Lightbulb Moment

We welcome Max Bazerman as our first guest of the second season! Professor Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he focuses on applied behavioral psychology and ethical decision making. He is author and co-author of more than 200 articles and 20 books, including The Power of Noticing.

In this episode, we interview Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. After obtaining his PhD in Economics from MIT, he worked at the World Bank for many years, and was a contributor to the first Copenhagen consensus, a project that seeks to establish priorities in addressing environmental issues. In his book, Let Their People Come, Pritchett argues that the best way the developed world can help impoverished countries is to allow for immigration of low-skilled workers. We talk about this, and a whole lot more.

How to introduce Spencer Greenberg? He’s a man who wears many hats– entrepreneur, doctorate in applied math from New York University, researcher, startup founder, and he’s extremely productive in his spare time, too! He founded Spark Wave, a startup foundry which creates novel software products designed to solve problems in the world. A few of the issues they’ve tackled are scalable care for depression, and technology for improving social science. He also founded ClearerThinking.org, which offers free tools and training programs, that have been used by over 150,000 people, designed to help improve decision-making and reduce biases in people’s thinking.

Bryan Caplan is an economist and professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a frequent contributor to Freakonomics as well as publishing his own blog, EconLog. He’s also the author of the books The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education. He is a self-described libertarian and anarchocapitalist, but in his popular works I mostly think of him as a contrarian.

Scott is a student at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and the Associate Project Director of Charity Science: Health – a new charity founded within the effective altruism community with the goal of becoming one of the most cost-effective organizations in the global health space.

Before joining the Charity Science team, Scott conducted cost­-effectiveness analyses on global health interventions as a summer intern at the WHO. He has experience working at the Center for Global Development and the US Department of State.

We welcome Max Bazerman as our first guest of the second season! Professor Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he focuses on applied behavioral psychology and ethical decision making. He is author and co-author of more than 200 articles and 20 books, including The Power of Noticing.

Brian Tomasik writes about ethics, animal welfare, and far-future scenarios from a suffering-focused perspective, all of which you can find on reducing-suffering.com.

He helped to found Foundational Research Institute, a think tank that explores crucial considerations for reducing suffering in the long-run future. (Full-disclosure, Holly is currently a contractor for FRI.)

Previously, Brian earned to give as a programmer at FlyHomes, and before that at Microsoft.

Brian is something of a cult figure in EA. You’ll see in the interview that he has an extremely thoroughly thought out viewpoint that still strikes a lot of EAs as very unituitive. That combination is pretty irresistable. Brian has changed our minds a lot and convinced me of the importance of a lot of things I previously overlooked. And he does it with such serenity and goodwill that you can’t help but like him while he’s dutifully showing you how wrong you are. Ales and I really loved the experience, and we hope you will, too.

Joshua Greene is a professor in the Harvard Department of Psychology where he runs the Moral Cognition Lab. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and then a PhD in philosophy at Princeton where he was mentored by many bright lights of analytical philosophy, including Peter Singer, who served on his committee. After doing a post-doc in a a cognitive neuroscience lab, Greene returned to Harvard to begin his own lab, the Moral Cognition Lab, which studies both descriptive and normative psychology and philosophy.

In episode 2, we test Irene Pepperberg on animal cognition and symbolic communication. Dr. Pepperberg worked with Alex the African Grey Parrot for 30 years, until his untimely death, and continues to work with other African Greys (Athena and Griffin) to explore the limits of their congnitive abilities. Long story short: she still hasn’t reached the edge. The more we look, the more fascinating avian capabilities we find. Irene is an unconvential scientist in many ways, from her wrist bangles (which you’ll hear) to her background in theoretical chemistry (!), and she’s great at telling her story. Enjoy!