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.

Before we get to today’s episode I just wanted to mention a few articles we’ve released lately.

I’ll put links to these in the show notes and blog post associated with this episode. If you want to skip this section jump ahead a minute or two.

Last week we launched a career review of working as a congressional staffer which covers the impact you might expect to have, various other pros and cons, and what are indicators that it’s a good personal fit. If you could see yourself pursuing a career in US politics you should check it out.

A few weeks ago I wrote up a summary of a randomised controlled trial that found people who were on the fence about whether to quit their jobs or make other changes to their lives. It then advised some of them to make the change, and others to stay the course. It found that in general people who changed their lives were happier six months later. The write-up goes into more detail and you should certainly read it before taking action on this basis.

You may have heard about a paper published 2 weeks ago reporting on the results of an effort to replicate 21 psychology papers published in the best journals, to figure out which effects were real and which weren’t. I made a quiz that describes the results of these 21 papers and invites you to guess whether that particular effect replicated or not.

It’s quite fun and so far 6,000 people have used it. We’re collecting data on what kinds of people have the most accurate guesses, which we’ll write up soon.

Finally, just yesterday we published a new and quite advanced article on whether or not it’s important to focus on finding your comparative advantage relative to other people in your professional community.

Alright, here’s Amanda.

Robert Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with Amanda Askell. Amanda recently completed a PhD in philosophy at NYU, one the world’s top philosophy grad schools with a thesis focused on Infinite Ethics. Before that, she did a BPhil at Oxford University, with her thesis being focused on objective epistemic consequentialism, quite a mouthful. She’s been involved in the effective activism community since its inception and blogs at rationalreflection.net.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Amanda.

Amanda Askell: Thank you for having me.

Robert Wiblin: So, we plan to talk a bunch about your philosophy research and I guess, your views on philosophy PhDs and academic careers in general. But first, you finished your PhD defense a couple of weeks ago, right?

Amanda Askell: Yeah, last week.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, yeah. How did you find the PhD experience? Is it six years you spent at NYU?

Amanda Askell: Six and a half years I think, altogether.

Robert Wiblin: I mean I’ve heard that PhDs in the US are pretty painful. Is that kind of your experience?

Amanda Askell: I think it depends on your disposition. In some ways I think I’m maybe not the perfect disposition for a PhD. You have to be able to focus on many things at once if you want to kind of get a lot out of the program, I think. I tend to be much more kind of singular in my thinking. And so, I find it a little bit hard to spread my research across multiple topics. Whereas in the US you start out kind of doing many topics and then eventually focusing in on the thesis.

Robert Wiblin: I thought the challenge that most people had was focusing in their PhD. Because they kind of want to graze intellectually, but then they have to spend potentially years just getting to the forefront of one particular topic.

Amanda Askell: I think it depends on the kind of person you are. So, some people have this kind of magical ability to do a PhD and at the same time produce many different kinds of research while they’re doing their thesis. And I think I always saw that and thought, “Oh, that’s what I want to do. I want to be the kind of person that just produces many things while I’m doing my PhD.” And then I found towards the end that it was like, actually, if I want to get this PhD finished and do the research, I have to really just focus on this one thing.

So some people have this ability to focus on multiple things. But I always don’t have a problem with just focusing in on single research topic. It’s just that I wish I could kind of multitask, in that way I seem unable to.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I think you seem like one of the most conscientious people I know. Is this a potential downside of that? I’m trying to find any justification for my lack of conscientiousness.

Amanda Askell: This feels surprising to me. Because I think I can be conscientious about work but this can also mean neglecting things in ways that other people don’t. So I can be very non-conscientious about emails for example-

Robert Wiblin: Yeah.

Amanda Askell: As a result of this. So I just trade off. I just take conscientiousness from one area and I like erase it and I apply this to some other area, like my research. So that’s how I work. I’m like I have a pool of conscientiousness. And I have lots of emails that I haven’t responded to.

Robert Wiblin: I think most of the philosophers I know seem … They really fit the philosopher’s stereotype of kind of a bit having their heads in the clouds. Perhaps like, quite bad at life admin. Filing their taxes and answering their emails and buying food and cleaning their room.

Amanda Askell: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: I guess you seem a bit like that.

Amanda Askell: Yes, I’m very like that.

Robert Wiblin: Do you think there’s a systematic reason why philosophers have to be that way?

Amanda Askell: I think that you have to carve out a space for research. So the kind of intense research that is involved both in PhDs but also later in research jobs, just needs kind of single minded focus on one topic. And I just find if I’m having to think about other things, it just divides my attention. And so I compartmentalize really heavily.

So I’m the kind of person where I’m like, I completely get rid of my emails. I’ll just snooze all of them until a given task is done. And I think if you don’t have that space, it’s just like you can’t get to that point where you can just focus fully on this very difficult problem in front of you. So I think it’s that, that people are inclined to just get rid of the other stuff in order to focus on problems.

Robert Wiblin: So, having finished your PhD, are you glad that you started it in the first place?

Amanda Askell: Oh, that is a tough question. I think in retrospect, I’m unsure whether I would do a PhD again, were I faced with the same choice that I had say, like six or seven years ago. Mainly … Not because I haven’t enjoyed the program and not because I haven’t learned a lot. It’s just a huge time investment. And it’s a time investment in the case of philosophy that’s quite singularly focused on one outcome. Namely, people are mainly focused on getting academic jobs. It’s somewhat unusual for people to do other things.

