This is a crosspost of an episode of the Clearer Thinking Podcast: 022: Self-Improvement and Research Ethics with Rob Wiblin.

Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths.

So we thought it would be useful to discuss some on the show for everyone to hear.

From one point of view academia forms one big 'epistemic' system — a process which directs attention, generates ideas, and judges which are good. Traditional print media is another such system, and we can think of society as a whole as a huge epistemic system, made up of these and many other subsystems.

 How these systems absorb, process, combine and organise information will have a big impact on what humanity as a whole ends up doing with itself — in fact, at a broad level it basically entirely determines the direction of the future.

 With that in mind, today’s guest Owen Cotton-Barratt has founded the Research Scholars Programme (RSP) at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, which gives early-stage researchers leeway to try to understand how the world works.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

Instead of you having to pay for a masters degree, the RSP pays *you* to spend significant amounts of time thinking about high-level questions, like "What is important to do?” and “How can I usefully contribute?"

Participants get to practice their research skills, while also thinking about research as a process and how research communities can function as epistemic systems that plug into the rest of society as productively as possible.

The programme attracts people with several years of experience who are looking to take their existing knowledge — whether that’s in physics, medicine, policy work, or something else — and apply it to what they determine to be the most important topics.

It also attracts people without much experience, but who have a lot of ideas. If you went directly into a PhD programme, you might have to narrow your focus quickly. But the RSP gives you time to explore the possibilities, and to figure out the answer to the question “What’s the topic that really matters, and that I’d be happy to spend several years of my life on?”

Owen thinks one of the most useful things about the two-year programme is being around other people — other RSP participants, as well as other researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute — who are trying to think seriously about where our civilisation is headed and how to have a positive impact on this trajectory.

Instead of being isolated in a PhD, you’re surrounded by folks with similar goals who can push back on your ideas and point out where you’re making mistakes. Saving years not pursuing an unproductive path could mean that you will ultimately have a much bigger impact with your career.

RSP applications are set to open in the Spring of 2021 — but Owen thinks it’s helpful for people to think about it in advance.

In today’s episode, Arden and Owen mostly talk about Owen’s own research. They cover:

• Extinction risk classification and reduction strategies
• Preventing small disasters from becoming large disasters
• How likely we are to go from being in a collapsed state to going extinct
• What most people should do if longtermism is true
• Advice for mathematically-minded people
• And much more

Chapters:
 • Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• The interview begins (00:02:22)
• Extinction risk classification and reduction strategies (00:06:02)
• Defense layers (00:16:37)
• Preventing small disasters from becoming large disasters (00:23:31)
• Risk factors (00:38:57)
• How likely are we to go from being in a collapsed state to going extinct? (00:48:02)
• Estimating total levels of existential risk (00:54:35)
• Everyday longtermism (01:01:35)
• What should most people do if longtermism is true? (01:12:18)
• 80,000 Hours’ issue with promoting career paths (01:24:12)
• The existential risk of making a lot of really bad decisions (01:29:27)
• What should longtermists do differently today (01:39:08)
• Biggest concerns with this framework (01:51:28)
• Research careers (02:04:04)
• Being a mathematician (02:13:33)
• Advice for mathematically minded people (02:24:30)
• Rob’s outro (02:37:32)

 Producer: Keiran Harris
 Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
 Transcript: Zakee Ulhaq

In its first 28 days on Netflix, the documentary The Social Dilemma — about the possible harms being caused by social media and other technology products — was seen by 38 million households in about 190 countries and in 30 languages.

Over the last ten years, the idea that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are degrading political discourse and grabbing and monetizing our attention in an alarming way has gone mainstream to such an extent that it's hard to remember how recently it was a fringe view.

It feels intuitively true that our attention spans are shortening, we’re spending more time alone, we’re less productive, there’s more polarization and radicalization, and that we have less trust in our fellow citizens, due to having less of a shared basis of reality.

But while it all feels plausible, how strong is the evidence that it's true? In the past, people have worried about every new technological development — often in ways that seem foolish in retrospect. Socrates famously feared that being able to write things down would ruin our memory.

At the same time, historians think that the printing press probably generated religious wars across Europe, and that the radio helped Hitler and Stalin maintain power by giving them and them alone the ability to spread propaganda across the whole of Germany and the USSR. Fears about new technologies aren't always misguided.

Tristan Harris, leader of the Center for Humane Technology, and co-host of the Your Undivided Attention podcast, is arguably the most prominent person working on reducing the harms of social media, and he was happy to engage with Rob’s good-faith critiques.

• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
• FYI, the 2020 Effective Altruism Survey is closing soon: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/EAS80K2

Tristan and Rob provide a thorough exploration of the merits of possible concrete solutions – something The Social Dilemma didn’t really address.

