Transcript

Robert Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is the 80,000 Hours Podcast, where each week we have an unusually in-depth conversation about one of the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve it. I’m Rob Wiblin, Director of Research at 80,000 Hours.

This week we’re going to find out what it’s like to become a journalist who strives to cover the issues that really matter.

A few quick notices.

Firstly, if you’d like to come to the Effective Altruism Global conference in San Francisco from the 21 to 23 June, applications are now open at eaglobal.org. If you like this show you’re highly likely to enjoy the people you’ll meet and the conversations you’ll have there.

Secondly, most people find out about this show from personal recommendations. So if you’re enjoying the show, or know someone who would benefit from listening to it, please send them a message so they find out that it exists.

Alternatively you can leave us a review on iTunes which also helps people find out about the show.

At the end of this episode my colleagues Michelle and Keiran come on the show again for a 20 minute chat about whether journalism is a good career and the risks of political polarisation.

Finally I’ll also link to some of my favourite articles by the journalist in this episode for you to check out, including topics like what works to stop factory farming, how to improve science grant funding, and why impact investing is probably overrated.

Alright, here’s Kelsey.

Robert Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with Kelsey Piper. Kelsey is a staff writer for Vox’s new vertical focused on effective altruist themes, including threats to humanity as a whole. She previously worked as the head of the writing team at Triplebyte and ran Stanford effective altruism during college. She’s also blogged at the Unit of Caring, her own blog, for many years.

Robert Wiblin: So, thanks for coming on the podcast Kelsey.

Kelsey Piper: Thanks so much. I actually love this podcast so it’s a treat to get to be here.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So I’ve been really enjoying your writing since you joined Vox in last October right?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so I hope to get to talk about careers in journalism in general. Like how we can improve the information environment out there on issues that we care about. And I suppose also some specific articles that you’ve written. But first, tell us, what are you working on at the moment? And why do you think it’s really important?

Kelsey Piper: Yes. So I report for Future Perfect. I write mostly about factory farming and animal issues, about existential risks, and about some intriguing ways to improve the world. For example, improve scientific research or improve how we do voting, some of the stuff that you guys have covered on 80,000 hours actually. These big ideas that I think aren’t necessarily getting as much air as they possibly should.

Intro to Future Perfect

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, guess it’s pretty similar to what I do in a way. Yeah, so this new section of Vox’s website Future Perfect. Tell us a little bit about the history there and how people have been reacting to it so far.

Kelsey Piper: Yes. So a Future Perfect is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. They did not give us very much editorial direction, which I think is really good. You want journalism to not be following a set of instructions about what cover. That can sort of constrain the ability to tell the most important stories. So they were very flexible. They just wanted to create room for more coverage that’s not tied to the news cycle. That’s focused on important issues.

Kelsey Piper: A lot of the people at Vox, in particular, Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein, were both very sympathetic to effective altruism. Both had a lot of overlap in their interest with effective altruism and had written before about those topics. They wanted Future Perfect to be heavily inspired by effective altruism and to draw on a lot of the work the effective altruism community is done on those important questions.

Robert Wiblin: What kinds of articles have you been writing about or what kind of topics have you been writing about so far and how have readers responded?

Kelsey Piper: Yes. So I cover factory farming. I cover AI and the big breakthroughs on the AI capabilities front and the case for AI safety and the way researchers are thinking about safety today. I’m writing a piece right now about bio risk and gain a function research and some of the ways that the research we’re doing right now and bio could be dangerous if we don’t handle it appropriately. Then I’ve written about improving the grant process, improving the voting process, stuff like that.

Robert Wiblin: And what’s the reception been to the to the articles? Are getting like many people reading them and do people send you emails, either like love mail or hate mail?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. So Future Perfect has gotten an encouraging response. We’ve had a lot of people reading and engaging with the articles. We’ve had a lot of people subscribe to our newsletter which is something we look for as a sign that they’re valuing Future Perfect content, in particular, on seeking out our perspective. I don’t get very much feedback in emails. This is actually something I think people should know they could do more. Journalists tend to really value feedback and responses, especially feedback and responses that make it clear you read the whole article and thought about its content. You do get a lot of reactions that are maybe a little bit shallower responses to the headline, that’s a little bit less valuable. But I think if you see high-quality reporting and you want to let a reporter know that you valued it, that you shared it with your friends, that it taught you something? I think that we’re not nearly as drowned in that kind of feedback is I think people might anticipate. It tends to encourage more coverage with whatever it is you’re looking for.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Interesting. I follow Matt Yglesias, one of the Vox’s journalists, on Twitter semi-regularly. I guess, he’s like quite a public figure.

Kelsey Piper: Yes, I think he gets some more hate mail and probably more fan mail.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. He semi-regularly posts the most horrific emails that he receives but I guess that’s pretty not typical. I guess he’s been at this for a lot of years, so he’s able to take it with a great sense of humor at this point.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I think I have not had that experience and I’m somewhat glad. Maybe, maybe I’ll develop a thick skin for it over time.

Robert Wiblin: Yes, so how does Future Perfect view its relationship with effective altruism as a kind of intellectual community?

Kelsey Piper: Yes. So, I think Future Perfect definitely hopes that we’re creating content that effective altruists will find it worth their time to read. I think we’re definitely hoping that a lot of our content will advance conversations in effective altruism or bring them to a wider audience. We’re not an effective altruist outlet. Future Perfect wants to also cover other things that are part of our mission but not necessarily good priorities for EA. But certainly, I think we want the EA community to be getting a lot of value from Future Perfect and I joined Future Perfect for EA reasons. I thought it was one of the best ways I couldn’t improve the world.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. How many of you are there? It sounds like there might only be two or three.

Kelsey Piper: Right now, me and Dylan are writing for Future Perfect and we’re also in the process of hiring a community manager. On Monday, our new writer Seagal Samuels, who just left the Atlantic, is starting. So, then we’ll have another team member.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, because Vox has a whole has 50 staff, 100 staff? It’s recently big now, right?

Kelsey Piper: It is pretty big. That’s a good question because there’s also all the sister sites. I don’t have a number for you.

Robert Wiblin: I guess I’m curious to know what does the rest of the organization think of Future Perfect and your work. They’re kind of a little bit more focusing on the issues of the day and politics and so on. I wonder, like whether they think this is the wonky, like academic side of Vox.

Kelsey Piper: So far the reaction has been really positive and really encouraging. We’ve had a lot of writers who are interested in when one of their stories might fit within Future Perfect, they’re excited to have it published there. They like that we’re doing that and are excited to contribute that. We’ve gotten a lot of advice.

Kelsey Piper: The science and health team obviously contribute a lot of articles to Future Perfect when something in their purview comes up, the team that works on global warming. So I think we really couldn’t do something like Future Perfect without the rest of Vox just because you need a lot of science expertise to do good science reporting. You need a lot of climate change expertise to do good climate change reporting. And Dylan and I don’t have that, but we have this great team we can draw on.

Which FP articles are you most proud of?

Robert Wiblin: Yes, which articles that Future Perfect has put out so far are you kind of most proud of? Are there anywhere you feel it’s actually moved the needle and make the world a better place? It’s early days, it’s only been around for five months or, maybe less than that, three months, four months?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, we launched on October 15. So, I think it’s a little early to start seeing if we’re influencing the world, but I’m really proud to see factory farming coverage be a little bit more mainstream.

Kelsey Piper: It’s just something that seems like it should be covered along with all of the other issues of the day and excited to see it fit into that role. I was really happy when I published a piece about AI safety a while back. I heard from some people that that gave them a clear explanation of what was going on with AI to point to on. That’s something that seems potentially pretty valuable, just to make sure people are on the same page about that.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I think you wrote an article about the state of evidence and animal advocacy. So yeah, do we have evidence for like leafleting in favor of vegetarianism or veganism working and online ads and things like that. Do you wanna describe what you found there?

Kelsey Piper: Yes, so I really just had conversations with a bunch of people who are doing this research in the animal field. That’s one of the best things about being a journalist, is that I can call up experts in the field and say, just tell me what’s going on and have great conversations. That’s a perk I didn’t really anticipate that people be so willing to talk with me. But what I heard from several of them.

Kelsey Piper: I heard from the team at Faunalytics, I heard from the team at the ACE or Animal Charity Evaluators, was we’re seeing these corporate campaigns be hugely successful. We’re not seeing very much of an evidence base for a lot of things that have traditionally been a focus of these animal groups. In particular, leafleting but also more generally, any efforts to kind of convince the public to become vegetarian or vegan. So it was like, I feel like there’s lots of people who care about animals and care about factory farming who aren’t aware of where the evidence is at. And haven’t seen the case that corporate campaigns are where to focus and so got to write about that.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I just brought up that article because I just thought it was the best thing that I’d seen written on that topic. Like evaluating what things do we have evidence is working and what things don’t we and summarizing it all like very quickly. I thought like I was really learning a lot and I kind of slightly work in this area. So it’s great that they can be an article in the mainstream media where I feel like I’m getting seriously informed.

Kelsey Piper: Wow. Thank you.

Day-to-day life at Vox

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So, what is kind of the day to day life of a journalist like? I imagine it’s kind of hectic. The demands to put out content a pretty serious, I’ve heard.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, Vox has a very fast pace which was definitely something I was a little apprehensive about going in, like can I write that much? But it’s been very good for me because I think the push to think about something you want to tell people every day just keeps you moving. On most days I will try and send my editor about three story ideas. Things that I’ve thought of that I want to write about, things that I have a lead on, things that I saw in the news that I felt like we needed a Future Perfect take on. My editor will get back to me with the one or two that he’s most excited about and say, Yeah, go ahead and write this story.

Kelsey Piper: So, then I’ll email people who I want to talk to. I’ll try and get introductions. I’ll research for the piece. I’ll have those conversations and phone calls. I’ll try and write the piece. I’ll try and file it before I go home. Then often, at the same, time my editor and I will be going back and forth with edits on yesterday’s story to get it to a state where we’re both proud of it and confident of it and ready to put it on the site.

Robert Wiblin: OK, so now on a typical day you have like two things on the boil. One that you are starting today and one that are finishing from yesterday. And the goal is to hopefully publish something basically every workday?

Kelsey Piper: Yes. Now, in practice, some pieces take longer to come together. Or they come partway together and then we realize there’s not a good story here. Or the situation is confusing enough that our initial take on it didn’t work. A fair number of stories get scrapped. In practice, I think I end up publishing four things a week. But yeah, the goal is certainly to have a week where every day we put out a new story.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so you arrive in the office on Monday morning. The first thing you have to do is figure out what you’re going to write about that day? How do you go about that?

Kelsey Piper: So, I do a couple different things. One is I keep an eye out on the EA forums, on the EA discord, in the Facebook groups, just for things people seem to be confused about. Those often make for great stories. Or things that I’m a little confused about and would love to just spend four hours digging into until I have a clearer picture of what’s going on.

Kelsey Piper: And then I also look at the news. We are covering a fair bit of philanthropy, is another thing that EA is not necessarily focused on, that Future Perfect is pretty interested in. It’s like coverage of the big philanthropists. What is Bill Gates doing? What is Jeff Bezos doing? So I’ll check the news and look for stories that seem like there’s a lot of takes out there but it would be valuable to have a sort of Future Perfect take out there. Then I’ll look at research that just came out especially research in development economics or in health interventions that give well supports or on other topics that are of interest.

Kelsey Piper: A write up a study is always a great piece because it’s pretty straightforward. The authors are usually happy to talk with you and make sure you understand their research. Then you just explain the study, explain how confident we should be in it. Stuff like that.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so, at the start of the day you come up with, was it five or ten ideas for articles to write?

Kelsey Piper: I aim for three.

Robert Wiblin: Three. Okay. And then, how do you choose among those?

Kelsey Piper: My editor will usually take a look. M editor has better instincts than me for what will our Vox audience like and which of these are going to turn into a solid story.

Robert Wiblin: And then how do you go about writing it? I mean most people I think would find it quite hard to write an article within a day or two. Most people find it very hard to put pen to page to begin with.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I think Vox has a big focus on explaining things, on answering questions. So you want to put yourself in the mind of an audience and ask, “What questions are they going to have here?” And often, you have to start by explaining to them, why do they care about this. Why are you telling them about this? Then they’re going to wonder, why aren’t people doing this obvious solution I thought. I heard something about this, why doesn’t that work?

Kelsey Piper: So I think often articles are sort of shaped around figuring out where the readers at and then telling them, this is interesting. Here’s some things you’re wondering about it. Here’s the answer. Then here’s a takeaway, our understanding of what’s going on. I like that style of writing because it’s very audience focused. It seems very suited to a lot of the topics I’m interested in. Where you both want to engage people and explain why they care. And give them a somewhat complicated picture of what’s going on with some takeaways that hopefully they can use to make better decisions and focus on the stuff that’s important.

Robert Wiblin: So I mentioned, if I had to write something every day that I would often get to the mid-afternoon be like, I don’t know what I think about this issue. I haven’t really figured out what the answer is yet. Or am I get there and be like, Oh, wow, my whole like take on this was just…I misunderstood the whole issue. And now it’s like 3pm and I’ve got to file something I guess, within the next few hours. But I don’t know what to say at this point.

Kelsey Piper: I get a pretty good reaction when I say, sorry, the story is going to take another day because it turned it into a different story. Sometimes that means we scrap the story. Sometimes, it means I write one that has a different, more complicated take. I think there’s not much pressure. Aside from, your desire to file the story and get to stop to write something that you’re starting to feel like is more complicated than that. Because complicated is okay and the journey you had in the process of figuring it out is probably a journey you want to take the readers through. It’s in some ways more interesting than whatever your original take was.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, okay. So if you decide that actually, things are quite different than what you originally thought then you can just explain the process by which he got there. And that’s like an interesting story in its own right. You didn’t have to stick with the original vision, just to like get something out there.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, sometimes that’s a compelling story in its own right. And sometimes it’s not, and the story ends up getting scrapped. But both of those are fine outcomes. You don’t want to put something out there that you’re feeling, even as you post it like I don’t know how much I stand behind that. That’s just not gonna to be reporting you can really stand by in the long run.

Tradeoffs between the interests of Vox and doing the most good?

Robert Wiblin: Do you find that there are meaningful tradeoffs between just doing what’s in the interest of Vox as a business or what is it good? in terms of building your brand as a journalist? What seems to be like most effective from an EA point of view?

Kelsey Piper: Yes, so I think a lot of journalists run into the same conundrum here. Which is that takes on the news of the day, political stuff, polarizing sort of takes, tend to do very well. If you’re looking at page views, those will get overwhelmingly good page views. I think the article I wrote that did the best was the one that was titled “Billionaires Don’t Run for President”. I stand by the article. I feel like it’s a pretty good explanation of why, if you’re a billionaire and you have some goals, you have better avenues to pursue those goals. The evidence that self-funded candidates do well and the road for office is pretty mixed. So I feel like it’s a good article. But certainly that headline “Billionaires Don’t Run for Office” the timing, the day of Howard Schultz announcement, that made that like a really exciting story that everybody wanted to share. Compared to something that’s just an explanation of the literature on skills development programs in the developing world, it isn’t going to get that kind of response.

Kelsey Piper: So, I think in Future Perfect but probably less in Future Perfect than in journalism in general, there’s certainly a feeling of like what I want people to read the things I write. And if I write about politics, and if I have these provocative headlines and if I go for the sort of more interesting takes, then everybody reads what I write. And if I try and step back the rhetoric, and if I try and add nuance, and if I try and you know tell a more complicated story that no one really wants to hear, then no one will hear it.

Kelsey Piper: I think that’s I see a lot of takes on why journalism has gotten or seems to many people to have gotten more polarizing and more driven by anti-Trump, pro-Trump, back and forth. I actually don’t think it’s journalists really wanting to convince the public to be pro-Trump or anti-Trump. I think it’s that the articles that aren’t about that don’t get shared and don’t get liked. That both makes it hard as a journalist to tell the stories that you think it’s most important to tell. And it means that as an audience member the stories you see your friends sharing will all be selected from that subset, that’s sort of more provocative. Future Perfect is somewhat insulated from this because we don’t have page view goals. Because while politics is sometimes within our purview, certainly what did Trump say today is not going to be within our purview.

Kelsey Piper: And because we have this mission we can hide behind. It’s like we’re trying to tell the big picture. But I think lots of journalists who would love to be doing substantive reporting are in hard place if they also want people to read what they’re writing.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So how do you reconcile those goals? I don’t suppose, you’re someone insulated from this. You have the good fortune as I do, doing the show, to just go into great detail about things that we actually think are important. But what should someone who’s in a less fortunate position do? Is there any way of squaring the circle?

Kelsey Piper: I think in the long run there’s certainly still a market for nuance and complexity and good reporting. I know a lot of people who do very good stuff in that vein. I think there are also a lot of people who’ve chosen the sort of tradeoff of writing about the latest Trump tweet but trying to do that in a way that paints a nuanced picture of a complicated subject. Using the stories of the day as the hook into that. That seems to me like the valid endeavor. Tell people the stories that they’re interested in reading about and then try and tell those stories with depth and nuance and complexity and just getting them right.

Robert Wiblin: So kind of seems on this story that, in terms of who’s to blame for a lot of journalism being quite bad, it’s the audience. Because they’re they’re choosing to read and share articles that are not of great lasting value. And so, to some extent, we’ve seen the enemy and its ourself. Is that fair to say?

Kelsey Piper: I think it’s certainly fair to say that there is more good journalism out there than people realize. And the reason for that is that a lot of the stuff that gets people very angry is not the best stuff out there. And not even the best stuff that those writers are producing and writing. I think what’s going on with journalism as an industry is very complicated. I’ve not been involved with it for long enough to be very confident in it. I think local news is dying in a way that’s very bad for communities. Because it’s often the main check on corruption and bad local politics and abuses of power on the local level and stuff like that. It’s dying in part because people actually prefer to read national news. So that one you can say is it’s following the consumers and the consumers have a bit of a collective action problem in the sense that they might care about like corruption being thwarted but they don’t care to read the local paper.

Kelsey Piper: I think digital media is been in the headlines in the last couple of weeks with a lot of major layoffs and job cuts that has a bunch of people saying, “Is digital media a good idea?” I think that’s just that digital media was pitched as a startup, like tech. Like you become big, you become a monopoly, you have these huge margins. People eventually realized it’s not going to look like that. It’s not going to be a huge margin monopoly business. It’s going to be a low barrier to entry competitive business. That meant investor expectations and funding levels were sort of out of line with the business models that made any sense. I don’t think it means digital media is over. I think it just means it’s going to be a low margins industry that’s going to stick around like that.

Kelsey Piper: And then there’s the polarisation scheme. I think there’s just a lot of things going on there. It would be very complicated to change any of them. Because a lot of them are just market forces acting quite strongly.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I guess we’ll return to journalism as an industry later on. So, when I visit one of your articles on Vox, the amount of revenue that Vox gets is probably like a fact tiny fraction of a cent. It actually maybe zero. Maybe it’s negative because I have an ad blocker on my browser. So I suppose there’s no point making any content for me. People should just avoid writing articles to me and people like me, who tend to have ad blockers on because it’s just there’s nothing to be gained. Is that right?

Kelsey Piper: I don’t know very much about Vox’s revenue model but that doesn’t seem far off to me. I do think that adds driven companies like Vox are in a different situation than subscription driven ones like the New York Times and The Washington Post moved to. You need lots of viewers, you need lots of viewers who are watching and hopefully clicking on ads. A lot of people just aren’t.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I have been wondering, so I think at the moment I don’t subscribe to any newspapers. In the past, I’ve had subscriptions to places that produce content. But lately, I haven’t. I’ve been feeling bad about that. Like maybe I should just always have a subscription to whatever place I think is doing the best work. So I can kind of do my fair share to contribute to actually creating content that keeps politics sane or keeps where we’re able to learn really useful things, is kind of contributing to a public good.

Kelsey Piper: I do think that paying for content you value is, obviously not on the individual scale but on the larger scale, the only way to expect the world in five years to have content you value happening. Which is tough because a lot of EA’s, where their money goes is already a really important question. I don’t necessarily think that they should be spending it. But I do think that as a society if we don’t pay for good reporting, then there’s going to be-

Robert Wiblin: It will not be there.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah.

Risk of political polarisation

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So some people have been concerned that Future Perfect, though it’s not kind of a specifically an effective altruism thing, it’s kind of effective altruism inspired, and effective altruism associated, and it’s probably the only EA inspired live section on a newspaper or a magazine, and I suppose that this could lead to effective altruism being associated with liberalism, because it’s in Vox, and Vox is well-known as having a general that kind of center left, liberal attitude. So do you think it would be good if more different places, particularly across the political spectrum, had sections that had a kind of effective altruism flavor, so there wasn’t this risk of EA being seen as partisan?

Kelsey Piper: I think I have complicated feelings there. So, one thing is that I think effective altruism is, it’s a couple different things. It’s a movement, it’s like a philosophy and an approach to answering questions, it’s a bunch of specific resources for people who are interested in working on specific problems. Some of those problems are likely to end up being part of political coalitions of one sort or another, and some of them probably are much better off if they aren’t sort of framed in those terms at all. I think it’s really unclear to me whether effective altruism being associated with center left politics is a problem to mitigate, an inevitable consequence of the sort of issues that effective altruism is about. Like, I don’t know if you could get The Wall Street Journal to write about factory farming, even if you offered them a grant to do that. I’m not sure whether there are people who want to work at The Wall Street Journal and want to write about factory farming.

Kelsey Piper: I worry a little bit about targeting perceptions of where EA is on the political spectrum instead of just doing what I think Future Perfect is trying to do, which is more just borrow some of the ideas of EA and write content that is valuable to EAs, but avoid that branding and therefore keep the EA movement hopefully can be branded however it wants. Future Perfect is Vox’s thing.

Kelsey Piper: That said, there are a bunch of specific issues that Future Perfect covers that I do think should just be covered everywhere. I think policy with respect to existential risk should just be an area that newspapers cover because it’s important. I think international development and health is, to some extent already, but should be more so just an issue that all newspapers should cover. I think it would certainly be a really good sign if newspapers across the political spectrum were covering factory farming as a problem. Yeah, there are a lot of issues where I would be very excited to see other people picking up Future Perfect’s manner.

Kelsey Piper: Then there are lot of issues where I think it would really matter who they hired. I feel like Future Perfect is something I’m so excited about in large part because Dylan is the person who sort of drove it, and Dylan is somebody who cares a lot about effective altruism, and cares a lot about the causes and priorities I care about, and because Future Perfect’s team was so open to hiring people with a background in the effective altruism community to sort of lend that perspective. I think if you tried to have it, for example, an AI department, and you didn’t specifically hire for background in the effective altruism community, then I’m not sure I expect that AI department to do anything good, so I would have some reservations about trying to convince a Future Perfect without a clear picture of what are the internal institutional incentives there, who would be writing the stories, and what would our goal be, even though I think many of these stories should be covered by everybody because they’re important.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, it is interesting. You think, I guess, like the three cause areas most associated with effective altruism, you got kind of global health, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks. It feels like global catastrophic risks just clearly shouldn’t … really isn’t that partisan at the moment, or at least in principle I don’t think there’s Republicans who are in favor of nuclear war.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, no, I think almost everybody expresses concerns about nuclear war, and in fact I’ve talked to a fair number of conservatives who specifically supported Trump because they thought he was less likely to have a dangerously adversarial relationship with Clinton, and they thought that Clinton’s approach was more likely to lead to nuclear war, and certainly it seems good to me for there to be more national conversation about which of these politicians’ approach to geopolitics endangers the world more.

Kelsey Piper: Factory farming seems likely to continue to be somewhat associated with liberals, but I’m not sure that’s necessary. I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to gay rights, which were fringe, and then they were mainstream among Democrats, and then that was enough to sort of get wide spread successes without them ever being mainstream among Republicans in the US. But, that has a bunch of religious implications. Republicans in the US are religious. Factory farming doesn’t seem intractable among Republicans in the same way to me. It seems like it might actually be on the left side of all of this just because it is associated with that and those are the people pushing for it, so I would certainly be excited about, like I said, I’d be thrilled if The Wall Street Journal had a factory farming beat. I would be thrilled if some of the more conservative outlets that are like the new media outlets of whatever had a factory farming beat. That would just straightforwardly be great news.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, it’s interesting. It feels like the animal welfare thing is perhaps rather than like a right, left thing, it’s more of an urban, rural, like the urban rural divide. It probably looms larger, though I think even there if you ask people in principle, are they against causing suffering to animals on farms, just the vast majority of people in every group are against this. I’m not quite sure why it is the case that it’s like that these issues are just so much more prominent among liberal left groups. I guess it’s possible because they’re much more urban in general, so it conflicts less with people’s livelihoods.

Kelsey Piper: And younger people seem more concerned about animal issues.

Robert Wiblin: I will say overseas that’s much less the case. In the UK, there isn’t really a partisan, or there isn’t really a left, right split going on in animal welfare. In fact, the Conservative party has pushed forward on animal welfare reforms, I think, just as much as parties on the left have. And in Australia, I think it is a bit more like it is here, but nonetheless, I think there’s not particular reason why it has to be partisan, and I think that it’s totally foreseeable that it might be much less so in the future.

Kelsey Piper: Huh. With that context, yeah, that does make me think, okay, trying to mitigate the extent to which animal welfare is seen as a partisan issue in the US is pretty important for the animal welfare movement, and if Vox contributed to making it seem like a liberal issue, then that would be unfortunate, because I think it’s just a universal issue, and I, yeah, want coverage to reflect that.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I wonder if it’s possible to write articles that kind of have a spin of yeah, people on … or treating people who are conservative who might otherwise not be treated in such a flattering light in Vox, like finding conservatives who are very worried about animal welfare and presenting their take on things.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, that’s interesting. I can definitely take a look at what’s out there.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. In terms, I guess, on global health and development, it’s interesting. That’s another case where I think the UK, there really isn’t such a big divide between the left and right, I think, on questions of international development and poverty alleviation, but again, in Australia and the US, it does seem to be more of an issue that is brought up far more on the left, and there’s some greater hostility among more conservative parties.

Kelsey Piper: So, keep in mind my co-worker, Dylan Matthews, wrote this great article arguing that George Bush’s work on AIDS in Africa was not just the biggest deal of his presidency, but was actually … he saved more lives there than he destroyed with the pointless wars in the Middle East. Which, I don’t think we need to add those up and say okay, he was good overall, but it’s still an important perspective to have, that this huge deal, the most important thing about his presidency wasn’t really getting a lot of coverage or a lot of interest, and I deeply respect what he did there.

Kelsey Piper: The current Republican party seems a bit more nationalist, a bit more hostile to the idea of significant investment in people overseas to some extent. I know Trump has a lot of rhetoric about how we’re being cheated, whenever we’re giving things to other countries and getting nothing in return, so under this administration it seems a little trickier to hit the bipartisan balance, but again, yeah, it doesn’t feel inevitable to me. It seems like an issue that certainly everybody cares about and that is possible to have investment in from all sides.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so let’s back up a little bit. It’s a very tricky question, but how much do you think effective altruism as a community should strive to not be seen as partisan? I guess you were saying you’re not sure that people should make active, specific efforts to avoid being seen as more liberal. Maybe you just think we should make the arguments as they are, and then the cards fall as they may in terms of what the partisan lean is.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. I think a lot of the discussion I see effective altruists engage in around whether they should be partisan seems focused on things that would be pretty costly to change, and I would be excited to instead see people, for example, make the pitch for a cause they care about in terms they expect to be compelling to audiences they think we’re under serving, and if that results in lots more conservatives hearing about it, then that’s great. I would be intrigued by efforts to sort of make effective altruism more compelling from other perspectives. I’ve written a little bit on my Tumblr, for example, about what the best approach to reducing deaths of fetuses might be from the perspective of pro-life people, and I would be pretty excited about there being effective altruists who are interested in that question the same way there are effective altruists interested in lots of questions that might assume some values I don’t share. That seems like all good stuff that I would be excited about.

Kelsey Piper: I think a lot of the things I see people suggesting to get EA less political seem more like don’t engage in politics or don’t have discussion of which candidates are going to have the most beneficial impact on the world, and I’m less optimistic about that. That seems like it compromises our ability to do stuff by quite a lot.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, it does seem it’s hard sell to gag people from saying things that they think are true and important. It seems like it’s easier just to add additional voices, say I’m going to write something about animal welfare in The Wall Street Journal or the National Review rather than try to get other people to shut up.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I think that’s a great summary. I would love it if effective altruism included more conversations and for other audiences. I get nervous when it seems like it’s should we restrict conversations for these audiences because, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: I guess I would think it was quite foolish if someone was trying to portray a global catastrophic risk as a left or liberal issue, because it’s like wrong, but I guess I haven’t seen that, and I’m not sure what the angle there is. I suppose maybe you’re criticized for right wing foreign policy or something, say oh evident these people don’t care about civilization or stability, but I think that would be a misunderstanding.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I think certainly for any issue, alienating lots of the country by asserting they don’t care about it looks like a pretty bad move, especially something like the destruction of civilization, which I think it appears to be the case that almost everybody wants to prevent that.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. We could be at least that charitable. This might be a hard question, but are there any other media outlets, or what would be another media outlet that you’d be most excited about starting another kind of effective altruism inspired vertical, or section I suppose, as normal people call it?

Kelsey Piper: Again, I think that depends so much on the internal support for the division and who gets to work there. I think, obviously, the outlet and the platform matters, but almost more important to that I think is what sort of direction they’re getting, and who they are, and how much background they have in covering these issues, who they know to talk to. I think even the best reporter in the world is going to have a hard time with accurate coverage of a beat they just don’t have any exposure to in the past, and I think even the best reporter in the world is going to end up sort of sidelined into the things that their editors understand, if their editors aren’t coming at it from a perspective of really being willing to step outside their comfort zone and do something new, so I feel like lucky that Vox had editors Ezra and Dylan. I feel like that’s pretty key to Future Perfect’s being able to do what it’s doing, and I’m sure there are more Ezras and Dylans out there, but I don’t know where.

The fidelity model of spreading ideas

Robert Wiblin: So, an idea that’s become popular in the effective altruism community over the years is that in order to impact, we really want to present our views in a very sophisticated version, and to get people to really understand them on a deep level, and that there’s been experience that when they get simplified in order to get promoted, very often so much of the subtly is lost, that people can’t meaningfully act on it, that they just get kind of this garbled version of it. I think there’s a [inaudible 01:17:09] say that the Center for Effective Altruism put out the fidelity model of spreading ideas, which kind of makes this case that we really want to find mediums like long form podcasting where people can really actually grapple with the idea. I guess, yeah, do you worry it’s possible that the articles of the length that Future Perfect puts out just might not be quite in depth enough for people to fully kind of grock effective altruism?

Kelsey Piper: I think yeah. There’s very few complicated ideas where reading one 2,000 word article about it is going to stick with you as a significant change in your understanding of the world. I think what it can do is maybe get you interested enough to read more, and over time there can be lots of articles that maybe reading all of them can be a little bit more compelling, but yeah, it seems absolutely true to me that you can’t expect your case for impact to be we wrote this article, tons of people read it, they changed their minds and got a more productive understanding of things.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess you think as a package, if they read many of these articles, then maybe they’ll become more informed and more able to achieve good in their life.

Kelsey Piper: I think that people can click through and interact with other content and find the in depth explanations and find the experts, and hopefully the people who are gripped by the initial idea are willing to sort of take those follow up steps.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, what would happen if you are someone else went into Future Perfect and said, “I think it would be good if we wrote half as many articles, but that they were twice as long.” So they went into an unusual depth on the topics. Would that be something that Vox would be excited about?

Kelsey Piper: I think Vox believes pretty strongly that having content go up frequently is pretty essential to engagement, and that telling lots of stories is an important part of telling the most compelling stories, and the stories that change minds. I think it’s not really structured … Longer would be fine, but longer at the expense of getting lots of ideas out there every week, I think isn’t sort of what Vox has experienced is the best model for what they do and sort of what they know how to make succeed.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I guess if you want the really unusual depth then you go and read the citations, read the papers that you’re writing about potentially.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, absolutely. We do have some long form content. My AI article is more than 5,000 words, which is as long as I wanted it to be. If I wanted 8,000 words, I could’ve done that for that piece, but that didn’t seem like it would add understanding at that point.

How could listeners ameliorate concerns they may have about Future Perfect?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, is there anything that listeners could do to, I guess, help with the project, or potentially ameliorate any concerns that they have about Future Perfect and its strengths and weaknesses?

Kelsey Piper: I do think people should talk to me. There was a discussion on the EA forum recently where people were airing a lot of sort of confusion about what Vox was doing, and what Future Perfect was doing, and how Future Perfect saw itself as relating to the EA community, and why there were articles on Future Perfect that were about causes that aren’t EA priorities, which is because Future Perfect is also interested in applying some of the same questions and approaches to other topics, and why Future Perfect covers politics when EA has some good reasons to not be involved in politics, which is that Future Perfect is not doing that branding, and is interested in applying some of the same tools and frameworks to political questions. I did get the sense that if people wanted to reach out and say, “Hey, why’s Future Perfect doing this?” Then I could just be like, “Oh, yeah, this is what’s going on.” And people should feel free to do that.

Kelsey Piper: Also, there was somebody was saying we don’t know, for example, whether the Rockefeller Foundation is paying per article, and I would be happy to answer that. Nope, it’s a grant for the year. We don’t know whether they have page view requirements. I’m happy to answer that. No, we don’t have page view requirements, so yeah. I think people can be a little bit more wiling to ask questions if they have concerns, and hopefully at least have concerns that are sort of grounded in a clearer picture of what the incentives are.

How should non-professionals communicate EA ideas?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, have you kind of got any advice for other people who are trying to communicate EA ideas, like as amateurs rather than professionals? Things that you’ve learned from trying to get people to really understand effective altruism over the years?

Kelsey Piper: I’ve touched on this a bit before, but I think people find effective altruism most compelling when it is answering a question that they have an answer to, and that’s something we sometimes fail at as a community, because for example, I think most effective altruists about like education in the US are kind of like the answer to education in the US is that it’s not a good place to spend money on at this time. But I think when you can, demonstrating how the effective altruist approach gives useful answers on a question that people already care about is a good way to make them care about it as an approach, and therefore care about the answers it gives to other questions.

Kelsey Piper: So without saying anything about what resources should go on the margin, I think it’s often very compelling to say like, “Hey, you’re interested in getting this one particular apartment building at the end of your block approved. You’re interested in homeless shelters in your community.” Or something. Here’s sort of how I would approach that question. I would look at where our money can have the biggest impact. I would look at successful other projects. I would look at what resources seem to be the limiting resources in making this happen. I would do a cost effectiveness estimate. This is the answers I get. This is the guide I would give. And I think when you do that, people are interested in your approach, and are much more likely to care about what answers you get when you ask what’s the best thing to do in the world to compared to it doesn’t seem to have any applications to things that are already important.

Robert Wiblin: Do you get any pushback from people who are like, “Ah, this is so preachy. This is so demanding. This is so moralizing. This is frustrating to me.” I know that’s one thing that EA ideas, one way that they can rub people the wrong way.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. I think part of the problem there is that people need lots of different things. Like there are people who genuinely benefit from an ethical system that says yes, this is demanding, doing the right thing in the world we live in is actually very hard, and it’s going to ask a lot of you, but it’s important. It will have a lot of returns, and there is supports to help you succeed while you’re doing this very demanding thing. I think there are people to whom that’s really compelling, and then there are people for whom that’s really depressing and overwhelming and they bounce off it, and they feel guilty and scared. And there are people for whom it’s much better to say you don’t have obligations, and it’s not reasonable to ask things of people, but if you could do this little thing, that would make things a lot better. Then there are people for whom that message doesn’t resonate and feels dishonest in some ways.

Kelsey Piper: I think you basically can’t pitch effective altruism to everybody, and I think most people have a comparative advantage at pitching effective altruism to people who are going to find it compelling for reasons sort of like theirs. That doesn’t mean you should just write articles that would’ve convinced a past you, but it does mean that if you’re religious, you’re going to do better at explaining religion to effective altruists than if somebody who’s not religious tries to do that. If you’re coming at it as an environmentalist who really wants to work on climate change, but has maybe decided that’s not the thing to do, then lean into that and talk with other people who care about climate change about effective altruism and about climate change and stuff like that. If you’re here from the animal community, then think about what effective altruism can bring the animal community, and try and bring that as many places as you can.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I think it’s important to kind of bring people on the journey with you sometimes.

Kelsey Piper: Yes.

Robert Wiblin: There could be a temptation to jump to final conclusions that are like 10 steps ahead of what someone currently knows about and just bludgeon them over the head with something that … it would make no sense for them to agree or to understand, because you haven’t actually justified it. There could be many steps in the justification, and also I guess just to be like … to not show the same level of curiosity about their interests that you expect them to have about your views.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I think those are definitely all errors I see. These days when I try and talk with people about effective altruism, I think I pretty much just say, “Making the world better is really important to me. I’ve gone a lot of weird places in trying to figure out the answer to the question what are the most important problems today, and I think that if you also get in the habit of asking what are the important problems, you will be able to do more.” But that’s not the right message for everybody. There’s not a right message for everybody.

Ideas to promote high-quality journalism

Robert Wiblin: So, we raised some of these concerns about journalism as a business model, and the incentives aren’t great, like the money’s not there necessarily to do the best work. Do you have any ideas, I suppose? You’ve only been working at Vox a couple months, but do you have any ideas of like are there business models that we could that would fund high quality journalism on a larger scale, and maybe also just get it out to more people, and as much as those articles are being written, but aren’t getting promoted sufficiently?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I do think there is a lot of high quality journalism, and I think finding authors who you observe consistently doing high quality journalism, and recommending them to your friends, and I think it would be great if a lot more people had a list. Like a lot of people have a list of blogs that they read. I think similarly it’s often valuable to have a list of specific journalists you read that your friends can then click through and sort of see the perspectives that are informing yours. I’d be excited about people doing more of that.

Kelsey Piper: On a bigger scale, grant funded journalism is somewhat promising. Obviously, Future Perfect is funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, but also there’s been efforts to fund journalism that does more investigation. Some of the looking for corruption in public good work.

Robert Wiblin: ProPublica famously kind of follows that model.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a promising model if you think there’s a lot of work that does a lot of public good and can’t necessarily support itself with subscriptions or ad sales.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so one approach is to write sophisticated content and then find a way to brand it. That gets more attention, so you get more clicks and you can cover the cost that way. I think there is a lot of promise in using foundations, using charitable donations to fund investigative journalism now that kind of the cross subsidy with the newspapers has kind of broken down, but it’s just the total amount of charitable donations as a fraction of the economy is just isn’t so large, and obviously only like perhaps ever a few percent of all charitable donations are going to go to journalism or that kind of political research. I imagine at the moment it’s a much smaller than that, so even if it grew, it’s never going to be as much money as newspapers used to get through subscriptions. I suppose I have no answer to this. I don’t know what the way out is, but yeah, are there any other options that I guess that you’ve heard people ever talk about?

Kelsey Piper: I think it’s going to be difficult for a while. I don’t think journalism is going to go entirely extinct or anything, but I think it’s going to be a low margin, low barrier to entry people who are trying to do something better are in a difficult position with respect to people who figured out something cheaper industry for a while, and then maybe eventually we get UBI. I think there’s lots of people who if they could afford to pay their rent would delightedly report just for the sake of getting stories out there, but yeah, we’re in utopian territory by then.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Well, it’s a shame you haven’t been able to solve the entire issues of journalism [inaudible 01:28:16].

Kelsey Piper: Give me six months at the job.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so I think you made an interesting point earlier that even though there is like a lot of bad articles, fairly low quality articles in your hot takes of the day style writing out there, it is just true that there’s far more amazing journalism out there than any of us possibly has the time to read, so maybe I’m thinking about this slightly wrong when I’m thinking how do we get more good journalism. It seems maybe what I want to do is discourage people, somehow stop them from reading the bad stuff, which are the kind of candyfloss journalism that everyone, including me, is very drawn to reading on a day-to-day basis, just because it’s so much easier. Yeah, is there anything that could be done to just, yeah, just discourage that?

Kelsey Piper: Subscribe to good newsletters, subscribe to good aggregators. Maybe take the aggregator apps off your phone that will tend to show you what most people are reading, and it’ll be whatever’s the most exciting story of the moment. I think I know a lot of people who’ve benefited from reading once a week about what happened that week instead of reading every day about what’s happening that day. I think there are definitely ways as an individual to make sure you’re reading bigger picture stuff that you care about instead of day-to-day stuff that you mostly don’t care about.

The case for taking AI seriously

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so one of the articles that you wrote, which I thought was one of the best you’ve done so far, was that the case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity. Do you just want to explain kind of what you did in that article and how it came about?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, so that one was one that was really satisfying to write and really felt like something I valued Future Perfect having and appreciated sort of being able to write. I got several weeks for it and we did several weeks more revising it. The Visuals team did the great artwork for it.

Kelsey Piper: It basically explains why many people, including many researchers in the field, believe that AI is an existential risk and believe that mitigating work, like figuring out how to design AI safety, should start happening now.

Kelsey Piper: My editor did a lot with this piece. He started by just writing like 10 questions he had about the AI risk thing. That meant it was very grounded in, “You’re a smart person who’s heard that EAs care about AI risk, but that’s all you’ve heard necessarily. You have a bunch of obvious questions like, ‘Well, couldn’t we turn the AI off? Like, can AI really get that smart? What would it even do?'”

Kelsey Piper: I feel like that made it a much easier piece for me to write because I was just, “These are reasonable questions that reasonable people are going to have,” and trying to sort of give an answer.

Robert Wiblin: I guess, yeah, this view that artificial intelligence or like very advanced artificial intelligence could pose a big risk. Regular listeners are going to have heard several episodes about this kind of idea before and be familiar with it.

Robert Wiblin: It’s an idea that’s become, I think, like very widespread and like pretty widely accepted now. It kind of used to be a bit more controversial, a bit more of a contrarian position.

Robert Wiblin: I suppose, part of the goal with this article would have been to like take people who are kind of skeptical, who have heard, maybe, an unconvincing version of it or who, for whatever reason, just like have a prior that this is unlikely to be the case, and kind of walk them through the reasons why you think it is a real issue. What stuff did you do to design the article in such a way that it would be persuasive to people?

Kelsey Piper: I think one thing I tried to do is, an objection I hear a lot is, “This sounds like lot of people in Silicon Valley who decided that Silicon Valley is going to save or destroy the world.” I don’t think that’s a very accurate picture of the AI risk landscape. In-particular both, of course, since early in computing, people working in computing were observing that this seems like something that will happen eventually, even if we couldn’t predict when.

Kelsey Piper: Secondly, lots of the people working on AI risk are researchers in universities, not in Silicon Valley. If you look at polls, actually people in Silicon Valley are more likely to be, AI is not a risk than the general public.

Kelsey Piper: One thing I wanted to do was sort of emphasize all of the perspectives that lead you to, “AI risk is a problem,” and hopefully move the conversation beyond, “People in Silicon Valley think that they’re going to kill us.”

Kelsey Piper: Then I think another thing that I ended up coming to during the course of the piece was feeling like, especially since some people now think advanced AI might be developed with building on existing reinforcement learning and machine learning techniques. That meant that a lot of the conversations that I think are very widely happening now about bias, about algorithm transparency, instead of being a distraction from AI felt like part of the same big picture.

Kelsey Piper: Like right now, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm and it doesn’t do what we expect. This has hilarious results if it’s a game playing AI that hacks the game and gives itself a high score. Troubling results if it’s predicting whether people should be paroled AI, that has racially disparate outcomes in violation of U.S. law. Saying, “All right, well, what if those systems were a lot more powerful and what if the scope of their operations was significantly bigger?” That looks pretty bad, right?

Kelsey Piper: I think to lots of people for whom the argument for hard takeoff is complicated or sketchy, just the simple, “We’re using these techniques. These techniques have some very visible failure modes. Scaling them up will mean scaling up the failure modes.” That was something that I think, Dylan found compelling and hadn’t seen before.

Kelsey Piper: That was something that I think a lot of people have an intuition for, which then maybe makes it easier for them to visit the question of, “Okay, what if AI didn’t come from reinforcement learning? Okay, how quickly could we expect this to happen?” Some of the bigger questions that are important.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, there is this funny catch 22 that sometimes people will say, “Oh, I am not concerned about AI because the only people who are worried about it are kind of, are people who are part of this like Silicon Valley elite, who were working on the problem and have these like delusions of grandeur about how they’re going to affect the world in a really huge way,” so that’s their objection now.

Robert Wiblin: Then you might say, “Oh, no. Actually like they’re not especially more concerned about it than anyone else,” so it’s actually like the general public who’s worried about it. “Well, now I don’t believe it because now it’s only amateurs. Like uninformed people who aren’t close to the technology who don’t believe it.”

Robert Wiblin: It’s like, if it’s the experts who believe that it’s not reliable because they’re biased, and if it’s the general public, “It’s not reliable. Oh, I’m not going to trust them either because they’re not informed enough.” It kind of … It doesn’t seem like both could be right.

Kelsey Piper: This is something when I was writing up the study that found that people in Silicon Valley are less concerned with AI than the general public, I was sort of thinking about how to balance. Because I think my impression of the actual state of the field is that lots of people have seen troubling things with present AI. Some of those I do think are related to the challenges that we’re going to face in aligning advanced AI, some of them aren’t.

Kelsey Piper: Like people are also concerned about like whether self-driving cars will run down grandma. I’ve actually written about this for Vox too. That’s not the same sort of problem as AI safety. It would be misleading to sort of take advantage of people’s concern about that for AI safety conversations. I do think that transparency and interpretability and machine learning conversations are very related to the ones about advanced AI safety.

Kelsey Piper: Then, among experts, the perspectives I see tend to be either, “This is important, we should be working on it.” Or, “We are really far from AGI. We don’t know enough about what it’s going to look like for working on it to get us anywhere.” I think that’s very different than, “Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong.”

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I want people to have an accurate picture of the field there, but that involves kind of getting into the weeds about, “Why do some people think that this isn’t that far away? Why do some people think that it’s centuries out? How would we be able to tell what the world will look like 10 or 20 years before AGI?”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so I guess one thing that people worry about when promoting concern for risk from artificial intelligence and potentially like just all kinds of other risk from new technologies, is that it could encourage kind of competition to create AI more quickly. It can kind of create and arms race if people will start to think that this technology is going to be more important than they felt before.

Robert Wiblin: I suppose, to be honest, like Vox is a drop in the ocean of like this overall discussion of whether AI is going to give particular organizations or countries comparative advantages over others. I suppose, sometimes you might worry that raising alarm about things could be counterproductive for like that or other related reasons.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I think there’s definitely, that’s something that you have in mind when you’re writing a story. I think I try to write about AI in a way that makes it as un-sexy as possible, honestly.

Kelsey Piper: If we don’t know how to cause reinforcement learning systems to reliably do expected behavior and have some checks on unexpected behavior that are perfectly reliable, then when they are more powerful and the space they’re operating in is big, terrible things will happen. Not terrible things that benefit the creators, just things that were outside the space we were looking for it and can be catastrophic.

Kelsey Piper: I think people run into this problem a bit more if your perspective is, “This is the most powerful thing ever going to happen. This is the thing that’s going to end death and colonize the galaxy.” That’s part of why I don’t cover it that way, although I also, in part, don’t cover it that way because that’s not really a story I’m comfortable with writing.

Kelsey Piper: Like I don’t feel very confident in speculating about what advanced systems will let us do necessarily so I tend to focus on the case that if we’re not careful, they won’t benefit anybody, including the creators.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. When you’re writing an article like that, do you have like, do you spend a lot of time thinking about who exactly is the target audience? Do you have kind of particular people in mind who you try to write for?

Kelsey Piper: For that one, my editor, again, was super helpful with a big list of questions that he wanted answered. I think, in general, yeah, I’m writing for … The advice we got in training at Vox was, “Assume that your audience is smart but knows nothing about the topic.” Like, “Don’t underestimate their intelligence but don’t overestimate their background.”

Kelsey Piper: That generally feels pretty good to me because you need to start from the basics, but you can start from the basics with the assumption that you have a smart, informed audience that’s following along and thinking of good questions as you go. That can make for a good piece.

Robert Wiblin: Your colleague, Dylan, tweeted, I think that, I think effectively you or this article or maybe this whole general discussion, he’d been, I guess, somewhat skeptical that, yeah, AI did really pose a threat. To his credit though, he’d, I think, accurately represented at least part of the case in favor of worrying about it in his articles before, but he overall hadn’t been convinced.

Robert Wiblin: It sounds like you changed his mind. Did you guys just talk about it a whole lot in the office and then eventually, like once you presented the ideas in like full sophistication, he realized, “Oh, actually, yeah, maybe this does make sense”?

Kelsey Piper: I think the piece was part of it. I think he’d already sort of been thinking from the perspective that lots of things deserve some resources, and it’s a question of, “What are the most important priorities for the world right now?”

Kelsey Piper: If you’re from the perspective that, “Yep, AI could happen and serve some resources,” then all that really needs to happen is a clearer picture of what the worry is and why resources are useful now. I think there’s probably never as much distance as some of the public skepticism might have implied.

Kelsey Piper: I think, yeah, having a clear articulation of the argument that didn’t rely too much on some of the more esoteric assumptions. I think hard takeoff scenarios are quite likely, but I think that the case for AI safety work doesn’t rest on them, so it’s good to have some cases out there that don’t necessarily assume that, or make it a central feature of the argument, or sort of treat it as, “If you’re not convinced by hard takeoff, you have nothing to worry about here.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I think I’ve become less convinced about the hard takeoff scenarios, but I think that more just changes like how you’d go about things rather than like whether you’re worried or think that there’s a lot of potential leverage by working on that issue.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess Dylan might’ve only changed his mind in like kind of subtle ways, but I guess publicly, it seemed like he had changed his mind quite a bit. I think it can be really hard to say, “Oh, well, I think, actually I’ve changed my mind on this issue, where previously I was a skeptic, and I now kind of buy into it.”

Robert Wiblin: I think it’s like super credible that he was willing to do that. I guess it’s a good sign that he’s like a very intellectually honest and curious and open-minded colleague.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. I really like working with Dylan. He’s going to watch this and then it’s going to be awkward. He’s a great person, super encouraging and helpful and very much someone who’s doing this because he cares about the stuff we’re reporting on and making the world a better place, which I feel like is a key ingredient for something like Future Perfect. You have to be there because you think figuring out what to do is both hard and important.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so to what extent do you think kind of educating the public about global catastrophic risk, because as you’re doing, really helps to reduce them? I know there’s some people who think, “Well, yeah. We could make more voters, general, worried about threats from artificial intelligence or all kinds of other technologies,” but then how does that really cash out into lowering those risks? The kind of causal pathways, isn’t super clear.

Kelsey Piper: I think there’s a couple things. One is if you’re a smart, young person and studying or a smart, established person in your career and you see the argument for AI risk and you think, “That’s what I should be doing, I want to do that.”

Kelsey Piper: Are the people around you going, “Oh, yeah. I heard about that. That’s important. I’m glad you’re working on it,” the way I think they would react if you said, “I’m going to work on making organ donations safer, or the way I’m going to work on reducing crime or like improving outcomes in policy.”

Kelsey Piper: Or are people going to be like, “That weird Silicon Valley, apocalypse cult thing.” That matters. I think to a lot of people, that matters. I think all of this is very hard to quantify, but I think if the general Vox reading, smart, wanting the world better, maybe not super informed about AI in-particular, but broadly sympathetic to efforts to handle technology safely. If they’ve heard the case for AI risk and they have this general sense, “Yes, that’s something some people should be working on,” then I think that’s good.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t know how much gains there are beyond that point. Do we get much from coverage of the differences between slow takeoff and fast takeoff scenarios? Do we get very much from differences in approach between, for example, the team at OpenAI and the team at MIRI? I don’t know.

Kelsey Piper: I’m looking for hooks for those articles, honestly. I’d be excited if it seems like there’s a way of telling those stories that people find compelling. Most of the impact I see is that if people are thinking about working on AI, it seems good for the people around them to be aware, “Yeah. That’s something important that we need some people working on it.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I guess writing more complicated or more technical content might attract like more informed and like smarter readers. That might be one benefit there.

Kelsey Piper: I think it’s definitely worth our while to publish articles that people who are in the field are excited about and feel like teach them things. AI is somewhere where I might be equipped to do that, because at this point, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of some of the technical concerns that the safety teams at various top organizations are working on.

Kelsey Piper: I think Vox does want most of its content, if not all of its content, to be something that a smart person with no background in the area can sort of get into and follow along. I think we’re always going to be walking that balance where we want articles to be informative, even to people in the field and certainly reading as consistently accurate to people in the field. We still want every one of our readers to sort of be able to follow along.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. How do you balance the incentives to want to create something that will get a lot of hits right away because it’s, say, topical, versus trying to create an evergreen piece that has good search engine optimization and relevant keywords and might continue getting visitors for years?

Kelsey Piper: I think Vox likes evergreen content. There’s a lot of focus on creating things that’ll last. Also, often you can use a news hook and then have most of the story be something that’s longer-term. Like it’s not just about the news, it’s about the context the news fits into and it’s therefore a piece that has a lot of reread value, and that’s definitely the sort of best outcome.

Kelsey Piper: In general, I think I’ll try, of the three pitches I send to my editor, to have like one be a topical news thing, one or two. Then one or two be a just generic big question that I would like Vox to have an answer covering.

16 Big Predictions About 2019

Robert Wiblin: Another article that you wrote recently with Dylan Matthews that I really liked was another one showing kind of the willingness to be open-minded and like more concrete, and try to just improve how people think about issues in journalism was, 16 Big Predictions About 2019, From Trump’s Impeachment to the Rise of AI. Yeah. Do you want to explain what went on in that article and how it came about?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. I think a lot of people have expressed that it would be really valuable for more punditry and more policy in general to involve specific numerical predictions about outcomes. That’s just because it’s the best form of accountability. It’s very easy to say, “2019, Trump will be a disappointment.” Or, “In 2019, Trump will get some big victories.” Like predictions like that are almost definitely going to come true.

Kelsey Piper: Being specific, giving numerical values lets people sort of tell whether you’re actually someone worth listening to. Whether when you say something is very likely, you’re right. I think Nate Silver won a lot of credibility by doing this in the specific area of election forecasting. He said how likely each outcome state-by-state and then Senate races and House races was.

Kelsey Piper: He’s very well-calibrated. When he says something is 60% likely to happen, it tends to happen 60% of the time. That just means that when it comes to election forecasts, you can expect that Nate Silver is accurately representing his uncertainty in what’s going on.

Kelsey Piper: I think that gives him a credibility that most topics that are less concrete than that don’t have, and that most pundits in any field don’t have. It would be really cool for it to be more widespread, the practice of putting numbers on things and then revisiting, “Where were you right? Where were you wrong?” That’s what we’re trying to do. I think it’s probably going to be very challenging, because it was our first year of doing it. I expect that we got some stuff quite wrong, because this is the-

Robert Wiblin: Forecasting is hard.

Kelsey Piper: Forecasting is really hard, and practice seems to make a big difference in improving at it. I don’t necessarily expect these predictions to make us come out looking particularly good, but I think it’s still really important to do this if you want to set that standard for journalists in general. If you want people to take your predictions about the future seriously, you need to start saying, “Here’s how seriously you should take me. Here’s how good I am at this.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. We have an episode with Philip Tetlock where we go into this whole forecasting issue and the question of like why pundits don’t make concrete forecasts, in more detail. It seems like the key reason is that people don’t want to be called out on being completely wrong.

Robert Wiblin: You were saying something like, “Donald Trump will be a disappointment,” is kind of well, obviously, that would be true, but is it even necessary? Because a disappointment relative to what? That kind of claim is so vague that you would never even know if it was true at the end of the year.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. I think that’s very fair. It’s a claim where the person who made it will definitely, at the end of the year, be able to make the case that they were right, which is different than it actually being true.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Do you want to go through some of the predictions that you made and kind of how you arrived at your confidence level?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, absolutely. We looked at some politics topics. Who is going to be the Democratic nominee? Whether Trump is even going to stay in office. Whether the U.S. would enter a recession. I made that one. I said an 80% chance that we wouldn’t enter a recession, which was just looking at the odds in any given year of entering a recession. Then adjusting up a little bit because it’s been a while since the last recession. There’s some instability and scary stuff happening.

Kelsey Piper: Then right after I made this prediction, the government shutdown dragged on longer than a government shutdown ever has, which did a lot of damage to the economy, and was looking like it might single handedly cause a recession if it kept up for a while. I was like, “Oh, no. Oh, no. I predicted there wouldn’t be a recession. There can’t be a recession now.”

Kelsey Piper: It was amazing how motivated I felt by the fact I’d made this prediction in public instead of by all of the immense human suffering that would be caused.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. We got to keep our priorities straight. Yeah. “Millions will suffer, but at least I will have been right.”

Kelsey Piper: My 80% is looking pretty good right now. The January jobs numbers looked great.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I think, yeah, I think 80% still looks pretty right. What was another one you did here? I guess an 80% likelihood that U.S. homicides will decline this year relative to last?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. That was one where my own prediction ended up surprising me. A tactic that Tetlock recommends is reference class forecasting, which is if you don’t have a good answer to a question, you just figure out what the general category of the question is and what the answer would be.

Kelsey Piper: For, “Will homicide rates decline?” I asked, “What if I’d asked this question in 2000? What if I’d asked it in 2001? What if I’d asked it in 2002?” It turns out that if you predicted homicides would decline, you would only be wrong four years out of the last 20 years. Every other year, homicides declined.

Kelsey Piper: There are some reasons to think maybe that trend is flattening out. There are some reasons to think that since 2018 was a rise, maybe we should expect regression to the mean. There’s lots of reasons to not be sure that that’s the right approach. I tend to believe that people step away from the reference class a little too readily.

Kelsey Piper: Like if homicide rates declined all but four years of the last 20, including some years when you might think, “Oh, it’s a recession that’s going drive crime up. Oh, there’s other stuff going on that’s going to drive crime up.” Then I think you should trust the outside view a little bit more, so I ended up standing behind the 80%.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Interestingly, crime and the economy are incredibly unrelated. Also, interestingly, the Federal Reserve thinks that the amount of time since the last recession isn’t that related to whether, to the likelihood of having another one in a given year. At least that’s what they said a few years ago. Maybe they’ve changed their mind, but yeah.

Robert Wiblin: I think, yeah, absolutely. Starting with the reference class and like you went pretty close to that, is definitely the right approach in most of these cases.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. We’ll see whether that approach is born out because I also used it in predicting whether global carbon emissions would rise, and in predicting a couple of other things. Whether more animals would be killed for human consumption.

Kelsey Piper: Then one prediction of mine that I wasn’t very sure of, I think has already happened. DeepMind every couple of years … DeepMind is Google’s sister company. They’re both part of Alphabet that does AI stuff. They released AlphaGo and AlphaZero, which was amazingly good at to two player perfect information games.

Kelsey Piper: Last year, they released AlphaFold, which is big deal in protein folding but didn’t reflect any particular advances in machine learning per se. Then just now, they released a StarCraft playing game, which reflects a big improvement over all previous efforts to win imperfect information, complex, real time strategy games, which just are very hard. OpenAI also works on this.

Kelsey Piper: I was pretty excited to see that from them. Even if nothing else happens, I’m going to consider that something within the benchmark I was trying to outline. I had a very hard time describing that prediction precisely enough, because it’s hard to characterize what of their many regular releases is like a big advance on an interesting problem that we hadn’t seen progress on before.

Kelsey Piper: Then, do you count if it’s a big advance but doesn’t seem to use very novel techniques? How important is that? I think AlphaStar, the StarCraft playing game, is a less of a big step forward then say AlphaGo or AlphaZero were, but it’s still enough to make me say, “Yep. That’s the sort of impressive progress on new domains and new problems that you’d expect to see if AI capabilities are continuing to increase.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so you guessed 50% on that. I guess you break even on that, either way.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: You can have a strong horse in the race.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I wanted to go for a more uncertain number, but sometimes you think something has a 50% chance of happening, and it’s still worth making the prediction because if your 50% predictions are right half the time, then that’s a good thing to know.

Kelsey Piper: Like Scott Alexander does these predictions and he said that his 50% predictions were only right 30% of the time. Which is also a good thing to know about yourself, that when it feels 50-50, you probably have a favorite even if you don’t know it.

Robert Wiblin: I guess another one was, yeah, “Fully autonomous, self-driving cars will not be commercially available as taxis off-sale,” and 90% likely.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I am pretty pessimistic. This was one where I didn’t do reference class forecasting. I’ve just been falling self-driving cars and I’m like, Google is generally agreed to be the leader here. They have the most miles driven. They have the most resources. They don’t have any embarrassing accidents that have already happened.

Kelsey Piper: They still seem to be having a really bad time in Arizona, where there’s no weather and no complications, of coming up with a viable Uber-like service that uses autonomous vehicles. That’s not for reasons that seem like they’ll change this year. Like it’s not a shortage of engineer hours, although you can probably eventually patch some of the problem was by pouring enough engineer hours at them.

Kelsey Piper: It just kind of seems like our current techniques that are seeing all these gains aren’t that helpful for self-driving cars, and so it continues to be a really hard problem.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess, are you worried that in a year’s time, people will criticize you a whole lot?

Kelsey Piper: I worry about all these predictions. Whenever things happen, I’m like, “Oh, no. What if my predictions are wrong?” I think when I am taking a step back from it, I want people to know how accurate I am as a pundit because I want them to have a better understanding of the world, and that includes an understanding of how accurate I am.

Kelsey Piper: If the results come back in a year, then I’m not very accurate, then people should know that and they should read my articles with that in mind, because that’s part of them having an accurate understanding of the world. Of course, I want to be accurate but not checking is very much not the way to handle that. I do think we’ll get better with time.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. There can be a temptation to give people a hard time when their forecasts are wrong or they make bets about issues and then they’re wrong. I think in a world where most people aren’t doing that, making a bad forecast and losing a bet is actually like way better than not having done it in the first place, so even the loses are winners, to me, in this situation.

Kelsey Piper: I do think, in general, the response has been very supportive with people saying they’re excited to see this and that they commend it. That definitely helps with keeping it happening.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Do you think it’s possible to create kind of a competition between different news outlets that don’t necessarily like one another very much of who can make more accurate forecasts? You could have like Vox versus the National Review journalists. Like each making predictions about what will happen that year, and then at the end, like gloating about winning.

Kelsey Piper: It would take a fair bit of time to set up, but I think it would be great to do some sort of cross-outlet thing like this. I know some other people are interested in it. Maybe if this does well for Vox this year, we’ll have a little bit more leverage to convince everybody else to jump on.

Robert Wiblin: It seems like that could drive a lot of clicks. Even if you’re the losing side, or even if, yeah, your journalists are more wrong. Like the competition itself would be very amusing to people.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah. I would be excited about that story.

Things to improve at Vox?

Robert Wiblin: Maybe this is a difficult question but we’ve spoken a lot about things that are good about Vox. What are the things that, perhaps, you like least about it as a publication?

Kelsey Piper: Man, I guess I have to answer that so it doesn’t just sound to our listeners like I came here to talk about how great everything is.

Kelsey Piper: I really wish that it was possible to have more people looking at pieces and more people doing fact checking. I think when I do it myself there’s some things that I’m going to be good at catching, but there are some things that I’m just coming at it from the wrong perspective. And I think I would write better articles if I had that.

Kelsey Piper: I think politics is absolutely part of what Future Perfect is about, because it’s part of how to do good in the world. And there are reasons for EA to not be about that, but they mostly don’t apply to Future Perfect. But sometimes we write politics articles that make my friends who are moderately familiar with U.S. politics be like, “Man, I feel like I’m being sold a side of a story.” I definitely want to avoid that. I want people to feel like they’re not being sold a side. They’re being sold a complete picture.

Kelsey Piper: I think the age of Trump has been very bad for media in that he continually does things that are very annoying and upsetting and not that important, but important enough that it merits coverage. And that means that if you’re a journalist you spend almost all of your time saturated in like, “The president said this blatantly false thing; the president did this unprecedented and rude thing.” And that just creates this environment of exhaustion with the whole situation, which doesn’t seem conducive to necessarily helping people figure out what the most important stories are.

Kelsey Piper: I think the state of media in general is bad for journalists. I think if you don’t really see how you have a viable career in your field, because it’s not clear your field is going to continue to exist, that’s upsetting for anybody. Maybe we’re better at empathizing when it’s people we agree with, but on all sides of the aisle it’s hard to do a good job of a job that doesn’t have a clear business model, and is subject to bad incentives all around, and is pretty frustrating.

Kelsey Piper: Twitter seems very bad for that in that it exposes you to mostly a lot of angry jerks and I think makes people too easily react against angry jerks.

Taxing billionaires

Kelsey Piper: I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a bad thing about Vox, but it’s certainly a place where I notice my views diverging from my colleagues a fair bit is: there’s a big conversation right now about billionaires and philanthropy. I think several Future Perfect articles have touched on this, and other media articles have covered this as well, asking what is the place of people who are in a position to throw $20 billion at a problem compared to the situation where we have higher taxes, and we tax people and we use that money as a society, we vote about how to use it to solve problems. I think most of the people in Future Perfect lean towards the perspective that that would be much better, if we tax the money and spent it on problems.

Kelsey Piper: This is largely a question of which problems you care about and whether you can imagine Congress ever spending meaningful amounts of money on them. If you care about U.S. poverty or U.S. healthcare, or maybe even to some extent international aid, then maybe the government having more money that could be democratically spent on those priorities is good.

Kelsey Piper: If you think some of the most important problems out there are like factory farming, something where the government’s just never going to do much, or if you think that the government is actively working against your interests … I know a lot of sex workers who just wouldn’t be happy about the government having more resources with which to pursue the policies it thinks are correct because it thinks those policies are terrible. Or if you’re worried about the far future and you don’t think that U.S. government work on AI risk is necessarily that helpful since it could contribute to an arms race in a way that private research doesn’t, then I think you have a lot more reservations about the, “Let’s just do this through taxes” thing, because a lot of the things you think are important won’t happen through taxes. If they don’t happen through private charity, they won’t happen at all.

Kelsey Piper: I think I care a lot about various issues that will never happen through taxes, and that makes me more protective of billionaires, maybe, than the typical member of my team. Not billionaires in particular, I do think if you’re a billionaire you have a moral obligation to give away almost all of your money. But I also think that the world where the billionaires are spending it on their priorities is a world where my priorities have a lot more resources than if it’s all taxes and it’s Congress deciding where the money goes, because they’re just never going to care about many things that I think are important.

Robert Wiblin: I’ve read a lot of articles about that, and been thinking about it, and have made some commentary about it on Twitter. I don’t know where I land ultimately. Wouldn’t it be great to transfer the money away from the billionaires and spend it through the government? I haven’t read any article that I feel nails that topic, that deals with it the way that I would, looking at what exactly … What do billionaires actually spend the money on? What would the government actually spend the money on if it raised taxes? What is the actual switch here?

Robert Wiblin: People seem to have very strong views without having a very strong empirical grounding or knowing exactly what the ultimate change would be. And because that’s so hard to know I think there’s a temptation to make the decision for other reasons, like based on what seems just or what seems fair, that kind of thing, which I suppose does matter. But I think it matters less to me than it perhaps does to other people.

Kelsey Piper: I’m certainly not willing to lose Gates’s work on malaria which has saved millions of lives for a fairer distribution that doesn’t save millions of lives.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I would also be interested in that article. Maybe I can write it. It’s very hard to write. The question of, “What does the government do with marginal money?” is just such a hard question. I keep stabbing at understanding what the government does with money on the margin, and then backing away because it’s deeply unclear. So that makes it hard to write an article about because at some point your article is just like, “Unfortunately we don’t actually know much about the marginal effect of the government having your money. We don’t even know the sign.”

Robert Wiblin: I think it would be interesting for someone to at least lay out what is the equation that should determine that, even if they don’t know what the numbers are in there. I suppose that would be a step forward even if it would lead people to agnosticism. But I suppose agnosticism doesn’t make for great clickbait.

Kelsey Piper: I could try writing it. I could see what the story there is.

Robert Wiblin: There is this funny paradox. I think the people who currently think that the U.S. government is terribly run and has bad priorities and isn’t taking on the most important issues often seem to be in favor of raising taxes more. I think you can make this coherent, but there’s definitely a strange tension there.

Kelsey Piper: I have also noticed that tension and it also seems a little strange to me. If we raise the money from the billionaires and spend it on the border wall, does anybody who supports raising the money from the billionaires feel enthusiastic about that?

Kelsey Piper: But I think fundamentally the forces that seem to be going on here are that inequality is fairly high compared to most of what people remember, and most of what their parents remember, of their lives. That creates a lot of frustration. Right now a lot of that frustration is being channeled at higher minimum wages and higher taxes, like address the inequality.

Kelsey Piper: And if the ways we address the inequality also make the world a better place then that would be a bonus. But I think on a lot of levels this is a response to frustration about inequality, rather than like-

Robert Wiblin: Working backwards from, “Here’s what I think the government would spend it on, therefore we should raise taxes.”

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Wiblin: I’m very sympathetic to that consideration. I think it should be given some weight. But it’s a very complex policy question. It’s understandable if it’s very hard for anyone to really get to grips with it. I’ve thought about it much. I’ve got no idea, really, where I land.

Kelsey Piper: I also feel like, for me, I’m very much biased by … Most of the billionaires I’ve known as friends of friends, or spent any time paying attention to, have been the ones who are adjacent to the effective altruist movement; or, generally speaking, deeply interested in UBI for making the world better for most people here in general; and then spending their own fortunes to do as much as they can on the sort of problems that they’re more equipped to tackle.

Kelsey Piper: If you look, in my mind, at the prototypical billionaire, it’s like Dustin or Cari who I think are some of the most incredible people alive, or it’s Bill Gates who’s saved millions of lives. That’s superhero territory. And I think for a lot of people that’s not the prototypical billionaire at all. But I think that’s a bias I have. I’m thinking of people who are doing a ton of good with their money. I’m not sure I’m willing to give that up. Or at least giving that up is very salient to me as a trade-off in a way I think it isn’t to everybody.

Downsides and upsides of the job?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, all right yeah. Returning to the personal level, what are the main stresses of the job? What are downsides that people should be aware of?

Kelsey Piper: Hmm. So I used to hate phone calls. I’ve mostly gotten over that. But-

Robert Wiblin: I was terrified of phone calls when I first got an actual job and had to call people. I was like, Yes, I was like, sweating. But I went away after a few days.

Kelsey Piper: I think it would have been good for me to have a class in college or something that made me make 10 phone calls a day. Just get it over with. Learn that actually, you can do that. I think I frequently find it hard to when I’m reading a bunch of research and I have an overall impression of what’s going on. But I’m not that confident in it, figure out like okay what are the next hour of work on this that will like make me more confident that I’m getting the right impression here. Or pointed out to me if I’ve got the wrong impression here. That’s just always very scary because you don’t have a ton of time.

Kelsey Piper: You definitely want to make sure that you have the right impression of a field. Talking to people is very helpful but often, a lot of them have sort of their take on the field. Especially with all the recent understanding that we’re all coming to of how unreliable research can be and how often published studies just aren’t that good. You know, it can be very tricky to try and do a lit review and say, all right, this is my takeaway. How do I accurately represent to people how sure I am of this? I think that’s something I find hard.

Robert Wiblin: I find it quite depressing when people criticize 80,000 Hours’ work online. I guess, especially when it feels like they’ve misunderstood or they’re misrepresenting it. Have you had any experiences of that with people criticizing the articles? You know, this isn’t fair. That’s not what I was saying.

Kelsey Piper: When I wrote about the particle reactor, I basically said this costs a lot. We might have a complete standard model here. We might not find anything aside from measuring some parameters more accurately. The case that CERN is making for it is saying a lot about there’s so many undiscovered mysteries. Which is true, but it’s not clear that we’re going to solve those undiscovered mysteries with the bigger particle collider. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. It just means the cost-benefit conversation needs to be a little clearer about what the benefits are. There was an angry response in Slate a couple days later, that said Vox arguing shouldn’t build a bigger particle collider. Because particle colliders never discover anything. I was kind of like, Hey! I think that’s just kind of how it goes, you know?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, that’s the way of the world. It’s hard to grasp subtlety or it takes a lot of effort, potentially, and it makes it harder to write the response article, if you like, Well, actually, they had a very nuanced position Then it’s harder to be angry about it.

Kelsey Piper: Exactly.

Robert Wiblin: Yes. So, what have been any particular highlights? Are there things that are especially enjoyable? I guess you’re saying being having access to these experts who are willing to talk to you all the time 