And so, if you have any uncertainty about whether that’s what you want to do, it can be quite risky. And, given the way that the job market is at the moment, it can be quite risky even if you think that that’s definitely what you want to do. So, I’m not sure that I … Yeah. I’m basically not sure that I would do it over again and perhaps not on the topics that I chose to focus on.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, well we’ll come back to talking about philosophy as a career track and what you’re going to do next later on in the episode.

But for now I wanna move onto the issue of moral cluelessness. So what is that problem.

Amanda Askell: Cluelessness is this problem that arises when you’re trying to make an ethical decision and there are immediate ramifications to your actions that you can just understand quite well. So I can distribute twenty malaria nets in this region and I can estimate the impact that will have in terms of malaria for those people.

But there are lots of effects of your actions that are just very difficult to predict. An example is you save the life of a woman and you don’t realize that the child that she’s carrying is going to grow up to be a terrible dictator who murders many people. So this was just a very unforeseen consequence of the action of saving the woman. Similarly you could save someone whose child grows up to save billions of people but it was an unforeseen consequence of the act of saving the woman which the direct impact of it was just saving that woman and saving her unborn child.

And the worry about this is essentially you may think, well, maybe things just kind of cancel out. So I have action A, which is saving the woman, and action B, which is not. It’s just very obvious that I should help the woman. I’m inclined to agree with that. So you say, well, she could have given birth to this person who ends up being a terrible dictator but she also could have given birth to this person who saves millions of lives. And so these probabilities of these kind of outlier events cancel out.

The problem of cluelessness, of a novel problem of cluelessness that has been talked about by Hilary Greaves for example is that in some cases it doesn’t seem like we can use this kind of principle of indifference, so it could be that my actions have ongoing ramifications that are simply not foreseen but I don’t have any reason to think that they’re equal across both of my actions.

So you think about the consequences of having this huge impact in a country by donating a huge amount of money and affecting its economy and affecting its people. There may be consistent impacts of that action that are not such that I can just think, oh yeah and it’s equally likely that that wouldn’t have happened or that the opposite would have happened. Rather it’s just I don’t know.

And so the problem of cluelessness is something like I shouldn’t necessarily think that there is equal probabilities of these outlier effects of unintended effects but nor do I have any information to go on about the likelihood or otherwise of these good long term effects versus these negative long term effects. And so it’s this real worry our degree of uncertainty of the long term unintended of direct impact of our actions.

Robert Wiblin: So for this to be a real problem does it have to be the case that these long term or indirect effects are much larger than the direct effect? That they’re likely to swamp it?

Amanda Askell: I’m not sure if it’s necessary for the problem. I’m trying to think about whether you can generate a smaller version of the problem. I think it’s likely that this is what’s generating the key worry. Is just that consequences of my actions are actually quite likely to be large as well because when we think about the fact that this was the causal chain that you’re setting off when you undertake an action like intervening in another country, it’s not when you actually expect the ramifications to be kind of small. It’s one where you do expect a kind of important long term impact and you may not be sure about the sign of that impact if you think that these unforeseen outcomes that are quite negative and quite positive and that you do not have enough information to be able to see how likely they are. So I think the presupposition is more that almost all of the outcomes are fairly large and as soon as you get further beyond a few years from now you start to be really uncertain about what they look like.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I wonder if it’s worth pointing out how easy it would be for saving a single life to change the entire course of history, that this is not only possible but perhaps even probable that it could completely change the identities of all people and future generations.

Amanda Askell: Well yeah, a super fun … I think it gets called the ancestor’s paradox. That’s essentially think about how many grandparents you have and how many great grandparents you have and imagine that tree branching outwards. And it gets bigger and bigger as you go back in the generations. And imagine the number of people who have existed in history. It gets narrower and narrower. Our population has been increasing so as you go into the past it actually decreases. And obviously the reason for this is that there’s a lot of overlap between relations, so maybe it’s the case that your great great great grandparent is also your great great great something else. And because of this, if you go far enough back in history you can say, if this person had any living descendant then they are in fact the ancestors of everyone on earth and this is a really interesting effect when you think about it going forward because you should expect the same thing.

So one person, if they have living descendants far into the future will in fact be the ancestor of everyone. So, changing who they give birth to or changing whether they have children and whether they have living descendants can actually change the entire population of the world in the future. So, identities of agents are actually super delicate basically. And so yes if you save the life of one person they’re going to have children and have children’s children etc. there’s a really good chance you just changed the identity of everyone who exists, the entire population of humans that exist in the future, which is very interesting but it’s an example of how the cause of ramifications of your actions can actually be fairly massive.

Robert Wiblin: And also extremely unpredictable [crosstalk 00:52:16].

Amanda Askell: And very unpredictable. Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Are there different forms of cluelessness that we should worry about, different kind of classifications?

Amanda Askell: The main classification that I’m aware of is this kind of new puzzle of cluelessness versus the original puzzle where the new puzzle is pointing out that it’s very difficult to use the principle of indifference in some of these cases, specifically the example used is effective altruism where you expect to have large and fairly consistent effects so it’s not merely what’s the possibility that this woman gives birth to a dictator versus she gives birth to someone fantastic and maybe you think that you should use the principle of indifference because the person could have been a dictator or they could have been a real benefit to humanity but rather that they have consistent effects but we just don’t know about them.

So that was an unpredictable outcome versus one that is a consistent outcome of your action that you shouldn’t think it was equally likely that the opposite outcome would have happened. So in changing a population, improving the lives right now of a population and therefore changing everything about the future economy of that country, that will in fact kind of good or bad for that country but you shouldn’t just say, oh well, fifty-fifty, it could either be good or either be bad but rather if you investigate you would find reasons for thinking that it’s more likely to be good than bad but right now you just have complete uncertainty about which is the case.

Robert Wiblin: But for it to matter it has to be possible, or you either have to believe already that it’s either probably positive or negative or it has to be possible for you to find out, right?

Amanda Askell: Yeah. If you think of the principle of indifference isn’t true here, that’s a principle that lets you just kind of assign really precise values to kind of outcomes and just say, well I have this really very positive outcome and this really very negative outcome. Both of them are possible and I’m gonna assign them the same probability. If you think that this cluelessness problem is a real problem, one thing you might say is I just can’t assign probabilities to these outcomes given my current evidence and in that case you should perhaps try to use imprecise probabilities or probability intervals or something like that.

Robert Wiblin: Wouldn’t you always have some kind of credence, some kind of probability attached to each outcome? You wanna move away from this simple bayesianism?

Amanda Askell: I mean I like this and the question mainly here is, can we say this is actually rational, what we’re doing. And so, one possible response for this is actually you do have reasons and we’re not merely appealing to a principle of indifference but rather we are thinking of all of the possible long term ramifications of our actions given our current evidence and we’re using that to make decisions and we’re going to try to discover more about those long term ramifications are.

So I think if you do it within a kind of precise framework you would probably just end up denying that we’re reasoning using the principle of indifference and you try and say, no, we actually have evidence about these long term outcomes and we either are or should be taking into account and the major update that we get from the problem of cluelessness is that we should really be trying to figure out more what the long term ramifications of our actions are because the fact that we can even look at cases like this and be unsure about the effects that our actions will have in, like, seventy years is fairly bad. Because it could be that there’s just these things that we could gain evidence about that are at the moment unforeseen and that are gonna negatively impact future populations.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So, what’s this principle of indifference?

Amanda Askell: That’s the principle that says take the really bad outcome, the outcome where the agent was a terrible despot, then this other outcome which seems also kind of implausible that they are going to save humanity from something terrible and save millions of people.

Robert Wiblin: You just cancel them out?

Amanda Askell: Yeah, I don’t really have one reason. I don’t have more reason to think that their child is going to be a terrible despot than I do to think that they’re going to save the world and so, sure, let’s just say that these effects just get canceled out. I’m just indifferent between them.

Robert Wiblin: So, I’ve heard people in the past say that this issue of being totally unable to predict the long term consequences of your actions shows that consequentialism is wrong or it’s very problematic. I’ve even heard people say because no one even thinks about this that just shows that no one is a consequentialist. Which is kind of amusing given how much the effective altruism community stresses about this. What do you think of those arguments?

Amanda Askell: I think it’s a problem for consequentialism. One thing that’s worth noting is this is a problem that arises … Maybe this is a philosopher’s point. There’s a problem that arises in a content of making decisions rather than in a context of ranking actions. So some people are going to think about consequentialism as a theory that’s more about how you should rank actions given their actual outcomes and in that case cluelessness doesn’t arise because it’s specifically a problem about uncertainty. But you might think that it’s a problem for people who want to try to internalize a kind of consequentialist procedure, they’re really trying to work out what the best action for them to undertake is if consequentialism is true and it turns out that that’s really hard if not impossible to do.

I’m inclined to think that it is a problem if we can’t use principles to actually give kind of well defined expected values to outcomes. I suppose I’m more optimistic in the case of cluelessness that we can, given our evidence, give more precise estimates of how good the outcomes are.

Robert Wiblin: It seems more like a practical problem that an in principle problem.

Amanda Askell: Yeah-

Robert Wiblin: Even if that’s a very challenging practical problem.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, I think that’s how I … And maybe other people perceive it different but that’s how I perceive the cluelessness problem.

Robert Wiblin: I suppose you could imagine us constructing a world in the future where things are much less chaotic and much more predictable and so the cluelessness problem somewhat goes away.

Amanda Askell: Yeah and we have a lot of evidence about long term ramifications. Maybe one worry for that is going to be that even if you have a huge amount of evidence you will need something close to omniscience because you could just have random factors that huge causal ramifications. So like we said about identity, changing which children someone has is affecting the population of the entire future of humanity. You might just think that random events could have huge impacts on the outcomes of your actions.

Robert Wiblin: Yes, but I suppose at the very extreme end you could just have one non human agent that never reproduces remaining and then it would be much easier to predict the consequences of their [crosstalk 00:58:48] actions.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, we can just imagine worlds where it’s like and also there’s one agent in a box who is completely separate from the rest of the universe and so there’s no chancy behavior. And then we can maybe extrapolate from that. Yeah the amount of data we would need would be huge but in principle we could solve this problem by knowing about everything that’s going to happen, can just show the different things that we could do.

Robert Wiblin: So having mapped out this issue, do you think it’s a challenge for philosophers or is now just a challenge for social scientists and economists and things like that?

Amanda Askell: I think there’s a key challenge of figuring out whether we can actually have rational, precise credences in these kinds of cases especially if we reject this kind of principle of indifference and if so how we can make decisions under this form of uncertainty. And so for the people who think that you should just imprecise credences in this case, the key challenge is going to be giving a good decision theory for imprecise theories which is already a big challenge that philosophers are focused on and that could be something that philosophers and economists could contribute to in finding ways to demonstrate there’s irrational precise credence to have in cases like this, that’s also something that I think both philosophers and others can definitely contribute to.

Robert Wiblin: What’s an imprecise credence?

Amanda Askell: And imprecise credence is where you don’t … With credences the idea is often that we have very precise probabilities that we assign to different states of the world and this seems like an idealization, it seems like I don’t actually have real valued … I have zero point seven one four nine two three one dot dot dot dot in some given state of the world. So in imprecise credence is the value of your credence is in fact an interval between zero one one. And so maybe I think that instead of saying that I have a credence of precisely point six that this thing is going to occur, maybe I actually have a credence that’s between point five and point seven or maybe my credence is in fact the interval point five point seven. And so it just is cases where we don’t have precise credences but rather we just have intervals.

Robert Wiblin: Okay so it sounded like you were saying that if we adopt imprecise credences then we have a challenge at the decision theory end. How do these credences then interface with our decision procedure. But why would these imprecise credences really help? I guess it helps with the problem of it seeming arbitrary to give kind of a point estimate of the likelihood of kind of every possible outcome that could-

Amanda Askell: Yeah, to say that they’re equal. So the first question is what is the rational attitude to have towards these potential long term ramifications that are very positive or very negative and that are kind of unforeseen at the moment. If you answer that question with you don’t have enough … Given the lack of evidence but the fact that there might be a consistent effect in one direction than in another you should have an interval valued credence over these outcomes. At the very extreme end of interval valued credences you can have an interval that is just the entire zero one interval.

Or you may think no there is a precise credence that you have about these outcomes given your current evidence. There’s just a way of partitioning the world such that you’re like, yep, I have that specific hypothesis, I maybe even have it consciously formulated in my brain about having these positive effects on the economic situation which leads to this person being elected, which leads to this person adopting this healthcare program in this country, etc. Give that really precise state of the world I should have a very precise credence that that state of the world will be the thing that is the outcome of my action.

So the idea is you first ask what’s rational in this case and then you have to ask how does this affect our decision making and if it’s precise I think that the answer is hopefully just going to be that it’s going to massively increase the value of gaining information about these kinds of effects. If it’s imprecise then we need a decision theory that can deal with imprecise credences.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Is it possible for this cluelessness to kind of have a funny interaction with moral uncertainty or other moral theories you might put some credence on. So you can imagine if there are moral theories saying it’s very bad if your actions have any possibility of creating a negative outcome like violating someone’s rights … If you’re only thinking about the direct effects of your actions then it seems kind of easy to avoid murdering someone or causing someone to be murdered but if you think about this spiraling uncertainty and all the chaos that your actions create and how they change the entire course of history it seems like action that you take has some possibility of causing some horrific outcome in the future and so they might all be forbidden.

Amanda Askell: Yeah one result is that you could think that this ends up in dilemmas so a theory that says you should basically never risk violating someone’s rights far into the future and then I can say every action available to be has a risk above some threshold of doing this then if your theory just says if the probability is above some threshold and it is in this case then you just shouldn’t undertake the action, that theory would presumably end up with just dilemmas given cluelessness worries.

Robert Wiblin: Which I guess on pragmatic grounds is a reason to prefer more linear theories than ones with strict prohibitions where something is like infinitely bad or very bad or just totally impermissible.

Amanda Askell: Yes-

Robert Wiblin: Because it’s twice as likely it’s twice as bad.

Amanda Askell: And I think that most theories would have that as part of them. So take a theory like a kind of moderate deontological theory, it’s not clear to me that they would actually have the same kind of problem with cluelessness that say consequentialists have because they might just say that the thing that matters is the causal effects of your actions and not necessarily things later in the causal chain that although would not have happened had you not done the thing are not in fact things that you are responsible for.

Robert Wiblin: Because another agent has touched them and now they’re responsible-

Amanda Askell: Yeah there’s an agent that’s like, well it’s not the case that if foreseeably this action will lead to Jane being born and then Jane goes onto commit a robbery that I was somehow culpable for the action of Jane’s robbery because-

Robert Wiblin: Indeed like all of her ancestors are culpable.

Amanda Askell: Exactly and so theories that deny that as presumably a lot of theories are going to just might less of a problem closeness. It might have some problem but they might not think that things like future rights violations are the responsibility of current agents. They might say yes, it is actually quite … We do want to work out this problem because we also do care about the causal impact of our actions as a lot of non consequentialists do, we just don’t think that the key thing is going to be something like rights violations that occur in the future.

Robert Wiblin: Do you see more people working on this general research question?

Amanda Askell: I think that I would classify a lot of questions in this area as … This feels to me again like an important but not necessarily urgent question. So it depends on what people would be doing otherwise I suppose.

Robert Wiblin: I suppose another way of looking at this is just being people may be trying to research what are the floater effects or the long term effects of our actions and often they end up working on existential risk or long term future projects and they’ve in some cases found things that they can work on now that they think have satisfactorily confidently positive effects in the long run but that might just be a more practical way of approaching the question.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. So there is this question of … I am not going to give a great answer to that, how useful is very theoretical research in areas that can have very real world impacts? And I think maybe I could kind of step back my earlier answer because maybe if you find a very good response to this problem it can lead to further insights that are actually themselves very useful. So things like how to quantify how valuable information about the long term effects of our actions is, is kind of difficult without an answer to this slightly more abstract seeming problem.

And so one response someone might have is something like, oh well, just do the practical work, just try and work out flow-through effects and just do all of that kind of stuff. And I’m like, yes that is really important but actually maybe if you could just generate a fairly neat solution to the abstract problem it would just give this really good grounding to all of the other practical work that occurred in this area and that could in fact be kind of helpful. So yeah, I think that sometimes this theoretical research can really great very good foundations for later practical research.

Robert Wiblin: So, given that these long term effects of our actions might be very large and also very uncertain, does that imply that this should be one of the main things that we’re researching, ’cause just the value of further information about them is so huge?

Amanda Askell: Yeah so I’ve thought before that one thing that is kind of unfortunate is that value of information is often just kind of a side consideration when it comes to thinking about how we can do good in the world. If we think that the long term effects of our actions are very large.

If we think that the long term effects of our actions are very large, it could be that finding out more about the expected long term consequences of what we do is actually an extremely valuable part of investing in intervention. And so if you think that the value of information is very high in the ethical domain, this can favor a couple of things.

One is that it can favor kind of doing more research so just trying to investigate how the world is actually going to be and what the impact of a given policy has been in the past and all of this kind of stuff, but I think another thing that it means is that investing in interventions could itself be valuable mainly because we then get information about the impacts of those interventions and so we can kind of run experiments basically, and we can try out things and see if they work.

And I’ve talked a little bit about moral value of information in the past and I think that the main thing that I kind of concluded from it was that it’s very easy to take this kind of evidence based mindset when it comes to doing the most good. We are like, let’s just take these interventions, for which I have the most evidence about what the nature of their impact is, and let’s just invest in those or you can take a kind of more expectations-based kind of approach where you say, “Well, actually, what we should do is we should run some experiments and we should try out various things and see if they work because we just don’t have a huge amount of information in this domain.”

And if you take that kind of attitude, you can end up, kind of, investing in things a bit more experimentally and I think that there’s potentially a better case to be made for that than people have appreciated and so that might be one consequence of this is just, “Hey, the ethical value of information is actually higher than we thought and maybe we should just be trying to find new ways of gaining a bunch of new information about how we can do good.

Robert Wiblin: So this is a somewhat generalized document in favor of doing things that have very uncertain outcomes as long as you can learn from them in some generalizable way?

Amanda Askell: Yeah. I think an interesting, kind of, consequence of this that is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive is that if you have two interventions and one of them is very well evidenced. We know really precisely how much good it does and we have another intervention that has a kind of plausible mechanism … because it can be terrible in expectation. So there’s a plausible mechanism for doing a bunch of good, but it has a huge range that it could do virtually nothing or it could actually be really fantastic.

So an example of the first thing might be antimalarial nets, for example, so insecticide-treated bed nets or just, there’s a lot of randomized control trials about how effective they are, but you could have another intervention on malaria that’s much more experimental and we just don’t know how effective it’s going to be, that you could actually think that, in expectation, it’s actually less effective than the first one in terms of its direct impact and yet overall, you should invest in the second one because you’ll get information about where it lies on the scale of value and that will mean you can either reinvest in it or just never invest in it again.

And so, yeah, it’s like actually, maybe you should prefer interventions with less evidential support over those with more evidential support.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So that makes sense as long as you’re getting a good measurement of what the impact is. So this is kind of an argument in favor of, we should do a lot of science and technology and should spend a lot of money on R&D because it will have a really beneficial long-term consequences. But I guess in the case of cluelessness anyway, it seems like we might just learn basically nothing. We do a whole lot of work and then we still don’t … like we’re just as clueless at the end of the process.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. You still just haven’t touched these long-term-

Robert Wiblin: Because the problems are so fundamental and the future is so chaotic.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. You’re just like … I actually just think that I can’t really predict what the very long-term outcomes will be so I think this is a good argument for why if you can get information, especially about very long-term impacts of your actions, and that information is especially valuable, but I don’t think this is a solution to the problem of cluelessness because I think even if you can get information of that form, you would probably still have this problem because you’d be just given chaos. These long-term unforeseen consequences of my actions can still occur.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So we’re kind of stuck with cluelessness. I mean, how would you feel about the kind of practical solution that a lot of people have gone on board with this, of just trying to reduce the probability of civilization collapsing in the hope that that is a good sign post to a good future. Is that at all satisfactory in your mind?

Amanda Askell: I think there’s, kind of, a satisfactory answer to a lot of things just because I’m like, these problems are difficult, but if you generate this space where you can reflect on them and work on them, that’s almost always a good thing so I’m sympathetic to that kind of approach to most very fundamental ethical problems. It seems very plausible to me that you should try and secure the lives of people living now and people living in the near future because you can’t solve these problems if you don’t have people who can work on them. And so, yeah, I’m sympathetic to this being the approach that people take.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. That’s somewhat reassuring.

Amanda Askell: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: So just coming back to the value of information issue, you gave a talk about that at EA Global last year, right?

Amanda Askell: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: So, it sounds like one of the conclusions is that you should spend more resources that you otherwise would doing things that, in a sense, not very evidenced backed, where you’re unsure what the outcome is going to be so long as you can measure and learn from it?

Amanda Askell: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Are there any other, kind of, key conclusions that people should take away from this value of information consideration?

Amanda Askell: I think just thinking about the different ways in which you can gain information … so I think, often, when people think about information, they really do just think about the research component and I think it’s important to know that a really good way of getting information is just by doing the thing and then getting the data to yourself.

Sometimes, the data just doesn’t exist. I think this generalizes, I mean, we haven’t talked about careers so much, but I think this is actually really important in one’s career as well, is that if you have an opportunity to simply try things, this can be a really good way of getting information about how good it is and people can get kind of paralyzed by the evidence and think that the thing to do is analyze existing evidence.

I think that one of the other conclusions that I came to with this is, think about investment as something that’s mining value of information, not just direct value so I think that was a main one.

Robert Wiblin: And I guess this is also an argument for the community as a whole, kind of, sending one person into lots of sort of different areas so that they can learn about whether it’s promising and bring that information back to the group.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, I think it’s important. I’m not saying this always overwhelms things. Maybe they’re just really important things for people to be doing and really important career tracts that are fairly narrow because immediate needs or something, outweigh this consideration, but all else being equal, I think it’s quite good for people to be trying lots of different things and seeing what the impact of them is if there’s a plausible mechanism for it being fairly high impact. So obviously, there has to be a plausible mechanism. You might just think that there are certain paths that people can go down. They’re just not likely to be super high-impact.

Robert Wiblin: Clearly, we shouldn’t send someone into everything. It’s only the things that seem promising enough, where you can learn a lot by putting someone-

Amanda Askell: Yeah. That seems right to me.

Robert Wiblin: Is there anyone who has, kind of, a good process for going through and estimating the value of information from different actions or is this still, kind of, an unsolved practical problem?

Amanda Askell: There’s a lot of research in how you should evaluate the value of information. There’s a lot of results that should make us a little bit pessimistic about this. So the thing I’d recommend that people read on it, it’s just very interesting, is stuff on multi-armed bandits, the multi-armed bandit problem. And one interesting and, kind of, relevant puzzle for practical, real world stuff is puzzles where the probabilities of success for each thing that you’re trying change.

So it’s like, imagine you’re playing a couple of multi-armed bandits, but the probability that they will … the expected payout actually changes overtime. This is an extremely difficult problem and it’s extremely difficult to know where you should explore and where you should exploit when you have problems of this form and I think a lot of the real world problems have that form, where the amount of value you get from working in a given domain might change drastically depending on ways that things in the world are going.

And so I can’t offer a huge amount of practical advice here, but I do think it would be quite possible for someone to do very applied work in this area, actually trying to assess how we should assign information values like working on a given problem, say.

Robert Wiblin: I’m planning to interview the authors of a book called Algorithms to Live By. There’s a chapter about these multi-armed bandits.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. It’s also a really great book. I recommend it.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, it is very good. Unfortunately, I think they finished that chapter talking about how this is a very difficult, somewhat unsolved problem in computer science of what you do when the payoffs are changing over time. Maybe we’ll see if in the meantime they’ve managed to come up with any other answers.

Amanda Askell: If we just solved a potentially unsolvable problem.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Let’s push onto a new topic. One, kind of, theme that I’ve noticed to some of the things you’ve written online is, kind of, what seems to me like an attempt to, kind of, synthesize the views or arguments that are often associated with social justice activism, with, kind of, a more rational or analytical, philosophical style.

Amanda Askell: Yep.

Robert Wiblin: Is that something that you’re consciously trying to do?

Amanda Askell: I think it’s party just that I often agree with many of the arguments or conclusions of people who are advocating for greater social justice and I see a lot of common themes between that and people who are effective altruists. This idea of expanding your, kind of, moral circle beyond people who are just like you and in your, kind of, local area, but rather to lots of different people in society and looking back at the, kind of, history and the effects that those people have underwent and trying to basically improve the lives of as many people as possible. And I think that, in some ways, this can get, kind of, … there are really good arguments for many of the positions that I think social justice advocates are putting forward.

And so I always just want to, kind of, make those arguments because I think, sometimes, they can be caricatured or bad forms of them can end up being released on the internet and suddenly everyone thinks that that’s … I don’t want it to be the case that people start to think, “Oh, the only defense of these, kind of, social justice movements are these arguments that I disagree with.” I’m like, “No. There are actually really good arguments there and so we should search for those and look at the merits of the best arguments and not merely dismiss things because we don’t like the way that it’s put”.

Robert Wiblin: So it’s a bit surprising that there’s so many, kind of, conclusions that you, kind of, agree with that are often being justified on bad grounds, but … How is it that the conclusions are good if you think that the typical arguments being made are not good? Is this an example of moral convergence with different theories or when thought through properly, kind of, reach the same ideas?

Amanda Askell: I think that there are actually good arguments. So it’s hard to talk about it without specifics, but something that I am really interested in is some issues in things like criminal justice reform and I think that the arguments in favor of that, that are quite effective, are ones that look at the history of, say, the criminal justice system in the U.S.. Who it currently affects? The fact that it affects minorities really strongly even when there’s, kind of, parity of crimes being committed.

And so, those arguments are out there and I think that what people sometimes do, is they don’t … or maybe they disagree with a conclusion or they just see a bad form of the argument made somewhere and don’t think, well, actually, maybe there’s a really good case to be made for this or maybe there’s a really good case for us to be a bit humble about what we think in these areas because we’ve just come out of really, quite terrible periods in history and we should maybe think that our society isn’t set up in this really great way for everyone, seems pretty plausible to me.

And instead, they’re just, kind of, seeing an argument they don’t like made by someone on Twitter or something and they’re taking that to be representative of all of the work that’s gone into this, when, actually, I think that the work that’s gone into this from historians and philosophers and various other people is often way better than the thing that you’re reading on Twitter.

So it’s, kind of like, remember that there’s actually really good to … and I think there really is quite robust stuff here and that we shouldn’t just, kind of, dismiss things because we don’t like the way that one person puts it. So I feel very strongly about that, I guess.

Robert Wiblin: So, to make it more concrete and, I guess, possibly, more provocative to some group that I’m not sure which one yet, are there any, kind of, specific debates around social justice activism that you think deserve a steel man philosophical defense that haven’t been defended as well as you’d like?

Amanda Askell: So, I think, maybe I want to focus on a, kind of, reframing of some issues that I hope that people can agree on. So sometimes I think that it’s really unfortunate that policies that could potentially be good and that we’re really just trying out … for example, positive discrimination. Positive discrimination is quite controversial, I think. I see that more as a, kind of, social experiment, something that we should try out for a long time and see if it works and see if it makes people’s lives better and if it does, then that’s great and if it doesn’t, then we’ve performed an experiment and we found out that this wasn’t the way to actually improve people’s lives.

And so sometimes, I think that you can defend a lot of policies and you can find convergence on policies if you explain to people that this is an area where it’s important for us to just try various things and to get the information on whether they work. And sometimes I think people are doing the thing that we talked about earlier, where they’re looking for … that’s like, “I must have just established that this intervention works really well before I try it,” whereas, my attitude is like, “Hey, here’s a defense of these policies.

We should just try them for a fairly long time and see if the long-term ramifications of them are good because that’s what we’re trying to improve. Isn’t just the life of this one person right now, but rather to try and make society more equitable and function better for everyone. Yeah. I think that’s a steel man of specific policies that are controversial. Yeah, I have lots of very pro, kind of, social justice views that I think are very steel man-able, I guess.

Robert Wiblin: I guess, with experimentation, the usual approach is to experiment on a smaller scale and then increase the scale as the evidence base gets better. Why do you think we should experiment with a little action on a broader scale first or for such a long time?

Amanda Askell: Yeah, so I’m not sure about the broad scale versus … with a bunch on interventions, you probably want to experiment with them. There are ethical issues with experimentation, if you think that it’s likely that this policy will succeed because then you’re harming the people in the areas where you’re not performing the experiment. I’m more in favor of just trying to gather more information, but I kind of understand that people might have worries about that kind of thing.

I think that long-term, the structures that we have in society now, took a long time to build up and the idea that our goals should just be to, kind of, in the short-term, just change the lives of people and everything will be fine, seems implausible to me. Rather, I think that we want to, kind of, slowly make adjustments to society that will make everyone better off and that will involve doing things that are better in the long-term.

I am not certain that we should just be doing broad scale things rather than experimenting and seeing what works. That could be really good. Maybe you have one university that tries one thing to make their classes more inclusive and then you have another university that tries another thing and then you get more information about which of those things was better. That seems quite good to me, but I also do think it’s good to take this long-term attitude towards these things and be like, “We want to change society incrementally in the long run and not just in the immediate next two years or something like that.”

Robert Wiblin: So, it seems to me like there’s often kind of a tension between people who are really analytical, philosophical style of reasoning and social justice activists. Do you think this is indicative of really fundamental disagreements or is it more a matter of how they speak and how they like to communicate and perhaps things being lost in translation?

Amanda Askell: I mean, I tend to think that it’s more the latter, but I also have … I’ve been in this and I know other people who are similar where I have never been … I didn’t go to college in the U.S., for example, and a lot of people talk about the specific U.S. college experience that I just didn’t have. So all of my exposure to things like feminism and social justice, came really vie academics and people who were making extremely reasonable and sound arguments that I agreed with … obviously, there’s lots of reasonable disagreement on all of these issues, but I never encountered something that I thought was anything that was inconsistent with just analytical, kind of, careful arguing styles … or at least for the most part, I didn’t.

And so far as there’s tension being created in the, kind of, public discourse, I suspect that it’s not over … it’s not because one side has logic and reason on its side. I think there’s just a cluster of really reasonable disagreements here. And it could also just be that people are just dividing into political tribes and that’s, I think, a very damaging thing that can happen and that could also just be the source of it here.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, how impactful do you think it would be for someone to try to do a rational synthesis of social justice ideas or try to carve out, kind of, conclusions that are appealing to one side, using reasoning that’s appealing to the other side or to help people understand one another. I guess, it seems like that would be quite a personally challenging thing to do because you’d be attacked by all kinds of people whenever you touch these issues.

Amanda Askell: I don’t know how unfair it is to academic work in this area because I have looked into this a little bit and you have readers on some of these issues. So there are historians or people who look at the history of U.S. policy, like historians of U.S. housing policy, for example, can give you a lot of information about why you see very entrenched divisions in housing in the U.S. now, and that work is good and accessible. I do think that there could be … maybe it would be good to have more work that is engaging directly with the public on some of this stuff and I think we’re seeing more of that.

I’ve definitely seen a couple books come out recently, which were targeted at a general audience and were just trying to slowly go through all the arguments in favor of, say, … there was a recent book on misogyny and I read through some of it (‘Down Girl’ by Kate Manne). And it was like, yeah, this is just reasoned arguments about the nature of misogyny that aimed at a general audience and I think does a decent job of communicating these ideas in a way that … not everyone is going to be sympathetic to it, but at least it’s not obscure. It’s very standard, kind of, analytical style, I guess.