Given that these companies are mostly trying to design their products in the way that makes them the most money, how can we get that incentive to align with what's in our interests as users and citizens?

One way is to encourage a shift to a subscription model.

One claim in The Social Dilemma is that the machine learning algorithms on these sites try to shift what you believe and what you enjoy in order to make it easier to predict what content recommendations will keep you on the site.

But if you paid a yearly fee to Facebook in lieu of seeing ads, their incentive would shift towards making you as satisfied as possible with their service — even if that meant using it for five minutes a day rather than 50.

Despite all the negatives, Tristan doesn’t want us to abandon the technologies he's concerned about. He asks us to imagine a social media environment designed to regularly bring our attention back to what each of us can do to improve our lives and the world.

Just as we can focus on the positives of nuclear power while remaining vigilant about the threat of nuclear weapons, we could embrace social media and recommendation algorithms as the largest mass-coordination engine we've ever had — tools that could educate and organise people better than anything that has come before.

The tricky and open question is how to get there.

Rob and Tristan also discuss:

• Justified concerns vs. moral panics
• The effect of social media on politics in the US and developing countries
• Tips for individuals

Chapters:

• Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• The interview begins (00:01:36)
• Center for Humane Technology (00:04:53)
• Critics (00:08:19)
• The Social Dilemma (00:13:20)
• Three categories of harm (00:20:31)
• Justified concerns vs. moral panics (00:30:23)
• The messy real world vs. an imagined idealised world (00:38:20)
• The persuasion apocalypse (00:47:46)
• Revolt of the Public (00:56:48)
• Global effects (01:02:44)
• US politics (01:13:32)
• Potential solutions (01:20:59)
• Unintended consequences (01:42:57)
• Win-win changes (01:50:47)
• Big wins over the last 5 or 10 years (01:59:10)
• The subscription model (02:02:28)
• Tips for individuals (02:14:05)
• The current state of the research (02:22:37)
• Careers (02:26:36)

Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel.

In the last '80k team chat' with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is and isn't, and how to argue for it. In this episode we turn now to what the effective altruism community most needs.

If you want to make the world a better place, would it be better to help your niece with her SATs, or try to join the State Department to lower the risk that the US and China go to war?

 People involved in 80,000 Hours or the effective altruism community would be comfortable recommending the latter. This week's guest — Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast EconTalk, and author of a forthcoming book on decision-making under uncertainty and the limited ability of data to help — worries that might be a mistake.

 Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

I've been a big fan of Russ' show EconTalk for 12 years — in fact I have a list of my top 100 recommended episodes — so I invited him to talk about his concerns with how the effective altruism community tries to improve the world.

These include:

• Being too focused on the measurable
• Being too confident we've figured out 'the best thing'
• Being too credulous about the results of social science or medical experiments
• Undermining people's altruism by encouraging them to focus on strangers, who it's naturally harder to care for
• Thinking it's possible to predictably help strangers, who you don't understand well enough to know what will truly help
• Adding levels of wellbeing across people when this is inappropriate
• Encouraging people to pursue careers they won't enjoy

These worries are partly informed by Russ' 'classical liberal' worldview, which involves a preference for free market solutions to problems, and nervousness about the big plans that sometimes come out of consequentialist thinking.

While we do disagree on a range of things — such as whether it's possible to add up wellbeing across different people, and whether it's more effective to help strangers than people you know — I make the case that some of these worries are founded on common misunderstandings about effective altruism, or at least misunderstandings of what we believe here at 80,000 Hours.

We primarily care about making the world a better place over thousands or even millions of years — and we wouldn’t dream of claiming that we could accurately measure the effects of our actions on that timescale.

I'm more skeptical of medicine and empirical social science than most people, though not quite as skeptical as Russ (check out this quiz I made where you can guess which academic findings will replicate, and which won't).

And while I do think that people should occasionally take jobs they dislike in order to have a social impact, those situations seem pretty few and far between.

But Russ and I disagree about how much we really disagree. In addition to all the above we also discuss:

• How to decide whether to have kids
• Was the case for deworming children oversold?
• Whether it would be better for countries around the world to be better coordinated

Chapters:

• Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• The interview begins (00:01:48)
• RCTs and donations (00:05:15)
• The 80,000 Hours project (00:12:35)
• Expanding the moral circle (00:28:37)
• Global coordination (00:39:48)
• How to act if you're pessimistic about improving the long-term future (00:55:49)
• Communicating uncertainty (01:03:31)
• How much to trust empirical research (01:09:19)
• How to decide whether to have kids (01:24:13)
• Utilitarianism (01:34:01)

Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.
Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.

Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.

In this one — How much does a vote matter? — I investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote: