exposure aside from paint.Lucia’s story of founding a highly effective nonprofit, despite having no prior entrepreneurship experience, through Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program.Why Lucia pledges 10% of her income to cost-effective charities.Lucia’s take on why GiveWell didn’t support LEEP earlier on.How the invention of cheap, accessible lead testing for blood and consumer products would be a game changer.Generalisable lessons LEEP has learned from coordinating with governments in poor countries.And plenty more.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Milo McGuire and Dominic ArmstrongTranscriptions: Katy Moore

"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the government, it will change our interactions with each other. It will make all of us unwitting neuromarketing subjects at all times, because at every moment in time, when you’re interacting on any platform that also has issued you a multifunctional device where they’re looking at your brainwave activity, they are marketing to you, they’re cognitively shaping you."So I wrote the book as both a wake-up call, but also as an agenda-setting: to say, what do we need to do, given that this is coming? And there’s a lot of hope, and we should be able to reap the benefits of the technology, but how do we do that without actually ending up in this world of like, 'Oh my god, mind reading is here. Now what?'" — Nita FarahanyIn today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Nita Farahany — professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School — about applications of cutting-edge neurotechnology.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:How close we are to actual mind reading.How hacking neural interfaces could cure depression.How companies might use neural data in the workplace — like tracking how productive you are, or using your emotional states against you in negotiations.How close we are to being able to unlock our phones by singing a song in our heads.How neurodata has been used for interrogations, and even criminal prosecutions.The possibility of linking brains to the point where you could experience exactly the same thing as another person.Military applications of this tech, including the possibility of one soldier controlling swarms of drones with their mind.And plenty more.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characteristics. But we also have a tendency towards anthropodenial — which involves denying that nonhumans have human characteristics, even when they have them. And those tendencies are both strong, and they can both be triggered by different types of systems. So which one is stronger, which one is more probable, is again going to be contextual. "But when we then consider that we, right now, are building societies and governments and economies that depend on the objectification, exploitation, and extermination of nonhumans, that — plus our speciesism, plus a lot of other biases and forms of ignorance that we have — gives us a strong incentive to err on the side of anthropodenial instead of anthropomorphism." — Jeff SeboIn today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Jeff Sebo — director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program at NYU — about preparing for a world with digital minds.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:The non-negligible chance that AI systems will be sentient by 2030What AI systems might want and need, and how that might affect our moral conceptsWhat happens when beings can copy themselves? Are they one person or multiple people? Does the original own the copy or does the copy have its own rights? Do copies get the right to vote?What kind of legal and political status should AI systems have? Legal personhood? Political citizenship?What happens when minds can be connected? If two minds are connected, and one does something illegal, is it possible to punish one but not the other?The repugnant conclusion and the rebugnant conclusionThe experience of trying to build the field of AI welfareWhat improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the worldAnd plenty more.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it?It's common to think that 'staying informed' and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do. But in today's episode, host Rob Wiblin is joined by economist Bryan Caplan to discuss the book Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life — which argues that reading the news both makes us miserable and distorts our understanding of the world. Far from informing us and enabling us to improve the world, consuming the news distracts us, confuses us, and leaves us feeling powerless.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.In the first half of the episode, Bryan and Rob discuss various alleged problems with the news, including:That it overwhelmingly provides us with information we can't usefully act on.That it's very non-representative in what it covers, in particular favouring the negative over the positive and the new over the significant.That it obscures the big picture, falling into the trap of thinking 'something important happens every day.'That it's highly addictive, for many people chewing up 10% or more of their waking hours.That regularly checking the news leaves us in a state of constant distraction and less able to engage in deep thought.And plenty more.Bryan and Rob conclude that if you want to understand the world, you're better off blocking news websites and spending your time on Wikipedia, Our World in Data, or reading a textbook. And if you want to generate political change, stop reading about problems you already know exist and instead write your political representative a physical letter — or better yet, go meet them in person.In the second half of the episode, Bryan and Rob cover: Why Bryan is pretty sceptical that AI is going to lead to extreme, rapid changes, or that there's a meaningful chance of it going terribly.Bryan’s case that rational irrationality on the part of voters leads to many very harmful policy decisions.How to allocate resources in space.Bryan's experience homeschooling his kids.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireTranscriptions: Katy Moore

"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunities there are for a rare event to occur — that the right pathogen is involved and infects somebody in one of these labs, or is released in some way from these labs. And what I chronicle in Pandora's Gamble is that there have been these previous outbreaks that have been associated with various kinds of lab accidents. So this is not a theoretical thing that can happen: it has happened in the past." — Alison YoungIn today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews award-winning investigative journalist Alison Young on the surprising frequency of lab leaks and what needs to be done to prevent them in the future.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:The most egregious biosafety mistakes made by the CDC, and how Alison uncovered them through her investigative reportingThe Dugway life science test facility case, where live anthrax was accidentally sent to labs across the US and several other countries over a period of many yearsThe time the Soviets had a major anthrax leak, and then hid it for over a decadeThe 1977 influenza pandemic caused by vaccine trial gone wrong in ChinaThe last death from smallpox, caused not by the virus spreading in the wild, but by a lab leak in the UK Ways we could get more reliable oversight and accountability for these labsAnd the investigative work Alison’s most proud ofProducer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore