#36 William MacAskill: The Science of Doing Good

On this episode of The Knowledge Project, I’m happy to have William MacAskill. William is the co-founder and President of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Oxford University. He is also the founder and president of 80,000 Hours, the co-founder and vice-president of Giving What We Can, and the author of Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. William’s work is primarily focused on encouraging people to use reason and evidence to find the best possible ways they can use their resources to make the biggest possible impact in the world. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including: Why good intentions aren’t enough when giving to charity and how we can do better How William's giving philosophy was formed and how it developed into The Centre for Effective Altruism The best metrics to assess how good a charity is before donating a dime How letting our emotions guide our charitable giving can lead to ineffective, and sometimes harmful outcomes. How many charities today unknowingly reward low dollar donors and sell themselves short millions of dollars in potential donations A powerful thought exercise to help you gain a different but valuable perspective about helping the poor and suffering in the world The one cognitive bias William believes is the most damaging to any business, organization or individual William’s foundational values that guide his day to day decisions and actions William’s take on “radical honesty” and when honesty can be taken too far and is no longer constructive William’s definition of success and the imaginary conversation he has with himself on his deathbed to make sure he’s on the right track (this is awesome) The most common mistake William sees people make over and over (and the embarrassingly simple way to avoid making it) And then to wrap up, I gave him a softball question: What is the purpose and meaning of life? If you’ve wanted to make more of a positive impact in the world around you, this insightful interview will give you plenty to think about. Your resources are precious and should be optimized to improve the lives of those you help. I don’t know of a better person to guide you than William. *** Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shane Parrish?

  Do you get criticized for your approach to philanthropy?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes, more so than you might expect, given that we're really aiming just to be a bunch of people who are trying to improve the world and trying to figure out honestly how we can do so as well as possible.

• 0:23Shane Parrish?

  Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is The Knowledge Project. This show explores ideas, methods, mental models, and frameworks that will help you expand your mind, live deliberately, and master the best of what other people have already figured out. You can learn more at fs.blog/podcast. My guest today is William MacAskill, co-founder and president of the Center for Effective Altruism and Associate Professor in Philosophy at Oxford University. In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about injecting science into philanthropy, how we can identify effective charitable organizations, taxes, and so much more. Enjoy the conversation.

• 1:16Shane Parrish?

  I want to talk in broad themes about some of the things that you've been studying and writing about. You've described what you do as injecting science into sentimental issue of doing good in the world. What does that mean? Why is it different from the way philanthropy has been done in the past?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  The approach we take is called effective altruism. It's, as you say, about trying to make your attempt to do good more scientifically rigorous, more evidence-based, more based on argument. And that is pretty different from how most people normally try to do good, where charitable giving, for example, is often very emotion-driven, it's often very unreflective, and people just assume that if you're going to give to charity, for example, the place you give, if they've got good intentions, that's going to be good enough. What we've seen, and through our research, over and over again, seen this, is that sadly, that's just often the case. You can have the absolute best of intentions, you can be really meaning to do good, but then firstly, you can often just fail to have any sort of impact at all.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  But then, secondly, even within those programs that work well, there's often just a vast discrepancy between those that are good, those that are just actually making a positive impact in the world, and the very, very best, the ones that are really transformative. And I think we can identify those ways of doing good ahead of time. And so what we do in the Effective Alters Community is try and work out what are those ways of doing good, whether that's through your money, through your time, through your career choice. What are those that are going to have the very biggest impact possible?

• 2:51Shane Parrish?

  How did you get into this, like into this world? I mean, you started off studying philosophy, right? And what led you to this exploration of effective giving?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the initial impetus was from a philosophical argument, actually, from a philosopher called Peter Singer. And he made the following argument, which is that imagine you see someone walking past a shallow pond and that person sees a child, his face down in the water, this child, at almost no cost to themselves, they can just walk into the water and pull the child out. But then they realize they're wearing this really expensive suit. In fact, it's such a nice suit, it costs several thousand dollars. And now suppose the person thinks, well, you know, obviously it'd be nice to save a kid and all, but I don't want to ruin my suit. This is like, it's, you know, a nice suit. And so they walk on by and they let the child drown. Now, like, how would you react morally to someone who chose to do that?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  In moral philosophy, we have this technical term that we'd use to describe someone like that. We'd call them an asshole.

• 3:54Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, that's just like the common sense model view. The amount of money of like three thousand dollars is just nothing in comparison to a child's life. But then where the argument takes this twist is that Peter Singer asks us to consider the fact that there are thousands of children in poor countries around the world who are losing their lives as a result of neglected diseases, who could be saved just for use of several thousand dollars. For example, by buying bed nets and distributing them to those who need them, just for the, you know, single-digit thousands of dollars, statistically speaking, you can save a child's life.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Um. In which case, how is it justifiable for us in a rich countries to be spending money on luxuries? When we could be spending money, that same money um in order to save lives of people we don't know. And I found this argument extremely compelling, um so compelling in fact that um when I was just starting graduate school. Um. I did some calculations. I thought about how much money I needed to live on over the course of my life. And I decided, even as an academic, where I'm not going to earn as much as perhaps I could have done. I'm still going to earn much more than I need to be happy. And so what I did was chose choose a certain baseline. Um. Where everything above that baseline, I was just going to give to charity. And it worked out, at the time, that would be about kind of half of my lifetime earnings.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Um. I now expect it actually to be quite a bit, the amount I'll give to be quite a bit more than that. But it meant that I now had quite a lot of money, you know, over the following forty years that I had to think about donating. And so the natural next question was, well, if I'm going to start donating my money, but seriously. You know, I want to ensure that it's like actually making a difference. If, you know, if I have this duty to try and help other people, then I also have a duty to help them as much as I can. You know, just being kind of blasé or assuming that it was easy, you know, that would be. That would be problematic in just the same way as just not thinking about the problem at all would be. And so in early two thousand and nine, another um philosopher, Toby Ord and I.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Um. Co-founded an organization called Giving What We Can, which encouraged people to give at least ten percent of their income to the most. Effective charities they knew of. But then in order to advise people to do that, we created a list of top recommended charities. Um. At least at the time, those that were focusing on the developing world. Um. In order to help people uh do as much good as possible with the charitable donations.

• 6:25Shane Parrish?

  Do you give this money above this certain threshold uh yearly? Or is it something that you just set aside uh and then um do something with and then you'll give it later?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Uh. So I give for my income just once a year. I just um uh look at how much income I took in over the course of the year. Um. And then donate uh everything above that. Um. So this year, for example, that will be about twenty five percent of my income. And I do a kind of annual giving. The primary reason for that is in order to kind of keep myself accountable.

• 7:01Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  But I also think there are strong arguments for giving earlier rather than giving later. Because often money that you donate compounds in just the same way that your return on investment, if you save the money can compound. In particular, if you're investing in a small growing area, um often the rate of growth of that cause area can be far greater than the rate of return you can get um from a financial investment. Certainly the, yeah, certainly the discount rate I would have had for the nonprofits I set up um would have been kind of much greater than, you know, seven percent or even ten percent per year in the early stages.

• 7:37Shane Parrish?

  I guess when you're talking about that, I mean, one of the things that comes to mind is Warren Buffett's decision um to give away most of his wealth, but not do it until he had compounded it over a period of, you know, seventy years, basically. Uh and now he's giving away much more than he would have had he given it away all along. But I guess, you know, his ability to compound that was probably not something within reach for most of us.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So if you're Warren Buffett and, you know, if he does have the uh investing skill, but it's, you know, legendary that he has. Although I will note, he just won his this competition that he had with the hedge fund folks about if our index fund would outperform hedge funds over the long run. So even he believes that very few people are Warren Buffett.

• 8:23Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Um but yeah, you know, if you can compound at like fifty percent per year, then take those invest investment opportunities. The amount of good you're going to be able to do in the future will just be much larger. But if you've got a more typical rate on the turn, you know, if that's like six percent per year or something, then I do think you're probably going to be having more of an impact earlier on. Um partly because the places you can fund fund, you know, you're helping with the growth of that area. And also just because the world's getting richer, there's more and more smart money in philanthropy. And in general, the best giving opportunities are going down over time.

• 8:56Shane Parrish?

  Do you get criticized for your approach to philanthropy?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes, um, more so than you might expect, given that we're really aiming just to be a bunch of people who are trying to improve the world and trying to figure out honestly, um, how we can do so as well as possible. Yeah, a few different angles. Um, so one set of criticisms came from existing charity evaluators. So, uh, the charity, people at Charity Navigator, uh, were really quite critical of our approach, where what Charity Navigator does is assess all sorts of different charities, but just by looking at kind of financial metrics, um, the most famous of which was the overheads ratio, the amount that a charity spends on administration costs rather than program costs. Um, and we, for the long time, said that that's just a really poor metric if you want to actually try and do as much good as possible.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Because imagine if you've got a really lousy charity, something that doesn't do any good at all, it's working on a program that's just completely ineffective, but has zero administration, percent administration costs, perhaps everyone's volunteers and so on. Well, then it's still a bad charity. It's just in some sense an efficient bad charity, whereas perhaps something needs to invest, um, charity needs to invest a lot in, um, you know, monitoring and evaluation and other sorts of operations in order to do, um, what it does extremely well. And they could assist us on the grounds that the very idea of kind of making comparisons between different areas was just meaningless. But I think that's just far too extreme. If I can cure one person of blindness or one person of a broken leg, or cure a thousand

• 10:26Speaker 01

  people of a life-threatening illness where they would have, you know, certainly died otherwise, I think it's just clear and intuitively what does the more good. Um, you know, when you can save a thousand people rather than one, it's more important to save a thousand. If you can save someone's life rather than, you know, save someone's broken leg, then as long as the person has a good, happy life, it's more important to save that person's life. Um, and so that's kind of axiomatic philosophical foundation, but I just don't think it's actually that controversial.

• 10:56Speaker 02

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• 11:24Speaker 03

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• 11:34Speaker 04

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• 11:55Speaker 01

  Then, a second line of criticisms we've had have often just involved not really understanding what we're about. And often is focused on the fact that with respect to development, at least we're very often focused on programs that have a really large evidence base, like distributing insecticide-fed bed nets via the Organization Against Malaria Foundation. And that we even sometimes advocate deliberately going into a high net earning career in order to donate more. But that's only like a very small part of kind of what we're thinking about. We are very strongly interested in cause areas outside of global health and development, including attempting to benefit the very long run future of humanity. And in those areas, you just often don't have randomized control trials. Often, you need to use, you know, less quantitative evidence.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  But that's okay. That doesn't rule that out. Not everything can be quantified. And then we also just think there are very, very many ways of having an impact. Money's only one, but we're very strongly encouraging people to pursue careers in policy and research and working for nonprofits too.

• 12:55Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I want to come to that in a second. Why does giving away money seem like such a difficult thing to do properly? I mean intuitively, it seems like it would be pretty easy. I mean, it's all upside, right? Any dollar would help, but it doesn't seem to work that way in reality.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, again, think about the analogy with investment. So, I mean firstly, we wouldn't think, oh, investing your money is easy. You know, especially if you're, you know, doing seed or angel investing and trying to pick companies. Think, no, it's incredibly hard because different companies can vary so much in their productive capacity, their ability to take an early investment and turn it into really rapid growth. And so firstly, you've got that exact same difficulty when it comes to nonprofits. But then it's even more difficult again because in the case of the for-profit world, there's a kind of natural evolutionary mechanism. The companies that aren't able to turn a profit will eventually die. Um, you know, the bad companies will get, you know, will get killed effectively.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  But that doesn't happen in the nonprofit world. In the nonprofit world, the charities that aren't having any impact because the beneficiaries aren't the funders. It's not inevitable that they'll get killed off because you could be a very bad charity, but still extremely good at fundraising and marketing. And when you donate, you don't get the feedback of did this actually have an impact or not? You have to rely on the charity itself. And sadly, that means that we can just have incredibly, I often think incredibly misprioritized spending. Resulting in the fact that we have some charities that can do, you know, hundreds of thousands of times more good than others. Um, which is an amazing opportunity if you are trying to do the most good.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Um, but at the same time is indicative of the fact that it's just very hard to tell between these really effective charities and ones that are less effective.

• 14:45Shane Parrish?

  What's your take on ambitious young people making philanthropy a career choice rather than something you do after you've already had your career? Presumably a successful one or while you're in a career. I know you've personally advocated for basically making as much as you can legally and morally. So as to maximize the amount you can give to others, that would seem kind of at odds with pursuing a career in the nonprofit sector, wouldn't it?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Uh yeah, so I think the main point I wanna make is just that when young people, people on college campuses are thinking, oh, I really wanna have an ethical altruistic career. Um they typically think, oh, therefore I wanna have a nonprofit career. And they don't realize that there are just very many ways of having a positive impact on the world.

• 15:25Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Um so that could be going into government because um we definitely know that uh having competent leadership is extremely important, ensuring that the world goes well. Could be going into the search, could be going into uh certainly some areas of business as well. Um but then, you know, one stark comparison is just to think about, well, supposing you do go into business, go into finance or investing, and then you just donate kind of every year. Is it the case that through your donations, you could pay for someone better than you to be going into the nonprofit sector? Um and often it is the case, so often you can actually have more of an impact by going into um a higher earning career and donating a very significant proportion of your earnings than you can by simply working at a nonprofit.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And I know a number of people um who've chosen to do this and actually just some of whom are just a few years out of college and already are able to donate on the order of a million dollars per year. So if you're really passionate about that area, I think it can be an extremely good thing to do. Um but I would, what I would caution against, it's not the only way of having an impact. And in fact, for many cause areas, I think they're more constrained by having really good people, really talented people, than by having just, you know, additional money on the margin.

• 16:38Shane Parrish?

  That seems like a very financial way of looking at things. How would you counsel someone who's like, oh, I can make more money in the private sector, but I'd really rather um go into the nonprofit sector or like what are the other variables involved in those decisions as you see them?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what I call personal fit, I think, is extremely important because, you know, in particular, supposing you've got, uh, you know, you're not the only person making this decision. And suppose there's someone else thinking about this decision and um, you know, perhaps they're thinking, well, I'd really like to go into finance, but um I feel like I ought to go into the nonprofit world, um uh even though, you know, I've got much kind of stronger passion or personal competitive advantage in finance. Well, it makes some sense. What you don't want to happen is for that person to go into the nonprofit and you to go into finance to earn to give. Because what you want is both parties to be pursuing the thing that they happen to be better, better at.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Uh, and so I do think that a lot of weight should be put on what we call personal fit. Especially once you've narrowed your career options down to options that you think are kind of plausibly impactful for the world. Um, then considerations of personal fit can do a lot of work. But I think it's important to be careful about how you think about that. Where first, it doesn't mean what you're passionate about necessarily or you're calling. Because people's passions change a huge amount over time. And so it's, you know, you wanna avoid just getting locked down by what your currently existing passions happen to be. Um, nor even necessarily what you're good at right now. Again, because what people's skills, what skills people have can vary a lot.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And so instead, I think for personal fit, you should think, you know, suppose I invest a significant amount of time in the months or years getting good at this, would I become very good? And if you, if the answer is yes, then obviously that means you're gonna have a bigger impact by working in that area. And it also means that you're probably gonna find yourself passionate about it as well. Because passion tends to result from mastery of a subject or mastery of an area rather than vice versa.

• 18:41Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about that, because sometimes we're passionate about things that we don't know that much about. I mean, we're passionate about learning and we're curious about it. How do you see that?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when you look at what people are actually passionate about, the vast majority tend to be passionate about things where it's extremely hard to have a promising career. So that's the arts, that's music, that's sport. And that's not a coincidence. The reason it's so hard to become a professional sports person is because so many people are really passionate about this thing. And therefore they want to work in it and makes it extremely competitive. Um, but I think the whole framing kind of misconstrues the way that. You know, passion and deep interest actually works, where I feel like this idea of vocation or a calling conjures up the idea that you just close your eyes and you look deep inside in yourself and you see this burning desire for something that's, you know, very specific

• 19:35Speaker 01

  and then you pursue that thing. Firstly, most people don't have that outside of arts or music or sports. And then secondly, that's just psychologically not the way deep interest works. Instead, kind of as I said, what happens is you learn an area, you become good at it, and then you start to develop a kind of mastery of that area and that results in a kind of a passion or a compulsion. And I think it's very hard to judge what those are going to be just by kind of looking inward at yourself. Rather, what I'd recommend is try out a bunch of different types of work. You know, the organization that I set up that advises people in their careers is called eighty thousand hours, which is the number of hours that people typically work in their lives. Listeners of this podcast,

• 20:16Speaker 01

  it might be more. And we do that to partly get across, you know, this is this huge decision. And even if it means you're taking a couple of years or a few years out to try a bunch of different things in order to work out what is the area where you can spend the remaining seventy five thousand hours on. That's like a great use of your time. And that's a much more reliable way of working out what's the area that you can become passionate about or become extremely interested and good at than simply kind of kind of introspect on your own passions or desires.

• 20:49Shane Parrish?

  And that's so hard, though, because if you're you're taking some time at the the start of your career to figure out, you know, kind of this intersection of what works for you and what you can do and what you'll make and what kind of life you're going to live, and you're watching other people maybe get ahead quicker, it becomes really hard to to do that.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of social pressure too. You've probably got your parents telling you to become an accountant. Um, so, and you know, there's this feeling that you've got to do everything kind of all at once. Society doesn't really award you for taking your time to make a really great decision. Um, but I just think it's so worth it. I mean, and I think if there are people who are still undergraduates listening, but you know, that's also, you know, I'd say I'm a university professor, maybe I'll get into trouble for saying this, but I think the time that you spend thinking about what career you should pursue. And, you know, we provide a ton of materials on eighty thousand hours dot org, um, including one-on-one coaching for people who are interested in some key priority areas. But yeah, I think that uh, time spent thinking about your career is just gonna be more useful on the margin at least than time,

• 21:56Speaker 01

  additional time spent studying a new degree, but people tend to spend all their time thinking about the degree and not that much time on um, on their career. So it does take a little bit of willpower. It can be, it is trading a kind of short-term cost, but it's for the long-term goal, long-term benefit, I think.

• 22:12Shane Parrish?

  Is too much of the philanthropic world sort of like this self-perpetuating bureaucracy or is this like something I made up? I mean, in other words, are there incentives or agency costs, as they call them in economics, that kind of almost encourage bad outcomes? And how is that problem best solved?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's not so much that they're encouraging bad outcomes, but it's more that it's just hard to do things well. And unless you've got like some really intense feedback mechanism, then you're the kind of natural state you end up with is focusing on the wrong thing. And, and also kind of ending up bureaucratic. So, um, you know, look at any big company or kind of old company often ends up kind of very bureaucratic. Government institutions can be the same. Um, uh, you know, old institutions like universities as well can be the same. And so that whereas, you know, famously startups are able to be kind of much more efficient, they've got a much closer connection between um, the impact they're trying to have, profit and loss, and the activities they're doing.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Um. And so what we need to do then is create kind of independent institutions that are assessing different organizations, different nonprofits, and providing, in effect, that kind of evolutionary feedback of force. So one organization, for example, is GiveWell, a non-organization I co-founded, but one I respect very highly, which tries to work out what are the nonprofits that are, especially those focused on extreme poverty, that are really having as much of an impact as possible. And that means that now these other charities, ones that want to try and get their recommendation, they actually have a goal. They're going to be assessed by these

• 23:55Speaker 01

  very skeptical, very rigorous researchers. And if they do that, you know, if they do well, if they do get a recommendation, that results in many, many millions of dollars going to that organization. And so I think ultimately, it's just about the kind of the set of institutions and social structure that's currently lacking. If we can build things that are providing that feedback mechanism, then I think, you know, things could change quite radically.

• 24:19Shane Parrish?

  I like that. What are your thoughts on limited life foundations as opposed to perpetual ones? Like Chuck Freeny, for example, who founded the Atlantic Philanthropies, has pretty much given away all of his money, which was once in the billions, and now he lives on a few million that he's got left. I would love to live on a few million, but hey. I think Warren Buffett has a similar plan. I mean, he wants all of his money to kind of be giving, given away in a limited time period. What's the appeal to this approach as to something like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, which has existed for, you know, decades?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm extremely pro limited life foundations and very skeptical of perpetual foundations, where within that I'd include universities as well. It kind of baffles me that organizations, that, yeah, organizations like Harvard and Stanford are requesting donations from their alumni while at the same time sitting on an endowment of thirty five billion dollars that they could be spending down. Um, and the reason is just that, well, I mean, there's a few things. One is just that um foundations that have been set up in perpetuity often have this weird relationship with their founder. Where the founder might set up a foundation for the purpose of solving a particular social problem. Um, and then that problem just goes away. Perhaps it's been solved.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And yet you've still got this foundation that has to give out money to do this. One of the most bizarre charities I know of um is called Scots Care. So I'm Scottish and this charity exists in London. And uh it exists to benefit Scottish people who are poor in London. Um, which is kind of a weird thing to do. It's like, well, we benefit, you know, people with brown hair in London or something. It's kind of like a quite seems quite an arbitrary way to give out your charity. The reason it exists is because it was set up in the seventeenth century. When there were a lot of Scottish immigrants to London as a result of um. Yeah, as a result of the personal union of England and Scotland. And it just has never died. It just continues going um providing benefits to Scottish people.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And even though that problem is now has been solved for um several hundred years. And I feel like the same is true often of foundations where you can have a very particular set of um requirements from the founder. And they're just no, you know, no longer applicable. And then the other thing I'd say is, again, just many of the biggest social problems in the world are just getting better over time. Not all, the world's, in most ways, the world's getting better. In some ways, I think it's taking step backwards, steps backwards. But if you're focused on something like education or improving people's economic livelihoods. Well, we're just vastly richer than we were a hundred years ago.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And so if someone were to set up a foundation in perpetuity, then a very large chunk of that endowment would be being spent on people who are far richer than those who are alive today. And I just don't think that makes any sense.

• 27:11Shane Parrish?

  I think you did your your PhD in ethical uncertainty, right?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. What to do when you're unsure between different moral perspectives?

• 27:21Shane Parrish?

  So I think that that's a great place for this part of the conversation because I'm curious, what, how, how should we think about deciding between, you know, saving lives, bringing water to people, you know, fostering medicine in, in terms of the quality of life? Like, how should we, or how, I don't want to ask how should we think about it, but how do you think about it?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think, so obviously, this is kind of a deep, you know, ethical, philosophical question. There's plenty of disagreement on the topic. But here's one thing which, basically, all reasonable moral views agree on, which is that making people better off is a good thing to do. And the greater the amount by which you can make people better off, the better. That's like really pretty uncontroversial. You know, there's much more controversial things about how much value do you place on the natural environment, perhaps on producing kind of great art and so on. But all different moral views would agree that that's of moral value. And that's what we, you know, in the effective altruism community have been to focus on. We look at all sorts of different interventions, programs, and look at how many people are

• 28:30Speaker 01

  going to be affected, and by how much or how little are you benefiting them? Where if you can benefit a large number of people by a lot, that's better than benefiting a small number of people by a lot, or a large number of people by a little. A point like that seems, I hope that this seems kind of common sense. That's often not the way people think about it. And part of that reason is because people often are wanting to talk too often about instrumental facts, on the kind of ultimate facts that we care about. So you mentioned, you know, providing water. So people might say, well, how would you possibly compare, you know, how many wells are being built versus how many books are being distributed versus, you know, how many bed nets we can provide? And all of these have this common

• 29:13Speaker 01

  metric, which is, again, just how many people are benefiting and by how much. And tons of the search within both health, health economics and economics more widely has worked in order to help us provide answers to these questions. And often the answers are kind of, you know, willy, you don't get, you know, an approximate figure. Um. But because the differences in impact between areas are so great, you know, it's not a fact of one area being ten percent as effective as ten percent more effective than another. It's a matter of it being a hundred times effective um as another, then even just um very rough assessments can, you know, still be uh extremely useful in determining, at least cutting down kind of list of um priorities that we might have.

• 29:59Shane Parrish?

  How do you measure the return on that giving? Like, how does one go about saying, you know, hey, she's giving effectively, but he's not. I mean, what are the metrics by which you you evaluate that?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so um there's at least a couple. So one that um I like a lot is a health, a metric from health economics, which uh is called the quality adjusted life year, where that takes, it looks at two things. One is by how much you extending someone's life. And secondly, by how much you including the quality of life. So using survey data, they um find out how bad, basically on a scale of zero to a hundred, is living with different conditions like living with malaria, living with tuberculosis, um living with HIV AIDS. Uh, how bad, you know, how bad is that? So if I move someone from fifty percent health to a hundred percent health for two years, that would count as one quality adjusted life year.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Or if someone was already at a hundred percent health and extended their life by one year, you know, by providing a, let's say, a cardiac surgery, um that would also count as one quality adjusted life year. And so that's health economists trying to directly answer this question of just how many people are you benefiting and by how much? Um, I think you can also do it with income. So in general, um if you can increase someone's income by the same percentage, that's worth about the same, no matter how much um uh someone's income is. So you can then look at just how much you improving people's income um as a percentage. And then how many, for how many people have you increased their income?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And that's an alternative way of um uh looking at um how much of a benefit you're providing.

• 31:41Shane Parrish?

  What sort of people or organizations would you point me to or the models for effective, efficient, I would say effective first, efficient second, if I wanted to do a better job at, who would you point me to as a model?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the organization that tries to find the most effective giving opportunities and recommends charities on that basis is GiveWell. And they're just incredible at what they do, which is finding the best giving opportunities within global health and development. And they're extremely transparent, so you could read literally, I think, millions of words that they've written up on the justification for the charities they've chosen. And that includes Against Malaria Foundation, which I mentioned, that just debuts insecticide to the bed nets. It includes Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and DeWorm the World, that treat children for intestinal worms, which makes them very sick.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And then also GiveDirectly, which simply transfers cash to the poorest people in the world. However, they do only focus on extreme poverty, and I think they're just many extremely pressing problems in the world. And so a separate organization called the Open Philanthropy Project is actually advising a large foundation, Dustin Moskowitz and Carrie Tuna's foundation. Dustin Moskowitz was one of the Facebook co-founders. And I just think this is the model foundation. Again, extremely transparent in terms of how they're choosing causes, being extremely strategic in what cause areas they choose to focus on. And there, the kind of primary focus, they do fund a number of things, but primarily focus is on ensuring that new technological developments that could be extremely good

• 33:24Speaker 01

  and could be extremely bad. So as an analogy, think of kind of nuclear power in the 40s and 50s. Huge potential for good, huge potential for bad. Ensuring that those technologies are used for the benefit of humanity rather than...

• 33:40Shane Parrish?

  It's destruction.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, exactly, that's right. And so a particular couple of particular focuses from them are developments in biology, in particular, the ability to synthesize novel pathogens. It could be hugely important in terms of giving us protection against viruses and bacteria, but could be very dangerous because it gives people the ability to create new viruses and new forms of weapons. And then also artificial intelligence, one of the fastest growing areas of technology at the moment, could be hugely beneficial, could basically solve almost all of the world's problems. Because, you know, the reason we've made so much progress as a species is through our

• 34:24Speaker 01

  ability to solve problems through our intelligence. But could also be extremely risky as well. And it's takes a while to go to go into, but there's significant risks that that you develop artificial intelligences where you haven't specified their goals properly and they don't do what you want. You give them more power and that results in very bad outcomes because they optimize for what they've been told to optimize for, but that's not actually what you want them to optimize for. And then I think there's also risks that if it is such a powerful technology, if it does mean you can solve all sorts of problems, which include military strategic problems, it could give a very large amount of power to a very small number of people.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And I think both, you know, both of those have potential risks of catastrophe for humanity. And I think that's particularly well justified because if you're concerned not just about the present generation, but about future generations as well. Because there's just so many people, you know, so much culture and civilization that might exist in the future, literally thousands, millions of years of potential human history that we risk cutting short if if kind of technology gets ahead of us and we have some sort of global catastrophe. And they are the foundation, but we, one of my nonprofits, we set up a mechanism so that people can donate to the areas that that foundation is also donating to.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And that's called the Effective Altruism Funds, part of the Centre for Effective Altruism. And the way that works is you can donate into a fund where program officers from that foundation will then use the money within the fund on whatever they think is best. And often those might be smaller having opportunities that the larger foundation isn't concerned with or doesn't want to investigate itself, but still seems extremely cost effective.

• 36:14Shane Parrish?

  Are there things that need to be done in the world that can't be solved by philanthropy that are going to need capitalistic solutions or government-driven solutions? And what do you see as those problems?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in a sense, I think that most problems in the world shouldn't be addressed with philanthropy. I mean, my views in terms of, you know, structure of society are in general, like, just, you know, fairly mainstream from a kind of economic perspective. In a certain sense, I think, you know, the default is that you want to have markets. There are certain predictable ways in which markets fail. You want to correct for them, whether by taxes or kind of some regulation. I do think there are certain ways in which I'd, you know, depart from the mainstream, in particular placing so much value on those who don't yet exist, people in the future

• 37:10Speaker 01

  who don't get to participate in markets, they don't have a vote politically. So I'd want to kind of structure society a bit in order to, that we're kind of more responsible for future generations. But in general, I think that like the ideal is that most, most of the world's problems just get solved by markets and when they fail by market, kind of by government forces. Philanthropy is really that like last line of defence, as it were, where you've both got a kind of market failing and democratic failing. And I think that applies for people in very poor countries who, you know, they don't get a vote. Over who's US president, even though the president's actions affect them significantly.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  They do get to participate in markets a little bit, but because of their poverty situation, to a very small extent. It's also true for future people as well, um, uh, more significantly. And so when it comes to those people who just structurally speaking, aren't going to be benefited by markets or by, um, uh, or by governments, um, you know, well functioning governments. Then I think it's like philanthropy kicks in and has a kind of, um, last measure, as it were.

• 38:18Shane Parrish?

  It it seems like there's increasingly a feeling amongst well developed nations, perhaps, that, uh, taxes are a form of charity. How would you respond to that?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, this is, we talked, asked about criticisms of effective optimism in the past, um, earlier as well. And sometimes people do say, oh, I already do my bit. I pay taxes. Um, and I just think that's just a misconception of what taxes are, where there are so many goods that only are available. Like, our ability to make an income is very heavily dependent on a very large number of, um, public goods. Um, goods that are provided by, uh, the government. So I'm only able to make the income I have because there is a military protecting the country and because there are roads that allow me to get to work. And there's a functioning legal system that, um, uh, you know, will protect my property and so on.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  And so it's a kind of weird argument to me to think of taxes as, uh, charity, as if it's something that's, um, this additional thing, they've earned, you've earned this money and then you're losing some of it in order to be able to, um, you know, give to the government to help others, because at least for a very significant fraction of that, um, uh, of those taxes, you're paying for pre requisites of, um, the money that you're earning. Um, so I think actually it's only a kind of small proportion of, um, You know, in general, yeah, the taxes that you're paying is like contributing to a well functioning society. That is precisely what allows you to make that money in the first place. And therefore, I think that's kind of very different from charity. I mean,

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I think there are some things that governments do that are, you know, more kind of genuinely philanthropic. So especially from countries like Sweden and the UK, the money that they send on overseas development aid. You know, sometimes that's politically motivated, it's political gains, and different countries vary in how how much they do of their foreign aid spending. But at least to a significant extent, that's, you know, that is kind of philanthropic money. That's just, we're trying to make other people better off because we have a moral duty to do so. And so at least that part of the money, I think genuinely is, could count kind of as as charity. But most of it isn't. Most of it's paying for things that just everyone benefits from, including the taxpayer.

• 40:40Shane Parrish?

  Well, what should governments do? I mean, if you were put in charge of the the UK government, how would the charitable giving or how would you tackle things differently than than what's happening now with the the same amount of money?

• 40:55Speaker 02

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• 41:54Speaker 01

  With the same amount of money, yeah. So I'd certainly invest a lot in global public goods. In particular, so research, medical research, you can do a huge amount of good while at the same, you know, this are, these are cases where you're both benefiting the home country and benefiting the world.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Despite development aid, very heavy focus on global health. So if you look at the past fifty years of aid spending, the track record of spending on economic development is really the next. You know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Track record of spending on global health is just outstanding. You know, we've increased life expectancy by more than fifty percent. Neonatal mortality, under five mortality, number of people suffering from most of the major condition diseases have just plummeted dramatically. And there's still huge gaps there. So I'd certainly spend half a billion pounds a year on closing the bed net gap so that all children are protected from bed nets and ensure that all the major kind of immunizations are fully funded.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  And that would probably result in most of kind of aid spending. But then the final thing I'd also want to do is test all of that spending against simply simply donating cash. So this is, you know, you know, politically, well, politically provocative, but also extremely powerful, is that huge, the huge amount of spending goes on and we don't even know whether spend that spending, such as buying livestock or providing wells or providing textbooks, is actually having more of an impact than simply giving poor people cash, which is the simplest thing to do. We know it's extremely effective. There's huge amount, number of studies on this. And so it's extremely powerful.

• 43:39Shane Parrish?

  But less politically palatable.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Less politically palatable, absolutely. It could mean you could have a much smaller Department for International Development if a very significant part of the budget was simply giving poor people cash. And people also think about it as like handouts or something, but it's actually a very different, a very different scenario.

• 43:59Shane Parrish?

  The, the other disturbing, perhaps growing trend I see is a view of take care of our own before we take care of other people.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, and this is a view I just have very little sympathy towards ultimately. I mean, I just think all people are born equal, they have equal moral value. It's through no, it's through sheer luck that I was born into a rich country, not in a poor country. And the, you know, eighty percent of the income that people earn is explained by the country of birth and socioeconomic status of the parents. And that's just clearly not deserved. And so there's a kind of double jeopardy going on here where if we're, if we say, oh, charity starts at home, we should just look after our own, then not only is it the case that people in poor countries have the misfortune of being born into a poor country with, you know, poor institutions where they're not able to make productive

• 44:52Speaker 01

  use of their own labour, not only that, but also the people in rich countries who have an ability to help and improve the situation aren't going to do that, they're going to benefit people close to them. And if people still kind of want to defend this view, then what I'd ask is supposing, you know, someone living in Beverly Hills were to say, oh, well, you know, I could give to help the US poor, the homeless and so on, but I really think that I ought to benefit members of my own community. And so I'm just going to benefit those slightly wealthier doctors and lawyers and actors living in Beverly Hills because, you know, their plight of only living on a hundred thousand dollars a year just breaks my heart. And we'd think that was absolutely absurd.

• 45:31Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  But then globally speaking, that's the same as the situation where they're in now, where even the very poor in the United States, for example, or Canada, they're still in the richest ten to fifteen percent of the world's population. And that's not at all to, you know, belittle the problems that people in the poverty line in North America are going through or the UK. Like, life is like, you know, very hard and there's unbelievable number of social problems in North America and the UK. It's just that the problems are far, far greater than other countries. And most importantly, it's just they're much, much easier to solve because the people in question have such low incomes. And I think just a lot of people don't appreciate just quite how extreme that discrepancy in global income

• 46:15Speaker 01

  is where people on a typical income in, you know, a rich country, they're earning something like a hundred times the amount that the poorest seven hundred million people in the world have. And that's just, you know, that's just a mind blowing difference, something that's very uncurative, very hard to get our heads around.

• 46:31Shane Parrish?

  And most of it's due to luck, as you say, from where you're born. One of the ways that I like to frame that kind of thinking to give people a different perspective or offer a different perspective is to ask them what the world should look like if they didn't know what country they were going to be born in.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Hmm, I love that. So that actually dates back to an economist called John Hoshanyi, who wrote about this idea in the nineteen fifty's called The Veil of Ignorance, which is saying, yeah, exactly. Your moral views should be given by asking, yeah, if you didn't know who you were going to be in society, but you could structure society however, however you liked, how would you structure it? And the answer is that you would structure it so as to maximize total happiness, because that's the way you're going to, on average, do best for yourself. But once people have found out that they're already in a rich country, somehow people become more reluctant to say, well, that's the correct thing.

• 47:26Shane Parrish?

  There's a lot of reasoning that some types of giving, I mean, some types of foreign aid even, contribute to ongoing poverty and that if we're not careful, even if we have good intentions or despite our good intentions, perhaps, givers may encourage poverty to continue. I know it's a bit of a tense subject, but what's your take on that? How should givers think about that rationally?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sadly, I think that can be the case. There's vast numbers of, you know, you're doing something very complex, especially if you're giving in a foreign country, but also if you're giving at home. It's remarkably easy for the activities you pursue to backfire. And the development community, I think we learned this hard way. There were a number of, you know, ongoing, like, high-profile kind of failures with the specter aid. But it happens in the home, you know, rich countries too. We often give the example of Scared Straight, which is, you might know it from TV, but it's a program where it takes juvenile delinquents on a tour around a prison. So they spend three hours going around a prison, seeing how horrific conditions are inside, in order to be scared

• 48:35Speaker 01

  out of a life of crime. And this is touted as extremely effective. And of course, being in the US, it's all televised, made the reality TV.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  And it was, but so it's extremely effective, but there was actually many, many studies that have been done in this, including randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses, so studies of studies. So this is kind of among the higher evidence you can get. And what they discovered was not only was the program ineffective, it was actively harmful. So the juveniles who went through this program would go on to commit more crimes. You know, that's more thefts, more rapes, more murders. Um, if they had gone through this program than if they hadn't. And one think tank in fact estimated that for every dollar spent on the program, society bore the cost of two hundred and thirty dollars of um, costs of criminality and penitentiary costs.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Um, and yet this program continues to this day. And this just goes to show just how, you know, again, you just don't have the right feedback effects. The people who are running these programs, they um, see, you know, the children getting shouted at in prison. I'm sure the juveniles who go through say, yep, I'll never commit a crime again. Um, so they feel like it's really working, but it's not. And the sad truth is just the world's a very complex place and it's just, it's much easier to do harm than you might think.

• 49:59Shane Parrish?

  Want to switch gears just a little bit here for a second. You, uh, I think you became a tenured professor at Oxford at twenty eight.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:08Shane Parrish?

  How did you, and how, that's a remarkably young age to be a tenured professor at such a prestigious university. How, how did that come about?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I mean, surprisingly as well, it didn't have that much to do with the work I do on effective altruism. It was actually much more my um, PhD work. Um, and um, I'd been one year out of my PhD. Um, and I'm still a little bit unsure how that happened. Um, I don't, I definitely don't claim to be the best philosopher in the world or anything. Um, but I think one thing that does differentiate me from um, other people within academia is I am like quite a bit more action oriented. Um, and obviously that's evidenced by um, having set up faire des non profits and so on. But it also means I think more about. You know, I think very carefully about the research topics I choose. The research topic I wrote my PhD on was

• 51:03Speaker 01

  extremely neglected and it was clearly like a very ripe field for search. So rather than just like adding a little bit of knowledge to firstly, rather than having to spend an entire year understanding the literature. And then after that, like trying to make some contribution in a very crowded field. Instead, it took me two weeks to read the whole literature because there was so little written on it. And it meant there was just a very open field and therefore, you know, very fertile ground for being able to publish a lot of articles. Quite quickly. And that was definitely kind of, yeah, so that was definitely a huge help. I also think that having the kind of effective Altruism mindset did help my work and it has helped my work in ethics in general.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Because it gives this whole new lens on which the search topics to choose. Because normally the way that you choose the search topics is, well, what are the hot topics in the literature? What did your supervisor work on? And so kind of looking backwards, whereas for me, you know, I have this overriding question, which is how can I do the most good? Then there's a ton of questions that you need to answer in order to be in order to answer that question. Some of them are empirical, of course, questions about what we do. But many of them philosophical as well. And some of those questions already have a bunch of work done on them by philosophers or economists, but many haven't. In which case it's this, you know, just powerful way of discovering new, very important research questions.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  That again can be one of the first people working on. So, and that was true of my PhD, actually. It was, even though my PhD is more theoretical, it was driven by this question of, well, if I want to do the most good, I'm actually unsure what good consists in. But I need to make decisions. I need to make decisions like now because the problem's now. And that was the result. That means that we need to have a way of making decisions even in light of that uncertainty about what we morally ought to do. And that's what my PhD was creating. It was a framework for that.

• 53:01Shane Parrish?

  What did you learn about uncertainty during your PhD that you can apply to decisions outside of philanthropic ones?

• 53:08Speaker 01

  I think that the biggest kind of general lesson is that people are incredibly overconfident. So I know you had Julia Gayler from your podcast previously, she talks a lot about bias, the ways in which the human being is biased. I think this is chief among them is overconfidence. And there are various studies on this. So it's been found that when people say that something has a one in a million chance of happening, I think it happens about 10% of the time. When someone says, oh, this has a 1,000, yeah, absolutely. When someone has this 1,000 chance of happening, it happens 30% of the time. So people are just at the top end and the bottom end, people are incredibly overconfident in their own views. And that I just think is so damaging.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It means that people are, you know, we go to war, like we go to war when we shouldn't go to war. People make total business decisions when they shouldn't make business decisions. And so if there was one thing that I would, in terms of understanding of probability and getting everyone to work on, it would be improving the way they think about their own probabilities that they assign to events. Where you can actually do a calibration training game, if you look online, you can find it. They just ask you loads and loads of questions and you have to answer, you know, you often have to give a range. So it's questions you shouldn't know the answer to, like, how many potatoes were grown in Idaho in 2012 or something?

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And then you give a range, perhaps you think it's between a billion and 10 million potatoes. And the aim is to give a range such that you're right 90% of the time or something. And that means you can get better and better, but actually starting to understand and internalize what saying this is 99% likely to happen, what that really means, or when it's 80% likely, what that actually means. And then hopefully that also gives you a sense of your own stability. Because again, something that I think is very damaging is that we think that being very confident in your own view is a kind of mark of epistemic virtue. So you know, the typical, or at least stereotypical company boardroom just has

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Different people like really stating their case and, you know, really firmly believing their own views. Whereas the way I think of things, if I believe something and I meet someone who I think is just as smart and just as well reasoned in this case as me, and they believe the opposite. Well, then I just become ambivalent because this person's as likely to be right as I am. And in the nonprofits that I've set up, thankfully, we like Center for the Effect of Altruism and Eighty Thousand Hours, thankfully, we really have that culture and it's, um, uh, it's just it because it means the best argument wins rather than just whoever has the loudest voice. Um, and so, yeah, I think there's twin things of not being overconfident and then as a supplemental supplemental manner, um, of recognizing your own fallibility and the other people

• 56:02Speaker 01

  who are as smart as you just have as as good a shot at getting the right answer as you do. That's how I most want to change people's assessment of probabilities.

• 56:10Shane Parrish?

  Well, I have you on the phone. Uh, I have some philosophical questions for you perhaps that, uh, we can tackle. What would you say are your foundational values as a person?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, in part, that's the question that I'm always, um, that I'm, you know, always asking is, you know, what are the correct values? Um, values I ought to have, well, most I kind of do have. Um, ultimately, you know, my preferred model view is the one according to which for every action I take, what I ought to do is whatever will provide the most well-being and happiness for, um, other people. Um, where I measure happiness in terms of, um, good mental states and bad mental states. I think more happy experiences and fewer experiences of suffering. Um, so that's the kind of like deep fundamental value. Though I recognize also at the same time, you know, I'm unsure about that and in actual

• 57:05Speaker 01

  decisions, I want to consider the variety of ethical views.

• 57:08Shane Parrish?

