Pigeon Hour

A podcast with Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse, who is on Substack, Twitter (@littIeramblings) and potentially elsewhere

Topics discussed

* Current thing: Fable gets export-controlled

* Sarah defends government-enforced staged deployment

* Non-misalignment misuse as an existential risk, maybe

* Internal deployment (other current thing smart people talk about)

* Sarah goes woke thinks that rationalists should not say true but useless and unpalatable things; invisible graveyard of those who’d otherwise have gotten involved as AI safety

* Why Sarah left UK AISI after 10 months

* Agglomeration effects (London) vs being able to buy things (Sheffield)

* Current thing: it’s very hot in the UK and Sarah is coping

* Trump on AI: do we want high variance or reasons-responsiveness when they conflict?

Transcript

[00:01] Aaron: Hello.

[00:02] Sarah: Hello. Yeah, well, my laptop no longer has a functioning built-in webcam because I marinated my laptop in Coke Zero, so.

[00:09] Aaron: Nice.

[00:09] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:10] Aaron: I feel like maybe... All right. Whatever. I’ll try to convince you to get a $10,000 computer at some point.

[00:15] Sarah: I don’t think I need that.

[00:17] Aaron: Sorry. I think I’m projecting.

[00:21] Sarah: If you want a $10,000 laptop, you should get one.

[00:24] Aaron: Thank you. I probably won’t, but you know. I read 1.5, listened to 1.5 of your recent blog posts.

[00:34] Sarah: Thank you.

[00:35] Aaron: And not the one that you requested me to listen to. Although, to be fair, I did the listening before I heard from... Yeah, before you responded.

[00:47] Sarah: That’s fine. I had no idea of anything specific I wanted to talk about. I just felt like yapping.

[00:51] Aaron: Okay.

[00:52] Sarah: Did you generate any takes from listening to 1.5 of my blogs?

[01:01] Aaron: So, the full one I listened to was the Fable. And honestly, I could’ve done a lot more preparation, so we should talk about the other stuff. But the only thing was like, oh, maybe you’re very slightly sympathetic to the, oh, maybe it’s a coincidence — or sorry, not a coincidence — maybe it’s not the Trump administration just being hopelessly corrupt, and a little bit more sympathetic to that point of view than I am. But I didn’t have any burning hot takes.

[01:33] Sarah: Don’t we kind of have evidence that it wasn’t a malicious, petty, anti-Anthropic move because they’re now doing a similar thing with OpenAI? This was the update heard the day after I published that, and I was like, “Oh, no, my point has already been somewhat undermined.” Well, not undermined, because I left it open as to what I thought would happen, but...

[01:52] Aaron: So it remains TBD whether they will in fact be export controlled. And so one thing you can imagine, and I think kind of expect this to happen, is just a rapid approval process or a staged rollout over a month for OpenAI’s. It remains to be seen. I could be proven wrong, but staged rollout over a month. First of all, also giving warning beforehand instead of arbitrarily. Actually, let’s set that aside because, fair enough, maybe they just woke up or whatever. But yeah, basically similar from a high-level point of view, type of treatment, but in fact OpenAI’s just gets approved way faster, with fewer restrictions. And they probably didn’t go through all the effort of turning Mythos into Fable, which was — that amount of effort or time, money, et cetera, is probably bigger than what OpenAI will have ever spent, I’m expecting. Or I guess we’ll never know. But I’m guessing that it’ll be bigger than what OpenAI will have sort of spent or implicitly spent, including via the staged rollout. Also, I feel like the wording is such that the staged rollout is like — isn’t that the term that they’re using, or am I wrong? Am I misremembering?

[03:14] Sarah: Yeah, something like that.

[03:16] Aaron: Because that’s very much a “we’re going to let you do the thing,” just not like, “oh, no, we’re going to ban them,” and then retroactively, or then maybe we’ll have further negotiations. But these are in fact very different things — an indefinite export control versus an informal staged rollout. I don’t know.

[03:35] Sarah: Yeah, I can see how they’re different. I’m just saying it appears like there is now a general principle that the government wants some lag time between the model being developed and it being publicly deployed, and maybe this is partially to harden our infrastructure to cybersecurity threats or whatever. And it now appears that that is a genuine intention that they have, as opposed to they are just mad at Anthropic. They might separately be a bit mad at Anthropic, but like—

[04:02] Aaron: No, I think it’s both. And I just have a very high prior also on the Trump administration being ridiculously cynical and — is cronyism the right word? Just like if Jensen Huang asks for no export controls, it’s like, okay, no export controls. And Dario’s kind of autistic and woke.

[04:26] Aaron: And more importantly, not just totally bending the knee to Trump, and trying to actually be part of civil society in a non-sycophantic way. Now I’m saying sycophantic like it’s a word that you use.

[04:41] Sarah: Yeah. But, okay.

[04:42] Aaron: Yeah.

[04:42] Sarah: I don’t want to defend the Trump administration. That’s not my thing.

[04:49] Aaron: No, do it.

[04:50] Sarah: But I guess the most charitable possible interpretation of events here is that Anthropic did in fact do a much more — their comms strategy around Mythos and Fable was a lot scarier, right? And presumably policymakers don’t have, or at least not all of them have, the time to actually analyze the benchmarks and observe that Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5 were similarly capable. And so maybe they just got kind of jump scared. They scrambled. They did a clumsy, poorly executed thing. In OpenAI’s case, they have not been similarly alarmed because OpenAI doesn’t do that kind of comms, which in my opinion they probably should. And there’s a version of this story where they’re being kind of incompetent, but they are not in fact just maliciously going after Anthropic specifically—

[05:39] Aaron: I mean—

[05:39] Sarah: ...for personal reasons, right?

[05:42] Aaron: I agree this is in principle possible. I think what actually happened is Trump and one or two top people that he talks to just told the Commerce Department. It’s not like there’s an abstract policymaking blob. There is, but separately, I think this specifically ran through Trump and maybe one other person.

[06:01] Sarah: But I feel like that makes it more plausible, right? Because it’s a knee-jerky sort of impulse reaction.

[06:07] Aaron: But we already know — we literally know that Trump personally dislikes Anthropic.

[06:15] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t know. Honestly, I’m not—

[06:19] Aaron: I think—

[06:20] Sarah: ...really sure whether it really matters. The thing I’m more confused about is that there are people coming out now, like Zvi Mowshowitz, for example, being like this kind of principle of doing staged rollouts is the maximally bad policy because it widens the gap between the capabilities that the labs—

[06:36] Aaron: Oh, right. Yeah.

[06:36] Sarah: ...make available to the public. And I’m kind of confused by this take. I think it might be somewhat bad in the sense that now the capabilities are not as publicly auditable, and maybe if you really care about external orgs being able to do safety research with the current frontier, then this is a problem, and it’s bad that we don’t know exactly what’s happening. But it’s clearly not the maximally bad thing. The maximally bad thing is the government is just letting them YOLO and has no insight or visibility into this process at all. At least now there’s some plausible information flow. Just as a consequence of the government having to do the interaction with the labs to agree on the staged rollout, they are now getting more information.

[07:12] Aaron: Yes.

[07:12] Sarah: And the government getting more information seems like the only plausible path I can think of …

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Episode main page: https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/tommy-crowA podcast with Tommy Crow, who is on Substack, Twitter (@tommyjoancrow), TikTok, and elsewhere, recorded irl after a recent EAGx conference in DC!

Topics discussed

- Tommy’s awake top surgery: how it happened, why almost every doctor said it was impossible

- “Fighting the tube,” post-op torture, and the liability incentives that quietly make pain a tolerated feature of US surgical care

- The role of amnestic drugs like midazolam - preventing memory of suffering rather than the suffering itself - and why that’s epistemically and morally suspect

- Historical precedent for getting this catastrophically wrong as evidence the current consensus deserves scrutiny

- Practical self-advocacy: drafting a healthcare power of attorney with anesthesia/intubation restrictions, and why the state-default POA is worse than anything you’d write

- How to find heterodox doctors

- Hormones as a tightly-coupled system: Aaron’s cis TRT experience, Tommy’s trans TRT experience, and tradeoffs that get glossed over

- Healthcare abundance as a policy and career direction

- Shenanigans by Tommy’s insurance provider

- Gay male culture as Tommy’s “classically liberal” second home

Transcript

[00:00] Aaron: Hi, this is Aaron, and in this episode of Pigeon Hour, Tommy Crow and I talk about surgery, medicine, and more. Tommy is a super cool guy who I met in person for the first time at EAGxDC a couple weeks ago. We recorded the next day after the conference in person, and we’re finally getting this out now. One thing to note is that during the recording, I committed to running the transcript through Claude in case anything is misleading or deserving of correction. There are a few things what I consider to be pretty minor, but those are in the Substack post attached to this episode, with a bit of back and forth between Claude and then Tommy or I depending on who said the thing in question. So, without further ado, me and Tommy.

[00:48] Aaron: Okay, we are now recording.

[00:50] Tommy: Okay.

[00:51] Aaron: Actually, so we’re recording on one device just in case. And because now I have a 48-gig Mac, I can do Otter as well. Okay. Tommy, I hope that’s okay — that was the name of the Google Calendar event.

[01:13] Tommy: Tommy coming. Love that. Yeah, I had a similar incident that also made me a little paranoid about losing recordings.

[01:22] Aaron: Oh wow, what happened?

[01:23] Tommy: I mean, it wasn’t like a huge deal, but I similarly tried to rig up a way to record a phone call and failed to record one side of it — I only recorded my side. And it was with this kind of gray-market surgeon I was talking to. He — I almost did my surgery with him. I actually had plane tickets to Italy booked.

[01:49] Aaron: Oh, dang.

[01:51] Tommy: And he was actually a legitimate researcher at the University of Naples, and then we just found out that he was also doing black-market plastic surgeries out of a hotel on the side.

[02:01] Aaron: That’s kind of cool. I’m —

[02:03] Tommy: Yes. Like, and I totally —

[02:05] Aaron: — not sure if I endorse it, but it’s kind of cool anyway.

[02:08] Tommy: Well, we had a whole debate. I was thinking about doing it with him because at the time I couldn’t find anyone else in the world who was willing to try it. So I thought he might be my only hope.

[02:18] Aaron: Do you want to give — wait, so for the people, do you want to give context?

[02:23] Tommy: So, okay, so as far as we know, I’m the only documented case of someone getting modern female-to-male top surgery fully awake. And before I did this, most doctors would tell you that it was medically impossible. And this was just very obviously not true. Anyone who understands this particular method of local anesthesia that was used would know that it can be done this way. It’s not hard technology to understand, but it’s very underappreciated. So a lot of doctors will just sort of dismiss it out of hand.

[02:59] Aaron: And yesterday — so we met at EA Global. Well, we met online, but then we were talking at EA Global in person, Washington, DC. By the way, this is an in-person Pigeon Hour, a special event. Yeah, welcome to the beautiful recording studio, which is a couch.

[03:10] Tommy: Happy to be here.

[03:11] Aaron: So wait, why did you even want to do the not-asleep version?

[03:23] Tommy: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? So I think general anesthesia opens you up to a lot more risk of pain at multiple points throughout the procedure. And I think this happens a lot more than people are typically aware of. And it actually happens oftentimes as part of the procedure. So just one example of something that commonly happens in American hospitals is this phenomenon that they call “fighting the tube” — that’s actually the phrase that doctors and anesthesiologists use. They call it fighting the tube. And that’s basically exactly what it sounds like. It’s where they wake you up after surgery in post-op while you’re still intubated, and they wait for you to basically struggle and thrash and try to scream and gurgle against the tube because you feel like you’re getting waterboarded. And they just kind of tie you down or hold you down and let that happen for a while. And they do this because there’s a complicated mix of liabilities here. Basically they will slightly, slightly, slightly reduce your chance of dying in exchange for an almost certain chance of causing you extreme suffering and anguish, because that reduces liability for them — they face much more liability for your preventable death than they do for your preventable suffering.

[04:47] Aaron: Yeah, okay. So to not be coy about it — yes, we’re going to be talking about how you’re secretly being tortured in surgery and why this is bad. I’m always doing this — I’m always saying “um” and “uh” when I start recording. It’s terrible. I do it even off recording, to be fair. But anyway. So this is not just a top surgery thing. This is a general surgery thing. I’m not trying to cancel trans voices or anything, I promise. I’m trying to make it like — there’s a general problem here, right? Or a general phenomenon here. And then we’ll let the people of Pigeon Hour decide if it’s a problem. I think it’s a problem.

[05:32] Tommy: Well, and I will say it in my very trans voice — this is not the issue that I encountered, it just happened to be applicable in a trans surgery for me. But this is applicable in many, many, many surgeries across the entire United States, and presumably elsewhere as well, although I’m not informed about that particularly. And there are two things that I’ll say that are very general concerns or topics that I’m interested in. Number one, there is a pain management crisis in the United States that has been going on ever since the opioid epidemic, where basically there’s a whole bunch of incentives that discourage doctors from managing pain effectively and also normalize the use of anterograde amnesia–inducing drugs as a substitute for pain relief. So that’s number one. And number two, there are just better ways to do fat-based surgeries specifically. Any surgery that’s being done with fat can be done better oftentimes than it is, because this technology called tumescent local anesthesia is very underused.

[06:44] Aaron: Yeah, so wait — the amnesia thing is kind of obviously also — wait, to back up, a meta point is like, it’s a very kind of horrifying topic that I don’t especially like discussing. Do you think it’s important?

[06:55] Tommy: Yeah.

[06:55] Aaron: But we’ll try. I mean, we’ll try to strike a balance of being like — not withholding important information, but also not scaring people away from actually listening. I mean, I think it’s a genuinely hard problem. There’s some sort of curve where you maximize the impact, but if no one’s listening, you don’t maximize the impact. So you’ve got to hit the top of the curve. So the amnesia thing basically means that you don’t remember, and so that is effectively what’s going on — that you are being made to not form memories of being tortured, rather than just not being tortured in the first place. And you know way more about this than I do. This is like a big part of your researching this — it’s evidently a big part of your life. And the way it’s sort of been like the horrors of the background universe to me or something. But I do know as some context that there’s precedent in the sense of — we used to not use any anesthesia at all when operating on infants.

[07:59] Tommy: Yes.

[07:59] Aaron: And this is in Jonathan Birch’s book Edge of Sentience — sorry, we’ll cut out my pausing. And yes, that’s the proper, both philosophical and just accurate, as far as I can tell, description of what happened. And basically, it was totally standard practice to just simply cut open human babies without doing anything about — without any sort of prevention of pain or suffering. And one normie response is like, “that’s obviously bad,” and I think it probably is. But the other thing is that there’s a gigantic asymmetry. It’s like, why are you so sure? You know, if there’s only a — I mean, definitely at a 30% chance I think you can go pretty low while the moral calculus checks out as to whether you should take at least any steps, and certainly probably pretty intensive steps, to prevent suffering. Like, what are the chances that we’re wrong about infants not feeling pain, right? And I will go to bat for: knowing the subjective experience of another being is extraordinarily difficult. So like — yeah, I don’t think there’s any sort of trick going on to say that even if you think in some situations that maybe in fact there’s no suffering, like, ground truth under the surface — it’s worth considering the probability that you’re wrong, or how certain you are or whatever. That’s my pitch or ramble about — I don’t know, any takes?

[09:30] Tommy: Yeah. When people talk about the pain-related risks of general anesthesia, oftentimes what people are imagining is kind of the classic horror story where someone is aware during surgery, like while the doctor is cutting them open. And I actually think that there is a risk there. I mean, this has happened to people — people have woken up during surgery. I do think that’s a real risk. I will say that’s not my primary concern. My primary concern is mostly during post-op, where there are actual, you know, lots and lots of witnesses seeing this happen and whistleblowing and talking about how it’s actually part of the procedure to just expect pain. But also there is a concern about what’s happening during surgery. I don’t think general anesthesia is well understood. And I think it’s also somewhat simplistically logical to say, well, I can have a higher certainty that no pain is happening if I block that pain at the source, at the actual nerve, the nerve pathway, rather than try to do it systemically at the brain level.

[10:49] Aaron: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if that’s — maybe that’s true. It’s not intuitive for me at all. I feel like I’m much more confident if I just nuke myself with fentanyl instead of —

[10:56] Tommy: Oh, I’m not.

[10:56] Aaron: Okay. I mean, there’s reasons not to do that, right? But also I don’t know what I’m talking about. But just at an intuitive level, blocking it at the source sounds kind of like — okay, well, why? Like, maybe. Also, I have a sense that people, at least philosophically, often talk about pain as though it is entirely localized to where some sort of injury actually happens — and that is often true that if you get a paper cut, you feel it on your finger. But the visceral sense of suffering is, at almost a philosophical level, it needn’t at least conceptually exist or needn’t be tracked consciously as located wherever. Your brain can just decide to do whatever it wants or something. I feel like this is probably not the most important point, but —

[11:51] Tommy: Well, think about it. I mean, I guess if we’re going to get into this point — think about: okay, so I was in surgery and I was just as alert and clear as I am speaking to you right now. And in fact I was narrating the entire surgery to the camera and I was watching it happen. And I was watching him — sorry, this is going to be graphic.

[12:16] Aaron: No, tell it. You can — well, we can figure out what to cut later. If anything, we don’t have to.

[12:20] Tommy: So I was watching him literally skin me alive, because he skins them first, you know, and then cuts them off. And I was just watching and talking, like just like I’m talking to you now, and I was just watching him do this and I couldn’t feel anything. And for me, when I look at that scenario, there is no big philosophical question to ask, because I was exactly the same person that I am now and I know for a fact that I was not experiencing pain or suffering. But if I was in some sort of weird anesthesia state — I’m not going to call it sleep because it’s actually very different from sleep — there are actually real philosophical questions and uncertainties about what’s going on in the brain while I’m in that sort of weird sleep state. Whereas if I’m awake and I’m just talking like I’m talking to you now, I know that there’s no pain.

[13:09] Aaron: Or at the very least, I mean, somebody could be pedantic, but I think I agree that it is overwhelmingly likely that you’re correct about your own experience. We don’t have to get into it.

[13:16] Tommy: In whatever sense I can be confident that I’m not going through torture right now, I was confident at that time.

[13:22] Aaron: Yeah. And to poke at the — oh wait, hold on, I had a thought on the people waking up during surgery, which is that — okay, I take your point that this might be the secondary issue. I think it’s important as at least evidence, or like very, very high-evidence case studies or something, because you don’t need to speculate about the ground truth of subjective experience, like, absent report or things like that. Like, these are just existence proofs — or not approximately, but very, very close to existence proofs of terrible suffering during surgery. A pet peeve to get out there is that — I’ve read about this back in, I was honestly reading about this more than a couple years ago, I think 2023. And yeah, there are these horrifying case reports — people genuinely being tortured during surgery, and then they talk about it in terms of like, “oh wow, they’re traumatized.” It’s like, that sucks, I agree it sucks that they’re traumatized, but also it sucks they’re being tortured. I think that’s actually the primary thing.

[14:30] Tommy: Completely agree with that. Completely agree with that. And oftentimes I talk about the reliance on these amnesia-inducing drugs and people say, “wow, that sounds so horrible because the body keeps the score, these people must be traumatized afterwards.” And I’m like, I don’t really give a shit if they’re traumatized afterwards. If you have seen torture — like, I’ve seen some shit in hospitals, and that is way worse. I’m sorry, to me that’s way worse than any sort of psychological trauma I’ve ever experienced.

[15:00] Aaron: You also don’t have to take a strong stand of “I don’t give a shit.” It could just be that both things are bad. But I agree, the fundamental primary issue here, probably the main one, is the experience itself.

[15:08] Tommy: Yes. To me the trauma is rough, and I’m sorry if that exists, but it’s so secondary to the actual torture.

[15:17] Aaron: I mean, there’s a general thing — I guess we’re sort of preaching to a choir while having this conversation. But like, I don’t know, sometimes the choir is just correct, right? I mean, this is like many such cases in society — we have factory farming. There’s also the neonatal anesthesia thing. There’s the fact that — I don’t know, I’m pausing the fact that they use — what is the term again, prevention of memory formation —

[15:52] Tommy: Anterograde amnesia.

[15:54] Aaron: Yes, anterograde amnesia, like amnestic drugs or whatever. That is very, very sus, right? It’s like, wait, hold on a second, why are you causing me to not form memories specifically? And wait — sometimes it comes along for the ride, right? So it’s not necessarily nefarious, but I think we should — I don’t know, it’s a big — like, literally, not literally, but figuratively a red flag.

[16:17] Tommy: Yeah. And a few things I will say on that: number one, just to give a few disclaimers, I am not claiming that doctors have nefarious motives to torture you and they’re like, “oh yeah, I love this.” That’s not the motive. And oftentimes I think there is a level of pseudo-benevolent paternalism where they just honestly don’t want you to be traumatized by something that has to happen anyway. However, I think especially after the opioid epidemic, there has been an increasing callousness about pain, and it really has seeped into the culture of anesthesiology. You hear oftentimes a very common phrase that I’ll hear anesthesiologists say, or emergency room nurses say, is “pain is not an emergency.” And I just completely disagree with this philosophy. I think that is an evil philosophy. I think pain is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you besides death, and somehow it’s worse —

[17:17] Aaron: I mean, plausibly, quite plausibly worse than death.

[17:18] Tommy: Exactly, yeah. And similarly, midazolam is relied upon for the explicit purpose of memory prevention. I want to emphasize this very strongly. It is not relied upon for pain management. It is not a good pain management drug. It is for memory prevention. And you can Google this and look at what anesthesiologists are saying about it — they will explicitly say this is for the prevention of, quote, “unpleasant memories.” That is explicitly what it’s for.

[17:53] Aaron: Also, just as a tiny bit of added credibility, I commit to running the transcript through Claude and saying, with your consent, I guess — actually, non-consensual Claude transcript analysis, just kidding — to figure out, presumably something we say is going to be slightly off. It’s very hard to talk for an hour and never say anything wrong. But we will report that.

[18:15] Tommy: Yes, yes.

[18:17] Aaron: Yeah, seems bad. I mean, so at one level I 100% buy this, and at another, for some reason I am less mad than I feel like I should be about the fact that this has probably happened to me. And I don’t know, memory is highly integrated into the human psychology, neurology, whatever. I have gotten surgery before and I struggle — it’s very similar to like a factory farming thing — I just struggle to viscerally care enough or in proportion, or not even in proportion, but sort of to a maximally appropriate all-things-considered degree or whatever about pigs and chickens being confined their whole lives, et cetera. And I do think the amnesia thing is just doing a ton of work here. And I guess also, I do actually kind of bite the bullet — if we could causally isolate everything, that amnesia is good because of the trauma thing. Like, I’m glad that I’m not traumatized.

[19:23] Tommy: Oh yeah.

[19:23] Aaron: But it’s very hard to have people act in their self-interest when you’re preventing the mechanism by which they know to protest or something.

[19:34] Tommy: Right. And for a surgery that you have to have — if you know that you’re going to get it anyway and it has to be painful for some reason, then it does seem like a very useful tool to just prevent memory formation of that.

[19:48] Aaron: Yeah, I guess also — one dynamic is that often the condition of surgery is not that you’re in a position to be making much of a decision. I actually think this is maybe the most actionable thing — for a highly anticipated voluntary surgery. Often you’re not in a position to be making much of a decision. Maybe this sounds unagentic or something — I think in a literal sense it is, but, you know, some shit happens, you’re in a bad car accident, or I’m just imagining I’m in a bad car accident, in the hospital, vaguely know about these concerns. Realistically, I feel like I’m probably signing the consent papers anyway because, oh no, okay. Well —

[20:28] Tommy: Go for it, and remind yourself.

[20:29] Aaron: Well look, I’m not sure that I would at this moment, and second of all, I’m very — especially I think maybe I should think through, what are my actual asks? I should have a note in my phone in case this happens. What are my actual asks here? Because I probably don’t want to die because I refused surgery, all things considered. At the same time, I guess the one saving grace here — sorry, I’m rambling — is that if you explicitly refuse consent for something in the US, my sense is that in general they don’t secretly do it.

[21:02] Tommy: I think that’s mostly true.

[21:04] Aaron: Mostly. Oh, great. Wonderful.

[21:07] Tommy: Yeah. There are many, many exceptions to that.

[21:09] Aaron: I mean, there’s also a lot of gray area in the sense of — if you’re handed a 50-page document for the benevolent doctor to make you not die, generally you say yes without doing a whole analysis. I mean, maybe LLMs are something to be used here.

[21:25] Tommy: Yeah.

[21:26] Aaron: Yeah.

[21:26] Tommy: I do carry around my healthcare power of attorney.

[21:30] Aaron: Oh wait — I mean, like, if you’re comfortable showing it. So this is embarrassing, but I don’t actually know what physical item you’re going to produce.

[21:42] Tommy: It’s a piece of paper.

[21:43] Aaron: Okay. I mean, I feel like maybe you should have it on Google Drive also. I’m guessing you do.

[21:48] Tommy: Well, yeah, doctors can be weird about that, though.

[21:50] Aaron: Yeah, no, I know. Doctors hate Google Drive. They actually give you more — they give you, like, pain-causing medication during surgery if you try to send them a Google Drive link.

[22:01] Tommy: They give you a pain-causing medication, just like inject you with water.

[22:08] Aaron: Cool. Oh, this is based. Okay, I should do this. How do I do this? Seriously.

[22:12] Tommy: It’s really, really easy. So it depends on your state — it’s on the state level. I recommend every single person does this. This is one of my big tips that I tell to everyone.

[22:19] Aaron: Should we take a picture? Is it okay if we take — I mean, we can decide whether to add it, like take a picture and then maybe add it or link it or something.

[22:25] Tommy: This is just the Wisconsin —

[22:27] Aaron: Just so people have an idea of the kind of thing they’re looking for.

[22:29] Tommy: Yeah, so basically — it’s on the state level. Just Google your state name and then “healthcare power of attorney” and read through it. And then oftentimes you’ll have to take it to a notary and have it signed by like two people. But then the important part is that you can usually, depending on the state, attach an addendum to it.

[22:49] Aaron: Oh, that’s cool.

[22:50] Tommy: So mine just says — I only have like three items on it. It says, quote, “general anesthesia,” and quote, “deep sedation,” and similar states of medically induced unconsciousness should not be used unless absolutely necessary to preserve life. That’s number one. I have those two things, general anesthesia and deep sedation, in quotation marks because those are kind of like umbrella terms.

[23:13] Aaron: Do you want to take a picture of it?

[23:14] Tommy: You can take a picture and then we’ll discuss after. Let me think about it.

[23:19] Aaron: Okay, because I’m interested in the specific wording. But like, yeah, tell me to delete it later, obviously I will.

[23:25] Tommy: And then basically, no intubation unless it’s to save my life. And then a statement about who I want to make decisions for me.

[23:34] Aaron: Oh, that’s a good one. I’m not sure if I trust the people that I actually trust with most things to make good decisions on this front.

[23:40] Tommy: Yeah, so an important thing to keep in mind is that you already have a healthcare power of attorney. It’s given to you automatically by the state. So if you haven’t made one, you’re basically just outsourcing that to the state. And presumably the state is only going to make equal or worse decisions about your healthcare than you.

[24:01] Aaron: Wait, hold on, I feel like — what does power of attorney even mean?

[24:05] Tommy: Your healthcare power of attorney is a person who makes decisions for you.

[24:10] Aaron: Right, okay, that makes sense. Wait, so I feel like — isn’t it usually like next of kin or something? I guess it’s for inheritance stuff. But usually they ask your parents or something. They don’t just call up a bureaucrat.

[24:25] Tommy: Right, right, right. And that’s why my third amendment says “not my parents.”

[24:29] Aaron: Oh, interesting. Okay, wow. My parents are not going to like this — luckily they don’t listen to this.

[24:36] Tommy: Yeah, I mean, and if your parents are your choice, then that’s great. But —

[24:40] Aaron: No, I love my parents. I actually have them excluded from my will because I don’t think they donate the money well. I have somebody who I trust to donate. I don’t have a gigantic amount of money — oh, sorry, to be clear, they are comfortable. It’s not like they’re — yes, the expected direction of money flow goes the other way. I’m very confident they’re not going to need my dinky little savings.

[25:04] Tommy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[25:06] Aaron: Dang. Wow.

[25:08] Tommy: But basically anything you can bring up quickly should be equal to or better than whatever the state automatically gives you.

[25:14] Aaron: Yeah, maybe I’ll try to put — this is like a post-podcast-recording project — but what I would want is a checklist of things to follow or something. Obviously some things are approximately irreducibly your decision. But I don’t want to spend 100 hours of research figuring out what to do. I want somebody who’s done the research and has an appropriate and accurate understanding of the stakes here to make reasonable recommendations that I then approve or decide on. So maybe I’ll try to put together a website where this exists. One thing I can do is vibe-code websites.

[25:55] Tommy: We could work on that together.

[25:58] Aaron: Yo. Wow. Wild.

[26:02] Tommy: Can I give my other pitch while we’re here?

[26:03] Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[26:05] Tommy: There’s two things that I tell people to do. One is to have the healthcare power of attorney, and the other one is, if you have a stash of leftover pain medication — opiates or whatever — keep one of those in your wallet all the time.

[26:22] Aaron: Okay, yeah. No, I think Pigeon Hour is based and therefore not going to cut this for legal reasons. Cool. Although I have — so maybe I might cut this part — I don’t currently have any opioids in this house, for example. I think if it was up to me, sort of without any legal risk, I would. So it just — maybe out of sort of — it’s never been a priority of mine because I never think that I’m — luckily I’m not in chronic bad suffering, which is a great privilege to be in, you know, to not be in. So there’s a question of, like, should I in fact just seriously take seriously, and probably I think I’ll be able to acquire opioids, and if so, literally which ones? I mean, presumably pharma, not like — yeah.

[27:12] Tommy: Yeah, you know, that’s actually a great question, and I have no idea. I feel like they all work way better than ibuprofen or Tylenol, so whatever you can get your hands on, I think. I’m not actually informed about whether you should go for oxy versus hydromorphone.

[27:27] Aaron: Yeah, I’m guessing it’s mostly a question — if you have enough of any of them, it kind of works. That’s my very vague sense.

[27:36] Tommy: Yeah. The difference between zero and one is way, way bigger than the difference between one and two.

[27:42] Aaron: I’m just going to make a note on my phone.

[27:48] Tommy: Yeah, it’s a good question — literally which one — because there must be, I’m sure there are differences, I’m just totally —

[27:55] Aaron: I mean, frankly, it’s like — man, it would be really — I feel like no one’s going to buy it if I say like, “yes, officer, I’m importing X, Y, and Z, but listen to my podcast episode, bro.” Although —

[28:10] Tommy: “Tommy got me into it.” Go take Tommy to jail.

[28:14] Aaron: Yeah, no. I think — yeah, and this is actually something I have — I perpetually have a to-do list. This should probably go at least on the secondary to-do list rather than not even existing on the to-do list. It’s like, figure out at least whether this is something I want to do — like, acquire. And the system for, I mean, not literally but approximately, what did people refer to by “the system” — will tell you, oh, discard any unused medication. Like, no, bonk.

[28:43] Tommy: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[28:47] Aaron: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, one thing is — this is just not the most fun conversation to have, so —

[28:58] Tommy: I’m a party killer, yeah.

[28:59] Aaron: No, but that’s an actual issue, right? It’s like — AI risk even is a little sexier. Yeah, lots of — not to mention global poverty. Nobody’s uncomfortable talking about, like, preventing malaria. Maybe they are, but —

[29:21] Tommy: Maybe I’m a freak, but I find surgery and — I mean, pain relief is a very hard topic to talk about, but I also find surgery and pain management so interesting.

[29:33] Aaron: Okay, interesting.

[29:34] Tommy: Which is probably why people hate me at parties — they’re like, “God, here comes Tommy, we’re going to talk about torture again.”

[29:40] Aaron: I actually — no, no, that does genuinely suck. Am I glad? I’m glad this is someone’s special interest, right?

[29:50] Tommy: Well, we can talk about the more fun parts of something, like —

[29:54] Aaron: I mean, well, I guess we should — I do want to make sure we don’t miss anything important. Are there any fun parts?

[30:00] Tommy: The surgery itself was literally the most fun I’ve ever had.

[30:04] Aaron: Oh wild, that’s weird. But —

[30:06] Tommy: It was so fucking fun. Not —

[30:07] Aaron: Not because you were high?

[30:09] Tommy: Not because I was high. I was not really high. I basically felt the way I’m talking to you now. But I just love surgery. It was —

[30:16] Aaron: That is — you’re so weird.

[30:19] Tommy: My sister said that to me once.

[30:20] Aaron: You’re the only person in the world. I think my sister can relate.

[30:23] Tommy: She said, “You just keep getting weirder.”

[30:26] Aaron: Yeah, this is not — I had an MRI not too long ago and it wasn’t that bad, but I don’t know, I feel like it’s approximately the ideal version of surgery — you’re aware, you’re just lying there, and it was mildly unpleasant. At least I wasn’t like, “wow, this is amazing.”

[30:44] Tommy: We were laughing because I was videotaping the whole surgery, and I kept looking at the camera and going, “wow, this is amazing,” and being like, “wow, this is so cool,” because — it’s just the most beautiful thing, actually. I mean, when you think about it, you are literally watching the triumph of man and technology over nature. And I was disabled, you know — I had fucking triple-D tits and I couldn’t run. And if you’ve ever met me, I’m like constantly running around, climbing stuff, fighting. I’m an extremely high-energy, high-motivation person. I want to work like 10 or more hours a day. And I could not sit up, be upright, for more than six or seven hours at a time without shooting nerve pain down my shoulders, and my bra straps would cut into my skin or into my rib cage. I was disabled from them.

[31:40] Aaron: So you mean you were — you had gender dysphoria as well? This is distinct? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want, but —

[31:48] Tommy: Well, like, I’m definitely —

[31:49] Aaron: Like also this pain that’s like not —

[31:51] Tommy: I’m definitely a man on the inside. That honestly almost feels like a coincidence, in this bizarre way.

[31:59] Aaron: Yeah, no, that’s totally plausible. You can have breast pain, whatever it’s called — sorry, I’m not well informed — and also anything else.

[32:07] Tommy: Yeah, I actually decided to get top surgery before I identified as a man.

[32:11] Aaron: Well, you can also get breast reductions, right? This is me learning a thing, whatever — I’m sure most women learn this at, like, 11. I intuitively missed this information. I’m a 26-year-old man.

[32:23] Tommy: You’re forgiven.

[32:23] Aaron: God. But it would also — there was a thing, not to do just the viral discourse, but there was like a thing on Twitter — this is like a culture-war thing — like, “oh, you should definitely get breast enlargements.” I think that’s probably a bad set of advice to give people, and quite possibly you should consider the opposite if it’s causing you distress.

[32:48] Tommy: Oh, yeah. There was, like, a Cremieux tweet, I think, or a quote that I’m not going to get exactly right, so maybe his fans are going to come flame me for this — but he said something like, “if your value is to be as hot as possible, never, ever, ever, ever —”

[33:06] Aaron: I don’t think it was Cremieux who originally said that. I —

[33:08] Tommy: Oh, really? Who was it? Maybe he retweeted —

[33:09] Aaron: I might be wrong, actually. There was a woman who wrote an article.

[33:13] Tommy: Yeah, I think I saw it because he retweeted it. You’re right. She was like, “you know, if your value is to be as hot as possible, never, ever, ever get a breast reduction no matter how much they pay” —

[33:24] Aaron: Which is also just a little bit of a silly thing to say. It’s like —

[33:27] Tommy: Well, it’s tautological in a way. Like, yes, if your value is absolutely maximizing this one thing, then yes. But also, I think someone who is good would usually not be encouraging having that value to such an extreme that it actually derails the rest of your life. I am like a philosopher — in principle I understand the concept of holding the value constant and then saying what actions would result in optimizing for that value, but it is sus.

[33:55] Aaron: Yeah, and it’s not super specific, I guess. I could read the wording — I just dissect the words because it’s not that important, I guess. This is reminding me that maybe I should use steroids — just, not wait, yeah. What else? Do you have any other “people should definitely consider not doing X or seriously consider doing X” hot takes, in the broad medicine/physiology, or anything actually, sphere — I guess anything, honestly.

[34:33] Tommy: Well, in all seriousness, I do actually think you need to be careful with testosterone. I’m not actually very well educated on this for natal males, but I do — I’m probably not educated enough to speak on this, but I do think there’s probably some evidence that taking it for a natal male can decrease your natural production, which you might not want to have happen.

[34:54] Aaron: Oh, totally. It’s actually — no, decent — I was on TRT, I’m not anymore. But that’s — I mean, maybe I’m not sure if I’ll keep it in — that’s how I got through puberty. I’ve been fucked up from that.

[35:04] Tommy: Wait, is that why you’re so short? No offense, sorry.

[35:05] Aaron: No, no, no — I was much shorter. I started college at 5’2”, not 5’7”.

[35:12] Tommy: That’s what I am, 5’2”, short kings.

[35:14] Aaron: Yeah, I mean now I’m like a standard deviation, but this is only one, right? You see 5’7” people walking around, it’s not like, oh — but, oh, 100% — my understanding is that this is just very clearly and demonstrably true, but also might be worth it.

[35:31] Tommy: Okay, yes.

[35:31] Aaron: Although I’m not sure at very low doses — I’m sure there’s like, it’s a question of like, okay, one molecule, does that sit in your entire pituitary? I don’t know the answer. I mean, so it’s a matter of degree to some extent. But yeah, I will say that I think more people should get checked, or it should be the kind of thing you check, like, once a year or whatever, because why not. It’s a bit of a bitch to deal with — and not even logistically. It’s true that it takes a few minutes, it’s slightly painful to inject yourself, but it’s not that bad. Managing the dosing and trying to emulate a sort of endogenous control cycle is just a difficult project, especially if you don’t have rapid testing — we don’t have rapid testing. So you have to maybe get tested occasionally and guess based on what’s going on. I wound up on a very specific regimen, which is 11 milligrams every other day. It was very small at this point, so that’s why it was relatively low — but if I had taken a standard dose of 150, I would have just been perpetually extremely — so I mean, at one point — this is just an aside, whatever — I started out with a much larger dose, I think a single 100-milligram injection, and I puffed up. I mean, presumably the mechanism is estradiol, but I felt like total shit and I was extremely puffy, with what I assume was water — I don’t think I was gel of some sort. Long story short, it’s a bit of a — it’s not a “oh whatever” kind of thing. Factor in the fact it’s a bit of a hassle, it’s also quite plausibly worth it for many people.

[37:13] Tommy: That’s fascinating. So I haven’t experienced any of those downsides, which is probably because I have never done that high of a dose. Because I think for natal females, there’s also quite a lot of risks to it. For one thing, it probably just shortens your lifespan. And one of the privileges I have as a natal female is that I get a couple extra years on you guys. I don’t really want to throw those away. And then also it drastically increases your risk of needing to get a hysterectomy eventually, and obviously I don’t want to have that, because I’m going to have to do that whole thing awake and it’s going to be a whole other project to find a guy to do that awake. So I keep it pretty low, and I’ve never experienced any of those bad side effects. I basically always just feel insanely good whenever I take it.

[37:59] Aaron: Wow, I’m so jealous.

[38:00] Tommy: Yeah, but I really half-ass it these days. I used to be pretty careful with it and I would keep track of my levels and make sure it was at, you know, somewhat less than a natal male would have. Nowadays I totally wing it — I just wait until I’m feeling kind of depressed and then I give myself like a random shot.

[38:19] Aaron: No, I mean, that’s — I feel like it’s okay, hopefully you don’t have to be depressed for that long, but that is almost the ideal thing. It’s like you eat when you’re hungry or whatever, and that’s a system working well.

[38:27] Tommy: Exactly. Yeah, I basically just eat when I’m hungry.

[38:30] Aaron: Nice. I’m jealous, but I’m glad for you. Oh wait, so here’s a whole other thing — so I am, again, I’ll probably just keep this in because I don’t care at this point. So I am, I think, going to be trying — unless something good happens, like some sort of positive surprise — I’m probably going to be trying to find a surgeon to do an exploratory laparoscopic surgery on me, or partially diagnostic with the potential, if they see anything, to fix it. How the fuck did you find a surgeon?

[39:03] Tommy: How did I?

[39:04] Aaron: No, it’s a totally different specialty or situation, but, like, how do you go about finding a heterodox surgeon?

[39:10] Tommy: That’s a great question. So I don’t know much about laparoscopic —

[39:16] Aaron: Oh no, no, yeah, I was being in general, like, as a general process, but not necessarily specific to anything.

[39:22] Tommy: Yeah, so literally basically my strategy was to go on Google Scholar, or Sci-Hub, and find people who clearly are passionate about doing actual research related to whatever weird niche thing it is that you want.

[39:41] Aaron: Find an autistic surgeon, okay.

[39:43] Tommy: Yeah, yeah. And then literally just email them or reach out.

[39:46] Aaron: No, interesting. I was thinking about just making a Google Doc that’s like, “does anybody know a surgeon?” That was massive. No, but yeah, I should — this is also on my to-do list. I wish I was your 10-hour-working kind of guy. I mean, I think that’s sort of endogenous to my health issues — it’s like a vicious cycle of not being able to work on my health issues because — or not being able to do things like write up Google Docs. Not that I can’t or whatever, but it scarcifies your productive time. Sorry, not like a “woe was me” situation. It’s all good.

[40:19] Tommy: I will say, I think this is one of my unwoke takes — but it sounds unwoke but actually is woke — I do think testosterone is just a general-purpose performance-enhancing drug. Obviously physically, but also mentally — just my stamina is way improved. And I think it’s important to recognize this, that females are at general disadvantages just because biology is unfair.

[40:49] Aaron: Wait, I have always wondered, I’m not sure I entirely buy this — so if you compare a cis male with very low testosterone to a woman with the same blood level of testosterone, you don’t see the same — I expect the guys to be much more depressed, fat, unmotivated, and I don’t expect the same of the woman. This is based on my general observations of looking around society. But sorry, backing up, I don’t think you can just say women are basically operating at a disadvantage corresponding to the level that they have but if they were a cis man.

[41:31] Tommy: Yes, I do not think women are the same thing as a strangely low-testosterone man.

[41:40] Aaron: Okay. That is a plausible interpretation you might have.

[41:45] Tommy: Right, and I definitely do not think that. And obviously I think there’s a lot of confounders if you try to compare a bizarrely low-T man to a woman — obviously it’s probably just worse in a million ways, and with the causal arrow going in both directions, to be a weirdly low-T man it’s probably not comparably as bad to be a woman, maybe.

[42:07] Aaron: Yeah. Although, maybe there’s something that’s similar — I’m not sure. I mean, hormones in general are just very powerful and very hard to get right. One thing that jumps to mind is — it’s a totally different hormone, but if you have hypothyroidism — I also have hypothyroidism, so that’s another thing wrong with me. But that is also like — somebody, a loved one, basically had Hashimoto’s, and was just living, I think eventually luckily living poorly enough that they went to the doctor and just got diagnosed. And basically, if you have Hashimoto’s and you take levothyroxine, you’re just normal again once you get the right dose. But yeah, they’re very depressed, very, very low energy. I feel like Huberman or something — I don’t listen to him, but I feel like I see clips and he talks like this — so I don’t know if there’s anything I was getting at with that. Just, yeah, like, try not to have bad hormones somehow.

[43:03] Tommy: Yeah. I mean, another one of the many practical reasons why I try to keep my T very low is because hormones are just a very — they’re not well understood, I think. And they’re one of these systems that’s kind of like an economy, you know, where you try to tweak one little thing and then you fuck up the whole shebang. And people are always really surprised that I did this crazy ridiculous experimental surgery, but now on the other hand I’m claiming that testosterone is dangerous, and they’re like, “what are you talking about? Every trans guy does testosterone — but you’re doing these weird surgeries.” But I actually think testosterone is a lot riskier than the type of surgery I had done.

[43:46] Aaron: Yeah, that sounds totally reasonable and probably just correct. Although, so I do want to, in the name of being good Bayesians or something, share my experience with this, which is that I did not find a monotonic relationship or anything close to that between testosterone and subjective well-being when I was injecting. I mean, I’m guessing this is true for everyone at some point, right — if you inject a literal gallon you just die — so at some point that obviously happens. But I was really hoping — I feel like I read all the stuff on Reddit about how, like, “yeah man, keep it at 900 nanograms per deciliter to feel good,” and whenever that happened to me I just in fact felt overall worse. I felt best at a moderate — so in general, like 500 to 700, which is middle of the range. I’m going to get canceled because — I don’t know, it’s almost like, I kind of wish it was the case that you could actually just testosterone-max and be superhuman, and I think some people in fact for whatever reason can, but I think I consider myself an existence proof of this not being a universal experience.

[44:46] Tommy: That totally makes sense. Totally.

[44:49] Aaron: Cool. Oh wait, do you want to — I don’t know how much time you have.

[44:54] Tommy: I have all day.

[44:55] Aaron: I don’t have anything actually to do, but I do have limited energy, but I’m good for now. So it hasn’t even been an hour, honestly. I think these podcasts where people talk for three hours — that’s insane. I could do that once, but it would be difficult or whatever. Wait, so presumably you do other things in life besides having surgery takes. Is this true?

[45:21] Tommy: Oh boy.

[45:22] Aaron: No, you don’t have to answer this — I’m just, do you want to talk about anything? We can also cut whatever. Obviously we’ll cut whatever you want.

[45:30] Tommy: I do do other stuff in life besides having surgery takes.

[45:33] Aaron: Not that that would be a bad thing, to be clear.

[45:35] Tommy: Like, to only do surgery.

[45:36] Aaron: I mean, presumably you want to, I don’t know — do other stuff, get laid.

[45:40] Tommy: Yeah, well, that is mostly the other thing. I am actually somewhat — I would say not — well, I really, really like gay male culture, like, anthropologically.

[45:54] Aaron: I did not expect this. I wasn’t going to fill in my sentence with what you just said. But keep going, sorry, sorry, keep going.

[46:01] Tommy: Someone asked me last night, “what do you do for fun?” And I started, once again, talking about all of the takes that I have that are related to what I want to do for a career. And they were like, “no, no, no, I said what do you do for fun?” And I was like, “well, you know, I like to go to the club.”

[46:22] Aaron: Wait, what the fuck is — okay, I always hear about “the club.” Florida saying “I’m at the club.” Where do I go? I need a Google Maps link, okay?

[46:33] Tommy: Have you ever been to the one club?

[46:34] Aaron: I don’t think I’ve been to any. I’m not even talking about — I don’t have any particular interest in going to a gay club, sorry, but where — what does one do to find oneself in a club?

[46:46] Tommy: Well, the one that I go to is Jackhammer in Chicago, happiest place in the world. That’s kind of like my leisure space.

[46:57] Aaron: Okay, cool. Wow.

[46:58] Tommy: I have my work stuff and then my fun stuff.

[47:02] Aaron: Do you want to tell me what your work stuff is?

[47:04] Tommy: Well, right now I’m in a career transition period. I’m trying to do healthcare abundance as a career.

[47:09] Aaron: Oh, based.

[47:10] Tommy: Used to be in finance.

[47:11] Aaron: Good luck. I think I have a tweet about that, which basically makes us — yeah, we’ve been throwing it around. I’m sure I know about as much about it as you, because I had a funny take once. Um, that was a dumb thing to say. Yeah, sorry, gay male culture.

[47:28] Tommy: Yeah, well, you asked me what I do for fun, and I guess when I’m doing takes and they’re kind of my for-fun takes rather than for-social-improvement takes, I oftentimes talk about gay male culture. That’s kind of like my little side anthropology project.

[47:52] Aaron: Oh, interesting. Okay, wild.

[47:55] Tommy: Because I really fell in love with that as my secondary home, my primary home being rationalism/EA. Because I’ve never experienced a culture that is so truly classically liberal as that one.

[48:13] Aaron: As which of the two?

[48:14] Tommy: As gay male culture.

[48:14] Aaron: Okay. I was going to say, I would have suspected that, you know, rat would be, but isn’t it?

[48:20] Tommy: It is, mostly.

[48:21] Aaron: Yeah, but isn’t gay culture kind of woke? Or no? Is that just a myth?

[48:25] Tommy: So it can be — like, this is definitely a complaint that I have about it, just because —

[48:30] Aaron: I mean, because — I’m not saying that should be a reason why you don’t do something, but for the particular claim that it’s, like, radically liberal, that, I think, is surprising to me.

[48:40] Tommy: It is, yeah. So there’s a big difference between the culture in gay men’s spaces versus queer/trans spaces.

[48:48] Aaron: Okay, wild. There’s a civil war — I’m sorry, that was offensive probably.

[48:52] Tommy: Oh yeah. Well, no, it’s kind of true, actually.

[48:55] Aaron: I just actually did not fully realize that. I mean, obviously they’re different — they’re just conceptually distinct, right? People don’t have to be part of the LGBT community. But okay, say more.

[49:10] Tommy: The spaces are truly very distinct. There is a very distinct culture that I fell in love with the first time that I went to Jackhammer, which in practice still is basically a gay male space. They will accept anyone, but in practice it is male, male-dominated, male culture. And in that culture, it is very, very direct, and it’s really a free market when it comes to sex. So you can just make trade offers, and people will accept mutually beneficial trades, and the trade offer itself is never seen as a threat or as a coercion.

[49:51] Aaron: Wow, this is so not relatable. Keep going.

[49:54] Tommy: Very low transaction costs. And like, for me as someone who — this is going to be graphic — you can cut this out.

[50:00] Aaron: No, I mean — I’m just hoping nobody in my room — my roommates aren’t around, but I think it’s okay. It’s fine. Go for it.

[50:06] Tommy: I have always wanted to be the dominant and be kind of rough, and it’s very rare that I feel like I can just directly ask for that stuff and directly initiate that stuff and trust that no one will be threatened by the trade offer itself. Just very low transaction costs. And I really fundamentally love free markets, both for money and for every other good and service imaginable. So I really fell in love with that culture, and that is exactly the opposite of queer spaces.

[50:42] Aaron: Okay, interesting. I am so not informed on this.

[50:48] Tommy: So that’s kind of my for-fun stuff.

[50:49] Aaron: No, no, interesting. I am — there’s a very crude sense in which I could be jealous, which is just around the sex itself, but I am more jealous around the directness allowed. You know what I mean?

[51:12] Tommy: Yeah. It’s hard. And some of it makes sense, right? Because it obviously makes sense that women are more threat-sensitive than men. That is not irrational.

[51:20] Aaron: Yeah, I’m not making any sort of enormous, like — I’m saying like, it’s an inconvenient reality for some people, not like I’m saying it’s anyone doing anything bad.

[51:29] Tommy: Right. Yeah, like to go back to the previous topic, nature is unfair. And it’s particularly unfair to females, I think. This is just a reality of the world that we live in.

[51:39] Aaron: Yeah. Return with a vengeance to asexual reproduction.

[51:44] Tommy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[51:47] Aaron: Wait, so actually I’m curious — do you mind — do you want more, have more gay culture? It’s healthcare abundance — we’ve talked about stuff. Is there a — do you want to give your pitch for, or actually not even pitch, what else besides the things we’ve talked about is in your vision of healthcare abundance?

[52:09] Tommy: Yeah, great question. Where to even start?

[52:17] Aaron: Or you can say what’s not. Is there anything that’s like — or is the answer just yes, access to anything, anything you want? Like drugs, certain diagnostics, whatever. I think that’s actually a very intuitive, plausible thing.

[52:37] Tommy: Yeah. I mean, I do have very libertarian instincts when it comes to just being able to access stuff. I do think natal males should be able to access testosterone — it’s definitely not right that I’m able to access testosterone and most of my man friends can’t.

[52:52] Aaron: Yes, or at least not easily, or it’s expensive — it’s a whole thing.

[52:56] Tommy: Yeah. One of the things I’m really concerned about lately in the healthcare abundance realm — the Niskanen Center talks about this kind of a lot — is that freestanding doctor’s offices, more and more over the years, we’re just bleeding those off because they’re getting acquired by hospitals. And this happens because of the way we’ve set up our Medicare system, where basically they reimburse doctors at much higher rates if they perform the exact same procedure in a hospital rather than in a freestanding clinic. And so what happens is that a doctor operating a freestanding clinic is very highly motivated to sell his clinic to a hospital, and he doesn’t even have to move locations — they just change the paperwork, and then he starts making like double money. But now all of a sudden he has all this hospital overhead, he’s bound by all these liability concerns, and something like my surgery, that was extremely safe and better than the standard of care, could not have happened outside of a freestanding office. It happened because my doctor cared about doing innovation, and he owned his practice so he could do innovation and take on that risk himself. And it was worth it to me to take on the risk myself. So we’re losing the spaces where innovation can happen.

[54:20] Aaron: Yeah, that sucks. I mean, I actually now recognize when you say it — correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking, that’s why random doctor’s offices everywhere in this area are somehow associated with George Washington University for no obvious reason. Is that a plausible — or the same phenomenon, you think, or just something different?

[54:42] Tommy: Maybe. I’m not informed around here, but —

[54:43] Aaron: But I guess it could be, you know, the local university wherever, or Georgetown. But yeah.

[54:50] Tommy: Very possibly. I have no idea what’s going on in this city.

[54:52] Aaron: Okay. I’ll ask Claude — that’s right. Oh yeah, I actually — so I was talking earlier, I mentioned, if you explicitly do not say “I do not consent to something,” they generally abide by that. I think if you have an MD, there’s a fair amount of latitude in what you can do, right? So a lot of healthcare is ridiculously controlled, and so a ton of shit revolves around having a person with an MD, or I guess a DO in many cases, down to do the thing. I don’t know if I have any — there’s something, I don’t know if there’s more to say about that, but like, this is where the freedom lives — it’s like, within the discretion of individual doctors. And I think — I haven’t given my whole health history, which is obviously not interesting, but I think the main challenge for me is not — I’m guessing here, right, it could be that my case is intractable in terms of physical or physiological level, but my overall take is that in fact the problem is finding doctors willing to do even quite safe and not extremely expensive, not even operating — so I was talking about surgery, but a lot of this is like diagnostics. Like, please just do the diagnostic, I promise, you know. But often they just don’t, they don’t want to.

[56:31] Tommy: Yeah.

[56:32] Aaron: And actually, I mean, this is the kind — I think money buys you quite a lot. I got a concierge doctor but at the very, very low end of what that means. And I think this has been a bit helpful, but my overall sense is that if you’re very wealthy, then there are doctors who are willing, you know, for $400,000 a year, to help you get whatever tests you want. But most people can’t afford to spend $400,000 a year or whatever.

[56:59] Tommy: Yeah, yeah. There is a lot of medical tourism stuff that seems very promising that I’m not super well-informed about, but maybe worth — just flying outside the country. I don’t really know much.

[57:13] Aaron: I actually am considering this for something. It’s underdeveloped, so I probably don’t want to go into too much detail. That means maybe a future Pigeon Hour. But yeah, I know Mexico and Turkey — so it’s not just hair. And, especially if you care about being in the US, Puerto Rico is often a bit more expensive than Mexico but also a potential option for lots of things. I think there are many cases in which, if you need the best thing in the world, it’s in the United States; if you don’t, then the 90th percentile for 1% as much is in Mexico.

[57:52] Tommy: Yeah, so I was looking at Mexico when I was getting desperate. I thought that I might never be able to get this surgery.

[58:00] Aaron: That sucks.

[58:01] Tommy: It was just awful. So many people told me I would never be able to get this surgery.

[58:06] Aaron: I mean, I think I would have guessed that.

[58:09] Tommy: Yeah, that I would never have gotten it.

[58:11] Aaron: That you would never have gotten it awake, like you did.

[58:13] Tommy: Really?

[58:14] Aaron: Oh totally. I’m surprised that in fact you got that somebody — I mean, you know, it’s a testament in part to the state of the world, in part to your persistence, right? But it’s some function of those that determines whether in fact you get the thing.

[58:32] Tommy: Okay, I feel like — if I was sitting here before and I still had boobs and I told you that I was going to get it awake, I feel like you would have laughed.

[58:39] Aaron: No, I wouldn’t have laughed, because I wouldn’t have known. But given what I know now about this not being standard or being very uncommon, then in sort of a weird hindsight sense, I would have been surprised.

[58:49] Tommy: Okay, but I feel like — the thing is, the technology is so relatively speaking simple.

[58:55] Aaron: Yeah, that’s an update.

[58:59] Tommy: It’s like, every single doctor would say that it was impossible, but it’s actually very easy to understand.

[59:05] Aaron: I’m guessing what they mean is, it’s not standard.

[59:08] Tommy: They don’t want to do it, yeah.

[59:09] Aaron: And to be fair — I mean, I’m not that sympathetic to that concern, honestly, but I would be a little — there’s one thing that is, if someone is asking you to do something weird, that’s a Bayesian update that they’re a little weird in some way. I feel like this is true in many cases. It’s like, okay, is this person going to try to sue me with the footage somehow? Are they just going to be harassing me? Are they going to be crazy? Are they not going to pay? It does increase the likelihood that something weird happens, in a way that it’s worth recognizing, even though it’s not true in your case and I’m pretty sure it’s not true in mine either.

[59:46] Tommy: Yeah, totally, totally. I think basically the reason it worked was because, after I got super desperate, I was looking at gray-market body-mod surgeons in Mexico — you know, like the people who put reptile spines on people’s backs.

[1:00:02] Aaron: Oh god.

[1:00:03] Tommy: I was getting so desperate, and I finally just tracked down the inventor.

[1:00:09] Aaron: Oh, that’s — okay, nice. This is so smart.

[1:00:11] Tommy: Yeah, literally just the guy who invented the method of anesthesia that I knew would work. And because I thought that he would maybe care, you know, because no one else would fucking listen to me. And he’s retired, you know, so I just —

[1:00:25] Aaron: Oh wow, I did not know that. New bit just dropped.

[1:00:28] Tommy: So that’s why I didn’t think to call him previously, but I was just desperate, you know, so I just called him and I was like, “you’ve got to help me.” And he connected me to a co-inventor of his who did it.

[1:00:39] Aaron: Wait, can I ask how much this cost?

[1:00:41] Tommy: $8,000.

[1:00:42] Aaron: Oh, wow. Okay, I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d said ten times that. He’d have a lot of leverage over you. I’m finding someone — I’m not sure what your willingness to pay was, but I’m guessing it would have been at least $9,000.

[1:00:54] Tommy: Oh yeah, way more. I would have put myself in debt for the rest of my life.

[1:00:56] Aaron: I mean, I was just curious.

[1:01:00] Tommy: I would have signed a contract to pay him $10 million over the course of the rest of my life.

[1:01:04] Aaron: I mean, I think I wouldn’t, because I’m a little bit — sure. No, I get it, I get it. Wow. Wait, that was out of pocket, I’m guessing? Like, you didn’t involve any sort of intermediary like insurance?

[1:01:18] Tommy: Correct. So I literally just read him my credit card number over the phone. He put it on a credit card. I did get it pre-approved by my insurance company after the fact — like, after I had paid, but before I got the surgery. I got it pre-approved by my insurance. The insurance approved it. Totally approved it. I gave them all the paperwork, all the codes.

[1:01:43] Aaron: “We don’t want to deal with this, guys, too.”

[1:01:44] Tommy: All the codes — they approved everything. Then I got the surgery. I asked them to reimburse me, as they had already promised to do, and then they told me that this surgery was impossible and they were not going to reimburse me because they didn’t believe that it actually happened.

[1:01:55] Aaron: Oh, sounds like a lawsuit.

[1:01:57] Tommy: Yeah, I need to sue them. It’s on my wishlist.

[1:01:58] Aaron: I mean, honestly, it’s actually a good use of your time for $8,000. In some just universe — I actually don’t think it’s crazy to not — I will honestly really want to — not in a bad way — I do want to experience seeing somebody — I’m honestly 60% joking. This is not in fact — I think in fact it would be more stressful, more expensive, more frustrating than I anticipate. But maybe I would want to observe someone like you going through it, especially for something that’s like — I imagine this is a very central case of a good reason to be able to sue someone. They tell you, they sign legal documents saying they’ll do X, they don’t do X. That is like the Assyrian 3000 BC type of situation.

[1:02:42] Tommy: Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

[1:02:47] Aaron: Probably it’s also a cool Substack article — “I sued [insert your healthcare provider].” They probably — they’re not going to go to court for $8,000.

[1:02:56] Tommy: Presumably. Yeah, although the amount of money — like, I have spent more than $8,000 worth of my time already fighting them.

[1:03:05] Aaron: Oh, oh. Okay, no, I feel like you should contact a lawyer to say, “here’s the situation.”

[1:03:11] Tommy: I should, yeah.

[1:03:12] Aaron: I mean, you know, I’m not actually sure about this, but it’s something to consider, especially because — I don’t know, I feel like they would love this case. Are you kidding me?

[1:03:20] Tommy: Yeah, yeah.

[1:03:22] Aaron: I mean, I have no idea.

[1:03:23] Tommy: It’s on my to-do list. I have a hundred things.

[1:03:25] Aaron: You should Substack your to-do list. It’s gonna — I feel like it’s gonna be very obviously redacted if you want. It’s gonna be very disparate — it’s like, “sue the healthcare provider, solve pain in America...”

[1:03:41] Tommy: My long-term goals. Go to the club.

[1:03:44] Aaron: Yeah, exactly.

What Claude flagged for review and why Tommy stands by his claims

Context (from above)

[00:17:06] Aaron: Also, just as a tiny bit of added credibility, I commit to running the transcript through Claude and saying, with your consent, I guess — actually, non-consensual Claude transcript analysis, just kidding — to figure out, presumably something we say is going to be slightly off. It’s very hard to talk for an hour and never say anything wrong. But we will report that.

1. “Fighting the tube” as a deliberate liability-driven practice.

Claude (Opus 4.7)

The phenomenon and terminology are real — patients can emerge during/after extubation and react to the ETT, and anesthesiologists do talk about “bucking the tube” / “fighting the tube.” But Tommy’s framing — that they “wake you up...while you’re still intubated, and they wait for you to basically struggle and thrash...and they do this because” of a liability calculation that trades suffering for slightly lower death risk — is one strongly editorialized interpretation, not a description of standard practice. The actual goal during extubation, per the standard literature, is to have the patient “awake enough to breathe without assistance, but sedated enough not to fight the endotracheal tube.” Sometimes that goal isn’t achieved, and the patient does fight the tube, and that’s genuinely awful — but presenting it as the intended design of the procedure is going to read as conspiratorial to anyone with anesthesia training and will be the easiest thing for a critic to dismiss the whole episode on. Worth adding a caveat or rephrasing as “this happens routinely as a failure mode of how we do extubation, and the system seems remarkably tolerant of it.”

Tommy:

On the “fighting the tube” topic - I think you can see some examples of both corroboration and denialism in this random reddit thread. It is so frustrating that I have talked to tons of nurses who are trying to whistleblow about the fact that many hospitals have terrible “vent weaning”/”fighting the tube”/”awake extubation” PROCEDURES and then tons of other people - and AIs, lol - show up to be like “That is totally not part of the procedure”

2. “I’m the only documented case of someone getting modern female-to-male top surgery fully awake.”

Claude:

Maybe true for the specific procedure (double-incision mastectomy with chest contouring on a non-elderly, low-ASA patient, framed as gender-affirming), but mastectomy under tumescent local anesthesia has been in the literature since at least Worland 1996, and the Sassari, Italy group (Trignano et al.) has published a body of work doing breast surgery — including subcutaneous mastectomy, gynecomastia correction, and trans-related breast augmentation — under TLA, with cohorts in the dozens. So “most doctors would tell you it was medically impossible” overstates the consensus. More defensible phrasing: “no documented case of this specific procedure being done awake on someone like me” or “essentially absent from the US gender-affirming literature.”

Tommy:

Like yes. There is “no documented case of this specific procedure being done awake on someone like me.” That’s why I said “I’m the only documented case of someone getting modern female-to-male top surgery fully awake,” lol.

And yes, the reason I knew this was possible, the reason I stuck to my guns for years while people treated me like a conspiracy theorist, is because of breast cancer patients undergoing mastectomies! That definitely proves it’s possible – that was my whole argument! I was going around making the case that mastectomies were not relevantly different from FTM top surgeries from the perspective of the anesthesiologist (despite significant differences from the perspective of the cosmetic surgeon), because that was obviously true. And then, you know, I was being told that this was my untested theoretical argument, and that it was extremely dangerous and naïve to try to get a surgery that hadn’t been done before, on the basis of my theoretical arguments.

Obviously though, my arguments were right, and I was right to make decisions based off them. And I’ve now written about that publicly. But before I wrote about it publicly, doctors AND AIs were saying that an FTM top surgery done this way was either medically impossible or very risky / unlikely to work. I almost feel like Claude might be using the existence of MY work to say that my work wasn’t novel, lol.

What Claude is doing is just sorta building the same argument that I had to build, but framing it as a correction, which is weird and misleading. Like: “A research group in Sassari, Italy has published multiple papers on breast surgeries performed this way in dozens of patients.”

Part of the research that I relied upon heavily to make my case was a collection of diverse breast surgeries done under TLA that came out of Naples, Italy. Unfortunately for me, there were no FTM top surgeries included in that group (or any that I’ve ever been able to find documented in modern times), which was a huge problem. That’s why I kept getting rejected from every doctor – because I did not have a single documented case of it to point to, and no one wants the potential lawsuit of doing something without precedent, even if it’s clearly safe. So for two years I was going around making the case that the differences were irrelevant and that this was really super safe, and then getting told a bunch of bullshit about how unknown unknowns would come to bite me and how I couldn’t possibly know that it was safe, since I was “just theorizing” and “there’s no actual evidence” (aka no published report of this particular thing actually happening). But, you know. I eventually succeeded.

(It’s also perhaps notable that breast augmentations, which Claude mentions as a piece of evidence, ARE very relevantly different from mastectomies, and much easier. No real doctor would have ever listened to me if I tried to bring in augmentations as a main piece of my argument – they just aren’t great evidence. I think Claude just doesn’t have a deep understanding of the field here.)

3 and 4. Testosterone “just shortens your lifespan” (for natal females) and “drastically increases your risk of needing a hysterectomy”

Claude:

This is stronger than the evidence supports. The Amsterdam cohort study (de Blok et al., Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol 2021) — the biggest dataset we have — found trans men on testosterone had ~1.8x the mortality of cis women, but the excess was driven by non-natural causes (suicide etc.), not directly attributable to testosterone. Multiple cohort studies of trans men on T for 10+ years have found no increase in MI, stroke, or DVT. There are real cardiovascular risk-factor markers that worsen (hematocrit up, HDL down, LDL up), but the leap from “biomarkers move in a bad direction” to “shortens lifespan” isn’t established. Worth softening to “the long-term effects aren’t well-characterized, and the risk markers move in concerning directions.

and

Also overstated. Older WPATH guidance recommended hysterectomy after ~5 years of T, partly on theoretical endometrial-cancer grounds, but that’s been walked back. The actual data is mixed: ~60-65% of trans men on T for 5+ years have atrophic endometrium, ~20-40% have proliferative endometrium, and large-scale evidence of increased hysterectomy necessity (vs. elective gender-affirming hysterectomy) isn’t there. Endometrial cancer cases in this population are rare. “Increases the risk somewhat, and the long-term picture is uncertain” would be more defensible.

Tommy:

Way less confident on this one; I don’t know much about testosterone/hysto compared to how much I know about surgery. But I will just flag that I’m a little suspicious that Claude is overupdating on like, lack of a singular published study to back up these claims, while NOT actually modeling how these chemicals work and making reasonable extrapolations. He basically can’t do that still, as far as I’ve been able to tell.

Newer models are obviously wayyyy better, but as of last year, before I started writing publicly about having done top surgeries awake, the big models were still essentially claiming that it was impossible or highly unlikely to work. They would do this even after I begged them to think about MECHANISMS for the action of tumescent local anesthesia, and apply that reasoning to the proposed surgery. They were unable to form their own independent model of how an anesthesia style works, and then apply it to a hypothetical. Instead they were only able to tell me, like “This probably won’t work because there is no evidence [i.e. a published study] saying that it will work.” The conflation of “no evidence” with “no published paper” is one I’m always on alert for. But again, not confident on this one.

5. The insurance lawsuit framing.

Claude:

[Aaron’s] “honestly, it’s actually a good use of your time for $8,000... probably it’s also a cool Substack article” framing may oversell how winnable this is. Insurance retroactive denials after pre-approval are notoriously hard to litigate — there are ERISA preemption issues for employer-sponsored plans, mandatory arbitration clauses, and the fact that “pre-approval” often isn’t a binding payment guarantee in the fine print. Tommy might have a case, especially if he has the written pre-approval in hand, but the casual confidence (”they’re not going to go to court for $8,000”) is probably wrong — insurers very routinely fight small claims hard precisely to discourage future ones. Worth either softening or noting the legal complexity.

Aaron:

Ok fine increase the uncertainty on my claims. I will note that the fact that Tommy has hours and hours of high quality footage of the surgery would seem to be an unusual factor in his favor insofar as the claim really was “this didn’t happen.” Video gen models are a thing but we’re talking about hours and hours of real footage - not easy to generate synthetically without a ton of time and money.Also the “insurers routinely fight small claims” thing doesn’t necessarily push in the direction of “Tommy won’t get his money.” If true it indicates that they’d take it to at least arbitration, which I think Tommy would win.

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Summary

In this episode, Aaron and Robi reunite to dissect the nuances of effective charitable giving. The central debate revolves around a common intuition: should a donor diversify their contributions across multiple organizations, or go “all in” on the single best option? Robi breaks down standard economic arguments against splitting donations for individual donors, while Aaron sorta kinda defends the “normie intuition” of diversification.

The conversation spirals into deep philosophical territory, exploring the “Moral Parliament” simulator by Rethink Priorities and various decision procedures for handling moral uncertainty—including the controversial “Moral Marketplace” and “Maximize Minimum” rules. They also debate the validity of Evidential Decision Theory as applied to voting and donating, discuss moral realism, and grapple with “Unique Entity Ethics” via a thought experiment involving pigeons, apples, and 3D-printed silicon brains.

Topics Discussed

* The Diversification Debate: Why economists and Effective Altruists generally advise against splitting donations for small donors versus the intuitive appeal of a diversified portfolio.

* The Moral Parliament: Using a parliamentary metaphor to resolve internal conflicts between different moral frameworks (e.g., Utilitarianism vs. Deontology).

* Decision Rules: An analysis of different voting methods for one’s internal moral parliament, including the “Moral Marketplace,” “Random Dictator,” and the “Maximize Minimum” rule.

* Pascal’s Mugging & “Shrimpology”: Robi’s counter-argument to the “Maximize Minimum” rule using an absurd hypothetical deity.

* Moral vs. Empirical Uncertainty: Distinguishing between not knowing which charity is effective (empirical) and not knowing which moral theory is true (moral), and how that changes donation strategies.

* Voting Theory & EDT: Comparing donation logic to voting logic, specifically regarding Causal Decision Theory vs. Evidential Decision Theory (EDT).

* Donation Timing: Why the ability to coordinate and see neglectedness over time makes donation markets different from simultaneous elections.

* Moral Realism: A debate on whether subjective suffering translates to objective moral facts.

* The Repugnant Conclusion: Briefly touching on population ethics and “Pigeon Hours.”

* Unique Entity Ethics: A thought experiment regarding computational functionalism: Does a silicon chip simulation of a brain double its moral value if you make the chip twice as thick?

Transcript

AI generated, likely imperfect

AARON

Cool. So we are reporting live from Washington DC and New York. You’re New York, right?

ROBI

Mm-hmm.

AARON

Yes. Uh, I have strep throat, so I’m not actually feeling 100%, but we’re still gonna make a banger podcast episode.

ROBI

Um, I might also, yeah.

AARON

Oh, that’s very exciting. So this is— hope you’re doing okay. It was— I hope you’re— if you, if you, like, it was surprisingly easy to get, to get, uh, tested and prescribed antibiotics. So that might be a thing to consider if you have, uh, you think you might have something. Um, mm-hmm. So we, like, a while ago— should we just jump in? I mean, you know, we can cut.

ROBI

Stuff or whatever, but— Yeah, um, you can explain, uh, so I talked to Max, uh, like 13 months ago.

AARON

It’s been a little while. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And so this is, um, I just had takes. So actually, this is for, for the, uh, you guys talked for the as an incentive for the 2024, uh, holiday season EA Twitter/online giving fundraiser. Um, and I listened to the— it was a good— it was a surprisingly good conversation, uh, like totally podcast-worthy. Um, I actually don’t re— wait, did I ever put that on? I’m actually not sure if I ever put that on, um, the Pigeon Hour podcast feed, but I think I will with— I think I got you guys’ permission, but obviously I’ll check again. And then if so, then I, I will. Um, and I just had takes because some of your takes are good, some of your takes are bad. And so that’s what we have to—.

ROBI

Oh, um, I think your takes about my takes being bad are themselves bad takes. Uh, at least the first 4 in a weird doc that I went through. Um, yeah, I saw you published it somewhere on YouTube, I think. I don’t know if it also went on Pigeon Hour, but it’s up somewhere.

AARON

Yes, yes. So that we will— I will link that. Uh, people can watch it. There’s a chance I’ll even just like edit these together or something. I’m not really sure. Figure that out later. Um, yeah. Yes. So it’s, yeah, definitely on you. Um, so let me pull up the— no, I, I think at least two of— so I only glanced at what you said. Um, so two of the four points I just agree with. I just like concede because at least one of them. So I just like dumped a ramble into, into some LLM.

ROBI

Yeah.

AARON

Like, These aren’t necessarily like the faithful, um, uh, things of what I believe, but like the first one was just, um, so like I have this normie intuition, and I don’t have that many normie intuitions, so like it’s, it’s like a little suspicious that like maybe there’s a, a reason that we should actually diversify donations instead of just maximizing by giving to the one. Mm-hmm. Like just like, yeah, every dollar you just like give to the best place. And that like quite popular smaller donors say people giving less than like $100,000 or quite possibly much more than that, up to like, say, a million or more than that. Um, that just works out as, as donating to like a single organization or project.

ROBI

Yeah. Okay. Um, I, I think we should explain, uh, what was previously said on this. So there’s some argument over— okay. So like, um, normal people donate some amount of money to charity and they just give like, I don’t know, $50 here and there to every charity that like pitches them and sounds cute or sympathetic or whatever. Um, And then EAs want to, um, first of all, they, I don’t know, strive to give at least 10% or, I don’t know, at least some amount that’s significant to them and, uh, give it to charities that are highly effective, uh, and they try to optimize the impact of those dollars that they donate. Whatever amount you donate, they want to, like, do the most good with it. Um, so the, like, standard economist take on this is, um, So every charity has, uh, or every intervention has diminishing marginal returns, right, to the— or every cause area or every charity, um, possibly every intervention, um, or like at the level of an individual intervention, maybe it’s like flat and then goes to zero if you can’t do any more. Anyway, um, so cause areas or charities have diminishing marginal returns. If you like donate so much money to them, they’re no longer, um, they’ve like done the most high priority thing they can do with that money. And then they move on to other lower priority things. Um, so generally the more money a charity gets, the less, um, the less effective it is per dollar. This is all else equal, so this is not like— like, actually, if you know you’re going to get billions of dollars, you can like do some planning and then like use economies of scale. Uh, so it’s like not strictly decreasing in that way with like higher-order effects, but for like Time held constant, if you’re just like donating dollars now, there’s diminishing marginal returns. Okay, so, uh, it is— the economist’s take is like, it is almost always the case that the level of an individual donor who donates something like, let’s say, 10% of $100K, like, the, the world’s best charity is not going to become like no longer the world’s best charity after you donate $10,000. And most people donate like much less than that. So the, uh, like standard advice here is, um, if you are an individual donor, not a like, um, institutional donor or grantmaker or someone directing a ton of funds, um, you should just like take your best guess at the best charity and then donate to that. And then there are ways to optimize this for like bigger amounts. So you’ve probably heard of donor lotteries, which is like 100 or 1,000 people who want to save time all pool their money and then, then someone is picked at random and then they do research and maybe they split those donations 3 ways. Or like it all goes to something, or like— [Speaker:HOWIE] Yeah.

AARON

[Speaker:Kevin] Hmm.

ROBI

$10,000 times, uh, 100 or 1,000 is like a million or $10 million. At that level, it’s plausible that you should donate to multiple things. Um, so in that case, maybe it makes sense.

AARON

Um, so I don’t, I don’t— oh, sorry, go ahead.

ROBI

Uh, so that’s the standard argument. Um, and, um, I, I’m happy to, um, explain why this still holds, uh, to anyone who is like engaged at least this far. Um, most people haven’t even heard of it and they’re like, um, well, but what if I’m not sure about which of these two things, then I should like donate 50/50 to them.

AARON

Um, uh.

ROBI

I’ll let you go on, but I just want to say this is a really lucky time to record this podcast because Yesterday someone replied to me on the EA forum linking to some, um, uh, have you heard of, uh, Rethink Priorities, um, Moral of Parliament simulator?

AARON

[Speaker:Howie] Yes.

ROBI

[Speaker:Keiran] Okay, so it has some, um, pretty wacky and out-there decision rules, and, um, so I was— I was arguing with someone on the EA forum about this, like, um, saying Uh, it doesn’t make sense to, um, to, to split your donations, uh, at the level of an individual donor, um, even moral uncertain— and they said, but what about moral uncertainty? What if I’m not sure, like, if animals even matter? Um, uh, and I said, well, even then you should take your, like, probability estimate that animals matter and then get your, like, EV of a dollar to each and then give all of your dollars to whichever is better. Um, and they said, well, but I, I, I plugged this into the Rethink Priorities moral parliament simulator and there’s a bunch of these like different worldviews and different decision procedures here. And then these two decision procedures say you should like split your donations. Um, it was like, um, wait, that can’t be right. And I went and looked at it and actually, um, That is a correct outcome, which I can tell you about later. But, um, yeah, uh, you were gonna.

AARON

Say— wait, wait, hold on, we have to— I feel like I just got cut off at the best part. So there are coherent worldviews where you.

ROBI

Think you said— um, not, not worldviews. I think the, the worldviews decide what you value, but then there are, there are decision rules. So the two that this person gave me on the forum as examples are, um, Okay, so the— maybe the, the standard one, uh, under which I was arguing is like— or like a simple one is, um, uh, I guess I’ll explain what a moral parliament is. So if you have moral uncertainty, you’re like, let’s say you’re not sure whether deontology is true or consequentialism is true or virtue ethics is true, um, instead of So if you are sure, it— like, let’s say you’re just a consequentialist, then you simply decide according to consequentialist rules, uh, like what you want to do. Um, maybe you just like max the— or like you try to— you pick the action that will maximize your expected value based on your, uh, best guess as the consequences. Um, or if you’re a deontologist, you just like follow the rules that tell you what is right. Uh, in a moral— so if you have moral uncertainty, the moral parliament is one way to, um, decide what to do when you’re not sure which of these views is right. And in the metaphor, so if you’re, uh, you give them seats in the parliament proportional to, um, how likely you think it is that that view is correct, or you’re proportional to your credence in each view. So if you’re completely uncertain, uh, like consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, you’re like equally sure those are— or like you find those equally plausible, um, and you, you’ve ruled out everything else, then you would give them each like 33 seats in the parliament or 33% of the votes, um, and then they would vote on what to do.

AARON

Um.

ROBI

So one simple decision rule Although maybe non-consequentialists will argue this favors consequentialism or so. I don’t know, it’s unclear. It’s like, do the decision that maxes the total value according to all of the representatives. So under each view, there’s like different values of the different possible outcomes. And then you add up the possible value over all the representatives or like take the integral with respect to the probability, um, uh, sum over all the probabilities. The, the weighted sum of value and probability. Anyway, um, uh, so that’s one way. Um, but there’s like some criticism of this, which is like, um, well, maybe this is, uh, this is bad because Uh, it gives extra weight to views that believe in, like, that more value is possible or something. Um, which I’m not sure is like really a flaw, but I mean, I guess that’s true. Um, okay, so the, the two rules which are somewhat exotic and unintuitive, uh, the, the first one I had heard of, the first one Rethink Priorities calls it moral marketplace. And this is, um, uh, this is maybe the least fancy decision procedure. This is just, um, your total allocation— your overall allocation is, um, each of the factions in the parliament gets a fraction of the funds proportional to their credence or proportional to their representation, and then they all independently decide Um, what they want to do with their money, and then your overall action is you just do, uh, you just add all those together. So if the consequentialists want to do option A with their 33%, and the.

AARON

Um.

ROBI

Deontologists want to do option B with their 33%, and the virtue ethicists want to do, uh, option C with their 33%, you, you give like 33% of your donations each to option A, B, and C. Okay, uh, I think this is— this is pretty straightforward, and it’s very plausible as a strategy for.

AARON

Um.

ROBI

What you do if you’re, um, allocating a large portfolio. Uh, so like, if you rethink priorities and your staff, uh, collectively are uncertain or can’t agree on what is the right worldview and you have a large amount of funding, then this would make sense to me. Um, I’m not sure this is reasonable to— like, I’m not sure if it would be reasonable to let this guide your actions as an individual, but I just heard of this yesterday, so— or like, I, I’ve heard of this before, but I hadn’t heard of it used in this context until yesterday. So I haven’t fully thought through whether this makes sense for individuals. I will— let me just tell you the last, the other example they gave. So the other example they gave was, it was, uh, this is— I think this is completely ridiculous. This is maximize minimum. And so the strategy is, uh, it completely disregards um, like, share of the parliament, and it’s just, uh, you do the option of all your possible actions that, um, that maximizes the satisfaction of the most unhappy party. So this is like minimax over all of the different possible actions and all the different, uh, people with any seats at the table. Um, and this is complete and utter nonsense. So, um, First of all, this gives equal weight to, uh, a view that you’re like 99% sure of, a weight that you’re— a view that you’re 80% sure of, a view that you’re 30% sure of, and a view that you’re 0.000000 like 10 to the minus 20% sure of. Um, those are all like weighted equally, and then the 10 to the minus 20 view is like infinitely more, uh, has infinitely more consideration than the 0% view. Um, you can— so this is, this is just like completely unworkable. I don’t know. I, I, okay, I just heard of this yesterday.

AARON

I’m not gonna— I agree with you, by the way.

ROBI

Yeah, so, okay, look, uh, I just heard of this yesterday, so I don’t know if anyone has like published a philosophy paper refuting this yet, but if they haven’t, I will. Um, you can mug anyone who believes in this nonsense by just proposing— okay, so the example I gave was, um, Uh, if someone believes this or like follows this rule, you can mug them into doing literally anything at any time. You just, uh, say, hey, I heard of this, uh, I I saw a preacher on the street corner and he was preaching to me the, uh, religion of shrimpology. Um, it turns out the universe is created by an omnipotent shrimp deity, uh, who will torture, uh, 10 tetraded to the 20 sentient beings for, uh, 3 octillion years unless you donate all of your money to shrimp welfare. Um, and they can be like— you can be like 1 to a googolplex, uh, confident this isn’t true. But— or like, it— maybe the probability of this is 1 in a googolplex because it’s so ridiculous. Um, you’re more sure this is not true than anything you’ve heard in your life, but you can’t be 100% sure, like, that’s not a, uh, a real credence you can assign. And so just by me saying this, you would be forced to donate all of your— like, you could make up any view that wants anything and is the most unhappy, like, view you’ve ever heard of, and then your action just has to follow that. Um, okay, so, uh, I think I’ve ruled that one out. Um, so Um, the upshot is I’m much less certain than I was 2 days ago that, uh, you should not diversify your donations, uh, at the level of an individual. I still think you shouldn’t, or like, I don’t see a real-life case where you would— where it would make sense to do this. Um, but I retract my, uh, previous perhaps possibly overconfident assertion that it’s like completely 100% always illogical. Uh, like maybe there is some way where it makes sense to do this.

AARON

Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I, um, so the one thing I like want to say the words two envelopes problem, because isn’t that like where some of this comes from in a, like, if you try to just be ruthlessly, maybe that’s not a good word, just like, um, what, like full-mindedly, uh, and full-heartedly. Utilitarian and consequentialist, like you run into the problem of one worldview that, um, takes a position of like ants and one that takes a position of elephants. And I, I feel like I’m just not smart enough to always have this. I would, you know, like think through it a little bit to like load it into my brain. I’m just not smart enough to like immediately have it booted up. But like, that is like one thing I like wanna— wanna say. Although I, I almost just like wanna investigate Like, I’m inclined to disagree with you because, like, like, at an intellectual.

ROBI

Level, um.

AARON

Although, yeah, we should talk— we can talk about that. I guess the plausibility of the moral parliament view. I’m, I am just like almost— I’m.

ROBI

Actually very on board with moral parliament. Um, I have moral uncertainty. I’m not like 100% consequentialist or anything like that. Um, I think it makes sense if you’re like deciding among things. Um, and again, I think it makes a lot of sense for like Rethink or Open Philanthropy to diversify because they have large donations. Um, I do not think it makes sense for me to apply moral parliament with like moral marketplace decision rule to my own donations as a small donor. Um, and then there are, I think, better decision rules that— so for example, I think Was it Toby Ord who proposed the, the, um, what’s the one you, um, I think his rule makes more sense. You, um, select a dictator with probability proportional to, um, to—.

AARON

[Speaker:David] Wait, that’s crazy. Why would you do that?

ROBI

[Speaker:Elana] Oh, ‘cause it, uh, this is optimal in various ways. Uh, um, let me, let me propose, Let me mention a couple of the, like, improvements I’ve heard of. Um, so there’s more of a parliament, but instead of everyone just gets a— instead of everyone votes on something. So that, that has the problem, there’s like unstable coalitions. Um, you know, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, and like, um, two factions prefer option A over B, but then two of three factions prefer B over C, and then two of three factions prefer C over A. There’s like a lot of, a lot of voting problems. Um, uh, one is, um, the groups are allowed to bargain with each other. So, um, they’re allowed to say, uh, like, hey, uh, I’ll— the utilitarians can say, hey, I’ll, um, vote to, like, protect the sanctity of the rainforest if you’ll allocate just, like, 1% of the light cone to, um, hedonium if you’re— if you, you end up in charge, and like they will offer different things based on like how much voting power they have, um, and who the other— the players are and what everyone values. Um, I think this is an improvement. Um, there’s— so, uh, one of the rules proposed in one of the moral parliament papers is, um, instead of “take a vote”— so, so one of the problems with just “take a vote” is, um, If you have 51% credence in one view and 49% in the other, the 51% will just like completely override the 49%. Bargaining helps this a little bit, but actually no, bargaining doesn’t help in that case. So the, the 51% might just like override the desires of the 49% and do something that they like slightly more than what the smaller group wanted, but is like completely and utterly horrible to the smaller group. Um, uh, one thing you can do is— so one proposal is, um, everyone votes as if it’s like a straight-up majority vote, but instead of simply taking the results of the vote, you pick a voter, uh, with probability proportional to their representation, and then you enact that voter’s, uh— this has beneficial properties for the same reason, um, This would be good in like a regular democratic election, uh, which I won’t get into because.

AARON

I was just going to say— [Speaker:KEVIN] No, I just want to say, um, this sounds crazy to me because, um, I think it— maybe it makes sense. I like believe you, um, if you like sort of expand the analogy of like an in— like, um, or expand the situation of an individual person’s moral uncertainty to like a society where you’re having multiple people vote. But like, you can actually just do way better than that insofar as you’re a single person because you can credibly and you can just decide to be honest and say, like, so what— one problem with eliciting, uh, preferences in democracy is it’s really hard to elicit, uh, like, strength of various preferences, um, from various people. I can just, like, assert, oh, I am, like, a quadrillion times more certain than you are that, you know, Donald Trump is bad, and maybe I actually am or whatever. But if you’re just a person, um, yeah, you could just, like, in fact, uh, care about the 49% in, like, uh, in, in, like, proportion to, like, how much, like, um, how strong that preference actually is and like not, not pretend that this is unelicitable information. And so that’s why, like, it’s the dictator— like, I mean, I also just have the strong intuition that like, wait, hold on. Uh, there’s no way, there’s no way leaving it up to chance at the end of the day is like the best thing to do. But this is like sort of— oh, wait, wait. Okay.

ROBI

Actually, I think you reminded me of something. So, so, uh, another, another proposed improvement. Gives— so you, you tell all the representatives in the parliament your decision procedure is you will, you will, you will pick someone randomly and then they vote as if they’re, as if they believe some— the dictator is being picked randomly. But then you actually, in fact, go with the majority vote.

AARON

[Speaker:Howie] Um, wait, okay. Like me, like, why would you do that?

ROBI

I don’t know. This has some kind of elegant, like, properties where it, like, I don’t know. Yeah, actually, I must be misremembering it. That, that doesn’t make sense because, like, if there’s not a majority, uh, or if it’s more than two options, you.

AARON

Could just take the plurality, like, in principle. I don’t know.

ROBI

Uh, if there’s more than— if there’s more than two parties voting on more than two options, um, I think it gets complicated. But yeah, it’s something like that.

AARON

I feel like we’re over— I feel like— so there’s like, not this is like intrinsically like too, too complex or anything, but like the thing that I want to investigate is like, so I in fact donated a little bit of money this year, um, and I donated like part— I donated to 3 different, um, organizations, uh, pretty sure, and like also maybe some small, like some one-off, like small things for like various reasons, but like basically Uh, Late Cone, um, the EA Animal Welfare Fund, and Alex Borris. And like, I don’t do this because, like, at a conscious level, it just seems like the right thing to do. Um, it’s not necessarily a great— I.

ROBI

Think this is— so, uh, leaving aside Alex Borris, which I think has some special, um, uh, actually, no, maybe that’s not right.

AARON

Yeah, it’s like, it’s like you might not— if you’re only limited to like $7,000 and you have $8,000, you might donate the $7,000. I didn’t donate $7,000 to him.

ROBI

Oh, okay. Well then I think you’re— okay. I think you’ve definitely done something unreasonable. Although I think you have built— yeah.

AARON

No, for like, for that one, for political stuff, there is like some benefit to just saying, oh, like, um, I have like X number of donors. So it’s like not totally exactly the same, but we can even just do the EA Animal Welfare Fund or like pretend it was just Animal Welfare Fund and, and Light Cone. I like, so like at a con— like at one level, like I have this, I just like have a strong intuition that like doesn’t, and I don’t normally have strong normal intuitions. Not that strong. It’s not like as strong as like, oh, like the feeling that I have qualia, but it’s like, it’s like somewhat strong that like, um, there’s like something going wrong if I, uh, um, yeah, I don’t— and the problem is that I can’t actually articulate it, right? I like, I like in fact basically just endorse what you, what you in fact think, and I like don’t know what you mean.

ROBI

So I think your intuition is wrong. I believe that, uh, By your own lights, you have done less good by splitting your donations among Lightcone and EAIF, uh, than you would have if you— or sorry, uh, you said Animal Welfare Fund?

AARON

Yeah, AWF.

ROBI

Yeah, AWF. Okay, uh, you split your donations between Lightcone and AWF. Um, I am pretty sure that, uh, you would have done better, or like the world would be better according to your own views, uh, and values if you had given all of the money to one or the other. Um, I think we both agree there are like, uh, there are some like small exceptions to this. Like political donations are limited to like X dollars per person. Uh, so I maxed out. I, I donated $7K to Alex Horace. Um, and, uh, yeah, and I do, I do do like really small donations. So like if it’s someone’s birthday and they have like, I don’t know, they ask for donations for their birthday, I’ll donate like $50 to some charity on GiveWell’s like top 10 that I think they would like— yeah, might get them interested or something. Um, or it’s like valuable to be able to say you’ve donated to that in case it comes up in a conversation with normies, and then you might be able to get them to like do more charity research or something. Um, apart from that, if you’re just— if you’re just— if you’re just looking at the direct first-order, uh, help to the recipients of the charity, of the dollars you’re donating, of your donation budget, um, I think you have to be.

AARON

Uh.

ROBI

At least a bigger individual donor than we are, uh, before— [Speaker:KEVIN] Yeah.

AARON

I mean, the problem is that I don’t actually, I don’t actually know which of animal welfare funded, like, what is the better use of my— [Speaker:ASH] Oh.

ROBI

Well, in that case, uh, in that case, that’s easy. Then, um, just like spend 5 minutes doing a BowTech and then just give all the money to the top one.

AARON

Or— [Speaker:KEVIN] I’m still gonna, so I’m gonna wind up with, I’m not exactly 50/50. So I actually did, actually, or like, I need to check back on what I did, but I actually gave, I think, more to— I think I gave more, more to like John, um, sort of in proportional, but like, I think what I was implicitly doing was something like that. Oh, everybody gets to see that the moral parliament, but almost like not everyone because only the, only like the views that are actually compelling to me or something, which is like sort of like a hybrid 5E decision procedure.

ROBI

Um, yeah, you did. Okay. You did like boundedly rational moral marketplace. Like you’re not, you’re going to round off any, like, you’re going to round off any views with like less than 5% like credibility. And then the, the top 2 or 3 views get to spend money according to their, um, yeah.

AARON

Although, although, like, I, I, it’s, my brain doesn’t clearly, at least like my conscious mind doesn’t clearly distinguish between like moral uncertainty and empirical uncertainty. Like in this case, it sort of all just mashed together. I don’t know if that matters.

ROBI

Yeah. Okay. So I am 100% sure empirical uncertainty is not a valid reason to split your donations. Moral uncertainty might be.

AARON

So wait, but now, so like, I know you commented on this thing about— so my like first hypothesis is like, maybe there’s an ED thing going on, and I’m actually not entirely sure. So like your point is, so basically the, the, the thing, the idea is like, okay, um, like is the con— so does the world look better from the position where everybody behaves [Speaker:HOWIE] Um, yes, yes, yes.

ROBI

So if everyone would stop, uh, if everyone would stop splitting their donations and just donate to whatever they think is best, at least if most people are well-informed, uh, then this would improve. Maybe that— maybe this doesn’t improve the world for like, because normies are donating like $10 to 100 different charities and 99% of charities are like approximately worthless compared to effective charities. Um, then actually it’s probably good for them. It’s probably good that they split coincidentally, just because if they took my advice and gave all the money to their favorite charity, then 100% of the money would go to like church or like homeless shelter for cute kittens. And then, but like, maybe they’re better.

AARON

Than, maybe, maybe they’re, maybe they’re better at than, than, than chance at guessing which is the best, right? Isn’t it? I actually don’t think that your argument falls down. In the normie case, it’s like, oh, maybe there’s like a 2% chance that they donate to the one out of 100 that is like the best.

ROBI

[Speaker:Howie] Uh, that’s actually, uh, that, that’s plausible to me. Um, I won’t get into that, but okay. So, um, you— so this argument often comes up for like, okay, so there’s this argument people sometimes give, uh, that it’s not worth your time to vote because there’s already 150 million other people voting in For example, the US presidential election, there’s like 140 million voters already voting. Um, and the, uh, margin in almost every state is going to be— it’s not even going to be close. Uh, even if you live in a swing state, it’s pretty unlikely that it comes down to one vote. So like the election outcome is going to be the same, uh, whether or not you vote. So therefore it’s, uh, it’s not worth your time to vote. You should just, like, stay home and do something else. Okay, here’s a really bad counterargument to that. People often say, like, I think the most common argument I’ve heard is.

AARON

Um.

ROBI

No, but that, that can’t be right. If everyone did that, then no one would vote. And then by me voting, I’ll be the only voter and I’ll decide the election. So I have to vote. Okay, so, um, my, uh, the straightforward response to that is, well, okay, yeah, if everyone followed this bizarre logic and, uh, if everyone— if everyone acted in this way and no one voted and you didn’t, then you would be the— then you would be the only voter and you would decide the election. However, we know for a fact That is not the case. Like, 80 million people have already voted. You are not going to do anything. Okay. Um, there’s a rationalist— yeah, yeah. So, uh, okay. So there’s a better rationalist version of this, which is, uh, instead of— so the— here’s a rationalist argument, um, in favor of voting. So they concede the causal decision theory outcome, like, like if you subscribe to causal decision theory, then What I’ve said so far is correct. So 80 million people have already voted. Your marginal vote will do nothing. So therefore you should not vote. It’s not worth the time. However, if you subscribe to evidential decision theory, then you’re not just casting one vote. You’re in some sense, maybe, um, uh, your vote is like correlated influenced by, maybe not causally, but somehow correlated with the decisions of everyone else who thinks like you. And there are enough people who are smart and thinking this way that you should vote as if you’re, like, kind of directing all of their votes. And so you should vote, uh, because, like, you’re better informed than the average person, and across the multiverse, you, like, improve a lot of election outcomes. Yeah, um, so I basically endorse this, I think. Sure, yeah, okay. So, um, uh, let me not— let me leave that aside for elections. And so you, you took this argument, which I think is better than the usual argument for voting, uh, for elections, and then you applied this to donations. So, um, you said, so does it make sense to split your donations because EDT— uh, for— on EDT grounds, um, should you diversify because then everyone will diversify and then you’re— this is correlated with like not just one person’s donations but many people’s donations will go to like both of these good charities. Um, and, uh, I think I have like, uh, refuted this with the observation that, um, this might make sense for an election where everyone votes simultaneously. However, this is not what the scenario is for donations. So everyone donates at like a different time throughout the year. You can, uh, you can talk to each other, like the donors can talk to each other. Um, you can look up what all the previous donations were and you can see what is the most neglected charity at the time of your donation. And then you can leave instructions or like talk to people donating later. And then based on whatever is most neglected after you and more people donate, they can change their donation.

AARON

So this is not obviously a, like a Like, I think this is a plausibly good point, not like a clear refutation. So like, the first thing that comes to mind is just, um, that you don’t— it’s not— so in an election, you can have a system where everybody commits to voting once in a given time period, and then, like, you know, for example, every— the 365 people, everybody in, in the year, and everybody has an assigned date to vote, whereas donations, like, there’s uncertainty around, like, how much people are going to vote, how much you’re even going to vote. You might not, like, have decided that yet.

ROBI

Um, uh.

AARON

When that— yeah, and like when that happens, and like to some extent this is solvable with communication, but it’s just communication that empirically doesn’t actually happen. Um, and like maybe it makes sense to happen.

ROBI

That’s not true. Wait, that’s not true at all. When— whenever I donate to a fundraiser, there’s like— there’s like that thermometer that is like, we have raised $5,000 of our $30,000 goal.

AARON

Yeah, but like you, you don’t— you don’t have complete information. My point is that you don’t have complete information about every other— sure, you.

ROBI

You don’t need complete information. The scenario, the argument breaks down as long as there’s any information, like, um, you can look up like approximately— you don’t have to know the exact amounts donated to every charity for you to, um, for it to, uh, not make sense to split. You just have to know the approximate, like, neglectedness of different options. And then it only makes sense to donate to the most neglect— to the, to your best guess of the most neglected option at that time. And then that will change over time. Like, maybe it doesn’t— maybe they don’t, like, do their financial reporting right away. Maybe there’s some lag on when the charity donates— how much— uh, updates how much money they’ve raised in donations. But later donors can find out about that and then donate differently, donate to different things, even if they are following the exact same decision procedure as you, and even if they have the exact same values as you. Um, your, your values might be, like, donate to AMF if that’s the most neglected, and donate to, um, Uh, uh, what— lead, uh, LEAP if that’s the most neglected. And then you donating first when AMF is most neglected will donate all of your money to AMF, and then this person donating later in the year who has the exact same values and wants the same thing will instead donate to, um, to, uh, LEAP because that’s the most neglected later in the year. But, uh, and so you’ve collectively split your donations even though you, uh, want the same thing, and it wouldn’t have made sense for you to split your donations initially. Um, what was good changed throughout the course of the year with the intervening events as more funding came in. Um, yeah, but so actually, this is.

AARON

A good point but might already be accounted for. So it’s like, there’s a reason why, like, part of my moral parliament doesn’t say, like, give to, like, Will McCaskill so he can, like, seed effective altruism as a movement. It’s like, that’s already totally funded. I already— it’s already, like, accounted for or something. Like, I still— like, I still don’t know which is the more neglected one, like, between EA Animal Welfare Fund and Light Code. And so at some point, like, I still have this genuine uncertainty, you know what I mean? Like.

ROBI

Um, I think— well, this all comes down to worldviews. I think one or the other is the more neglected one based on how much you value animals and how and what your discount rate is for the, the far future. I think once you decide those parameters, one or the other is the one you should donate to.

AARON

Well, you might— maybe, but what if you have— are you— is that still true if you have, um, you know, uh, probability distributions over those parameters?

ROBI

Oh yes, yes. Then, then at the scale of an individual donor, you just like integrate over those and then one or the other is the one you should donate to.

AARON

I want to think about that.

ROBI

That’s for empirical uncertainty. Um, someone raised the point that moral uncertainty is like maybe more ambiguous for this than I realized. So I have retracted my claim that you should not diversify even if there’s moral uncertainty and you are following like some— Yeah. Strange procedure.

AARON

I’m kind of in the position of the normie that you talked about with the— like you said you didn’t want to get into it. Maybe I’m going to pressure you to. You still don’t have to. About like the normie who has like, oh, donate $10 to 100 charities. I feel like in some respects I am just in that position where like, I, um, like maybe I can do better than chance, but like my intuition is something like, um, like I am trying to— like we, like we, we maybe like share the same intuition or like, like in, in some respect, which is like, oh, I have like, and, you know, and charities and one of them is going, going to be the hit and I just don’t know which the hit is. Um, but like, maybe this isn’t necessarily contradict anything you’ve already said, but, but.

ROBI

That doesn’t— then, then you should just like donate to whichever one you have the highest probability of is going to be the hit.

AARON

Yeah. Um, yeah, I think you’re probably right. That, to be clear, that’s my like takeaway.

ROBI

Yeah.

AARON

And yet, yeah, go ahead.

ROBI

Oh, uh, we can talk about the, the normie 100 charities thing if you want. I, I don’t have a strong opinion on that. I just It wasn’t quite relevant to what I was saying before.

AARON

No, I, I think, I think it just, it just like, in fact, the same, that’s like, in fact, just like structurally the same position that, like the actual position that I’m in, maybe like less extreme. And like maybe I have— you’re, you’re smarter. You can do.

ROBI

Calculus.

AARON

No, no. So I’ve, I’ve a Pareto, I have a Pareto improvement over them by like having more information, maybe being smarter, but like I still, um, I’m still in the position of like sort of having 100 options and like, even though the worst one is like plausibly, at least in expected terms, like plausibly better than like, um, like even potentially the best that they’ve identified, it’s still like by my own lights, like probably like a, like a, something like a power law distribution, um, like ex post. And so like the question is like, how do I, how do you give when like most of the impact comes from basically guessing, comes from the money that you give to the like best single choice or something.

ROBI

Yeah, I, I agree with that. Um, in this case, I would either, like, satisfy— or, like, bandedly rational— like, decide what amount of time it makes sense to spend, and then, like, spend that amount of time and see if I’ve made progress. And then, like, maybe just donate all my money to whatever is my best guess at the end of that time. Or, um, maybe it doesn’t make sense for me to spend time thinking about this, uh, join a donor lottery, or, like, ask a friend you trust to like allocate your money for you, or, um, or yeah, donate to something like EA Animal Welfare Fund or Light Cone or EA Infrastructure Fund where they do more research and like allocate to different projects.

AARON

No, I was actually having a conversation with this, uh, uh, with somebody on, uh, wait, who was it? Um, I think Caleb. Yeah, I think Caleb on, on Twitter, Caleb Parikh, uh, and about how the thing that I actually want is like a, like a like a fund, like analogous to, like, animal welfare, a long-term future fund that just, like, in fact has my, like, values exactly. But, like, this just doesn’t exist.

ROBI

Right.

AARON

Yeah. So it’s like, and, and in fact, like, if any, like, I’m actually quite open to just anybody wants to make the case, I should just give them money and they’re like, they’re better at making decisions than me, but like we have relevantly, like, very similar values. I’m actually like pretty open to that. I just like, I, I like, I know a lot of friends and we all have like important, like, disagreements, even though it’s like sort of like nihilism of small, uh, narcissism, small differences. It’s like, yeah, these are like actually like quite important disagreements about like what the world is like or something.

ROBI

Yeah, I, I agree with you on all that. I liked your approach of, um, um, you made that manifold market according to Aaron’s views, what should Aaron donate to?

AARON

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

ROBI

And that there were like 20 different options. See, I— so I think you should make that market and then at the end you should just give all your money to whatever is the highest probability.

AARON

Yeah, no, I think that that’s probably the act, in fact, the right thing to do. Or like, at the end of the day, like, taking that into account as a source of evidence or something. Like, yeah, sure. I, I think I probably— right.

ROBI

Or you could even— maybe this makes sense. I don’t think it does. You could even moral marketplace and do your donations in proportional to the percentages on the, the market. Um, but I think— actually, no, I’m sure that is just worse than donating all to the top one.

AARON

Yeah, yeah, I think I’d probably agree. And yeah, so maybe— okay, should we move on?

ROBI

Yeah, um, uh, I, uh, don’t have good new thoughts on the repugnant conclusions things, but, uh, I would be happy to talk about the rest of the doc.

AARON

Uh, okay, wait, so— well, one thing I just want to, like, clear the record. So you’re totally wrong. Wait, I’m just like— to be clear, I, like, say this with love or whatever. But like, you talk about this like purple yellow card thing in the first— Yeah. Um, interview around 40 minutes for, for, I guess starting at 39:30 for people who are like, want to reference that. Yeah. Um, and like, I actually think in some like extremely autistic, um, interpretation of utilitarianism, like you’re right, but like nobody actually means that. So nobody, nobody actually thinks that like you should be like considered blameworthy or like suboptimal if you try, if like you absolutely try your best and like the ex ante. The best guess.

ROBI

I’m not claiming that. I, I, I’m not claiming that. I’m, I, I still think you should do your ex ante best guess. I’m just saying it’s very arbitrary based on this, like, fact of what happened to be in someone’s mind, like, that determines whether you were wrong, whether, whether you were good or bad.

AARON

No, but like, ex ante isn’t the whole point that you can’t— wait, so like, the, the thing that you don’t know is like whether like you’re this like potential, uh, like, uh, moral patient. Prefers, like, X or Y, and you don’t know that, but like, that doesn’t affect what the best choice is, ex ante.

ROBI

I agree. Yes.

AARON

And so like— Yes.

ROBI

Yes.

AARON

Yeah.

ROBI

So you, you’re saying the morality of doing your choice is, um, is based on your ex ante. Um, and I’m saying the, like, ex post, uh, morality is, like, decided by this, like, unknowable bit or something.

AARON

Yeah.

ROBI

Um, and this just makes it really, like, Like, really, universe? This is— this is the moral truth?

AARON

[Speaker:Kevin] I don’t know, it seems like it’s like probably just like, yes, like I’m not surprised at all that this is the case.

ROBI

[Speaker:David] Okay, uh, well, anyway, if you ever come across any evidence for moral realism, let me know. I still haven’t seen any.

AARON

[Speaker:Kevin] Um, okay, I— like, my evidence is like, eat a— eat a like California Reaper pepper and then get back to me. Oh, that’s really nice.

ROBI

I love that.

AARON

Oh, okay. That is— I’m assuming it was from like a— like I, I think somebody like asked me like a similar— I forget if it was exactly this question, but like something similar. And like, actually, like at the end of the day, like you actually like experience sort of is the argument. Wait, I actually sort of stand by—.

ROBI

No, that, that’s not evident. That’s just like, it’s just unpleasant. It’s subjectively unpleasant. That’s not objectively bad. Um.

AARON

You’Re part— I mean, I feel like I’ve, I feel like I’ve had this conversation many times. I don’t want to like beat too much of a dead horse, but like you are part of the universe, right? Like, you can imagine, would it still be that if, like, every molecule had the same— it was like panpsychism is true, and also every— like, every molecule— just pretend that this is coherent or, like, possible— like, had the same experience. Like, at some point, would you concede that, like, the, the, like, the subjective, like, is just part of the objective? And in, like, when you have, like, sentient beings who are just, like, an aspect of the world.

ROBI

Um. Good question. I’m not sure.

AARON

Um, you’re like, I don’t think there’s anything like weird, like sort of like spooky written into the stars. It’s just like sentient beings are part of the— are part of the world. And we talk about like bad for one person, um, like versus bad in general. What do you mean? What would we mean by bad in general is like bad for the world and like they’re just part of that. Yeah, sure.

ROBI

Um, Maybe you have a good point. I think you’re moving the goalposts to, like, something less than what, uh, I understand moral realism to be.

AARON

Okay. I mean, maybe I just have a different conception of moral— Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. It’s, it’s, um, like, I guess maybe I want to, like, say that, okay, like, I actually, um, there is some additional step, which is like, uh, what is, like, genuinely good or bad. Is just, is like, is like identical. And this is like a substantive claim. It’s like identical to what is good or bad for the world or something.

ROBI

Okay, great.

AARON

And what’s your evidence? My evidence is just like—.

ROBI

Yeah, that’s right. You don’t have any. No, because it’s like, it’s like— Source, I made it up.

AARON

I made it up, but it’s, I made it up because it’s true.

ROBI

Okay, well, I can’t argue with that.

AARON

No, but, um, uh, okay, maybe there’s some like logical, I feel like this is gonna get into like a highly semantic, like a highly, um, yeah, like semantic, uh, discussion about like what we mean by words.

ROBI

Um, yeah, uh, maybe, maybe we’re, uh, maybe we’re not gonna convince each other. Uh, I’m happy to talk about it more if you want, but maybe not productive.

AARON

Yeah, maybe, maybe we’ll— I feel like we’ve already had this discussion, so yeah. Um, oh yeah, so there’s the, there’s the total happiness point. Oh, and then you said— so I actually totally would think that interpersonal utility comparisons are, are legit. Um, that doesn’t— so ignore that part.

ROBI

Um, uh, you like ordinal but not cardinal interpersonal utility comparison.

AARON

So, um, me, so No, cardinality still exists, just not necessarily, um, it’s not necessarily well, well modeled by, by addition over the real numbers. And this is like, did you see my— are you familiar with my EA forum post where I like, I spent way too long on this, but it’s like, uh, like effective altruism should accept that some suffering cannot be offset. Um, and then this actually— I, I.

ROBI

I decided it was all wrong, and I, I didn’t read that carefully, but yeah, you’re okay.

AARON

Okay, I think this is like— okay, I will— okay, I feel like I.

ROBI

Will— I will, I will engage further if you want, but I, I don’t— I think I’m gonna, uh, actually, I think I just read the first half and found lots of problems with it.

AARON

Okay, sure. I like don’t believe you, or like, I don’t believe that your problems The problems you identified are legit. Um, or like, I think, I think—.

ROBI

I don’t think they would convince you.

AARON

Oh, okay. Maybe you, if you want to, like, uh, if you like, yeah, maybe we can have another discussion, like, or which do you, do you have them like top of mind enough where like you could pull up the link and then go through them?

ROBI

No. Um, I remember this post. I think I read the first one-third or half and decided it wasn’t worth the time to comment.

AARON

Oh, wild. That’s funny, because I’m like, I’m like 99% sure in the first— the part 1 is true, and like less sure about part 2. Okay, 1 part is like, it’s like the logical thing, which is like, uh, it could be the case, it’s like not illogical, uh, that under utilitarianism, um, some off suffer— some suffering cannot be offset. And this part 2 is like, in fact, some suffering cannot be offset.

ROBI

Uh, okay, uh, I might have— it might have been I agreed with that, and then Scroll past it to the second part. It was like the second half.

AARON

Okay, that, that makes, that makes more sense. Like, I, I am, I’ve actually updated against, uh, the, like, not below 50%, but like from like, I don’t know, like 80 to 65% or something after.

ROBI

Yeah, fair enough.

AARON

It’s a, it’s literally on my to-do list to like go back over the comments. And there’s like some good points that are like, I, that are just actually like really conceptually hard for me to think through. Um, that I like, it’s, this is literally on my Google Tasks and I needed to do it.

ROBI

Um, what’s your day job these days?

AARON

Oh, so as of now, arb— I— arb research. Arb something. Yeah, this is like, as of like a week ago. Thank you.

ROBI

Okay, yeah, um, I am not sure, uh, how much time that takes up and whether you should— I don’t know. Yeah, um, if you get to it, um, Yeah, if I’m, um, maybe next time I’m on the subway or something, I will, um, try to go back to your post and get through it. Uh.

AARON

If you want, I don’t want to, like, pressure you. Um, plausibly, yeah, plausibly the— like, wait, maybe, maybe I’ll— maybe after this, I won’t try to find it now, but, like, there’s a— there’s, like, a single comment there that is, like, a bunch of— that is, like, cruxy or something, and, like, maybe I’ll try to link that so I can, like, make clear, like, what my current uncertainties or something.

ROBI

Amazing. Yes, you can send me a link to the comment.

AARON

Okay, I will— let me try to do that. Okay, cool. Uh, what else should we talk about, if anything?

ROBI

Uh, is there anything else on the doc before the repugnant conclusion stuff?

AARON

Those stipulated happiness— I forget this one. Paper— Uh, that’s like not— no, so I think, I think the main additional one is, um, the very repugnant conclusion that you just bite the bullet. I say no, don’t bite the bullet.

ROBI

Um, I think I still endorse Bite the Bullet. I would have to read through it.

AARON

Yes, so like this one, um, let me just remind myself of what I said when I was originally listening. Oh yeah, so no, this is, this is honestly just my— this is just like the paper again, or the EA forum post again. Um, okay, not, not just, but like very similar, like very closely related. Um, and like, I think the main point is like, or like a main point is, um, that it’s not unlike the repugnant conclusion where you could just— wait, no, no, even the repugnant— oh, so sorry, this actually relates to number 4. So even though we’re probably in conclusion, I’ve come to believe, even if, even though I like tentatively am willing to bite the bullet on that, it doesn’t actually follow from the premises of utilitarianism. It’s not like a logical thing. Like, you can’t just— like, it’s conceptually possible that there’s like happiness so great that it, that it like isn’t consi— like moral— it’s like morally, uh, more important to create like one amount of that than any amount or any like, you know, a number of like time being units of some like more normal happiness. This is like a possibility to consider.

ROBI

Um, uh, is this like a finitist objection? Like, there could be that much if the universe were like bigger, but the universe is not big enough to have this much utility.

AARON

We don’t in fact know, like, there’s, um, we’re so like the— in part because of like the radical, I guess mostly because of like our radical like uncertainty about like the nature of like qualia and experience. It’s just like not— so like the mapping between like qualia and like moral value or Um, what am I trying to say? Um, it’s just like, it’s like not written anywhere that like the moral value of an arbitrary qualitative state like has.

ROBI

To be— [Speaker:KEVIN] Can go higher? Can— like there might be a ceiling somewhere? You’re saying?

AARON

[Speaker:Howie] Um, conceptually there’s like probably not a ceal— wait, I’m just like trying to remember that like the right words to say this. So like conceptually there’s like probably not a ceiling, but it’s just like nothing breaks if you imagine that like one pigeon, like Like the state of a pigeon eating an apple, like, just doesn’t— like, like, there’s just, um, morally, like, no, like, uh, any, any, like, real number, uh, number of, like, hours of pigeon apple hours, like, don’t morally, um, or, like, morally, like, less important than creating, like, one, like, hour of, like, I don’t know, like, jhanas or something. And, like, it could— like, on the, on the merits, like, you can debate this. Like, is this, like, like, okay, like, is it— are in fact, like, 100,000 pigeon hours or, like, way more than that? Like, morally equivalent, but like nothing under, like in the utilitarian core, as I call it, like breaks. If you, if you like, um, if in fact the answer is no, like for any, for any number you pick of pigeon apple hours, like, like the moral value of the, of like the jhanas, like situ— uh, experience, like still— Yeah, sure, sure.

ROBI

I agree with that. Um, uh, is this where the name pigeon hour came from?

AARON

No pigeon. That was, uh, no, I just like pigeons.

ROBI

Yeah, okay, um, yeah, uh, have I told you about, um, what’s it called, unique entity ethics before? Have we talked about this?

AARON

I don’t think so, I don’t think so. Go, go for it.

ROBI

Um, okay, there, uh, this is a— have you read Unsung by Scott Alexander?

AARON

No, sorry.

ROBI

Oh, okay. Um, so in Unsung there’s this, um, uh, do you know what theodicy is? Like attempts to resolve, like how Uh, there can be suffering in the world even if God is omnipotent. Yeah. Um, so there’s this, uh, there’s this theodicy theory, uh, proposed by like some Christian philosopher, uh, which also happens to show up in, um, uh, Scott Alexander’s fiction novel. So, um, the question is, uh, how can there be suffering in the, the universe if God is omnipotent and benevolent and omniscient? Surely he would like not let us suffer. He— because he’s able to stop it. And he doesn’t want us to suffer. Um, uh, so, um, in the book, some character talks to God and finds out God created— like, uh, Job is like cursed with boils and plague, and he asks God, like, why didn’t you make me happy? Um, and God says, I did make a universe where you’re happy. Then I made a universe almost exactly like that perfect universe where everyone is happy. Then it made a universe almost exactly like that one, and then like so on and so on. Uh, I made every universe with net positive utility. Uh, and then yours is like the farthest one from the perfect universe, uh, where, where the universe is still good. So your life is filled with suffering, but it will ultimately be worth it. Um, uh, so Now you could imagine God just creates like an infinite, infinite, like uncountably infinite copies of the, um, the, the perfect universe where everyone is having the same experience over and over. Um, but maybe duplicates don’t count, or like the value, the moral value doesn’t increase linearly.

AARON

Um, so like, I mean, maybe I don’t know.

ROBI

I think— yeah, this is debated. So let me, let me give you an argument for why it, it doesn’t scale linearly. Um, although I think this might depend on more, um, physicalism than you’re willing to endorse. Okay, suppose I take— suppose I take your, um, your, uh, your brain and I scan it and I imprint it, imprint it onto like a silicon wafer. I’ve got like a one-atom-thick silicon wafer, and then I add some circuits on it so that when I plug in this chip, uh, it runs neural pro— like some electrical processes. So it’s like perfectly simulating your brain. Um, uh, can we assume, or like, bear with me for a sec. Um, can we agree if like the, the mind that is experiencing the things because these like electrons are flowing, has the exact same experiences as you do, it has like the same moral value as you, or like— [Speaker:HOWIE] Yeah, conditional.

AARON

On having the same experience, then it has the same moral value.

ROBI

[Speaker:David] Sure, yes, uh, or, or let’s just say it has some unit of moral, moral value, um, but like it has some experiences, it has some moral value. Okay, it’s like one atom thick and there are like circuits etched into it. Okay, now, um, uh, now let’s say I take an anatomically precise 3D printer and I just like stack another atom on top, uh, to double the thickness. So it’s a 2-atom-thick, uh, chip. Um, like everywhere there was a silicon atom, there’s now another silicon atom on top of it. And everywhere there was a copper atom, there’s another copper atom. And now it’s, it’s a chip exactly as before, except twice as thick. It still runs the same processes, still has the same experiences. Okay. Um, is this still the same moral value as before?

AARON

I have no idea. Like, maybe. It’s like, it’s like, it’s a quasi-empirical question. Like, are there two— are there two beings now, or are there one? Like, streams of experience or one? And like, I, I just don’t know the answer.

ROBI

That’s a good point. Almost everyone says yes, this is the same as the, the, the previous, like, before I doubled the thickness. Um, okay, now the gotcha is supposed to be here. So like, I take this two-atom-thick thing that’s having the same experiences as before, and then I separate it by like one angstrom. So now there’s two copies. I’ve done nothing except like split it apart. Is this now suddenly twice as valuable.

AARON

As— [Speaker:HOWIE] I mean, the answer is like, the answer is like, maybe it’s like, it’s not inconceivable that like, that you have like some version of computational functionalism, just like [UNCLEAR] is just like, it’s like a brute fact of the universe. Like you have to separate functional, you have to separate like instantiations of an algorithm by like some amount of like air.

ROBI

[Speaker:Howie] Okay, great. So, so just to This didn’t work on you, but a lot— uh, many people find this like a knockdown argument against, like, linear scaling of identical experiences of, like, moral value. So, um, uh, many people would say, “Okay, this argument conclusively demonstrates, yeah, 2 pigeons eating 2 apples for 2 hours is not twice as valuable as, um, 1 pigeon eating an apple Uh, yeah, it’s somewhere between 1x and 2x. Like, there’s some kind of discount.

AARON

Like, the discounting thing is like pretty— seems pretty implausible. Like, the closer thing to like plausible in this, in this like space is like, um, it’s like you, you want to be able to say— it’s like, uh, this gets into like weird multiverse stuff, but like you want like a genuine— like you want, um like two copies of the quote unquote, like the exact same thing. And there’s like sort of metaphysical question, which is like, can you have two copies of the same thing? Like if, if there are just like two copies of, of like, uh, of like a set. So like, I think at the sort of low level physics, ‘cause like my understanding is like, it’s just properties all the way down. And like, can you even have two different, like I quote unquote, like identical pigeons? Or something, because like they’re not identical with respect to like how their fields are interacting with like, uh, you know, like various, uh, like other gravitational— [Speaker:HOWIE].

ROBI

Yes, wait, okay, um, suppose I just take, uh, I say there’s this pigeon eating this apple for 1 hour, uh, let’s suppose I make an atom-for-atom copy, uh, it’s so far away they’re like outside of each other’s visible universe.

AARON

[Speaker:Howie] But like, like, so, so like, like, um, I think that I haven’t thought about this very much because I don’t think it holds, but like, um, I think the idea is like, oh, like physical position, like, is just a property that matters here. And so like, you can’t— basically, like, the idea of the argument is like, you, you can’t actually— you can’t actually get to like two pigeons, like two identical things. Like, in some intuitive sense you can, but it’s in like genuine metaphysical sense you can’t, because like, okay, yes, exactly the exact same properties, it’s just like one item.

ROBI

[Speaker] Right. So I was going to say, like, yeah, suppose they’re so far apart, they’re like, they can’t causally interact with each other. But then you say, okay, like, yeah, but I don’t know, bird’s eye view of the universe, there’s one bird over here and one bird over here. And like the location in the universe relative to the other bird is like a property that is different between them. Okay. What if I have an infinite grid of birds and like, 80 billion light years apart from each other so that for any individual bird, there’s an equal number of birds in every direction. And so they are in fact, like, identical in that.

AARON

[Speaker:Howie] Oh, uh, I love it. Um, you know, I, I, I, some, like, the answer is like, yes, like maybe that makes the difference. And like in this, in this situation, there’s in fact only— so I, I think the fundamental thing that I believe is like, um, there is like, it’s like a fact of the matter about like the number of streams of experience. — or like, there’s something about, like, how much quality is going on, or like what quality exists in the world. Um, and like, physics can, like, pretend to, like, have an answer to this, but like, there’s either— either there’s one stream or there’s many. And like, maybe it’s a brute fact of the universe that if you have, like, structurally— like, the structural perfect, like, lattice of pigeons, there’s only one stream. But this seems, like, very unlikely to.

ROBI

Me. [Speaker:ELANA GORDON] Uh, okay, yeah. Um, I don’t know if we can, um— I don’t know that there’s any way to empirically resolve this. No, I don’t think it comes down to— I think it comes down to, like, people believe different things about this, uh, because of arguments like that, like, one-atom-thick etched silicon circuit.

AARON

Thing.

ROBI

Yeah. And people have different intuitions, uh, and maybe you just can’t test.

AARON

This. Yeah. No, I mean, the, um, I, I, it’s like a little bit— it’s like interesting to me that people— and I think objectionable, I guess, also not just interesting— that, like, people will go from —uh, the direction of like, oh, that there’s this like wafer argument to— and therefore there’s like less than 2 streams of experience as opposed to the— or sorry, less than 2 times like the amount of moral value as opposed to the, the like other logical direction, which is like, which is like clear, like there can be 2 identical twins, therefore this, this thought experiment is nonsense. Um, like, or like there, there can be 2 identical twins who are like clearly like have their own —like conditional on them, on us not being radically wrong about what the world is like, there are just like two— there are in fact two persons there, like two streams of experience, two sets of qualia. Like they can— and so like this demonstrates that the thought experiment like doesn’t— is like, is like tricking me somehow. Like I think that’s the correct.

ROBI

Inference. Yeah, some people, some people see this and they’re like, okay, that seems fine. Yeah. So now there’s just two— it’s just, it’s, it’s— that’s right. It’s twice as valuable when you separate them by one Planck length. Um, you’ve made it twice as.

AARON

Valuable. No, that’s the other option. Yeah. Um, cool. I’ll FYI, so I’m actually happy to keep talking, but I’m like at 6:30, I’m probably gonna hop.

ROBI

Off. Or, uh, yeah, I should get going. Um, I can send you some, uh, I’ll send you two links. I’ll send you one, uh, I don’t know if you know Richard Bruns. Um, he works at JHU. He wrote a blog post on unique entity ethics. I’ll send you that. I’ll send you an EA forum comment thread about the Moral Parliament tool and point out where in the Moral Parliament tool this— these decision rules are. Oh, and maybe something about voting mechanics. Send me the transcript. I’ll listen to it and then figure out what would be the best—.

AARON

Okay. Okay, cool. And I will try to send you— I just wanna identify like a single comment thread that is like good to identify about from my, from my forum.

ROBI

Post. Great. Uh, and then I will see you again in 13.

AARON

Months. Yes. Maybe even sooner. Maybe we’ll run into each other in real life. You never.

ROBI

Know. Uh, likely. Um, are you going to.

AARON

EAG? No. If you’re ever in DC, you can look.

ROBI

Uh, likely in.

AARON

March. Yeah. Okay. Well, you hit me up. Okay, cool. See.

ROBI

Ya. Awesome. See you.

AARON

Later. Take care. See.

Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe

A great discussion between my two friends Max Alexander of Scouting Ahead and Robi Rahman (in response to a fundraiser that we wrapped up more than 13 months ago)Tweet with context: https://x.com/AaronBergman18/status/1999918243205779864?s=20

Transcript

(AI-generated, likely imperfect)

MAX

Hello to the internet, maybe.

ROBI

Hey internet.

MAX

Um, I’m Max.

ROBI

I’m Robi.

MAX

Um, thank you all for donating, especially you. Um, so we’re gonna do a vegan version of Hot Ones. I actually don’t know if the camera can properly see. I mean, we took a photo as well, so someone will see it eventually. Um, but I have some very not spicy questions for you, and I hope.

ROBI

They get spicy, right?

MAX

Do you think it’s a little spicy?

ROBI

Um, I don’t know. Anyway.

MAX

Yeah, they’re not, you know, I’m sure someone will judge me greatly for this online.

ROBI

Um, yeah, the, uh, the food is spicy at least, or it gets a bit spicy. So, um, we’ve got, um, uh, we’ve got field roast, uh, buffalo wings without the buffalo sauce. We’ve got some spices on them. We’ve got, uh, Jack and Annie jackfruit nuggets and Impossible fake chicken nuggets, uh, with— my god, Sriracha, um, spicy chili.

MAX

Crisp.

ROBI

Calabrian hot chili powder, habanero hot salsa, Scotch bonnet puree, Elijah’s Extreme Regret Screamin’ Hot, um, Scorpion Reaper hot sauce.

MAX

Cool.

ROBI

And, um, some, uh, Dave’s Hot Chicken.

MAX

Reaper seasoning and Carolina I’m going to have a much worse time than you are.

ROBI

I’m looking forward to this.

MAX

Yeah, uh, I guess I think in tradition of hot ones, um, the guest, um, introduces themselves and like says a background. So I don’t know if you want.

ROBI

To— okay, yeah, um, let’s see, um, I’ve been involved in EA for— well, I think the first meetup I went to was 2017. Um, they, uh, EA was much smaller then and, uh, we didn’t have our own meetups. They were, um, the DCEA meetup group was, uh, combined with a vegan feminist environmentalist— [Speaker:MAX] That’s cool. [Speaker:ROBI] —something meetup. [Speaker:MAX] Yeah, nice. [Speaker:ROBI] Eventually we, we had enough EAs that we, you know, spun off our own, uh, effective altruism only thing. [Speaker:MAX] Cool. [Speaker:ROBI] Yeah, um, yeah, but, uh, that was fun. Um, that was also the first year I played giving games. Um, And then, uh, I was, I was kind of a global health person back then, but, um, um, Matt Ginsel was way ahead of his time, and he, um, like in the Giving Games, you get to— you like play all the games like poker or like whatever, whatever, and you win the chips, and then at the end you put the chips in, into the box for whatever charity you think should get the money. And, um, He surprised me by donating to pandemic prevention, which wasn’t even on my radar then. And then, like, 3 years later, he was totally right.

MAX

Yeah, unfortunately.

ROBI

Yeah. Uh, yeah.

MAX

And now you work at Epoch.

ROBI

I work at Epoch. Yeah. Um, I do AI forecasting, basically. My job is kind of to figure out when everyone else’s job will be automated. Delightful.

MAX

You know? Yeah. Cool. Um, yeah, I guess maybe our very lukewarm, uh, question is, uh, which do you think is better, fuel or soil land?

ROBI

Um, I think I prefer Soylent for the drinks.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Interesting.

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] But, um, Hewlett Hot Savory was great. They’ve recently rebranded, right? [Speaker:ROBI] I don’t know. [Speaker:MAX] Hot Savory to, um, Instant Meals or like, something like that? I haven’t bought it in a while.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] I, yeah, I bought some for the fundraiser.

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] Should we eat some lukewarm nuggets to go with the lukewarm questions?

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] So let’s start off with the Chili Crisp, um, uh, buffalo wing. [Speaker:ROBI] Okay. [Speaker:MAX] Cheers.

MAX

Yeah, that’s not that spicy.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Eat the whole thing.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Oh no.

ROBI

I’m sorry. It’s so far. Chicken nugget. [Speaker:ROBI] Yeah, um, yeah, I don’t think I would— I don’t know if I would notice that’s not chicken.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Oh yeah. For sure.

ROBI

I mean, I’m not a huge fan of chicken nuggets anyway, but yeah. Um.

MAX

Cool. Okay, um, let’s see.

ROBI

Uh.

MAX

Okay, well, this one’s a little spicy at least. Uh, what’s one thing you think everyone in EA is getting wrong?

ROBI

Um, I’m kind of like very EA orthodox, and I think EA is like basically right about everything. Um, the The thing I think EAs get wrong— I think the, um, I don’t believe in the, like, perils of maximizing stuff, or like— like, maximizing does have the problems that they point out, but like, I don’t think anyone has a good argument that, like, you should not maximize.

MAX

Sure.

ROBI

I think all of the, like— I don’t know, I just bite the bullet. I’m taking everything to the— like, if the principles are right and you have the facts, yeah, the conclusion is what it is.

MAX

Okay, well, that’s good. I think I have a question later that’s like Is the repugnant conclusion actually repugnant?

ROBI

I’ll have some thoughts on that. Yeah, I think I basically disagree with Holden Karnofsky and Scott Alexander on, like, you should get off the crazy train if it seems too weird. Like, no, if the reasoning checks out, you should do what you should do.

MAX

Cool.

ROBI

Yeah, I kind of think— this might be a bit spicy— Okay. I kind of think, um, they are— I slightly suspect they’re just saying that as cover, like after the FTX scandal and whatnot. Like, no, no, no, no, we don’t really believe in that stuff where you like take it to the extreme and like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MAX

That is plausible. I don’t know Holden, so I cannot say for sure.

ROBI

Neither do I, but I’d like to think he’s smarter than to— sure.

MAX

Yeah, yeah. Um, cool. Yeah, though Yeah, I mean EA is a whole big thing, so, you know, um, cool, that’s a good one. That’s a— if you brought that to a party, you know, you would start a 3-hour discussion, sort of.

ROBI

No, I think that would be like, um, a 30th percentile EA spicy opinion.

MAX

Well, yeah, but then the other people, you like start the whole thing and they, uh, yeah, cool.

ROBI

Um, cool.

MAX

Oh wait, should we eat another thing first?

ROBI

Yeah, how many questions are there?

MAX

16? I have 16, but some of them are like not— Yeah, 2, 3 questions. Okay, cool.

ROBI

Um, yeah, uh, so you spoke at UHG once, right? I— not— I wasn’t quite a speaker. I was a, um, I ran a session. Yeah, it was, but it was, um, it was like a forecasting interactive exercise. So it was a, like, short presentation, and then we did a workshop.

MAX

Cool.

ROBI

Yeah, I think the EAG team has been trying to move away from static content and lectures, because EA has this meme of, like, you don’t go for the content, you go for the one-on-ones. Or a lot of people say, like, well, why should I watch a talk when my time is scarce and I could just watch it on YouTube anyway at 2x speed, thereby saving all this time? I don’t think people would— I don’t think the counterfactual is actually watching. I think it’s just never seeing the talk. Exactly.

MAX

Yeah.

ROBI

But, but, um, And there have been some really good talks at the AGs. Kevin Esvelt at EAJxBoston was incredible. Yeah, very, very good biosecurity presentation. But yeah, so I offered to— or like was, you know, talking to the content team about like they might have wanted a presentation, but they didn’t want it to just be a lecture. I could just give an Epoch spiel, but I think it was more fun with, you know, people who are in current views.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Cool. Yeah, I guess if you were to do it now, has anything changed or.

ROBI

Is it mostly the— [Speaker:ROBI] Well, I would fix— one of my forecasting questions had a loophole. I think we were— so Matthew Barnett is another AI forecasting guy. He has just left Epoch to form a startup. Spicier than anything I’m doing. I can talk about that later.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Yes, that’s a good question actually.

ROBI

Well, I’ll finish. Um, Matthew and I, you know, uh, had some questions. We adapted them for the UAG format. Um, I think I made some last-minute changes and then overlooked a loophole, which was— so the, um, I don’t remember what it was exactly, but it, it was something like one of the questions ended up being like— so there were 3 big questions of like different domains. Um, one was like superhuman in math, one was like, um, do all like households tasks by inventing robotics, and one was, um, um, synthetic biology capabilities. And one, uh, the last question was something like, um, when will it be possible to, with the aid of AI, invent a virus at least— like, synthesize a virus at least as dangerous as COVID or something. But I think I edited it last minute and then left some loophole where someone raised their hand and was like, “Well, you can already acquire a sample of a virus at least as dangerous as COVID by getting a sample of COVID.” Simply just have someone sneeze and then deliver it. So AI can already do that. But that’s not the point of the question. No, it was something like, “When will a rogue terror— when will it be possible for a rogue terrorist group with the aid of AI to get a sample of a virus at least as dangerous as COVID?” And they can already get COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MAX

Uh, yeah, cool.

ROBI

Uh, that wasn’t the exact question, but something like that. Yeah, nice.

MAX

Um, cool, that’s very fun. Yeah.

ROBI

Um.

MAX

Let’S see, uh, I guess, yeah, so if you kind of weren’t in EA now, is there like a career you would— do you have like a dream career that you’re like, ah, it’s just not impactful enough?

ROBI

So, um, that is a great question. I really like data science. Um, this is a little suspicious. Um, like Maybe I would do the same thing anyway. But yeah, I mean, I previously had a different job. I was like a construction engineer. But it was kind of boring and I wanted to switch to data science anyway. And then I found out— well, I was already considering it and then 80K was also a factor. Work on AI and all this stuff. It’s going to be really impactful. I had an old non-EA job and was just like earning to give. Um, but it like wasn’t much direct impact, and I wasn’t earning that much money, so like, um, and also I was like bored at my job, so I probably would have quit anyway. Um, but like that, uh, I ended up quitting I think in 2020, um, around when the principles came out, and that like influenced me a bit. Like that also spurred me to, you know, get into this.

MAX

Yeah, cool. Uh, should we do another one?

ROBI

Sure, yeah. Can I— interest you in, uh, an Italian spicy chicken nugget. Wait, this is, um— Oh yes, yeah, this is the, uh, field roast nugget but with a Calabrian hot chili powder.

MAX

Cool.

ROBI

Um, which is, uh, I believe it’s the spiciest thing from Europe. Um, nope, Scotch bonnets are not from Scotland. They’re, they’re named that because the pepper is in the shape of that, like, Scottish hat. Oh, okay. I’m putting some more spice on mine, but, uh, this stuff tastes really good. Like, well, apart from spiciness, but, uh, cool. Yeah.

MAX

Cheers.

ROBI

Cheers.

MAX

I can see how that’s the spiciest thing in here. Do you think it’s spicy, or— No.

ROBI

But yeah, um, This chili tastes so good, I put it on everything. It’s like great on like risotto, arancini, pizza, pasta.

MAX

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I could see why you would do that. And that would— I don’t need a lot of spice and it’s not like super, uh, yeah, but it’s nice. Cool. Um, let’s see. Yeah, so, well, this one’s a little spicy. What do you think a big mistake people in AI safety you’re making right now?

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Oh, I don’t know if I have any. Um, I think it’s become— at some point it was like low status to be too doomer. Like, I think AI safety didn’t— or like, EAs didn’t want to be associated with like being, um, like having high P doom. Um, because I don’t know, maybe government official— like, maybe it’s not put into the government, so like policy people didn’t want to like be one of those rabid doomer people, start to gain credibility, they went with the angle of, “I think it’s only 1% or 5%, but even regardless, you should still take it very seriously.” Which I agree. I totally think even if you have only 1% or 5% be doomed, this is possibly the most important issue. And the government is like sleeping on this and has no plan. But, um, no, but I don’t think these people— I don’t think there’s enough evidence to be like 95% confident this won’t cause doom, basically. Yeah.

MAX

I guess, do you have a P-Doom?

ROBI

It’s hard to define. I think it really depends what negative outcomes are included. Um, so I guess I, I don’t see humanity existing in its current form in like centuries from now.

MAX

Cool.

ROBI

But like, so a lot of people might think if we, um, like upload ourselves to cyborg bodies and then every 10 years like there’s more and more advantages of like, like having a robot arm instead of a human arm, they just get better and better, and then like people who are old-fashioned are like die out or are competed. Even if everyone at every step is happy with, like, “Oh, I would rather have robot hands instead of regular hands because robot hands are better.” Some people, if you look 100 years in the future and see that humans have turned into these cyborg monstrosities, might think, “Oh god, that’s horrid, that’s human extinction, like there are no biological humans left.” We’ve been destroyed. Even if it happened in a good way, where everyone is happier and happier each year, I think I would not count that as due. But, um, yeah, if I had to put a number on it, maybe 20-30%.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Okay, well, you know, it never.

ROBI

Makes me happy to hear anyone’s numbers.

MAX

But thankfully I’m good at processing using, um, what’s the word, all those things you read when you get into EA where it’s like, ah, scope insensitivity and stuff.

ROBI

So yeah, you know, uh, I’ve never heard that one before. Luckily I’m very scope insensitive, so I’m not as worried. I’m not freaking out as much as I should be.

MAX

Okay, yeah. How many work trials have you done in your life?

ROBI

How many work trials have I done in my life? Um, at least one. I mean, I worked for Epoch and.

MAX

Then.

ROBI

Uh, Um, I mean, I solved the thing we were, we were trying to do in the work trial, so I got, got the job, uh, that way. Um, what other places have I worked out that— oh, um, I applied to Open Phil. Their, their hiring process is really long. I made it to the third round of work trials, and then I think they, uh, hired someone else for the position.

MAX

Yeah, yeah.

ROBI

Um, man, EA, uh, EA job market is rough. Yes.

MAX

This might be more of a more— Everyone’s super overqualified. Yes, yeah, uh, you know, as a young EA, you do a lot of work trials.

ROBI

Yeah.

MAX

What do you think the optimal number.

ROBI

Of work trials is? Optimal number of work trials is?

MAX

Yeah, in a hiring round, I guess. Um, but maybe in your life.

ROBI

Oh, for an employer to have?

MAX

Yeah.

ROBI

Or for you to do before picking a job?

MAX

Um, you know, either.

ROBI

So I, um, I— when you said that, I interpreted the question as like, what is the right number of work trials to do before you I thought this was like a secretary problem question, like how many jobs should you— how many job offers should you go through before you settle down on a job? The optimal number of work trials to do is I think 20 or 30, because that’s how many the guy did when he wrote that famous post. Getting an EA job is really, really, really hard. So, um, for that sweet, sweet forum karma, you should do 20 or 30 work trials.

MAX

Well, you gotta do like 10 more or something, see if I keep one up.

ROBI

I, I, I, I mean, you can’t just— you can’t just— that’s like 2020 talk. Yes, yeah, that was 5 years ago. The standards are, uh, yeah, much higher now. Yeah, cool. Um, should we eat another? Sure, yeah. Um, so this is just some, um, Tostitos Habanero Salsa on a, um, Jack and Annie jackfruit nugget. What do you think of the jackfruit or the habanero?

MAX

It’s spicier.

ROBI

I honestly, I’m not noticing any spice.

MAX

That— you know, well, um Um.

ROBI

Yeah.

MAX

I think the nuggets first though.

ROBI

I feel like you don’t like the nugget as much. Yeah, yeah. Um, my favorite is Impossible Nuggets, which are the last two. Um, yeah, um, I didn’t eat much jackfruit. Um, I think they had it at UAG, maybe in like a, like a salad or something. It was like kind of a meaty option. Um, but I looked at the macros of this. Unfortunately, jackfruit isn’t like very protein dense, so, um, it’s not my, uh, chicken replacement of choice.

MAX

That makes sense. Yeah. Uh, what do you think the best UAG venue is?

ROBI

Not UAG venue. Yeah, I don’t know how many you’ve been to. I freaking loved, um, London 2021, which was in— what’s the housing project called? Um, can you look up UG London 2021?

MAX

Yeah. Oh goodness.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] What’s it called? Uh, the Barbican. [Speaker:MAX] Okay. [Speaker:ROBI] Um, it’s like a, um, it’s like public housing, but it’s like freakishly nice. It’s like they have a museum and like an opera hall and bookstores and cafes and like an indoor tropical jungle.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Okay, yeah, it seems like it would win, you know.

ROBI

And they had a conference, and they had, um, that was my— was that my first UAG? Yeah, it was. And then I was, I was blown away at the delicious vegan food. Maybe I had low standards for vegan food back then, but yeah, it was so good.

MAX

I’ve heard it’s gotten much better. I wasn’t really engaging with it that much in the past. I guess it got better than, like, 20 years ago or something.

ROBI

Yeah, sure.

MAX

So, you know, on some time horizon.

ROBI

I’m so glad that veggie burgers are good now. They used to be just like bean paste. Like, that’s not a burger substitute. Anyway.

MAX

Yes, yeah, yeah. Maybe we save that. Cool. #ADKpodcast or #Dworkishpodcast?

ROBI

Ooh, I really like both of them. I think I would— so if you took all of the 80K episodes I haven’t listened to and all the Dwarkesh episodes I haven’t listened to and randomly picked one of each without me seeing what they were, I would rather listen to the 80K episode just because— I think my reasoning is wrong, so I have to reconsider. I was going to say, because Dwarkesh mostly does AI stuff and I hear enough about— like, I have enough AI in my, uh, podcast ecosystem diet, uh, so I don’t need any more. Um, but actually Dwarkesh’s, uh, episodes on, like, history and, like, um, anthropology have been really good. So, um, yeah, now I’m torn. Um, gotta pick. Okay, I’m picking— I’m actually— now that I’ve remembered, he does non-AI stuff that’s also very good. Like extremely good. Um, no, I’m gonna say Dwarkesh, actually. Um, partly because I think I’ve already listened to most of the 80— like, I’ve gone through the 80K, like, episode list and listened to all the ones that seemed interesting. Um, so the ones that are left are, like, stuff I don’t really care.

MAX

And see here and there. Um, yeah, this one’s a little spicy, I guess. I was going to say this, but we’ll just do it because it’s on theme. Uh, what do you think about the 80K, uh, pivot?

ROBI

Kind of— 80K pivot to AI? Yeah. Um, I I really respect them for doing it. They’re doing what Holden is too chicken to do.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Well, he’s an anthropic now, right?

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Oh, sure. I meant, um, with the maximization. [Speaker:MAX] Ah, yeah, fair. [Speaker:ROBI] If you think—if you have done the research, and you think you have the best—like, you have figured out what the best thing to do is, just friggin’ do it. Don’t waffle about how, “Oh, but we don’t want to maximize, we don’t want to—” optimized too hard, it would be too optimal. You can’t have that. Um, no, they, um, if they—their mission is to, like, um, maximize impact, and, um, they think AI is just, like, much more pivotal in the next few years than all, like, every other issue that could steer people to or focus on, which I think that’s correct. Um, it absolutely makes sense to go for it.

MAX

Nice.

ROBI

Um, yeah, but— and, and I mean, they’re leaving the career guides up on the other cause areas, so for people who are like not, you know, AI true believers or are, um, animal welfare fanatics, they’re still— yeah, yeah.

MAX

Do you, um, what do you think about like, uh, there’s kind of a thing where like EA is very young, like we have an oversupply of, you know, young 22-year-olds, uh, ambitious. You think we need to like, uh switch our recruiting? Yeah, recruiting, you know, now that— yeah.

ROBI

I think I rubbed spice in my account. Um, switch the recruiting? Uh, I don’t know. Um, I think I understand and mostly agree with most of EA’s, like, past decisions. Like, they get criticized for focusing on, like, um, um, like, fancy universities or something, but, like, the, the kids who go here— there— like, they’re the ones who have the most opportunities to go into these, like, uh, like, competitive, like, tech or, like, consulting jobs, which are, like, the kind of things that were needed by the movement. Um, Um, yeah, I think— I guess the shorter your timelines are, the more important it is to not do stuff like— so, like, Horizon Fellowship makes sense, right? They’re incubating people in with maybe technical or policy expertise and get— getting them placed in influential positions for policy. Um, If you have shorter timelines, maybe this, like, long setup stuff doesn’t make sense, and maybe you should just, like, directly, like, pitch to— just, like, try to convince the senator instead of, like, this, like, galaxy brain plan where you, like, train the staffers who will then be in the office of, like, the next candidate who wins, and then, like, when the House switches back to Democrats, then they’ll have like these people in a position of power, and then there’ll be the singularity in like 2032, and by then we will have like gotten all the— yeah.

MAX

Nice, cool.

ROBI

Yeah.

MAX

Um, should we get another one?

ROBI

Sure, yep. Um, okay, I’ve got a spicy, spicy take for you along with a spicy nugget. So this is, um, um, the last jackfruit nugget, and it’s got scotch bonnet puree, um, Yep, enjoy it too. I wasn’t thinking about this, but I put a lot of Scotch bonnet on mine. It might hurt my stomach later, but it’s delicious. How are you doing?

MAX

Oh, you know, okay. It’s just spicier than what I would put on my food, but you know. I eat a lot of cereal, so, you know, it’s like, yeah, all right.

ROBI

You know, I haven’t heard that one in, uh, I mean, like, yeah, not.

MAX

Like an insane amount of cereal, but, you know, probably more than average.

ROBI

I can’t remember the last time I ate cereal.

MAX

Like, maybe it’s not surprising. I guess, like, maybe it’s not. I only have, like, I only know the cereal eating habits of people I’m around, and like, if you live in a house where people— it’s like, you know, no one likes cereal. Yeah, I don’t know what the market cap is.

ROBI

I don’t know, I guess we’re just not a cereal household.

MAX

Yeah. So what’s your spicy take?

ROBI

Uh, well, I think, um, you know, politics is the mind killer from restaurant. Yeah. Um, I don’t know if I’ve actually.

MAX

Read it, to be honest.

ROBI

Sure, but I’ve heard people say like political— like having political opinions biases you. My spicy take is that, um, I think EAs are too Democrat and they’re like, oh, discriminating against Republicans. Like, we’re leaving billions of dollars of donation and like tons of political influence on the table because EAs won’t put aside their like partisanship.

MAX

Yeah, that I don’t know. I feel like you’re probably right there, though also being liberal-leaning, I’m like, I.

ROBI

Don’T know, like, you know, like, uh, we could get twice as many donations for vendettas. But on the other hand, Republicans are just so— like, if you met MAGA supporters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, um, yeah, but I think we’re seeing, um, maybe some bad effects of this kind of situation in EA. Um, EA’s being too left-wing, I guess, where the administration— there’s just like no EAs in power right now. And I think we could have, you know, we’re missing impactful opportunities to have the policy and implementation be less terrible if we just had people in the system who could like, you know, if we just built up the deep state in both parties. Like, if there were any EA Republicans, they would be in the government right now, and they would be, you know, throwing a spanner in the works of the disastrous tariffs and US aid cancellations.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] I’ve heard people say that Doge is EA, though I don’t think it is.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Okay, there was this— there was this, uh, what’s, what’s a tweet but on Bluesky? [Speaker:MAX] I just rolled a tweet. [Speaker:ROBI] A Bluesky tweet or post.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Yeah.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Um, they got like 50,000 likes. And it was like quote tweeting an article about how Doge had just cut billions of dollars from USAID, and I’m like, “Millions of people are dying in Africa without the foreign aid.” And the tweet or whatever on Blue Sky is like, “This is horrible. Effective altruism always leads to disasters. Don’t you see how horrible these people are?” [Speaker:ROBI] Yeah. This is the exact opposite of effective altruism. Yeah, like, what do you think effective altruism is?

MAX

Yeah, there’s a— we’ll never live down that Elon Musk went to like one EHE one time. Yeah, it’s gotten worse every year. Oh man.

ROBI

Um.

MAX

Yeah, uh, what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve donated to? I don’t know if this is like—.

ROBI

Most embarrassing thing— I kind of mean.

MAX

This is like, you know, like, I don’t know if you gave to the What’s like a— the plate pumps?

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Right, um, honestly I don’t think I’ve got any funny answer here.

MAX

[Speaker:Max].

ROBI

No. [Speaker:ROBI] Um, no, nothing. Everything I donate to is super effective. [Speaker:MAX] That’s great to hear. [Speaker:ROBI] Um, well, okay. Okay, maybe a spicy opinion. I think, um, so you know how, like, for example, the average charity is like— or sorry, an effective charity is like 2+ orders of magnitude as effective as some average charity? So if you just donate to random charities and you look at the bucket of that portfolio and what you’ve achieved with those Like 99% of donations, you’re just completely wasting your money, basically. And this, like, people get offended if you point this out. Like, how dare you imply that my cute neighborhood kitten shelter is not the most effective thing to do. Yeah, I think the Robin Hanson take of, like, at the scale of an individual donor, There is, for whatever your values are, you should not diversify. You, um, you should spend up— like, you should research as much as you have time for, or like bounded rationality, and then all of your donations should go to one thing, um, and anything else you do is just like sabotaging your own effectiveness.

MAX

So you’re not a Headspace giving guy?

ROBI

No, no, even if you’re— oh my God, this is, uh, Yeah, you should just— you should simply— okay, you have an assessment of each different charity. You have an expected value and the variance. But at the level of an individual donor who is not saturating— like you’re not donating enough for the charity you donate to, then fulfills its most urgent funding need and then becomes less effective than something else. Um, like, hitspace giving is good, but at the level of an individual, you should not be splitting it up. You should not be trying to, like, do the hits. Um, yeah, uh, my roommate is like— she, she really, like, intuitively resists this, um, even though we’ve tried to explain to her many times, but it’s just like very unintuitive to her. Um, Like, she wants to donate to global health and animal welfare and AI. I just like— but what if I’m wrong and the AI, like, animals are, like, more important than, um— well, okay, if you think the animals are more important, with your, like, $10,000 of donation, you should put all that money into animal welfare. Um, and then she said, but no, but what about the, the people? I should at least donate something to— yeah. [Speaker:MAX] I’m confident in that. [Speaker:ROBI] It’s just like— yeah. But it’s just like a mathematical fact. You should not be splitting up.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Have you seen the meme that’s like, “I’m doing a billion calculations a second, but all of them are wrong”?

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] No. [Speaker:MAX] Okay.

MAX

It’s like— maybe one day you’ll see it. Like, people reply with it and this sort of things, but that’s, you know, maybe. So we have to hedge a little Yeah.

ROBI

Another bad argument I hear in favor of diversifying individual donations is like, “Well, you diversify your portfolio, why wouldn’t you diversify your donations?” But this is also wrong. It’s not like— going from everything donated to one charity to everything donated to a couple of charities is not Like having a portfolio that consists entirely of like one stock and going to an index fund, it’s like you already have an index. Let’s say, uh, stocks on average return 7% per year and bonds return 3% and savings accounts yield 1%. Um, this would be like you already have a diversified account including, um, like 70% stocks and like 20% bonds and 10% cash, um, and then like, “Oh, but I want to diversify, so I’m going to take a dollar out of stocks and put it into like something with like— something with like lower EV.” Like, that doesn’t actually help. Um, it’s just reducing your, um, uh, expected value without improving the, like, risk that balance.

MAX

Yeah. Sure.

ROBI

Um.

MAX

Let’S see, what remaining questions do I have?

ROBI

How many do we have left?

MAX

Uh, I haven’t gone fully in order, so that actually makes it annoying to, uh, count.

ROBI

I can make more nuggets, but I don’t know if we have, um, more hot sauces.

MAX

No, I think we have like 4 questions left.

ROBI

Uh, um.

MAX

Should we do another nugget?

ROBI

Uh, sure. Okay, so, um, Oh, I encourage you to, um, eat them like sauce down so you can taste it better. You want— like, flip it? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. Okay, um, so this is Elijah’s Extreme Regret.

MAX

Okay, fantastic.

ROBI

Scorpion and Carolina Reaper. Okay, and, um, it’s on an Impossible Chicken Nugget, so enjoy it.

MAX

Yeah, that’s much harder, hotter.

ROBI

Are you, um, extremely regretting eating this?

MAX

Not yet, but we’ll see how it— uh, it’s still, you know, you’ll get.

ROBI

Some hiccups in the podcast increasing.

MAX

Yeah, in spice.

ROBI

You didn’t put very much, uh, of the last few sauces on yours. I thought they were supposed to be like, you know, Doused in the sauce.

MAX

Well, you know, I’m not the guest.

ROBI

All right, well, yeah, but, um, that was delicious. I love that.

MAX

That was a good nugget. I’m glad it was hot. That is beyond where I would, uh.

ROBI

You know— Well, you’ve got some oat milk here.

MAX

I’m gonna drink some of this, actually.

ROBI

What do we got left?

MAX

Okay, um, what’s an essay or blog— I guess you’ve already kind of said one, but what’s another one? Forum post that you, uh, find really annoying but everyone keeps sharing? Ooh, um.

ROBI

An essay or forum post that I find really annoying but everyone keeps sharing? Yeah. I don’t know, um, I don’t think I have anything like that. Um, closest might be— so I think, uh, you know, Bentham’s Bulldog? Um, I mean, he’s really smart. Um, I respect his, um, moral philosophy takes. Prolific writer, like— yeah. Um, but he believes in God, and this opinion is just like really stupid. Like, um, yeah, and I, I think some of the stuff he’s written about, like, reasons for God are dumb. Like, and he’s way more into philosophy than I am. Like, he’s got lots of arguments that I, like, I can’t refute this specific argument. I’m not gonna, like, I don’t think it’s worth my time to, like, dig into this. Um, Yeah, I guess that’s the only.

MAX

Um— [Speaker:ROBI] Yep, that’s fair. [Speaker:MAX] Stuff I’ve been annoyed with among.

ROBI

You know, the EA blogosphere.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Yeah, um, yeah, cool. Let’s see, um, what’s the, the best moral philosophy? I mean, I feel like I don’t know why I put that one down because I don’t know, what are you going to say?

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Yeah, um, so I’m— I have most of my, like, probability mass on utilitarianism being, like, the best way to act. Or, well, actually, um, I’m a moral anti-realist. I’m, like, 95+ confident. Like, I just don’t see how moral realism could be true, or, like, what it would even mean if it were true. Um, I’ve also never even heard an argument in or like never heard—seen any evidence in favor of it. Like, as far as I’m aware, the only arguments I know of in favor of moral realism are, uh, if God exists, like Divine Command Theory. Like, if God exists and he set the laws of the universe, fine, uh, in that case, sure, that’ll make sense. Um, every other argument I’ve heard is just like moral intuition. Like, oh, it seems like there probably are Like, clearly this— it’s wrong to murder because I intuitively know it’s wrong to murder. [Speaker:MAX] Yeah. [Speaker:ROBI] Um, which is just like, okay, interesting claim. Uh, do you have any evidence for that? Also, like, evolution is a much better, uh, explanation for people having this intuition than, like, moral facts existing in some metaphysical sense that, like, interacts with your mind and then causes you to believe this. I don’t know.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Yeah.

ROBI

But, so conditional on— conditional on moral realism being true, I’m actually a deontologist. The only moral philosophy that seems viable to me if moral facts exist would be something like the non-aggression principle. I think conditional on moral realism being true, I’m like, very deontologically libertarian, like, um, it’s immoral to, like, harm another sentient being, basically. Um, a lot of other moral philosophies don’t really make sense to me if moral realism is true. So, like, uh, I think I said this on Aaron’s podcast, but, um, so suppose moral realism is true and utilitarianism is true. This would be kind of— actually, like, this would be really weird. So for example, you meet a stranger, and unbeknownst to you, they really, really, really love the color yellow, but they really, really hate the color purple. In fact, purple was like— [Speaker:ROBI] Purple killed my father. [Speaker:MAX] Purple— A guy, a murderer wearing purple, genocided their ancestors or something, and seeing anything in the color purple will cause them vast anguish. You’re going to meet them, so you bring a gift. It’s like a thank you card or like a flower or something. If moral realism is true and utilitarianism is true, then you’re either like— being extremely moral or committing some heinous atrocity based on the random happenstance of this card you give them being purple or yellow, which strikes me as a bit nonsensical. So, the only viable moral realism kind of ethics I’ve thought of is like, if someone is a sentient conscious being, just like, don’t hurt them. Um, or like, don’t like destroy their atoms or like, uh, inflict pain on.

MAX

Their mind or something.

ROBI

I don’t know.

MAX

Yeah, discount utilitarianism.

ROBI

Or discount— no, no, no, but it would be like, hurting people is immoral. Yeah. Um, and then anything else is supererogatory. Great. Thanks. Cool.

MAX

Um, do I have another question? Oh yeah, um, I guess maybe let’s eat the, the final nugget and then you can say those— Republican conclusion takes you, uh, a little bit too earlier.

ROBI

Um, so, um, we’ve got another Impossible Nugget, uh, my favorite kind of nugget, and, um, it’s got some Dave’s Hot Chicken Reaper seasoning and some This is, um, did we put any of the Carolina Reaper batter? Oh, basically it’s Carolina Reaper batter. Yeah.

MAX

I think I’m going to regret this.

ROBI

Cheers. I don’t think we put that much spice on it.

MAX

I don’t think I did.

ROBI

Yeah, the, um, Reaper-flavored chicken or cauliflower at Dave’s Hot Chicken is, um, that is beyond my spice tolerance. They put, um, I think capsaicin extract on it. It’s basically like getting pepper sprayed when you take a bite.

MAX

Yeah, that doesn’t really sound fun to me. I know someone will be like, “Ah!”.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] It is very fun, but, um, I threw up after taking 2 bites.

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Okay, yeah, so, you know.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Delicious though, in my— [LAUGHTER] [Speaker:MAX] Mass acoustic device opinion.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Yeah, I, uh— [Speaker:MAX] Ooh, that does taste good.

ROBI

Are you sure you don’t want some more of— more of Reaper spice?

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] No, I have some on my tongue. I can feel that. [Speaker:MAX] Mmm, that’s tasty. [Speaker:ROBI] Oh man. I should not be a permanent host for the show. I guess maybe that’d be funny, but usually I think the conceit is like the other person, yeah, the guest, but it’s maybe it’s funnier if, uh, the host is just dying every time. Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, so what’s your, uh, delicious, um, illusion?

ROBI

Well, isn’t there the— do you know the Hillary newspaper about like, um The paper being referred to is called Population Axiology by Hilary Graves.

MAX

I feel like she’s, uh, you know, underrated EA sort of, uh— I feel.

ROBI

Like she was everywhere in EA at some point, like every meetup I’d go to was like talking about a Hilary Graves, um, something something.

MAX

Yeah, of course, that was, you know, when I was around.

ROBI

The one I was thinking of was, um, is it, um, impossibility theorems for, um, Do you know what I’m talking about? So like, if you have these assumptions, you get the repugnant conclusion. But if you try to behave any differently or construct some other axiology, it has other worse— [Speaker:MAX] Yep. [Speaker:ROBI] Yeah. So I agree with this. I think if you assume anything else other than utilitarianism, you end up with even worse problems than the repugnant conclusion. And also, I just bite the bullet. Like, I don’t think there are— I disagree with Scott on this. The repugnant conclusion is not repugnant. I think there’s the classic situation, like, imagine a planet with a million happy people, and then imagine a series of slightly modified planets where you take the people and you replace them with two people who are slightly more than half as happy. And then you go all the way down, uh, a very long series of planets until you get to people who are like just infinitesimally happy, and their lives are just barely worth living. Um, they like eat boiled potatoes and listen to elevator music. Um, but there are so many of them that adding up all their epsilon happiness, you have more— you have a better planet than the million blissfully idyllic happy live people. And people say, “Oh, this is obviously not better. No number of these people could be better than this.” Yeah, I think they’re just neglecting the— or not taking the premises seriously, or each step. If you are really replacing it with more than half as much happiness and doubling the population, you do have more total happiness. And I think people are underestimating, or like, they have this vision in their head of like, that those lives on the last planet being like worthless or negative. Actually, you have to remember, if you set it up like this, as stipulated, they are a little bit happy. Like, they have more total happiness. And I, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with like, Many people with a little happiness.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Yeah, fair. Um, you know, I guess if you were behind the veil of ignorance, you’d prefer to be on the, uh, the most small equator, but if you were—.

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] No, no, no, no, okay.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Well, because if you knew, you wouldn’t be one of them.

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] No, okay, excuse me. You’re not doing the veil of ignorance properly. So, like, a billion people with— so, Planet A, a million people with, um, 10 happiness, or Planet B, um, a billion people with 1 happiness each. So Planet B has more total happiness, a billion. Planet A has less, 10 million, but there’s— the average happiness is 10. You’re saying veil of ignorance would, um, you would choose— Well, what I was.

MAX

Going to say is that, you know, if you’re behind the veil of ignorance and you’ve kind of already assumed that going to exist.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] That’s right, yeah, yeah, that’s where I was going with this. So, um, if you had to choose between being a random person on planet A and a random person on planet B, obviously you pick planet A. But I think the apples-to-apples choice is, um, 1 million chances to draw a ticket where you exist and have 10 happiness, or 999 million to just not exist and have no happiness. In that case, if you set it up fairly, actually you should pick the Plan B.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Yep, yeah, nice. Um, have you heard of the Very Repugnant Conclusion?

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] Uh, yes, but remind me what this is.

MAX

[Speaker:Robi] Uh, it’s the— so there’s suffering, so it’s lots of small people, or small happiness people, suffering people versus a happy planet, and then the, the one with suffering is higher total because there’s just so many.

ROBI

[Speaker:Max] Oh yeah.

MAX

Do you have like, I don’t know, I feel like for— for so the, the problem here is something that’s like, ah, like I can bite the bullet.

ROBI

That if you have just a little.

MAX

Bit of happiness, you know, like that’s fine, but now you’ve like also introduced all these people to suffering.

ROBI

This like kind of— yeah, if you were like a negative utilitarianist. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of problems with negative utilitarianism. Um, I, I don’t agree with that. I’m just like a total utility— yeah, uh, I was gonna ask you if.

MAX

You have, uh, hot takes [Speaker:ROBI] Um.

ROBI

Mechanized?

MAX

[Speaker:Max] Yeah, yeah.

ROBI

[Speaker:Robi] Um, yeah, well, um, Tamay and Agee have much longer timelines than I do. Um, Matthew I think has similar timelines to mine, uh, I think past. Um, but, um, I think they all have much lower P2M. And so, um, while I wish they wouldn’t, like, you know, go do capabilities, um, I can’t fault them for it. Like, basically If you think AI is probably almost certainly going to go well and you see this opportunity to earn trillions of dollars by automating the whole economy, and again, you don’t expect to— you think it’s going to go well, um, yeah, that makes sense to do. And I don’t disagree with them on factual premises. They are completely right that there is this opportunity here to automate the economy and earn trillions of dollars. I guess hate the game, not the player.

MAX

Sure.

ROBI

Yeah, um, yeah, but I wish people would stop doing capabilities until we can, like, you know, figure out alignment and whatnot.

MAX

Yeah, so true. Uh, cool. Well, yeah, thank you for donating and for, you know, recording.

ROBI

Yeah, um, happy to save the chickens. I hope, um, I hope maybe a few hundred or a few thousand of them are, you know, not, not suffering.

MAX

Yeah, cool.

Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe

This is an audio readout of my recent post Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset”, also on the EA Forum

Enjoy!

Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe

Summary

Join host Aaron with Jesse Smith, a self-described "unconventional EA" (Effective Altruist) who bridges blue-collar expertise with intellectual insight. Jesse recounts his wild early adventures in Canadian "bush camps," from planting a thousand trees daily as a teen to remote carpentry with helicopter commutes. Now a carpenter, HVAC technician, and business owner (Tay River Builders), he discusses his Asterisk magazine article, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Manometer Readings."

Discover the HVAC industry's surprising shortcomings, the difficulty of achieving good indoor air quality (even for the affluent!), and the systemic issues impacting public health and climate goals, with practical insights on CO2 and radon monitors like the Airthings View Plus.

Jesse’s links

* Lies, Damned Lies, and Manometer Readings, the Asterisk magazine article discussed at length

* Tay River Builders, his contracting company

* Willard Brothers Woodcutters, his wood store (and its viral Instagram page)

* Jesse on Twitter

* The Airthings View Plus air quality monitor discussed (currently $239 on Amazon) (no they’re not paying either of us for this but they should

Transcript

Aaron: Okay. First recorded pigeon hour in a while. I'm here with Jesse Smith resident dad of EA Twitter. I don't know if. I don't know if you'll accept that. Accept that honor. Okay, cool. and I actually, we haven't chatted, face to face in, like, a while, but I know you have, like, a really interesting. You're very, like, unconventional EA in some respects. Do you want to, like, give me your whole like, life story? In brief?

Jesse: okay. So I guess one thing is that I'm super old for EA, right? like. And so being a dad and owning, like, a kind of normal business, I guess another is kind of more blue collar background, right? So, I was originally a carpenter also, then took on being an HVAC technician. So I, the businesses that I own Kind of like focus on a little bit of both those. yeah. So like my my background. I was raised in Canada. I left school, I didn't go to college. yeah. I went into, like, after a few years of, like a few years after high school, went into the trades basically.

Aaron: Okay. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Like. Yes, I think that. Yeah, that definitely, like, makes you at least, at least stereotypically. But I think also like, in real life, like, there just aren't that many, like, carpentry businessmen who are, like happen to, like, hang out on Twitter also. So no, this is like legitimately really interesting. And at one point, I swear, I thought you went to Princeton. You must have mentioned the city, and I must have interpreted it as the town.

Jesse: Yeah, my my brother, my brothers and I lived in Princeton for quite a while. Two of my brothers actually.

Aaron: Still.

Jesse: Okay around Princeton. I'm not far from Princeton. That's kind of the area where we work. it is where my dad went to grad school, so could have been that as well. so. Yeah. Yeah, but I did not attend Princeton.

Aaron: I mean.

Jesse: I worked on some of their buildings, but I have not attended.

Aaron: Maybe, maybe that was where I got the that like. Yeah, like like myth from. So I know I have, I got like a couple at least. Matt. Matt from Twitter sent in a question, but I as usual, I've done a minimal level of preparation. So also we can we can talk about talk about truly whatever, but like, maybe. Yeah. So how did you, how did you, like, find out about Yale's? Like one thing.

Jesse: Well, yeah. Okay. So there's some, I guess, some weird stuff. So I was fairly enamored with Peter Singer. Kind of just like starting with the book Animal Liberation. It would have been. I forget when he wrote that. Like it would have been years after he wrote it, right? Because I think he wrote it in even when, like when I was super young. But I probably read that in my late teens. Okay. And so, yeah.

Aaron: That's that's the 1975 book.

Jesse: So yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. I was going to guess the 70s. Right. So I was like.

Aaron: Nice.

Jesse: Nice or something. Right. So what.

Aaron: Year old?

Jesse: Yes, exactly. But so so when I was 16, I briefly dropped out of high school and I was working. This is really weird. I was working in these, like, bush camps in Canada. It's somewhat popular to do this. And so, like, I was 16, I celebrated my 17th birthday in a bush camp. That was like a tree planting bush camp. But this. Okay, so this is really weird. It sounds like this is like core blue collar, but it's not quite. The guy who owned the company I was working for was a friend of my dad's, and he was Baha'i and vegetarian. And so he had these vegetarian bush camps that we planted trees and did like some brushing out of. Right. So we ran like brush saws and stuff. And so I sort of I think that's kind of what, like I became a vegetarian out of those camps and was reading kind of Peter Singer's stuff at the time. And I think partly being there made me realize like, oh, this is going to not be that difficult. A lot of guys were really irritated by vegetarian bush camps, right? Like some of it was kind of core blue collar, mediating type guys. But like, I was totally fine. I was actually like super happy because it was kind of my first experience in a full time job. And I was nervous because everybody was like, oh, you know, it's going to be hell. And I actually thought it was great. It was much better than being in high school. I thought at the time, like, they just like everything was squared away, like they just fed you. You just had to go and like, try to put as it was piecework. So it was like $0.22 a tree or something. And after a few days, I think on my third day I put something like a thousand trees into the ground or something. Right. So I was.

Aaron: Like, Jesus Christ.

Jesse: I was like, oh, this is amazing, right? Like, all I have to do is like. Run as fast as I possibly can with these big bags of trees in the woods in, like, this beautiful setting. Eat the food they give me and then like, go to sleep and, like, read or whatever. Right. So like it was a it was a great experience. I know that's the total effect, right. What's that.

Aaron: No no no it's not it's not a digression. One thing is can you just define bush camp like for for us dumb American like, oh yeah, dumb like Americans or whatever.

Jesse: Yeah. So I, I don't know, I, I guess maybe I haven't heard the terms. They're in the US, but they must exist for some purpose. Right. So usually it's like somewhere remote that you are basically camped out of. In my case, it was literally like camping. It was tents, which I didn't mind at the time. So you'd be like, you know, in our case, it was big camps. Like, I think sometimes they can be as little as maybe ten people, let's say. Right. And this was like a pretty decent company. So they were running 40. The max I saw was maybe 100 people working out of this camp in the remote wilderness. The first year I did it was around an area called mica, which I understand now is a popular heli skiing destination. Like I have a friend who now skis and mica, which is hilarious to me, but it would maybe take you to the nearest town to mica was probably Revelstoke, which was in this case we could drive there, you know, maybe like a year or two later. There were ones that we were flown into, and in some cases there were even ones where I'm trying to think like I was in one in my like early 20s where they would helicopter. You would take a helicopter ride every day to the site, like so like you. So they would like, you'd see this helicopter coming in and like, they'd land in the camp and then they take you. But it was just it wasn't like it didn't feel like special operations. It was like the helicopter was rented from the, like, small towns Weather channel. Right.

Aaron: Well, that's so badass as like, I feel like the correct term for all this is, is very based.

Jesse: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I like it seems weird now to describe this to people and it's not in people's experience. But it wasn't it didn't feel the helicopter thing. Maybe did initially felt weird. Right. Because like, I don't know anything about helicopters, right. Like but it didn't feel that weird at the time. And I knew a lot of people growing up who worked out of bush camps and then years later. So like probably around when I was in my early 20s is when I started my carpentry apprenticeship formally, like I had worked in construction a bit and then done the bush camp thing on and off. And so then I ended up doing some some remote wilderness bush camp carpentry work as well, maybe midway through my apprenticeship. So I worked on a it. An Indian reserve building, a water treatment facility that would have been like probably late 90s. Like I'm thinking like probably right before I moved to the US. And that was like that was months and months. That was actually not a good camp. One of the things I hate is that the first camp I went to was incredible, like incredible, like incredible food, like they would haul in saunas like you had you had a trailer with a sauna. And so, like when you're 16, you know, you're just like, oh yeah, this is like normal, right? And I've often thought like. And the food was amazing. Like the, the lead cook would make like she made it for my 17th birthday. She made me a cake. Right. But I was like, and I'm I'm sure I said like, thank you. But it should have been like effusive with praise, right? Because it was just like, yeah, incredible. And then if you, you know. And then I was probably in like over the years maybe 2 or 3 other camps and they suck. Like I remember showing up and being like hey, when is. And like, so this woman would, she would have like Indian night and Mexican night, like themed food nights and like you like they had generators and you could watch movies and like, it was just crazy. And I remember rolling into, like, this next, logging camps and logging camps are legendarily crappy, right? They just feed you food basically out of a warmed up can, right? I remember being like, hey, when's like Mexican night, you know? And they're like, what are you talking like just like nothing, right? Like no amenities. The sleeping was maybe a little better. And that you were you slept in a trailer, but that didn't feel like a quality of life improvement anyway. So that so that is that's Canadian bush camp experience.

Aaron: I guess that's. That is nuts. I literally just I yeah, this feels like highly optimized for just sounding like as badass as possible. And you wait. You. So you said this is like normal. Maybe it was like, normal for your. What was your reference class, like a 50 other families or something? Because this sounds incredibly abnormal to me as like a grew up with like a very like sheltered, like upper middle class, like American. Like there was zero chance I was ever gonna, like, fly into a bush camp at 16.

Jesse: Okay, so to be fair, the first one was not flown in. That was. That was driving.

Aaron: Okay. Oh, sorry.

Jesse: Subsequent ones were. Or potentially there was one where we took a boat to get to the camp initially, but yeah, it wasn't uncommon to be flown in, I guess. the I don't know, actually, it's a good question. I think if I'd been raised in a Canadian city, it would have been more unusual. But, you know, so some of the kids that I, it was very common at the time and I think it may still be for college kids in Canada, like kids attending university in Canada. Maybe go do this in summers, right? Because it makes you it's piecework. If you get proficient, it's fairly highly paid, right? It was a surprising amount of money at the time and even the remote work for construction was similar. Right. You're you're going to be well paid. You're not going to spend, like any money, right? In some I mean, yeah, there were some where there would be like something nearby that you could spend money on. But the first few camps I was in, we would go to some buffet for the Mica dam once a week and it was like $10 or something, right? And I was like, yeah, you know. Yeah. Like you just didn't spend money. So yeah, it was good for that, I guess. Yeah. I it didn't feel that weird aside from being very young, even by the reference. Like I was very young, I was like, I was very much not wanting to be in high school at the time. So that was a little bit weird. Yeah.

Aaron: Let's come let's come back to, actually. Yeah. So what was, so that's like, interesting that you didn't want to be in high school. Was that, because because, I mean, we've known each other sort of. I don't even think we've met in real life, which is very, very sad, but, like, feel like people in general who are, like, as smart and thoughtful as you generally are, the type that wants to stay in high school. So what was that situation like for you?

Jesse: Oh, I don't know. I, I yeah I, I just didn't like it, but it wasn't like it was common for kids. Okay. So I was in Ontario and Ontario at the time had a 13th grade as well. So it seemed like insurmountable, right. Like and it just wasn't uncommon. Like it, it just wasn't uncommon for kids that I was around to be like, okay. Like and also I think the US really limit this, limits this somehow in a way that that Canada, or at least Ontario didn't like. You could just leave high school, right?

Aaron: And yeah.

Jesse: People didn't. You know, you just were like, okay, I'm going to work like, I, I'm kind of tapping out.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah.

Jesse: And it wasn't like, also, I didn't really grow up in an area where. Not a lot of kids who I knew were even considering going to college, like in my friend group. There were. Maybe it was. It just wasn't common. Like in at least in my core group of friends, like there were other kids, I'm sure, who definitely went on to college, but it just wasn't in the US right now. You know, my kids, it's it's weird to look at, right? Because there is no doubt they'll go to college, right? Like there's there's this established pathway. I don't remember I don't think I talked to my parents about that much. I don't think we ever, you know, it wasn't it wasn't established early on in the way that people today and I'm sure it was the same with you, where they just it's just established that you will be attending a four year college.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, I think I looked it up recently and it's like, I think something like half of like high school or like college age students at some point go to college. I forget the exact number. So it's like not universal, but I think it's pretty close to universal in some like urban, like relatively wealthier, like liberal settings. It's like basically, yeah, basically like 100%. yes.

Jesse: Like my daughter, her friends and my son, his friends, they will just all go to college. They may get weeded out at some point. I know that's also surprisingly common for kids to sort of struggle and then drop out or something like this, right? But the likelihood of them attending a four year college is is extremely high in that circle of kids. I think so, yeah.

Aaron: Oh, yeah. So something I just remembered. Sorry. This is like my ADHD brain is maybe not like the best made for a podcast, but that's okay. So like, yeah, you're making a lot of money in part because as, as is probably, I assume, been consistent through your whole life, you're extraordinarily athletic. I can just apparently, like, run and plant a thousand trees a day while, like, carrying a bag. I feel like that you shouldn't, like, take for granted or something like that is so sorry. I won't I won't ramble on too long. But at 16 I also had a blue collar job for about one week was that I was a, summer camp counselor Outlaw, and at first they didn't know where to put me. So like I, there wasn't any like youth group for me to go to. So they just like there was like this barn to like work on. And I was like, wow, I can't believe I signed up for this. Like, this sucks. So like, that that I guess to some extent like demonstrates. Yeah, I people's like personal preferences or like abilities or whatever.

Jesse: Like, so what did they have you do to the barn? What? Like what were you what type of work were you.

Aaron: Oh man. So this is so this is like nine years ago, where, like, I remember we were cutting stuff. Cutting wood, like what were we doing? I think I was like, a very small chunk of a project to either to, like, expand the barn or something, and like, what I was doing was, like, literally just, like carrying wood around, but like, wasn't it wasn't fun. It definitely wasn't fun for $2 an hour, just like how much I was making, or like, yeah, maybe someone could have paid me, like, a lot to be, like, very excited. I think I have photos on my phone, maybe I'll like link those in like the show description. And I was also I was I mean, I was an exceptionally tiny 16 year old also, so that might have something to do with it. anyway. Yeah.

Jesse: Yeah. That's interesting. Like, like also I can like okay, so I have some exposure to environments like this. And I think also in a lot of cases people sort of feel directionless. Right. Like, so you're probably being supervised by someone who has no clue what they're doing. Right.

Aaron: Like, I don't even remember, like something like.

Jesse: I find this commonly in construction is that people don't approach. It's like an oversight where people don't approach things like there's a kind of systematic way to engage in the exercise and therefore it becomes sort of more frustrating as a consequence, although like the physical demands are real and I, you know, it could be that it's like, you know like people find it physically demanding. But I also find that people find it, you know, in in bad environments, they find it frustrating and directionless and, and like, this kind of ties in with the stuff I say about HVAC that like, if everybody in the kind of hierarchy, if you're being supervised by people who are just completely ignorant, right, you end up, you know, kind of lost, right? So it could I mean, I'm not saying necessarily it's the case with you, but it could have been that you're like, what am I doing again? I'm moving wood.

Aaron: I mean, honestly, I think it was probably largely the fact that, like you, yeah, I would guess the physical demands had like and, like preferences, just like sheer preferences around that had like a lot to do with our differential experience.

Jesse: It could be. Yeah, it could be like I don't have. Yeah. So I ended up like, yeah, that ended up athletics and that kind of thing also ended up being kind of a like a big feature, at least by like a little maybe more later on. But yes, it was like the constant thing, like constant. Even my wife says that. Right. Like she finds it difficult sometimes to be my presence because I'm constantly in motion Ocean and doing stuff.

Aaron: Thank you for sitting. Thank you for sitting down. Also, I don't know if I can cut this out, but you're in a car right now. I should have mentioned that, right? Yes. Okay.

Jesse: I'm in my truck.

Aaron: Very, very badass. Okay, nice. yeah. No. Just like. Just like, jump forward. Now you run like, a gazillion miles a day and also do jujitsu all the time and also do, like, like carpentry. Like as, like the break in the middle or something.

Jesse: But yeah, that's so. Yes, that's pretty accurate. like, but keep in mind. Right. So I own the business and I end up doing a lot there, right. Like, so I'm not doing a ton of field work necessarily. If I'm doing field work for someone else, it often is HVAC. HVAC has, in my opinion, like extremely low physical demands, usually residential in particular. Like you can get into some stuff and like if an HVAC tech hears this, they'll get all bent out of shape about it. But in all, like I have experienced in like a lot of different subsets of carpentry and HVAC is like, yeah, okay. Yes, you had to carry something of a ladder like one time in your day, like. Yes. Okay, great. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like like yeah. Like like I did concrete formwork for years in my apprenticeship and that was, that was probably the most in terms of, like direct physical demands. That was pretty high, maybe the most. Right. So you're just slinging like 88, like 85, £90 sheets of form ply just all day long. Right. So that was more physically demanding. Framing is maybe like a big step down, but, you know, still moderate I'd say. yeah. So yeah. And so I did that and then started racing. The big thing that kicked that out like was racing Ironman like when I moved to the US, maybe a year or so later, I started training for Ironman and fell in with like a group of, like, mostly Princeton grad students or a lot of Princeton grad students who, who well, or maybe in some cases, older kids who like guys who had Would run under an undergrad program in Princeton. So like, really fast runners, right? Like so D1 runners. And there was this training group in Princeton, we would go out and just try to murder each other every Thursday night for like, like eight years or something. So that was super fun. And so that was like pretty eye opening. And then being able to do that and do carpentry at the same time.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, we're gonna have to we should put up a notice. You mentioned your wife because all the the many thousands of ladies like, listening to this are gonna, are gonna get. Yeah, are going to get a little too optimistic.

Jesse: With what? What do you mean?

Aaron: No, sorry. That was that was a terrible. That was a terrible joke. I'm saying, like, you're coming across as, like a very like, you know, you mentioned like. Oh, yeah, like running, you know, running like these, like Iron Man triathlons with these like and like doing, like all this, like backcountry carpentry stuff. Like very like very sexy and like manly and so, like, we're gonna have to, like put a flag up just to say that. Like to say that, like, yeah, you're, you're you're a taken man.

Jesse: That's really funny. I funny. I don't feel like.

Aaron: It's, like.

Jesse: Almost.

Aaron: Over. Honestly.

Jesse: Yeah. It feels like the blue collar thing is more a detriment today, but I'm really uncertain. Like, people talk constantly about social status and things like that. And obviously like.

Aaron: Yeah.

Jesse: Collar jobs are way down on the what people think of as social status, I guess I don't I don't participate much in that discussion. Like, I have a lot of, I mean, aside, like trying to decouple from the fact that I am a carpenter and like, I have many sort of like when you start to unravel it I often think it's not like it's not clear to me like that, like I, that I understand what that means really. But it. Yeah. So but it is my understanding that those blue collar jobs are not like highly skilled people don't highly seek out men, and women don't highly sought out men in blue collar jobs.

Aaron: That's interesting. I mean, actually, yeah, it's like maybe like discuss. Maybe not. Not just from like that the like, romantic angle, but like, just like social status in general is like pretty important topic. So like, you're you're a business owner in one respect, right? So, like, you could, get do you have any like, I guess further insight on, yeah. For someone who's like, sort of like grew up or like professionally and literally around like blue collar stuff, but like, now, like owns a literal business, like where whether you think, like, the status stuff has more to do with just like, money or like, like if you were just like, took somebody who's just like, you know working literal construction, but they were suddenly making $100 an hour instead of whatever. Like, would that, like, balance the status scales, do you think? Do you know what I'm getting at?

Jesse: Yes, I do, and that's what like people talk about this all the time. They say, oh, well, you know, like a college professor, you know, at an entry level in an entry level role where they may get stuck in some cases permanently is ostensibly higher social status than someone working in construction who could be there are jobs that actually pay towards like a very There are jobs that pay really quite well in that world, right? Or, you know, like moderately there are many. Like there are many. I mean, not a ton. So like, you know, I want to be fair here, right. Like, I think there's this separate trend in society to be like, why don't you go be a plumber where they make $250 an hour? I'm like, no, they do not make 250. Like there's a widespread conflation of, like what people are being billed by the hour in some cases with what people are being compensated. Right. Which is weird because they don't seem to make that mistake when you know they understand, like corporate employment at a deeper level than they understand plumbing employment, let's say. Right.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesse: But there are definitely jobs in the blue collar world that routinely kind of, pay sort of in the you know, like on the bubble, six figures. Right? Like it's rare to be over 150, but it's not that rare to have like 80 to 120 as a range for people in highly skilled jobs and competitive markets. Right. Yeah. So but yeah like so that is a thing. Right. And so the college professor ostensibly has more social status than the HVAC technician making, you know, double their salary or something. This is where I sort of start to think that, like, I sort of have questions about this, like how people kind of perceive that, I guess, like it seems at least weakly coupled with the amount of money that people make, but not entirely. Yeah. Although, you know, there is some domain specific stuff to like. It seems like people play different games with social status, and I'm not entirely sure about social status being a motivation for something like I get the ascendancy part of it. But when Mark Zuckerberg started jiu jitsu, he entered a room in which he was the lowest possible social status imaginable. Right. And so I think that's really interesting, right? Because, like, it can't be that Mark Zuckerberg is strictly motivated by the achievement of the highest possible social status, because he entered a world in which he had no status. Right? Like he was the lowest possible.

Aaron: There's got to be some. There's got to be some continuity between general society and Jiu-Jitsu world. No.

Jesse: Oh, I well, yeah I mean like people are oh my God, it's Mark Zuckerberg.

Aaron: Like yeah yeah.

Jesse: Beat the ever loving crap out of that guy. Right or something. Right. Like but I don't think like there are many instances of this. Right. Like people just enter other domains. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg went to jiu jitsu because he was motivated by social status. He would have just done something like he would have continued to be Mark Zuckerberg. Only Zuckerberg harder or something, right? Yeah, yeah. So I don't like I don't think I totally get this and I think people don't. I think there is a domain specificity specificity to status that people kind of like, don't acknowledge. Like if you talk to people also about like how the blue collar world might be structured. Well, it will have its own social status, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, like, people kind of like it's just a blind spot. Like it's like people go, oh my God, the blue collar world has status to like and and engages in thinking about this, right?

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, so, like one thing that I was maybe intuitively thinking and now, like, explicitly thinking, it's just like a you're like an extremely, like thoughtful and like, interesting person and like, I don't want to I feel like there's no way to say this and like smart person that like, doesn't implicitly like denigrate like people who like, do. Maybe I'll have to like, clean up this section so it doesn't sound bad, but like there's some way to like in general, you're going to find that like the more like intellectual intellectually, like motivated, like people. The people who write for Asterix magazine, for example, are are generally the type that do like to go to high school and in college or whatever. So I feel like in some sense like the, the combination of like having that extremely like thoughtful and smart disposition, plus like the badass flying out to mercury mines in Canada. I know it's not literally mercury mines. It's like it's like kind of like the best of both worlds.

Jesse: I'm sorry, I appreciate that. yeah, I appreciate your thinking. You're saying that. Yeah. Yes. I'm not clear, but. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Maybe I should try to go to college or something and round it out.

Aaron: Yeah. Okay. So, wait, so, yeah, in your, in terms of your, like, biography, you were so you were like circa 18 as a vegetarian in, a bush camp. What do you want to do? You want to, like, lay out the next story? Like, I don't know a couple of years or something.

Jesse: Yeah. So, let me think. So I was working kind of like. Okay, so one, I did go finish high school, right? So I had dropped out of high school. I only had one semester left. So I think right before like around when I turned 18 is when I went back to high school, I lived like kind of on my own in a city called Kingston and finished out the semester to kind of wrap it up. then let's see, I was kind of working like a little construction in Eastern Ontario and then out to the West coast for bush camps and stuff for a couple years. I think I shattered my heels in a construction accident when I was 20. And that was pretty like like that was sort of like negatively transformative, I guess. Right? So I was out of work for maybe six months. I had so my right heel was surgically reconstructed. I mean, this is going deep on stuff, right? So, and also like, you know, I was I was like drinking much too much. Right? So I kind of like, ended up drinking heavily probably, you know, that that was just kind of like a period where I'm just drinking way too much. Once I recovered, like, I think I worked a little bit there and then moved back out to the West Coast. And that started my carpentry apprenticeship short, really shortly after moving to Victoria, British Columbia. and then did that. And that's sort of where I lived before I moved to the US. I moved to the US, like 99, I think I came, I moved to the US because my my aunt's house had burnt down in Hightstown, and so I rebuilt my aunt's house for like, oh, like six months. It was a townhome in Twin Rivers, which is actually the site. Well, this is okay. So this is not a building science podcast, but one version of the blower door, which is used to test infiltration, was developed in those townhouses in, in Twin Rivers like Hightstown, new Jersey, by a Princeton grad student. Actually, I forget whose name escapes me right now, but yeah. So so, you know, that's a tool that we now run every day. Pretty much a blower door for testing, house for leakage. But yeah. So I rebuilt my aunt's place, pretty much like by myself too, which was really funny.

Aaron: Like, That's that's insane.

Jesse: It was like a little bit of subject, but I can remember doing stuff like. Like I was like, back then, I was just a complete maniac. Like a complete maniac. Like things that no one had ever seen. Like, I at one point, like, so I had she had a truss roof all the, all the homes there are like truss roof. Right. So it's like this big pre-assembled roof member that typically gets craned onto the roof. And usually when you do that, you have a crew of maybe like four dudes or something, right? And I sort of and you get this crane rental, right? So I can remember like, oh, I got a book, The Crane. And I had this like, it was like a four hour minimum or something. And like, I was super cheap too. So the crane operator showed up and goes as the rest of the crew inside. And I was like, it's just me. And, and he goes no. And I was like, yeah, it's just going to be me. And we're getting you out of here. Like inside the window. Like, trust me, it's going to happen. And I just like, I think I was like two and a half or three hours or something, and that was it. Like I knocked out an entire truss roof going up and down like. So I had to go down, lash the truss, give the guy like directions as I was like running back up onto the roof, set the truss like, nail it right. You know, like off, off like just this whole package. Yeah. Like I was a complete maniac. Like other, like other things. Like I, when I first got there, I filled the 30 yard dumpster every day, like, so I would fill a 30 yard dumpster in a single day with the refuse from the fire. Like, I was just, like, fill the entire dumpster completely by myself. So I would just call for a dumpster every single day for like, I think it was like 3 or 4 days in a row that I just filled an entire 30 yard dumpster, which like those huge, like, roll off dumpsters. Right? There's no way, like, right now, I know for certain there would be. There would be like, no, I think no way I could possibly do that now. Which is crazy to think about. Right? So yeah, I.

Aaron: Mean, yeah, this is like feats of physical endurance, not just endurance, everything, whatever. Or like kind of kind of insane here. yeah. Wait. And so, like, not not to, during all this time, were you, like separately having this, like, philosophical track where you were, like, reading Peter Singer or.

Jesse: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah.

Aaron: Okay, cool.

Jesse: Yeah. Like, not just like I'm trying to think of what I was reading mostly. Then, like, Peter Singer really stuck with me. Oh, and there's. And the weird. Okay, so then, like, there's just this kind of weird Forrest Gump thing, so, like, my brother and I end up doing a project. We didn't meet Peter Singer, but we did a Peter Singer project at Princeton, right? For like, some, like I forget it. I don't know if it was even through the university or some other thing. So we ended up like doing some build project for like a community garden that was supposed to be endorsed by Peter Singer or something, right? And oh, and at the time, too, I was running with, I'll just say his name. Simon Keller was, a grad student under Peter Singer, so he was in that same running group. He's still a beast, too. He's in. I think he's in New Zealand now. he's a professor there. And he. And like, he can still like he's probably my age. I'm 51 and he can still throw down these, like, incredible runs on Strava. I follow him and he's just like a monster. Like he'll throw down like a, like a ten miler in the hills at like six minutes flat or something, right? Which is like really impressive. Like super, super impressive. Right. For a masters runner, it's just like. So I was running. But anyway, so I was running with Simon and a bunch of other like grad students too. It was really cool. And talking to him about that kind of stuff, like not all the time. Like someone was just like like it was probably like 90% bro talk. But then it was also like, you know, I had this kind of thing where we would talk about those ideas, right? And then also there was another one who was, at the institute. There was this woman at the Institute. We'd have dinner afterwards and talk about this stuff. And she was with you know, convent. She was with Daniel Kahneman. Right.

Aaron: Oh, wow.

Jesse: So that was pretty cool. So I was also like reading a, a ton of like at some point there, I started reading a ton of Kahneman. Shiller I was probably more enamored, actually, of like, behavioral economics and, and that kind of stuff for some period there. So yeah, but that was like really that was super cool. Like there were a few people like that who were just really interesting grad students and institute and that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Aaron: If you're listening to this, you should you should follow Jesse on Strava. I'm sure we'll we'll link him. it's very impressive. I can't say I keep up with you every single or like, I don't like, religiously. Scroll your feed. I'm sorry. I don't know if that's gonna get me canceled, but it's, like, also quite impressive.

Jesse: It's not. I mean, it's not crazy, like, it's not. Yeah. So I run like, I run a fair bit, but it's not like, you know I just run.

Aaron: Just run. Okay? Yeah. And also, you know, build crazy shit. And you. Jujitsu. okay. Wait. Cool. Wait. Where to? Where to go from here? Do you have any? I don't know. yeah. Is there anything you're, like, jumping out as, like, the interesting direction you want to, like, go in either. Like in terms of, like, keep talking about, like, I don't know how you got from one club to the current situation or like, intellectually or.

Jesse: Yeah. So I guess my thing on Twitter in life, right, is like the HVAC thing. And you know that sort of what I like. I wrote that asterisk article so we could talk a little bit about that possibly. So like in part HVAC is sort of it's sort of proxy for two, a couple of catastrophic risks. Right. Like global warming obviously is one. Right. Global warming Just in like basic terms, we end up kind of electrifying everything. And then so converting fossil fuel devices to heat pumps is kind of one of the things, although like recognizing that we I think most people are kind of. It looks like I think most people are kind of in agreement that global warming is not it's probably not likely to be severely catastrophic for humanity and almost definitely not likely to be X risk level. Right. Then the other is like sort of indoor air quality interventions that can mitigate pandemic risk. And there you get into things that are, you know, potentially, you know, definitely catastrophic risks and potentially now X risk level threats. Right.

Aaron: So that's you want to do you want to wait. So I have a confession to make which is that I haven't read I haven't read the article. I feel really bad. Do you want it. Okay. I'm going to try to find it. Do you want to, like, give an introduction to like that. Let me just like what it's.

Jesse: Yeah.

Aaron: What it's about.

Jesse: So I, you know, maybe around that time period like going to 2018 2019 okay. So I had this experience. Right. So in 2010 my company, you know, there was the the sort of housing bubble kind of pops. Right. And I, you know, I'd been reading Schiller, so like, I don't want to be like, oh, I'm like a genius, but, like I had the strong sense, like the sense that people had in kind of like February and March. EA had around February and March around Covid right? Which every EA was like, oh, jeez, this is going to be bad. Like, like, but you also had it was also a surreal sense. I think people had where you're like, okay, how much should I talk about this? You know, like my wife was like, you're starting to freak people out right? Like kind of thing.

Aaron: And think it's March. March is pretty late. I was like, like, I have to do any individual work myself. But like, it was like I was just like, like going on like other people's takes, mostly on Twitter. And like, March was still pretty early relative to the rest of the world. Yes. Yeah.

Jesse: Yeah. Like, it's a wild time, right? So I can remember the thing that really cemented it for me was one of the E. Like what? Like one of the 80k podcasts which I think dropped on Valentine's Day. And after that, I was just freaking out, right? Yeah. Like, you know, there it was definitive because I remember I can't remember the woman's name was someone from Hopkins, but, you know, she was very much like, yeah, there's no way at this point to contain this. Like it's just impossible. Like, I'm going to summarize and people should just go listen to the podcast, right? But like, she was like, this is just coming. Like you're going to see a bunch of waves. She laid, laid out kind of what she thought the next few months was going to be like, and it was just dead on. Right. And also it was just like, you know, like like so I think I don't know if it was like my feeling after that was like, oh, this is really bad. Like, this is going to be a big deal. And I probably listened to that the day after it dropped or something. Right. So, so like all of February, I'm like talking about this. And then my wife is like, hey, you can't like, you gotta tone it down. You sound like a crazy person, right? But, like, that's the real feeling. Was the same sort of feeling I had in like 2007 about housing in the United States, which is like, wow, you know, not not an EA thing. But I was like like Shiller had written about this and really called it and laid out a case. And then there were a few guys working in like, you know, in hedge funds who were also laying this out. And I was like, oh, yeah, like, this is going to be like really bad. So I had kind of like set the company up to be like, okay we're going to just segue. We're going to just transition into kind of energy rebate stuff. And that's what we were doing, like strictly carpentry and general contracting. And then we transitioned over to this energy retrofit thing where we would partner with HVAC contractors, and we brought like insulation and air sealing in house. And we still have like crews that do this. and it sucked like it it was we'd always had HVAC problems on job sites and it was like, oh, in the same way that I talk to homeowners all the time and they think they're having these kind of uniquely bad experience right? Rather than just the default experience, which is just overwhelmingly negative. So over time, I just realized like that there was a very specific problem within HVAC where the level of competence was just very, very weak. And I started just going to these training classes and doing things. And and it was just really obvious. And then Covid kind of rolls around. Right. And you're like, oh, okay. You know, somewhere pretty late in Covid, it looks like indoor air quality interventions. Like, I don't think we figured out the indoor air quality interventions or I didn't until it was like, you know, people started talking about going back to school. Harvard reached like they had what's his name? Joe. Something he had like healthy buildings. Right. He wrote that book, but he had, like, this whole blueprint for, like, sending kids back to school. And I was like, hey, that's really cool. Like, I like what you're. I like what these people are saying, but there's no fucking way. Like, there is no way you are going to do this across the current workforce, right? And so people would say things like, oh, training, training. And I'm like, no, you don't get it. Like this is extremely bad. This is not something that you can do with the workforce you have. Even the most remedial things that you are proposing are not doable, right? Like they are not going to happen. You need to figure out other things. And if you look at like the interventions that were successful, there were things like Hepa filters and Corsi boxes and this type of thing. And if you look at the interventions that failed, it was like, you know, anything that involved touching centrally ducted HVAC equipment, just like didn't wasn't able to be worked right, like it didn't feature as a solution. And so like I was like like just telling people that all the time and they were like, oh, training, training. The workers are going to need training. I'm like, no. And then I wrote that article and then then things like, I felt like at least the feedback on the article was like, oh, we we by the time I wrote that article, like, I like it was fairly recent. So like Covid was kind of like we had vaccines, we had other interventions. But like people were like, oh, this actually makes a ton of sense, right? Like this. This is what we experienced during the pandemic. Like we had things where text would just say filtered like filters can't be installed, the manufacturer doesn't allow it, or something like this. Right. Like that was the classic example.

Aaron: Yeah. I was about to ask you for, for like more specific examples for like Luddite or not Luddites. I don't know if that's the right word. Whatever the right like analogous term is for, for Luddites with respect to like not Luddites, but like ignorant people or whatever. so, so like filters couldn't be installed. Is there, is there something that's like, is there some like technical thing that like people just like couldn't do or like. Yeah.

Jesse: So there was okay, so one thing that I encountered over and over again and I would actually like engage in Twitter conversations about this. Right. Was the building, the the building facilities, guys say that you can't put a Merv 13 filter in our equipment. It's not built for it, right? Well, so I don't know for certain that every single piece of equipment ever made doesn't contain this in the instructions. But I have read the instructions for dozens possibly hundreds of pieces of equipment, and it's never been contained in any of the pieces of equipment that I've read. Right. Like, it's just it's something that, like, doesn't exist. And also, like, I know enough about equipment, like equipment. You're supposed to do what's called a static pressure measurement, right? So you actually put filters in and then you read the pressure that they're introducing into a system you don't you like. There are just many things that can be installed into a system. And if the static pressure becomes too high as a consequence, they don't say, you can't do this filter. They say the static pressure should be within whatever parameters right? It's just not a thing. Right?

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse: So but that was a common thing that people were told over and over. Like I would be willing to bet that that has been falsely claimed in hundreds of systems in public schools.

Aaron: So so this is a just to be like more specific. So. so I yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about. So like there are these filtering things, they're like rectangles and we're talking about rectangles. Yeah. We're talking about rectangles. Cool. And like people were saying, okay, we need to use one of the worst ones that like doesn't do filtering as well. Yes. Okay. That's like that's kind of silly. Prima facia.

Jesse: Yes. It is really silly. Right. Like it doesn't it. It is very silly. Right. Like and you can kind of like the other thing is like I think there's a thing too, where norms around bullshit are much stronger in the white collar world. Right. And sort of so white collar people like parents of, of kids going to those schools, they go okay, like, I'm going to take this thing, this idea that I read about Merv 13 filters, which like the difference in Merv 13 versus Merv 11, which is effectively the next step down, is really high, right? Like Merv 11? Probably. I think it's like less than 50% effective or what we think against droplets. Right.

Aaron: And then.

Jesse: Okay. Yeah. You end up you end up jumping from like half to 90% or over 90% as you go with Merv 13. Right. You could probably look this up. Yeah. But like so that jump was very significant. And most people don't have Merv 11 filters even though they have Merv eight or some other like. So essentially the filtration in most systems is like zero, right? So the parents parents or whoever would go to the facilities people and they'd say, hey, can you put this in? And they'd say, no, you can't because the equipment can't handle the pressure. Right? And that would be like the end of the conversation, basically. And then maybe the parents would go online and like bemoan this, and hopefully someone caught it and said like, hey. So the other thing was that like, it's mandatory when you have a piece of equipment that you've installed to measure static pressure, right, like the the manufacturer will say most times they'll say you must measure static pressure unless they have some external thing which that measures it for you, which they mostly don't have. Right. So you would say something like, okay, did they measure static pressure. And then whoever it was would say yes. And then you'd say, okay, take a picture and show me the holes you drilled to measure static pressure. Right. Which is like I was really used to doing that kind of stuff in bullshit environments, right? Like you want to do that kind of thing. You'd be like, okay, sure, show me the holes, right? If you can show me the holes where you drilled for static pressure, show me how you did it. In most cases, people making the claim literally don't know how to measure static pressure. Like, which is kind of like a basic HVAC piece of knowledge that you're supposed to.

Aaron: I don't know how to. I don't know how to know.

Jesse: Yeah, but if someone if you are given a set of instructions and like one of the final steps of the instructions is to, like turn on a piece of equipment and measure static pressure like this is your job, right? Like this is.

Aaron: Solidly.

Jesse: In your bailiwick. Right. So this kind of thing. So like this. And also this is totally unsurprising to me because I've already gone through like at this point, Covid hits like I've gone through ten years of bullshit, right? Like being bullshitted regularly. Like I have all these kind of, like, workarounds when I'm in the field for, like, managing this problem either, like making someone, like, not bullshit me anymore or just in most cases, just doing it myself.

Aaron: Yeah. Wow. Oh, man. There's so much. So one a lot, a lot of directions to go in. do you have a sense of, like, what? The fun. Any of the, like, more fundamental causes of this are? Because I just, like, imagine like there are some parts of like, the industrial American economy that are just, like, very competent and like, do you, do you like, have a good sense about, like what sets those apart from like your experience?

Jesse: Yeah. No, it's a great question. Like so. And then the other thing is like I think people sometimes get this case confused, right? They think that I'm doing this thing that I'm not doing. Like, I agree with you. Like you, the default is almost high levels of confidence. Like you talk to people who whatever like Program. Program stuff, right? They'll they'll inevitably bitch about their colleagues, right? Like they're like, oh, everybody around me is so incompetent. And then it's like, it's like two people or something like that in an office at ten. And like, of course, like this is like and mostly they can fulfill. They're just kind of shirking. They can fulfill like what I'm saying is very different. I'm saying the trades are somewhat bad. I think they are worse at competence than like currently than the white collar world. Right. And you see this reflected like I, I this is not my area of expertise. But you see like productivity numbers I don't think like so construction has no productivity gains on a per worker basis since the 1970s. Right. People interpret this to like they have a regulatory argument here. And I think the regulatory argument is pretty good. But I also think it's partly explained by sort of declining caliber of individuals. Right. So I think partly what's happening is the thing that we talked about earlier where there's this kind of like default expectation. Now, I don't know this empirically. And so like I want to say very specifically, this could be completely wrong. Right. Like I could be completely wrong with this. But my suspicion is that partly a society that's gone from like, you know, in, I think in the same time period of like where you're measuring productivity losses, like 15% of kids to like 40 to 50% of kids attending college, construction like, is damaged by having all the smart kids attend college, in part. Right.

Aaron: There's not many. There's not that many. Jesse's.

Jesse: I don't know necessarily if that's the case, but yeah, like so I think part of it is that there are some other things though, too. Like I argue that within the trades that HVAC is uniquely bad. Part of that is because the cognitive demands are higher. Right? So there is no doubt that in HVAC the cognitive demands are higher than other trades, right? And I think people find that surprising. I think if you say like, okay, my guess is I hate okay. So like, just to be clear, I hate IQ discourse. Like I think it's detestable. Like, I think it's I think it's a really like I think there's some stuff there that's real. Right. And I yeah. Like I'm not disputing like I don't think people are blank slates. I think there's probably a genetic component to IQ. I think, you know, all these other things like yeah, yeah. But like the worst people in the world are talking incessantly about IQ. Right. Like the worst.

Aaron: I agree with.

Jesse: Most racist people are are extremely hung up on IQ. But I do think there's a thing probably where like it could be that being a good HVAC technician demands an IQ that's, you know, at least the kind of like median IQ of like it could be that it needs a 100 IQ. And there's just this, this is horrible. Like this is I should not talk about this, but there it could just be that the median entrant has an IQ of like that's ten points or five points less than what's actually required to fulfill the demands of the job, right?

Aaron: You know that. For what it's worth, I mean, I'm a very I feel like I'm not the person to judge what the reaction to this is going to be, but like, this sounds totally reasonable and plausible to me.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, yes, but I like I want to be careful with it. Like.

Aaron: Yeah. Like I'm not.

Jesse: I'm not like I'm not broadly endorsing like IQ discourse, like the horrible cesspit of like IQ discourse. But I do think there like I think people end up in these roles, and they, it's just that the they're being outpaced by the stuff. And then there's this like, you know, maybe it would work if you had a kind of institutional discipline where you're like, okay, yes, this is your life now. Like, we're doing this thing no matter what your capacities are, we're going to pull you up. And I think the industry is sort of like in somewhat indifferent to this. Like they kind of like the tolerance for fraud. And grifting is extremely high. The tolerance for were dishonesty. Like you could potentially build an it's like something that was, you know, not great cognitively but had very strong norms around honesty. And you don't end up with that. Like, yeah. So it's just really bad. And you don't see that like, you, you don't see that nearly as much with carpentry. Right? You don't see that nearly as much with with other trades. Right. In my opinion.

Aaron: I mean, there's a bunch of bunch of things. it's like my first reaction is, okay, like, this sounds like a problem the market should solve. Like, you should be, you should be having like, some entrepreneur. And maybe at some point I'll get to that. My case for you trying to trying to beat this person, but like, you should, yeah. Like have some entrepreneur saying okay, like I'm going to like, like explain the issue and like, raise wages such that, like the most talented, potentially cognitively talented people are going to, like, be in my business and I'm going to say like, oh, are you like a rich hedge fund? Like, we'll make your office air quality like excellent or whatever. and so like my question is like why that dynamic hasn't worked or proliferated.

Jesse: Well, I think that's a great question. It's one of the things I talk about. One of the things I talk about is that, so like, that guy also doesn't get a good HVAC system, right? Like, and to me, this like, demonstrates in weekly demonstrates that there's actually an endemic problem, right? So when people do like really bougie HVAC, it tends to just expand the grift a little bit. So they end up with like UV lights that we know empirically do nothing. Right. Not that you this is not an indictment of UV generally, but like the things that we're installing in HVAC systems, we just we just know that the most common devices right now are not sort of scientifically validated in any way, and airflow is probably much too fast for them to be successful. Right? And it's also noteworthy that, like most people working in UV, taking it seriously very quickly abandoned like inductive as an effective means to like, end up with like a material impact on viral transmission. Right. But those guys will buy that stuff like they're they're buying it hook, line and sinker. They're buying other things that are like oh, how can I break it down? Like the really common thing to see in cold climates was. So there's this bullshit statement that boilers produce wet heat. So a boiler is a device that heats water and then circulate it. It's common to the northeast as you get like further up. Right. So like in areas that didn't have kind of default in cooling systems like Vermont. Right. Vermont has a ton of boilers and they just distribute hot water through baseboards usually. Right. Or maybe in floor loops or things like this. Right. So so people describe these as having as being a wet heat. Right? Which is just fucking meaningless garbage. Like it just has no meaning, right? Like, the boiler doesn't release water. It's just.

Aaron: That's what it sounds like. It's like. Like as a layperson, I would imagine. Oh, it's like. It's like hot air that's also humid. Like, that's what I imagine.

Jesse: Right? You imagine this, these characteristics. Right. And so then they would end up like and there are benefits to boiler systems. Like having warm feet is an advantage. But like when you go into these systems that are super bougie, it's just people start connecting boilers to air handlers and then blowing air across a boiler coil. And this ends up being like thousands and thousands of dollars extra. Right. And it has no advantage over a furnace, which is just a device that blows hot air, right? Yeah. Like you end up with like just reams and reams of like pseudoscientific garbage or multiple zoning systems, which in principle should work but then tend to catastrophically fail, like at a really high rate, like so people are like, oh, I'm going to take my air conditioner. I'm going to like, chop it into these tiny zones so I can achieve whatever temperature I want in every single room individually, right? And those like catastrophic. Like I'll be going to a job on Tuesday. That is almost definitely one of those systems having catastrophically failed for like a super rich person, right? We end up doing like a fair bit of that kind of stuff through around Princeton, right?

Aaron: Yeah, yeah. So man, that's. Yeah. That's interesting. So interesting man. I feel like I always want to you're going to say no, but we've had this discussion before. Like I will yell at you to like, try to make $1 billion.

Jesse: Yeah. Like, I don't like I don't know, like, it is interesting. Oh, yeah. Sorry. And the other thing I want to talk about was the effect of like that. So it could be true that people end up in like, if you're smart, right, you end up in like on the bubble jobs that just pay a lot more like HVAC sales is actually insane. Like it's actually an insane. So like when we're talking about like, oh, blue collar jobs don't pay that much, right? There's also this filter in which the smart blue collar people tend to end up either in training or sales. Right. And salesmen just like. So it's like there are some companies, HVAC sales companies that if you are less than 150 K a year, you're probably fired because your numbers are just too low. Wow. Right. So they're like, you know, they'll be like 7 to 10% commission. And if you're bringing in less than a million and a half, then they're like, I'm sorry, you're on the chopping block. Like you just have to be bringing in 2 million as a minimum, ideally 3 or 4. Right? There are 3 or 4 B starts becoming exceptional, but there are lots of like like production companies built around this. They don't want people to be less than a million, right. Like that's just totally unacceptable. You're just on the chopping block. So I think partly what happens is that anybody with who's articulate and smart tends to gravitate towards those types of jobs because they're just so much more lucrative. And it's interesting to me that also, like, they're still pretty dumb right? Like, like it's interesting because, like, you could talk to people who do, like, you know, with graduate degrees in engineering and it's not like I don't know where the ceiling is, but it's like, not that much higher than the HVAC sales ceiling, right?

Aaron: Yeah.

Jesse: Like, if you've got a good a graduate degree from a good college in the United States in engineering, like there's a good chance that you might go towards some kind of technical sales. Yeah. And it doesn't appear to be that much better than HVAC sales, which I find kind of interesting. Like, I know, I know people who make, you know, like 3 to 5, right. That's a shock. Like, to me anyway. Like, I don't make that much money. Like, that's a very high amount of money in my world.

Aaron: 300 to 500,000, to be clear. Yeah. Yes. Okay.

Jesse: Yeah. To me, that's a lot, right? Yeah.

Aaron: Yes. Likewise.

Jesse: Right. And somewhat like. And to be honest, like some of those guys come from real trades. Like some of those guys can't put together a spreadsheet, right? Like it's insane. So.

Aaron: Yeah. Wait. Okay, so this is interesting. So, I guess like one. Yeah. From like, the capitalism perspective, it's like, what are you trying to sell? Like is one issue that like consumers, whether whether like individuals or just like, businesses can't really tell the can't easily tell the difference. Like I have an indoor air quality monitor. Like would I be able to like, see the difference between like a good HVAC installation in my apartment and a bad one, like based on. Yes. Okay, okay.

Jesse: Yeah you would, but you're also in the minority of people who are are, like, watching this, like I push. Yeah. You know, like the air things view. Plus I push people all the time on now. Right. Like that's an incredible nice. And so it also frames directions. Yeah. Like if someone calls me and it's just a call, I'm like, try to get an air things before I go to your house. Right. Like if you have any concerns about indoor air quality really they.

Aaron: Should sponsor you. They should sponsor pitch an hour.

Jesse: No, seriously. Right. Like it's insane. Like I've probably sold like, off of, like, I've probably got people to buy air things off Amazon. Like, I don't know, many, many people have bought those devices and some of them like I'm like I'm like like I'm totally Mr. Poverty. Like I'm like, oh, you know, maybe you can share it with a friend or someone else who's interested, and then they'll buy like two just for them like, you know, so it's like.

Aaron: Yeah, there's, there's I feel like the kind of person who, like, cares enough, cares a lot about indoor air quality is like usually willing to spend $200 to like, measure it or it's like usually not the constraint or something. No. That's interesting.

Jesse: Yeah. And also that I think there's probably a case. Right. Like radon alone looks really bad and I think I don't know for sure. Like but to me everything's view plus looked like the first consumer facing radon that measured it in real time. Right. And that was like to me that looked like an incredible breakthrough. Right. Like I, I don't recall something prior to that that was like I mean, it probably existed, but like, yeah, like The View Plus just looked like knocking out of the park. Radon kills a lot of people. Radon kills a lot of people. I think there's probably a justification for like based on the economics of the thing to for people to buy these. Right. Like at 300, it's right now they list for like 300 bucks on Amazon. Right? When they're not on sale like 300 bucks. If you can materially take action to reduce radon levels, that alone looks pretty good. And we've done that right. Like we've found radon in quite a few cases. Like also there's a there's a weird thing where people so when when you buy a house usually the I, I don't know if it's the state law or the lender, but you're generally required to measure radon, right, as part of the terms. And then if you discover something you go back to the seller. But the seller, it's usually while the seller is in the house. So if they're like halfway savvy and evil, which for some reason, selling a house makes a very sizable fraction of people completely sociopathic, Right. Like so. They'll just open all their windows, right? Which is incredibly unethical. Like incredibly bad, right? But I'm almost positive it happens all the time because I always encourage people to get a radon test. Like for years before The View. Plus I was like someone would say, oh, I bought the house. Radon tested fine, and I would just say, get a, get another run, another radon test, right? Like for years I said that and now I just say get a view plus. Right. But there have been many surprises in houses where people have done gotten a view plus or gotten a second radon test. Right.

Aaron: So this is like, this is actually like, like encouraging because back in the day, of FTX being supplying infinite money to a certain set of people who are like, aligned with effective altruism. I asked for a grant to basically give out these devices. I got turned down, which is like, I think maybe fine, but like maybe now, maybe like if this is like maybe now the grant like the grant makers would have like, listened to this episode and said like, wow, Aaron. Like you're were actually really prescient. We should have given you $30,000 to give these to whoever you need.

Jesse: That's really funny. Yeah. So, like, for radon specifically, one can come up with like, you could easily come up with a couple of criteria for, for determining whether it's more likely. Right. Like the presence of a basement. Right. Or a substantial below grade foundation would predict that the presence of an HVAC system in the basement also predicts also predicts it. Right. And there's a lot of interaction. This is totally overlooked, but there's a lot of interaction between the HVAC system and radon that people don't like. Totally understand that. I also have had worked on for many years before The View Plus. Right? So yeah, so you end up like with a lot of depressurized foundations where the depressurization is induced by the equipment that's located in the basement. And so that's pretty bad. Those are two kind of like major predictors. yeah. So you could narrow I radon.

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse: Radon. So you could potentially limit this further. It's it is interesting. You know, like also publicly. Right. In the pandemic, I was very surprised that CO2 didn't take off in kind of restaurants and things like that. I was very surprised. I was confidently predicting in like late spring of 2020 to my wife. I was like, when we go out in restaurants, they're going to be CO2 monitors, like everywhere. There's just going to be CO2 monitors. People are just, I said, like, I can remember being like finally, honey, CO2 is a proxy. The time is here. Like CO2 is a proxy. Like had been widely used. Like it was like kind of like office buildings. I worked in a place that had they didn't, like, brought in the ventilation system, like cycled on and off to CO2 levels much higher, like back in the day, like, you know, whatever. Four years ago. Five years ago, it was like 1200 PM was the yeah was the cycling default. So they just tried to keep it like below 1200. And then by the time Covid like mid Covid it was like I think people initially were eight and then maybe six or something like that. Right.

Aaron: Yeah. Just just to be clear. So proxy for just like air quality in general, like including in a pandemic, the potential for viral stuff or.

Jesse: Yeah. So I think proxy for like respiratory disease transmission.

Aaron: Oh okay. Okay.

Jesse: Right. So people people have talked about that for years. Right. yeah. Maybe you could say proxy for occupancy levels or something. Right. But nah, probably not. Probably more like disease transmission risk. It's not clean, right. Like it's not like. But that was like how people talked about it with CO2 as a proxy, right? It's not clean. Like maybe people are sick. Maybe they're not sick. So maybe you're just exhaling there or sorry.

Aaron: There's also that the potential direct effects of CO2, which I know is like kind of controversial.

Jesse: Yes. Yes. Slightly controversial. My guess is it's better to think of it as a proxy for like a bunch of other things. And we just happen to be measuring CO2. Like, it could be, you know, it could be other things as well as disease transmission risk. It's not clear. Sitting in a room with elevated CO2 you know, if you're when you're by yourself, it probably doesn't there. Maybe there's some cognitive effects, you know, and maybe those aren't directly CO2. They could be some other thing. But like.

Aaron: Yeah yeah yeah.

Jesse: Like it's not. Yeah. That's less clear. But as a as a risk for like I think it's a pretty good way to think about under ventilated spaces. There's a trade off there with filtration as well. So like that got difficult people I think there was initially a lot of pushback on using CO2 because there were potentially school interventions. So like when people are talking about opening school, there were potentially school interventions where you'd go in and just like filter school classrooms like crazy, and they had no window and no access to ventilation. And we were like, yeah, that's probably okay. But if we put a CO2 monitor there, the CO2 would be really high, right? But the net result of not making things transparent was and this wasn't obviously the solitary contributor, but in not doing that right, like in refusing to adopt CO2 monitors widely like we didn't open schools. Right. Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah. Wait. So sorry, what what's the trade off between CO2 stuff and filtration? Like they seem to. Yeah. Can you explain that?

Jesse: Yeah, sure. So when you filter air. Right, you're just recycling it, right? You can't filter out CO2, right?

Aaron: Right right right, right.

Jesse: When you're running a filter, you're just you assuming that the filter is as effective as replacing the air with fresh air at reducing disease transmission. And that's probably pretty close to correct. Right. So filtered rooms, assuming the same volume of air of clean air is filtered, they probably have the same transmission risk as a room in which we're just replacing that same air. Right. Ventilation versus filtration.

Aaron: Yeah.

Jesse: So there was hesitance to make this transparent. Like people didn't want to distribute CO2 monitors across across classrooms, like in the early summer of 2020. Right? Or through the late summer. And they didn't want to do this, right. Because they thought, oh, that's going to be confusing. And then like, you know, they didn't really go back to school anyway, right? Like it just kind of didn't materialize. I was very much in the pro transparency camp for this stuff. Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah yeah.

Jesse: Yeah. And I continue to be surprised at the lack of public facing CO2 monitors.

Aaron: I mean, also like notoriously like us spends a lot of money on public education. Like one one $300 device per classroom would not break the bank of most public school systems, as far as I know.

Jesse: Yes, that and also like it was weird, right? Because I think parents easily would have done that. Like the cost of parents alone was probably really high, right? So I think like the whole thing I found bizarre, like I found it truly bizarre. And then and, you know, like I sent my kids in with CO2 monitors, not the view. Plus what was the the right? Like I said, I emailed my son's teacher and he was like this is incredible. Like, I can't believe that there are. Solutions like there are engineering based solutions to this problem had not occurred to him. And this was like months like this was well into the fall. Like I forget when school was partly open, but it was probably like November when they were going back to school like two days a week or something, right? And he he had never he had never considered that there could be, you know, solutions that were engineering based to addressing this.

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. And going back to the ventilation thing. So, the trade off. So like, the, the best of both worlds is just you pipe in fresh air, like, and then maybe you circulate internally, right? Like, you might want to also, like, have a, have a standalone filter. So like maybe it's. Yeah, maybe I don't fully understand like why there's necessarily a trade off or is it just like.

Jesse: You would have, you would have had classrooms in which you couldn't, you didn't have a window. I think this is I think this is probably somewhat rare. Right. So if you can open a window, you're probably fine, even if the window itself passively doesn't let in enough air. You could just put a fan in the window and now you'll just start driving.

Aaron: Yeah, that's what I, that's what I, I personally well I used to now I have an AC thing but that's what I used to do. I used to have a fan blowing either in or out like of a window to like. Yeah.

Jesse: So, so yeah, you could, you could if you have a class. So the counterargument was there may be some classrooms where there is neither ventilation nor a window. Right. And in those classrooms we'll have to filter. Right. I think this might describe a very small number of classrooms. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like, have you ever been in a window?

Aaron: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, maybe there's a few in, like, a basement in college, but, like, it's just not that common.

Jesse: Not common. Right. Like, it also felt like you could probably, like, get out of that somehow, right? You could move to a library or something or whatever, right? Like, yeah. Yeah, there was just there was some there were classes eventually held outdoors. Right. Like, and that obviously would have been like massively successful for Covid purposes. Right. A little bit over the top. But like, you know in, in like September it's fine. But like yeah. So that that was one of the counterarguments. And so like people there was a common argument against displaying CO2 to room occupants because it might confuse them. And you'd have to explain the filtration thing.

Aaron: Oh, God. I mean, I feel like there's like this this version of argument gets like, made in a lot of different settings, just like don't don't measure and or provide people like true information because of x, Y and z. And like it's not literally impossible that this never checks out, but I'm always so skeptical of it. I mean, like, one thing is like blood testing. Like, I feel like, yeah, if I could have a continuous blood monitor for like all my biomarkers, it's like, yes, like that would turn up some like quote unquote false positives, but like you can just account for that. And like in general knowing like more true information tends to be better.

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, I think in this case, like I can't speak to the, the biomarkers thing because I probably don't know enough about it. But like in this case, I think, well, yes, I think the default assumption should be we should just be honest and transparent with people where possible. Right. Like like, you know, there are just many examples of this like just endless, right? Like not wanting to cause a panic is another one, right?

Aaron: Like yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Jesse: Right. Like we don't want to give people true information about what this could be because we don't want to cause a panic. Right. Like that seems that seems really weak. yeah. Yeah. So but a lot of it seems to center even. I think the, the CO2 thing sort of centers around, like, we don't want to make people alarmed, right? I don't know what the next step in this is like what people do when they're alarmed. Right. Like they might, like, retaliate in some way.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, I don't know, I don't I feel like it's not gonna I can't imagine like, people rioting because there's like a little air monitor on the on the, on the like side of the room.

Jesse: Right, right. And there were like, you know, and as it stood like, I think like, I mean, people talk about this a lot, right? Like with Covid, I think that was like, you know, obviously a huge failure. I, I think to some extent there's some things going on that people like maybe they overrate. Like there wasn't a lot there was transparency. Wasn't as good as it could have been. There's some other stuff though, too. Where to be fair. So that was an argument given by people in public health. So I feel confident in saying like, I think that was a false argument that was advanced by people who should have had the expertise to, like, do that effectively. I think there's another thing in Covid that people do where they go, like the playgrounds were closed, right? And I like I don't think the playgrounds being closed in all of those cases represents like the consensus view of public health. I think it represents like a kind of like.

Aaron: I got you, I would say.

Jesse: Like a narrow minded, like petty bureaucrat somewhere.

Aaron: Yeah. It's the kind of thing where, like, if you're shutting down all of the county's buildings, it's like that's technically on the checklist of, like, things to shut down. Yeah.

Jesse: Right. Right. Exactly like the beaches, right? Like people go, why did they close the beaches? Like, public health is just science is wrong about. And you're like, well, in the beach case, like, I'm like, that just looks like something where, like somebody got a hold of something and and like like it doesn't, it doesn't reflect this other thing. Right? Like this thing of.

Aaron: Like.

Jesse: The science being wrong. Right. So I, I'm cautious with I'm cautious with the argument in some areas. Right. Because I think it's like people over, over make, make it too much. Right. Like it wasn't like a consensus perspective, let's say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funny.

Aaron: Yeah. And interesting. okay. So wait, so we got here from like, okay, why isn't the market solving the AC or HVAC, which stands for hold on because I didn't know this at one point, so I will I'm sorry. Yeah. This is going to get me canceled among among Jesse's colleagues since we're heating ventilation and air conditioning in case. In case I'm not the only one. There we go. Okay.

Jesse: Yes.

Aaron: so if we got if we we subsidized air monitors, would that have the downstream consequence of fixing the competence in HVAC, HVAC.

Jesse: Yes. So I think generally making many things transparent would be extremely useful. And that's one of the things. Now in general. Right. Like the focal point for people purchasing HVAC services. Right. Isn't always indoor air quality, right. So but yeah that would go a long way. I it's a big ask right. Like, you know it takes a level of technical sophistication that's high. But I think like I pushed for this in many areas. Right. So not just indoor air quality but like installation standards right now. Like we just have the capacity to make installation standards transparent because so much is recorded. Right. Like we just have like temperature and pressure in various forms being recorded. It's the most kind of central thing to HVAC installations. Right. And so we can't we have this information that we're able to provide digitally to people. And then we just don't do it right. Like yeah, they don't know that it exists and we don't tell them. Right.

Aaron: So yeah like I'm so I like where would I go to find this information for like I have an apartment. Like what.

Jesse: Oh it's really hard to do. So like, you won't ever be given the information. Like so when we install, let's say we install an air conditioner, right? One of the things with an air conditioner is that it? So you have refrigerant moving through piping, right. And that's a big part of of like air conditioning. Right. And so there are a few things that should happen with that piping. And it's actually it's actually a very diligent process that has to be followed. Right. One is that we want to pressurize the system, which is partly to test for leaks and then partly to purge it with, with nitrogen. Right. So we pressurize the system with nitrogen to ensure that there are no leaks. It's a very high pressure, maybe like we do like 500 psi, right? When we do that test at 500 psi. That is something that we can record. So we can record any loss of pressure to the system if we pressurize it. Right. And we can just we'll just have a digital file. That file could be consumer facing. Right. That would be very simple to do. Then we release the nitrogen and we do what's called an evacuation. Right. So we draw the system to a very very low pressure to get any like any impurities out of the system and also ensure that it doesn't leak a second time. Right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Jesse: Back. That's called a vacuum test. Right. And so we put it under a vacuum and we hold that vacuum for some period of time. So both of those could be made transparent with incredible ease. Right. And this would solve like okay. So one of the things that's happening with global warming is refrigerant has a very high global warming potential. We're phasing out, one refrigerant right now and going with a somewhat lower global warming potential. Right. And so like what appears to be happening is we have endemic leaking of refrigerant, and much of the gains of electric electrification are being clawed back by leaking refrigerant in systems. Right. And that's really bad. Right. So like, we have this policy direction that's like, oh, we have to do this thing, right? But we have, like endemic leaking refrigerant problems that are clawing back the gains of electrification. So everybody converts to heat pumps, but heat pumps require refrigerant, and then we leak the refrigerant and then we kind of lose the game.

Aaron: So I'm an idiot. Is refrigerant generally a liquid or a gas?

Jesse: It's both.

Aaron: Okay.

Jesse: Right. So it's actually doing a thing. So it's not an idiot. It's like it's you're making refrigerant is making a phase change. Well, two phase change.

Aaron: Well, that makes sense.

Jesse: Yes. Yes it does. Right.

Aaron: Okay, there we go. So you have this very smart.

Jesse: You have this kind of process that's like, really bad and would likely be fixed by that. I have a couple of other ideas like the adoption. There's a new technology that both technicians and the industry fails to adopt called a like a press, like it's a press tool that crimps fittings versus like either flares which are very finicky, or brazing, which is not quite as bad, but still sometimes pretty bad. So the the HVAC industry refuses to adopt press fittings as well. So now, like very little is compatible with press fittings, in the field. So you have to kind of like cut stuff off and make press fittings, which is also really bad. But yeah, so you have these things where like you can just measure things. And if you made that transparent to customers, like they would just get the digital file and it would prove that the system at the time of installation was free of impurities and not leaking. Right. And it's totally weird to me that this has like no traction, like it has no traction whatsoever. Right? Like nobody anybody making the digital platforms knows that technicians, even if they want to use the digital platforms, will not want to show those platforms to their customers, right?

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. It's like it can't, it can't it can't only benefit you as a or like not immediately as a provider I guess potentially it could. Right. Because like you could say like I'm going to provide this service that my competitors aren't, but like, people don't really know about it. yeah. No, I mean, like, I'm a huge I collect data on, like, everything I possibly can. So, like, I want to know. I want to know all this stuff, like about like my, like, environment, like health, like whatever. But, like, I feel like most people aren't like that.

Jesse: Yeah. And it's also weird because like, okay, so the blower door, which we mentioned earlier, right. So in 2010 when we started doing energy retrofits, they I was like, this is the coolest thing ever because we got like a couple blower doors and those test homes for leakage. Right? You put a big fan in the front door, you test the home before you start the work, right? You depressurize the home to like -50 pascals relative to the outdoors, and you measure the airflow across the fan. It's very slick. Like you can do this like I got it down to like five minutes or something, right? Wow. Like I can could test out in, like, five minutes. You set up this fan very fast, right? And then at the end of the job, you would also test the home, right? And you would see what kind of leakage reduction you'd gotten at the time, too. I had read. Adil Gawande, who I really liked, like, I really liked. He wrote a lot, I think, for The New Yorker. And he had some like it wasn't super empirical, but he had, a book on testing. And so, like, I was especially enamored of the idea of, like benchmarking. And then so the people working for me and I was in the field a lot then, and we just like went to work on taking these numbers down. Right. And like, even now, like I have a guy who like, I post the pics of the blower door sometimes in this like long Twitter thread I have. But like, you know, they went out to a job last Thursday. They spent a day there. They reduced leakage in the home by like I think it was like 26 or 27%. That's really typical, right? Like 1 to 2 guys will reduce leakage in the home. Working in an attic and like by like, you know, somewhere between 20 and 30% is pretty routine. Sometimes they'll get like 50 or 60 even, right? So like that kind of stuff was super motivating. Like we worked really hard to figure out, like what was working best. And the same thing is true of like, if someone gives you this digital file and you're like okay, how quickly can I make this number go down? Right?

Aaron: Or yeah, yeah.

Jesse: Right. Like it's very like I found that like kind of like kind of intrinsically motivating. Right? Like where you're like I just have this number and I want to hit it as fast as possible or whatever. Right?

Aaron: The economy tends to be very good at optimizing for changing numbers, either either higher or lower. Right. If you could get some sort of price on that, that the problem is that there's not like I would guess you're not economically capturing it like all like that value that you're like, you could just do like a worse job on reducing that number and like you would get paid the same amount, right?

Jesse: Yes. Correct. Yeah. That's absolutely correct. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. The incentives aren't like they're not great. But nevertheless like there's an intrinsic quality to doing it like like that. I felt that was like, oh man. And also speed like speed was definitely part of it because you make more money if you go fast, but also that you could be like give, like just send the owner two pics at the end of the job. Like you take a picture of the the little computer, the manometer at the start of the job and then you take it after, right? My guys do this. This is what they do systematically every time they hit a job, right? Like yeah. And like yeah, sure. Like it's maybe slightly against the incentives, but at the same time, you know, like we partly came up with systems like invented the systems for retrofitting buildings. We've done like, I think over 2000 retrofits in in like insulation type retrofits in homes. Right. Like it's a lot and like, it's also weird because like, everybody kind of reports like, I don't think there's anyone in our league for like those reductions. Right. And that's also weird because it wasn't like rocket science, you know?

Aaron: Yeah. Okay, so why aren't you richer? Sorry. Maybe we'll cut this part out. No, but. Okay. Sorry. I feel like that was a very autistic way of asking the question. Like, you have all this insight, and there's a gigantic market which is, like the United States of America is probably willing to spend quite a bit of money on air quality. How can I convince you to become a billionaire?

Jesse: Yeah, I don't know. Like, it's a difficult market, right. For. Well it's not, I don't know. Yeah. No, it's a good question. It's fair. Like, you know, partly like time. Right? And like, how much time am I prepared to put into this stuff? Like.

Aaron: That's, like, totally reasonable. Yeah.

Jesse: Yeah. Like I spent a lot of time doing other stuff. Right. So. But, like, you know. Yeah, we, I guess we could be a little more financially successful. We are doing more things like, we're we. It's taken a long time because I wanted to feel technically like really good about it, but we are adding, you know, HVAC stuff at rate like we encounter the same problem like anybody encounters, right? Which is like it's really hard to get technicians who are. Yeah like kind of committed and that type of stuff. It's hard to scale the business.

Aaron: You want to you want to plug your companies like their names and your websites.

Jesse: Oh yeah. I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. So like, my company is called Tay River Builders. the wood store I also own, which you haven't mentioned yet, is called Willard Brothers, which Willard brothers, you should search on Instagram because my youngest brother runs a really good Instagram page for our wood store and furniture shop and sawmill and kiln. Tay River is kind of my side of things. one of my other brothers runs the carpentry and building construction, and I do. I manage the insulation air sealing guys and then do the HVAC.

Aaron: So I will, I will link, I will give you as much advertising as possible. I will link this and my all all seven people listening to this. Well we'll see.

Jesse: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah it's cool.

Aaron: No no I wasn't I wasn't meaning to say like wow. Like you should be making you should really be squeezing their business out for another like 10%. I guess I was really wondering, like. yeah. Like, why are you just, like, literally the only person in the world and like, you were like, with, like the combination of like knowledge insight, experience, etc. who could like, like who could potentially try to like, create like a large industrial, I don't know, like, scale things up, like three orders of magnitude if that makes any sense.

Jesse: Yeah. That's interesting. So that is not super uncommon. Like it's not uncommon to have mixed residential and commercial HVAC companies that are doing say 50 to 100 million. It's not super common, right. But that's what the private equity wave has bought a ton of those sorts of companies. Like I am in a weird position like I'll acknowledge like I'm in a weird position because most of the people who think about things the way that I do Don't stay in the field for as long as I have.

Aaron: Maybe that makes a lot of a lot of sense.

Jesse: Yeah. They like they transition. Like I have friends who you know, inasmuch as they're similar to I am. Yeah. Which they probably are. Right. They teach one of my friends is pretty high up with ACA, which sets standard Air Conditioning Contractors of America set right standards. He does a lot of teaching a class that is targeted towards other like trainers. Right. other friends work for like utility or clean energy programs.

Aaron: yeah. Cool.

Jesse: It's not common for people to stay in the field, which I think partly speaks to the like norms. Right? Like you get into the field and you, you know, you are sort of like really constantly swimming against the current, even like another like one of the better texts text. I knew who didn't work for me, but worked for another big company and was like a true standout, right? he just took a job like maybe a year ago, representing, like a a Chinese, like, mini split heat pump manufacturer like. And he, he worked for a long time in the field, in all fairness.

Aaron: But yeah.

Jesse: It's just not that common in the. And that's also a distinction between other trades. Like you see there are many like there are many standout people framing houses. Right. Like you can find many examples of people and they're going and they're circulating in trade shows. It's pretty hard to like there is a weeding out thing. People just don't stay in the field. Maybe I could probably come up with a couple examples, but it does seem, I mean, somewhat rare.

Aaron: I mean, maybe one other thing. Just like people really don't like doing entrepreneurship. Like it like it requires like, a lot of risk tolerance and like a lot of initiative. It's like I'm imagining like the person you just mentioned, like the standout tech or whatever like in principle could have tried to start a competitor to you, right? But like, people don't like doing that.

Jesse: that's yes. That's true. Yeah. I think there is an aversion like it's a different it's definitely a different skill set, whatever it is like of the many high volume companies, many of which have been acquired by private equity, the technical sophistication of those companies is shockingly poor.

Aaron: Like, wow.

Jesse: It is crazy. And I know a lot of them, right? Like, like I've had meetings with them like we do some of their work like it is you will constantly like it's almost like I have a friend who does this like sales for another company. And it's pretty like all we do is laugh all the time, like it's just a wave. It's just wave after wave of just incredibly dumb things being said constantly. Like like hysterically. Right? Like just a complete lack of understanding of anything whatsoever. Like, it is really quite funny. A lot of the time.

Aaron: Wow. So I'm not going to lie, I am kind of running out of steam, so we might have to have a part. Part. I feel like there's. So you could provide honestly like dozens and dozens of hours of podcast content. so this this might have to be approximately part one.

Jesse: Yeah, I actually have to run to I got to get back, knock out some stuff. That's cool.

Aaron: Do you want to give a, like, a last message for for part, part one of an hour with Jesse.

Jesse: I'm like, happy to do this. Yeah. It was. This was really fun. I like I it's cool to think that this in some way overlaps with EA.

Aaron: So. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well thank you. Thank you so much.

Jesse: Thanks, Aaron. I'll talk to you later.

Aaron: See ya.

Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe

Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion is a recent paper by Fin Moorhouse and Will MacAskill.

* 00:00 - 1:58:04 is me reading the paper.

* 1:58:05 - 2:26:06 is a string of random thoughts I have related to it

I am well-aware that I am not the world's most eloquent speaker lol. This is also a bit of an experiment in getting myself to read something by reading it out loud. Maybe I’ll do another episode like this (feel free to request papers/other things to read out, ideally a bit shorter than this one lol)

Below are my unfiltered, unedited, quarter-baked thoughts.

My unfiltered, unedited, quarter-baked thoughts

Okay, this is Aaron.

I'm in post-prod, as we say in the industry, and I will just spitball some random thoughts, and then I'm not even with my computer right now, so I don't even have the text in front of me.

I feel like my main takeaway is that the vibes debate is between normal to AI is as important as the internet, maybe. That's on the low end, to AI is a big deal. But if you actually do the not math, all approximately all of the variation is actually just between insane and insane to the power of insane. And I don't fully know what to do with that.

I guess, to put a bit more of a point on it, I'm not just talking about point estimates. It seems that even if you make quite conservative assumptions, it's quite overdetermined that there will be something explosive technological progress unless something really changes. And that is just, yeah, that is just a big deal. It's not one that I think of fully incorporated into my emotional worldview. I mean, I have it, I think, in part, but not, not to the degree that I think my, my intellect has.

So another thing is that one of the headline results, something that Will MacAskill, I think, wants to emphasize and did emphasize in the paper, is the century in a decade meme. But if you actually read the paper, that is kind of a lower bound, unless something crazy happens. And I'll, this is me editorializing right now.

So, I think something crazy could happen first, for example, nuclear war with China, that would destroy data centers and mean that, you know, AI progress is significantly set back, or it's an unknown unknown. But the century in a decade is really a truly a lower bound. You need to be super pessimistic with all the in-model uncertainty. Obviously there's out of model uncertainty, but the actual point estimates, whether you take geometric, however you do it, arithmetic means over distributions, or geometric means, however you combine the variables, you actually get much much faster than that.

So that is a 10x speed up, and that is, yeah, as I said 10 times, as pessimistic as you can get, I don't actually have a good enough memory to remember exactly what the point estimate numbers are. I should go back and look.

So chatting with Claude, it seems that there's actually a lot of different specific numbers and things. So one question you might have is, okay, over the fastest growing decade in terms of technological progress or economic growth in the next 10 decades, what will the peak average growth rate be? But there's a lot of different ways you can play with that to change it. It's, oh, what's the average going to be over the next decade? What about this coming decade? What about before 2030? Do we're talking about economic progress, progress or some less well-defined sense of technological and social progress.

But basically it seems the conservative scenario is, is that the intelligence explosion happens and at some, in some importantly long series of years, you get a 5x year over year. So not a doubling every year, but after two years, you get a 25x expansion of, of AI labor. And then 125 after three years. And I need to look back. I think one thing they don't talk about specifically is, oh yeah, sorry.

They do talk about one important thing to emphasize. And as you can tell, I'm not the most eloquent person in the world. Is that they talk about pace significantly and about limiting factors. But the third, the thing you might solve for, if you know those two variables is the length of time that such an explosion might take place across and just talking, thinking out loud, that is something that they, whether intentionally or otherwise, or me being dumb and missing it. I don't think that they give a ton of attention to, and that's yeah. I mean, my intuition is approximately fine.

Does it matter if the intelligence explosion conditional on conditional on knowing how to distribution of rates of say blocks of years, say, so we're not talking about seconds, we're not talking about, I guess we could be talking about months, but we're not talking about weeks, and we're not talking about multiple decades.

So we're talking about something in the realm of single digit to double digit numbers of years, maybe a fraction of a year. So two ish, three orders of magnitude of range. And so the question is, conditional on having a distribution of peak average growth rate for some block of time. Does it matter whether we're talking about two years, or 10 years or what? And sorry, backtracking, also conditional on having a distribution for the limiting factors.

So at what point do you stop scaling? Because we know that there's the talking point, infinite growth in a finite world is true. They're just off by 1000 orders of magnitude, or maybe 100. So there actually are genuine limiting factors. And they discussed this, at what point you might get true limits on power consumption or whatever.

But yeah, just to recap this little mini ramble. We don't, one thing the paper doesn't go over much is the length of time specifically, except insofar as that is implied by distributions you have for peak growth rates and limiting factors.

So another thing that wasn't in the paper, but that was, I'm just spitballing that was in Will MacAskill recent interview on the 80,000 hours podcast with Robert Roeblin about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. Is that, yeah, I think Rob said this, he wishes that the AIX community hadn't been so tame or timid, in terms of hedging, saying, emphasizing uncertainty, saying, you know, there's a million ways it can be wrong, which is of course true. But I think his, the takeaway he was trying to get at was, even ex-ante, they should have been a little bit more straightforward.

And I actually kind of think there's a reasonable critique of this paper, which is that the century in a decade meme is not a good approximation of the actual expectations, you know, the expectations is something like 100 to 1000x, not a 10x speed up. As lucky as a reasonable conservative baseline, you have to be really within model pessimistic to get to the 10x point.

Another big thing to comment on is just the grand challenges. And so I've been saying for a while that my P doom, as they say, is something in the 50% range. Maybe now it's 60% or something after reading this paper up from 35% right after the bottom executive order. And what I mean by that, I actually think is some sort of loose sense of, no, we actually don't solve all these challenges.

Well, so it's not one thing MacAskill and Morehouse emphasize, but in both the podcast that I listened to and the paper is it's not just about AI control. It's not just about the alignment problem. You really have to get a lot of things right. I think this relates to other work that MacAskill is on that I'm not super well acquainted with. But there's the question of how much do you have to get right in order for the future to go well. And actually think there's a lot of strands there. Like I remember on the podcast with Rob, that we're talking in terms of percentage, percentage value of the best outcome. I'm not, yeah, I'm just thinking out loud here, but I'm not actually sure that's the right metric to go with.

It's a little bit like, so you can imagine just we have the current set of possibilities and then exogenously we get one future strand in the multiverse, the Everettian multiverse. And a single Everettian multiverse thread points to the future going a billion times better than it could otherwise. I feel like this approximately should not change approximately anything because you know it's not going to happen. But it does revise down those numbers, your estimate of the expected value, the expected percentage of the best future, it revises that down a billion fold.

And so this sort of, no I'm not actually sure if this ends up cashing, I'm just not smart enough to intuit well whether this ends up cashing out in terms of what you should do. But I suspect that it might, that's really just an intuition, so yeah I'm not sure.

You know something that will never be said about me is that I am an extremely well organized and straightforward thinker. So it might be worth noting these audio messages are just random things that come to mind as I'm walking around basically a park. Also that's why the audio quality might be worse.

Oh yeah getting back to what I was originally thinking about with the grand challenges and my P. Doom. They just enumerate a bunch of things that in my opinion really do have to go right in order for some notion of the future to be good. And so there's just a concatenation, I forget what the term is, but a concatenation issue of even if you're relatively optimistic and I kind of don't know if you should be on any one issue.

Like okay, so some of these, let me just list them off. AI takeover, highly destructive technologies, power concentrating mechanisms, value lock-in mechanisms, AI agents and digital minds, space governance, new competitive pressures, epistemic disruption, abundance, so capturing the upside and unknown unknowns. No, they're not, it's not as clean a model as each of these are fully independent. It's much more complex than that, but it's not as simple as you just, oh, if you have a 70% chance on each, you can just take that to the power of eight or however many there are and get the outcome that they all go well. Not only because they're overlapping and they're not independent, et cetera.

But I feel like this is sort of a more explicit, that, this is the kind of thing that I've been getting at with my relatively high, I think, PDoom numbers, even though a significant amount of my approximately 50% or 60% probability mass is basically not, not that there's a classic Yudkowskian takeover, single event where everybody drops dead from a pandemic that Claude 3.9 designed. But it's basically that, yeah, there's a shit ton of stuff to get right.

We could actually imagine a thriving sort of civilization on Earth, even one that ends wild animal suffering. And there's the question of, okay, what are the odds that, okay, what else is going on and also elsewhere in the universe and shit does get very weird. You get into weird counterfactuals, alternative evolution trajectories, aliens with different values.

So yeah, what else is there? Oh, yeah, I'm particularly nervous about getting AI consciousness right? I think the most likely way that we do get it right, or we do end up treating AI as well, is basically by accident. Just not a great position to be in.

I haven't really thought specifically about the likelihood that we basically treat AI as well as a group or don't.

I don't know. I want to say 50-50 or something, but it's also correlated with other things. Maybe that's too optimistic. I'm really just doing the opposite of what I dislike, which is when people refuse to put numbers on things. But I could change that in five minutes.

Yeah, another thing that is a little bit outside of the scope of the paper, but obviously relevant is, okay, so what do we do about this? And, you know, there's a meme of pause AI and actually I'm just in favor of frontier AI scaling. But quite possibly the more plausible and frankly, more important thing is that you actually take the growth rates down from 1000x year over year to approximately say 10x a year over year, which give you a 10 to the 10, x increase over a decade in terms of technological progress to approximately doubling. Sorry, approximately doubling every year, which would get you to the 10, which is 1000x or something. Or maybe you want to take us down to 30% growth. I don't know what 1.3 to the 10th is maybe that's roughly 10x or something. No, that can't be right.

But anyway, I do think it's an important question is, okay, what is the fastest rate of change we can get where we still muddle through? And 10x doesn't seem crazy to me. And I feel like this is actually just the default, this is the default alignment plan, is that we muddle through, and by some combination of effort, luck, restraint, and policy, just aren't independent. We merely see 30% annual growth, or something. Or things just go really right by accident. Now, that's not exactly a plan, right? But that is kind of where my optimism comes from, or my optimistic probability mass.

Yeah, and another point, important thing in the paper to reflect on, is punting stuff to future AI. And I don't think I have great original thoughts on this. I do think that, just point listeners to Joe Carl Smith, who I just, first of all, big fan. Second of all, even though he's wrong about stuff, not everything. Second of all, there, I think, he is specifically talking about, at least in this recent post that he wrote, the more fine grained dynamics of how we can best use AI to do AI alignment research. And that's only one sort of grand challenge in MacAskill and Morehouse's schema. But I will just point out, there's a lot of good thinking there.

Like one important takeaway is, you want to pause or slow down, maximally, in the range where AI is not yet maximally dangerous or ideally dangerous at all, but can significantly help with stuff with AI alignment, space governance, epistemics, et cetera. And that is something that I feel like I could have gotten to from first principles, but didn't. So hats on to me instead of hats off.

Yeah, also just in terms of the degree to which maybe this is going to manifest in my real life. I'm basically, so there's a chance I'll back out, but I'm not planning to, I'm just going to sleep on it one more night, planning to basically make a bet that any single calendar year by 2030 will have a growth Rate of above 5% now 5% is look and I'm planning to do this on something like a $1,000 magnitude and two to one odds against me. So I lose $1,000 if I lose and gain $500 if I win and I'll just throw that out there as 5% It's not directly addressed the question of whether we're got faster than last since the 1970s in economic growth. It's not directly addressed the question of whether we're got four percent versus seven percent. It isn't directly in the paper.

But yeah, I guess I'm reiterating here But look at a very broad qualitative level a lot of things have to go very specifically wrong quote-unquote wrong or right depending on your opinion in order for there not to be a world's historical speed up in technological growth and presumably also economic growth. I will also note that some of these random pauses I'm being self-conscious as I'm getting passed by joggers. And I kind of I would like to think that I think I'm a cool business analyst guy talking in these jargony terms. They probably don't.

Now totally separate from the substance. There's the question of whether I should do another thing of this this was actually a quite long paper.

So the recording is two hours I only did one very small section over again, literally 30 seconds. But basically just read it in multiple parts because I'm quite ADHD did like 7 and 17 different sections. That when you stitch them together you got two hours over the course of two days. But it was a true non-trivial amount of time energy and focus for those two days, but actually kind of the idea of doing of forcing myself to read this way. Because God knows that sometimes I won't otherwise a little bit too Twitter brained. But if you read it out loud to some extent you have to absorb some of it at least for me. You can't just skim totally over it and maybe I'll just maybe I'll do this more you know. Hopefully it won't be I think this is 55 56 pages. So pretty with some diagrams or whatever.

So I call it 50 pages of text so you're looking at 25 pages an hour or 30 minutes could do in Yeah, could not do it not that. Wouldn't be super difficult for me to do that in say three parts, I think. So maybe I should find more important PDFs to read there are really quite a lot of PDFs and Google Docs for that matter, I don't know. It's not a very enlightened point but I don't know, does anybody read this stuff?

Will MacAskill is kind of famous and this is a quite important paper and it's quite well written and it's very important. And so that's and but what about all the stuff that's just random PDFs out there that is written by some not a random guy, but a random smart guy which is maybe one-tenth of the importance which is still extraordinarily important or whatever. Does anybody read those PDFs?

The same park earlier today. I saw a wild turkey. And so I'm still hoping I see one. It's kind of cool. It was kind of from afar, but I haven't seen one yet another thing to spitball about which is I'm just reminded of isn't it's only tangentially related to the paper.

Is Leopold Aschenbrenner's if that's how you pronounce it. I forget the name but his big paper that was making the rounds on Twitter about how we need to ensure that the Democratic bloc of countries has a commanding lead over other particularly authoritarian countries particularly China when it comes to basically developing artificial intelligence and this is weird because it's a tension between okay if you're have a far enough lead then you know, you can take more safety measures. But also that sort of implies speeding up or whatever. I would just go on the record for that's for people listening to this. That's optimistic I basically agree with Leopold. And maybe tangential is putting it too weakly. This is certainly in the realm of MacAskill's grand challenges.

Um in some sense I yeah, maybe this is misplaced optimism but in terms of governance and stuff I'm not super confident I'm just spitballing but I do have a little bit of a sense of MacAskill maybe working a little bit too much of a Play model of you have an arbitrary country is what pops out of that whereas really what you actually have is the US and China and really idiosyncratic dynamics that can pop out of that and so some of my optimistic probability mass is basically on either by choice or by accident we get Leopold something approximating the ideal outcome of the US just continues to be dominant and that actually doesn't totally obviate especially when you get into the long term but at least diminishes or partially obviates some of the governance grand challenge stuff. There might just yeah, it's true that if there's arbitrary color countries there's these competitive dynamics and this and that.

I don't know I mean I do think part of the reason why maybe there's a vibes not quite a disagreement but a vibes separation or whatever is MacAskill thinking is not bound into this quite intuitive near-term frame of this is the world in 2025 and you know, there's... Yeah, this is truly a peak ADHD ramble but it's just quite interesting what dynamics pop out of the perhaps neglected intersection between quote-unquote long-term ism and actually very near-term timelines. You have the genuine intellectual foundations of long-term ism from what Toby Ward at all five years ago or something but we're not just talking about long... But Will MacAskill still actually quote-unquote doing long-term ism in this paper and I think that's good.

Like I think just on the merits long-term ism is more or less correct but maybe that actually binds you a little bit too much into a frame of these abstract models because you're so radically uncertain about what the future is gonna be like or as we're talking about developments that are potentially within the next two years quite plausibly the next five. So it's yeah, maybe abstract models just aren't actually the best way to go about doing intellectual work here.

I guess this is beating a dead horse to some extent but man, it is striking the degree to which that the what I think are the merits and or what objectively are the contents of this paper just how far that is from the current Overton window. The Overton window is quite a bit wider than it was in 2022. For example, but yeah, I genuinely don't know what percentage of members of Congress would basically nod along to this as opposed to objecting or just thinking it's crazy or something. What people and yeah this is quite a bit of uncertainty that I have.

Yeah, maybe this has come across but another thing is just in terms of vibes I think the paper is just quite high quality. This is from a one reading impression so I'm not gonna be able to justify this in a totally legit way but I was listening to this audiobook the other day. It was four stars or whatever and I was no, this is slop. It's written by a smart person or whatever but it's slop. I did not get the sense of this paper is slop. Needless to say if anybody had to be convinced that Will MacAskill is not writing slop you heard it here first.

Here's a really unrelated point. So I'm not a very good public speaker as you can tell I think I'm somewhere between a B maybe a B plus at best, but generally a B minus and C minus in terms of speaking quality. And I've actually been involved with this other school or screwworm related project.

And I think the answer is just Yeah for a lot of kind of random niche stuff no one else is actually gonna do it so even if you kind of suck you could make a contribution anyway, especially insofar as it involves punting some sort of other effort off to the actually competent people. So that's a vibe. I'm pretty sure nobody's listening at this point but if you are and you want to recommend papers for me to read you can do that. No promises, but just FYI.

Yeah, another thing just again kind of related in the same sense that Ashton Brenner's is related is I really don't think Donald Trump should be president during the intelligence explosion and this is not quite a hot take in my circle, but maybe I think it needs to be said because there's an ask you might have which is indefinite AI pause and then there's an ask you might have that's delayed timelines by two to three years and these are substantially different. In two to three years, you can do a lot of non frontier work. The products that anthropic and AI and Google DeepMind would make if they paused AI scaling it and put off an intelligence explosion would be quite society, quite I mean, it may be not transformative but quite impressive. It wouldn't feel like an AI pause.

And also I think that most of the smart people yes, even the tech bros are basically not fans of Donald Trump and so yeah, here's my ask as a rando on Pigeon hour the most famous podcast in the world is that we should not have self recursively self-improving or explosive technological growth driven by AI before the 2028 presidential election. Maybe I'll leave.

This is my last hot take. I don't know if this is tractable, maybe it's not. But I haven't seen it except for me on Twitter I haven't seen it said so explicitly. Usually it's a general notion of quote-unquote AI pause, and I you know, a lot of things are just dynamics or randomness, there's competitive pressures, but the federal government of the United States it's quite important and the person has quite a bit of power. I'm would be surprised if less than one percentage point worth of probability mass just comes down to the quality of the US federal government. Maybe it's five percentage points or something. That's yeah, if you take EV seriously, that's really fucking important. So yeah, I don't know Sam, Dario, Ilya, friends if you're listening to this, please wait until 2028 the outro music for pigeon hour doo-doo-doo-doo-doo

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The gang from Episode 10 is back, with yet another Consistently Candid x Pigeon Hour crossoverAs Sarah from Consistently Candid describes:In this episode, Aaron Bergman and Max Alexander are back to battle it out for the philosophy crown, while I (attempt to) moderate. They discuss the Very Repugnant Conclusion, which, in the words of Claude, "posits that a world with a vast population living lives barely worth living could be considered ethically inferior to a world with an even larger population, where most people have extremely high quality lives, but a significant minority endure extreme suffering." Listen to the end to hear my uninformed opinion on who's right.- Listen to Consistently Candid on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or via RSS

- My blog post on suffering-focused utilitarianism- Follow Max on Twitter and check out his blog- Follow Sarah on Twitter

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Please follow Arthur on Twitter and check out his blog!

Thank you for just summarizing my point in like 1% of the words

-Aaron, to Arthur, circa 34:45

Summary

(Written by Claude Opus aka Clong)

* Aaron and Arthur introduce themselves and discuss their motivations for starting the podcast. Arthur jokingly suggests they should "solve gender discourse".

* They discuss the benefits and drawbacks of having a public online persona and sharing opinions on Twitter. Arthur explains how his views on engaging online have evolved over time.

* Aaron reflects on whether it's good judgment to sometimes tweet things that end up being controversial. They discuss navigating professional considerations when expressing views online.

* Arthur questions Aaron's views on cause prioritization in effective altruism (EA). Aaron believes AI is one of the most important causes, while Arthur is more uncertain and pluralistic in his moral philosophy.

* They debate whether standard EA global poverty interventions are likely to be the most effective ways to help people from a near-termist perspective. Aaron is skeptical, while Arthur defends GiveWell's recommendations.

* Aaron makes the case that even from a near-termist view focused only on currently living humans, preparing for the impacts of AI could be highly impactful, for instance by advocating for a global UBI. Arthur pushes back, arguing that AI is more likely to increase worker productivity than displace labor.

* Arthur expresses skepticism of long-termism in EA, though not due to philosophical disagreement with the basic premises. Aaron suggests this is a well-trodden debate not worth rehashing.

* They discuss whether old philosophical texts have value or if progress means newer works are strictly better. Arthur mounts a spirited defense of engaging with the history of ideas and reading primary sources to truly grasp nuanced concepts. Aaron contends that intellectual history is valuable but reading primary texts is an inefficient way to learn for all but specialists.

* Arthur and Aaron discover a shared passion for rock climbing, swapping stories of how they got into the sport as teenagers. While Aaron focused on indoor gym climbing and competitions, Arthur was drawn to adventurous outdoor trad climbing. They reflect on the mental challenge of rationally managing fear while climbing.

* Discussing the role of innate talent vs training, Aaron shares how climbing made him viscerally realize the limits of hard work in overcoming genetic constraints. He and Arthur commiserate about the toxic incentives for competitive climbers to be extremely lean, while acknowledging the objective physics behind it.

* They bond over falling out of climbing as priorities shifted in college and lament the difficulty of getting back into it after long breaks. Arthur encourages Aaron to let go of comparisons to his past performance and enjoy the rapid progress of starting over.

Transcript

Very imperfect - apologies for the errors.

AARON

Hello, pigeon hour listeners. This is Aaron, as it always is with Arthur Wright of Washington, the broader Washington, DC metro area. Oh, also, we're recording in person, which is very exciting for the second time. I really hope I didn't screw up anything with the audio. Also, we're both being really awkward at the start for some reason, because I haven't gotten into conversation mode yet. So, Arthur, what do you want? Is there anything you want?

ARTHUR

Yeah. So Aaron and I have been circling around the idea of recording a podcast for a long time. So there have been periods of time in the past where I've sat down and been like, oh, what would I talk to Aaron about on a podcast? Those now elude me because that was so long ago, and we spontaneously decided to record today. But, yeah, for the. Maybe a small number of people listening to this who I do not personally already know. I am Arthur and currently am doing a master's degree in economics, though I still know nothing about economics, despite being two months from completion, at least how I feel. And I also do, like, housing policy research, but I think have, I don't know, random, eclectic interests in various EA related topics. And, yeah, I don't. I feel like my soft goal for this podcast was to, like, somehow get Aaron cancelled.

AARON

I'm in the process.

ARTHUR

We should solve gender discourse.

AARON

Oh, yeah. Is it worth, like, discussing? No, honestly, it's just very online. It's, like, not like there's, like, better, more interesting things.

ARTHUR

I agree. There are more. I was sort of joking. There are more interesting things. Although I do think, like, the general topic that you talked to max a little bit about a while ago, if I remember correctly, of, like, kind of. I don't know to what degree. Like, one's online Persona or, like, being sort of active in public, sharing your opinions is, like, you know, positive or negative for your general.

AARON

Yeah. What do you think?

ARTHUR

Yeah, I don't really.

AARON

Well, your. Your name is on Twitter, and you're like.

ARTHUR

Yeah. You're.

AARON

You're not, like, an alt.

ARTHUR

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I. So, like, I first got on Twitter as an alt account in, like, 2020. I feel like it was during my, like, second to last semester of college. Like, the vaccine didn't exist yet. Things were still very, like, hunkered down in terms of COVID And I feel like I was just, like, out of that isolation. I was like, oh, I'll see what people are talking about on the Internet. And I think a lot of the, like, sort of more kind of topical political culture war, whatever kind of stuff, like, always came back to Twitter, so I was like, okay, I should see what's going on on this Twitter platform. That seems to be where all of the chattering classes are hanging out. And then it just, like, made my life so much worse.

AARON

Wait, why?

ARTHUR

Well, I think part of it was that I just, like, I made this anonymous account because I was like, oh, I don't want to, like, I don't want to, like, have any reservations about, like, you know, who I follow or what I say. I just want to, like, see what's going on and not worry about any kind of, like, personal, like, ramifications. And I think that ended up being a terrible decision because then I just, like, let myself get dragged into, like, the most ultimately, like, banal and unimportant, like, sort of, like, culture war shit as just, like, an observer, like, a frustrated observer. And it was just a huge waste of time. I didn't follow anyone interesting or, like, have any interesting conversations. And then I, like, deleted my Twitter. And then it was in my second semester of my current grad program. We had Caleb Watney from the Institute for Progress come to speak to our fellowship because he was an alumni of the same fellowship. And I was a huge fan of the whole progress studies orientation. And I liked what their think tank was doing as, I don't know, a very different approach to being a policy think tank, I think, than a lot of places. And one of the things that he said for, like, people who are thinking about careers in, like, policy and I think sort of applies to, like, more ea sort of stuff as well, was like, that. Developing a platform on Twitter was, like, opened a lot of doors for him in terms of, like, getting to know people in the policy world. Like, they had already seen his stuff on Twitter, and I got a little bit, like, more open to the idea that there could be something constructive that could come from, like, engaging with one's opinions online. So I was like, okay, fuck it. I'll start a Twitter, and this time, like, I won't be a coward. I won't get dragged into all the worst topics. I'll just, like, put my real name on there and, like, say things that I think. And I don't actually do a lot of that, to be honest.

AARON

I've, like, thought about gotta ramp it.

ARTHUR

Off doing more of that. But, like, you know, I think when it's not eating too much time into my life in terms of, like, actual deadlines and obligations…

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Intro

Around New Years, Max Alexander, Laura Duffy, Matt and I tried to raise money for animal welfare (more specifically, the EA Animal Welfare Fund) on Twitter. We put out a list of incentives (see the pink image below), one of which was to record a drunk podcast episode if the greater Very Online Effective Altruism community managed to collectively donate $10,000.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, they did ($10k), and then did it again ($20k) and then almost did it a third time ($28,945 as of March 9, 2024).

To everyone who gave or helped us spread the word, and on behalf of the untold number of animals these dollars will help, thank you.

And although our active promotion on Twitter has come to an end, it is not too late to give!

I give a bit more context in a short monologue intro I recorded (sober) after the conversation, so without further ado, Drunk Pigeon Hour:

Transcript

(Note: very imperfect - sorry!)

Monologue

Hi, this is Aaron. This episode of Pigeon Hour is very special for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it was recorded in person, so three of us were physically within a couple feet of each other. Second, it was recorded while we were drunk or maybe just slightly inebriated. Honestly, I didn't get super drunk, so I hope people forgive me for that.

But the occasion for drinking was that this, a drunk Pigeon Hour episode, was an incentive for a fundraiser that a couple of friends and I hosted on Twitter, around a little bit before New Year's and basically around Christmas time. We basically said, if we raise $10,000 total, we will do a drunk Pigeon Hour podcast. And we did, in fact, we are almost at $29,000, just shy of it. So technically the fundraiser has ended, but it looks like you can still donate. So, I will figure out a way to link that.

And also just a huge thank you to everyone who donated. I know that's really cliche, but this time it really matters because we were raising money for the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund, which is a strong contender for the best use of money in the universe.

Without further ado, I present me, Matt, and Laura. Unfortunately, the other co-host Max was stuck in New Jersey and so was unable to participate tragically.

Yeah so here it is!

Conversation

AARON

Hello, people who are maybe listening to this. I just, like, drank alcohol for, like, the first time in a while. I don't know. Maybe I do like alcohol. Maybe I'll find that out now.

MATT

Um, All right, yeah, so this is, this is Drunk Pigeon Hour! Remember what I said earlier when I was like, as soon as we are recording, as soon as we press record, it's going to get weird and awkward.

LAURA

I am actually interested in the types of ads people get on Twitter. Like, just asking around, because I find that I get either, like, DeSantis ads. I get American Petroleum Institute ads, Ashdale College.

MATT

Weirdly, I've been getting ads for an AI assistant targeted at lobbyists. So it's, it's like step up your lobbying game, like use this like tuned, I assume it's like tuned ChatGPT or something. Um, I don't know, but it's, yeah, it's like AI assistant for lobbyists, and it's like, like, oh, like your competitors are all using this, like you need to buy this product.

So, so yeah, Twitter thinks I'm a lobbyist. I haven't gotten any DeSantis ads, actually.

AARON

I think I might just like have personalization turned off. Like not because I actually like ad personalization. I think I'm just like trying to like, uh, this is, this is like a half-baked protest of them getting rid of circles. I will try to minimize how much revenue they can make from me.

MATT

So, so when I, I like went through a Tumblr phase, like very late. In like 2018, I was like, um, like I don't like, uh, like what's happening on a lot of other social media.

Like maybe I'll try like Tumblr as a, as an alternative.

And I would get a lot of ads for like plus-sized women's flannels.

So, so like the Twitter ad targeting does not faze me because I'm like, oh, okay, like, I can, hold on.

AARON

Sorry, keep going. I can see every ad I've ever.

MATT

Come across, actually, in your giant CSV of Twitter data.

AARON

Just because I'm a nerd. I like, download. Well, there's actually a couple of things. I just download my Twitter data once in a while. Actually do have a little web app that I might try to improve at some point, which is like, you drop it in and then it turns them. It gives you a csV, like a spreadsheet of your tweets, but that doesn't do anything with any of the other data that they put in there.

MATT

I feel like it's going to be hard to get meaningful information out of this giant csv in a short amount of time.

AARON

It's a giant JSON, actually.

MATT

Are you just going to drop it all into c long and tell it to parse it for you or tell it to give you insights into your ads.

AARON

Wait, hold on. This is such a.

MATT

Wait. Do people call it “C-Long” or “Clong”?

AARON

Why would it be long?

MATT

Well, because it's like Claude Long.

LAURA

I've never heard this phrase.

MATT

This is like Anthropic’s chat bot with a long context with so like you can put. Aaron will be like, oh, can I paste the entire group chat history?

AARON

Oh yeah, I got clong. Apparently that wasn't acceptable so that it.

MATT

Can summarize it for me and tell me what's happened since I was last year. And everyone is like, Aaron, don't give our data to Anthropic, is already suss.

LAURA

Enough with the impressions feel about the Internet privacy stuff. Are you instinctively weirded out by them farming out your personal information or just like, it gives me good ads or whatever? I don't care.

MATT

I lean a little towards feeling weird having my data sold. I don't have a really strong, and this is probably like a personal failing of mine of not having a really strong, well formed opinion here. But I feel a little sketched out when I'm like all my data is being sold to everyone and I don't share. There is this vibe on Twitter that the EU cookies prompts are like destroying the Internet. This is regulation gone wrong. I don't share that instinct. But maybe it's just because I have average tolerance for clicking no cookies or yes cookies on stuff. And I have this vibe that will.

AARON

Sketch down by data. I think I'm broadly fine with companies having my information and selling it to ad targeting. Specifically. I do trust Google a lot to not be weird about it, even if it's technically legal. And by be weird about it, what do mean? Like, I don't even know what I mean exactly. If one of their random employees, I don't know if I got into a fight or something with one of their random employees, it would be hard for this person to track down and just see my individual data. And that's just a random example off the top of my head. But yeah, I could see my view changing if they started, I don't know, or it started leaching into the physical world more. But it seems just like for online ads, I'm pretty cool with everything.

LAURA

Have you ever gone into the ad personalization and tried see what demographics they peg you?

AARON

Oh yeah. We can pull up mine right now.

LAURA

It's so much fun doing that. It's like they get me somewhat like the age, gender, they can predict relationship status, which is really weird.

AARON

That's weird.

MATT

Did you test this when you were in and not in relationships to see if they got it right?

LAURA

No, I think it's like they accumulate data over time. I don't know. But then it's like we say that you work in a mid sized finance. Fair enough.

MATT

That's sort of close.

LAURA

Yeah.

AARON

Sorry. Keep on podcasting.

LAURA

Okay.

MATT

Do they include political affiliation in the data you can see?

AARON

Okay.

MATT

I would have been very curious, because I think we're all a little bit idiosyncratic. I'm probably the most normie of any of us in terms of. I can be pretty easily sorted into, like, yeah, you're clearly a Democrat, but all of us have that classic slightly. I don't know what you want to call it. Like, neoliberal project vibe or, like, supply side. Yeah. Like, some of that going on in a w…

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