  I like that. Uh, I, I think that that's a really interesting way to kind of approach, uh, how you are in the world. Do you believe in radical honesty?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I think that we ought to be, in general, much more honest than we typically are. Just again, on kind of altruistic grounds, I think that dishonesty is generally benefiting the person who's dishonest in exchange for harming kind of other people. It's also just, I'm not even sure how often dishonesty is benefiting the person who's being dishonest. This is very, you know, very difficult to keep track of a lot of lies. And so, in general, I have a principle of just trying never to lie. I know that's different, however, from radical honesty, where you're, anything that's on your mind, you just immediately say it. And, or, you know, any thought you have, you kind of proactively say something as well

• 58:05Speaker 01

  as, as well as just never telling a falsehood. And I think that's kind of too far. I think there's, at least in the society and culture that we have at the moment, which is not geared up for that, then, I think, yeah, what that kind of maybe doesn't appreciate is that words have symbolic value as well as literal value. So if I'm kind of spontaneously say, wow, you're, you know, that suit of yours looks really ugly, it's really ill-fitting. You know, maybe the person doesn't even really care what I think about their suit. But, meet the fact that I'm saying that is, must be symbolic of something, it must be representative of the fact that perhaps I don't think of them much as a person or something, or I just want to put them down.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And so, I think, yeah, going all out in terms of radical honesty is not appreciating the kind of symbolic aspect of language, it's just kind of, it's like somewhat too narrow, too literalist in terms of how it understands language.

• 59:03Shane Parrish?

  I think it gives people a crutch, too. I mean, it, it seems to give people a leeway to, they, they can say whatever they want without regard to the other person and just be like, oh, I'm just being radically honest. And it has actually nothing to do with honesty and more to do with intent on their part.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. There is one thing that I wish people were more honest about their positive feelings. Um, and maybe I'm just saying this in the UK where people are notoriously emotionally deserved.

• 59:30Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Um, but I think just very often people don't say positive things about others. They know like, you know, how much they value them, how much they love them, how much they respect them. Um, on the grounds that, you know, it feels silly or it's like slightly socially weird or something. Um, but I think if people did that more often, so you know, you've got something really positive to say about it. Me about someone just immediately say it. Um, I think the world would, you know, be much better.

• 59:55Shane Parrish?

  I agree. How how would you define success?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Uh, again, I think I'd define success in terms of positive impact I'm making on the world.

• 1:00:04Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Um, I I know that's gonna be um playing a broken record by this point, but I mean, I think anything else. So, I mean, financial success, we've got really great um uh evidence showing that actually that doesn't really convert into happiness very much. Um, whereas if you think about success in terms of actually significantly improving other people's lives, well, think about kind of what you might think um on your deathbed, kind of looking back at your life. If it's like, well, I made a huge amount of money and um got a lot of status and so on. You can easily imagine yourself thinking, well, was that really worth it? Um, but if you've done just a huge amount of good, you're like, wow, we're transformed tens of thousands of people's lives.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  So I made a really, you know, meaningful contribution to the flourishing of the human race over centuries to come. It's really hard to imagine yourself thinking, but was that really worth it in the end?

• 1:00:56Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  And so ultimately, I think, you know, success is very tied to the meaning of life. And I think the meaning of life is to um contribute to um, you know, the flourishing of humanity in the long run.

• 1:01:07Shane Parrish?

  It it it's so interesting to me because I I've witnessed a lot of people that uh I've worked with um and reached the pinnacle of their career as CEO and then they they go retire and they go from having all of these friends to having nobody. And it's almost as if the way that they've achieved their success is kind of mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning. Um, however, they would define that because when when they leave the workplace, they find out that, you know, people don't want to actually associate with them. And a lot of that has to do with the way that they they got to such a a high level of power.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, false consciousness where people believe that this is what's going to make them happy. This is what they've been told by society or marketing is going to be the key to fulfilling life. But um I think for the vast majority of people, at least the purely financial side isn't. Obviously, kind of building something great can be very important, including building a great company.

• 1:02:04Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  I think it's bigger way of it is the pure financial compensation that really does it.

• 1:02:09Shane Parrish?

  What's the most common mistake that you see people make over and over?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Um, not investigating how to do something. So people for any given task, if I want to know, so if I have a given task, given goal, the first thing I do is just find out. Who else has attempted to do this? What information is there on how to do this well? And then, and if, you know, if there's publicly available information, that's great. If there's books and so on, that's great. If not, then find people who did it and ask them for the advice. So I paid my way through grad school through a variety of nine different scholarships. Um, and uh so I got like really quite good at applying for scholarships. It was just the same time, which was this is particular scholarship. The committee are going to have particular things that they're kind of looking for.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Talk to people who successfully got the scholarship and then um ask for the advi- like ask for the advice. That's like figure out kind of what are people actually looking for and playing to that. Whereas just over and over again, I see people, they've got a kind of aim. And even though many other people have tried to um do the same thing, they try and, you know, invent the wheel. We invent the wheel, we can work on this stuff from scratch. And um yeah, that doesn't make sense. That just doesn't make sense to me.

• 1:03:24Shane Parrish?

  Uh I want to end with a particular question that a friend of mine brought up and they demanded that I ask you, which is a big uh philosophical question, but uh that is what is the meaning and purpose of life?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And I think ultimately, the question of, you know, what are your values and what's the meaning and purpose of life is the same. So I think there's no difference between the question of just what ought you to do and what is it your purpose to do. And so again, I think ultimately, the meaning of life is to, yeah, the meaning of life is to contribute in a way that improves others' lives where as much as possible. So, you know, that's a spectrum. That's the more you can improve people's lives, the more you've contributed. But ultimately, that's the purpose. And then I think when you consider the very long run, the fact that, you know, the human race has been around for 2,000 years and we could be around again for many millions,

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  many billions of years. I think the kind of meaning of, the meaning of life or the purpose of life today for the kind of whole civilization is to kind of carry this very fragile candle of humanity like and pass it on onto the next generation where it's totally non, you know, non-civil that we'll be able to do that. There's very, very many ways in which the activities that we, that humanity will likely do over the 21st century could lead to global capacity, civilizational collapse, or even extinction. And I think ensuring that we're not the, we're not the generation that kind of ends the human story, I think that's a pretty important meaning and purpose for us in this generation to have.

• 1:05:05Shane Parrish?

  I don't think there can be anything more meaningful or important than not destroying the rest of humanity.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  I'm glad you agree.

• 1:05:12Shane Parrish?

  That's a great way to end this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show, William.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Good day. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:05:22Shane Parrish?

  Hey, guys. This is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F A R N A M S T R E E T B L O G dot com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnhamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.