Robert Wiblin: So, when I mentioned on Facebook that I was going to be interviewing you, someone asked the question, whether you think utilitarianism is compatible with social justice causes and to what degree do you think they’re actually intentioned?

Amanda Askell: Yeah, so I think that one thing that happens a lot with people who think that utilitarianism is correct, is that you can end up having to prioritize causes based on how much harm you think that they’re causing. And so this can mean that you have a kind of ranking of things in terms of badness, like the things that you want to work on. So it took me a long … When I was younger, I became vegan. I was very interested in animal ethics.

I think one of the first books I read in ethics was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and then when I heard about effective altruism, I was really convinced by these arguments that global poverty was very important. And that’s actually where I’ve put most of my money, for example, and then slowly, I was, kind of, reluctantly convinced that these issues, like reducing existential risks were actually really important.

And I think that’s a good process to go through. There’s a sense, in which, if you reach these unusual conclusions about what’s most important, non-reluctantly, I kind of trust them less. I came to that conclusion kicking and screaming and trying to find every argument against it, but it can make it look like you think that the other stuff is less important. So if you come to the conclusion, “Oh, I should be working on reducing existential risk, so I don’t work on global poverty and I don’t work on issues that affect animals,” that you somehow think that those things are not important.

And I think the same can be true of social justice causes and I think it’s important to emphasize that that’s not the case. I think criminal justice reform in the U.S. is an incredibly important topic and one that people should be tackling. I think issues of improving the lives of women is incredibly … both within the U.S. and around the world is incredibly important and one that people should be tackling and so I don’t think that there is a tension fundamentally because I think that often, people working on social justice issues have the, kind of, the core thing that effective altruism or utilitarians, kind of, agree with.

Namely, they’re trying to expand their moral circle and they’re trying to benefit the lives of people and the tension comes at the level of what they prioritize and I think this is both, in terms of the causes that they end up investing in and also things like whether think that systematic versus incremental change is important. So I see those as being two of the, kind of, tensions.

I think utilitarians are often more inclined to favor incremental change rather than sweeping changing if they think that it’s implausible that we can actually get sweeping change, whereas a lot of people are more … I think a lot of social justice movement work is focused on, not solely on systematic change, but more so on systematic change and so I think it’s sort of unfortunate because I would rather have this attitude of, there’s a cluster of things that are super important. I want people working on those things and just because I’m having to do this weird ranking and then working on things that I think are most important, it doesn’t in any way diminish the ethical work that other people are doing.

Robert Wiblin: I guess, imagining that there’s kind of two groups: social justice activists and people who are skeptical of social justice activism. What would be your biggest criticism of each group? How would you like to see them change and improve?

Amanda Askell: So, I suspect that I would like more of a, kind of, prioritization attitude in social justice activism and it’s not to say it’s not there, but prioritization is not a, kind of, common tool that’s wielded in most places, I guess, and so it would be nice to see … and also maybe a broadening of the scope of issues that people work on and that’s sort of happening. I think you’re seeing people care a little bit, like immigration issues, for example, more than in the past and I hope that we’ll also see this with caring about global poverty issues as a, kind of, social justice concern.

And so I think a mix of really trying to target the things that will have the most impact would be really good and also, yeah, broadening the issues that people consider, which is happening and I think it’s going to be good thing. I suspect, more based on the interaction with other people or testimony from other people than any personal interaction I’ve had, that the thing that people mainly find off-putting about social justice activists is the methods of engagement of some of them.

And maybe some people feel, kind of, attacked when they just don’t understand these issues or they want to get to know them and they feel like they make mistakes and then they get, kind of, eviscerated and they’re like, “Well, I just don’t know anything about this issue and I don’t feel like I’m being engaged with fairly,” and if that’s the case, it’s probably not a good way to have a dialogue with people. It’s good to be like, “Look, some people just won’t understand this stuff or have encountered it and it’s important to be kind and considerate while they’re learning about it and if we aren’t, that’s just bad for discourse.

And I think from the, kind of, more … people who are anti-social justice activism, I think it’s a mix of … what I would want to see more of is a combination of epistemic humility and probably historical research. So in some ways, for me, a large influence was simply looking at the history … how recent the history of a lot of this stuff is. We just had an incredibly unequal society and we’ve had laws enforcing really unacceptably, unequal ways up until … like school segregation was happening until way more recently than I thought.

And when I looked into school segregation in the U.S. and I was … there were schools that were fighting this really not that long ago. And so I think that having a, kind of, more historically informed attitude towards why we should, kind of, expect society to be, kind of, unequal to be good and taking that historical information and using it to be like, “I’m going to be a bit humble about this issue so I’m not going to assume by default that everything is equal. Instead, I’m going to assume that it is just very likely that people are, kind of, doing worse than they otherwise would if we had just had a kind of fair society.

So, yeah, historical research and a little bit of epistemic humility is probably the other good thing.

Robert Wiblin: So, how do you think the quality of discourse between those groups could be improved the most so that they can actually gain some kind of mutual understanding and, perhaps, even be able to work together on solving some problems that they both accept?

Amanda Askell: Yeah, so I think that one phenomenon that I’ve seen happening sometimes in these debates is that people will … they’ll have a controversial view that they want to, kind of, put forward or at least have in the eyes of their reader, kind of, supported, but they won’t want to take ownership over the controversial view and so they’ll assert something that seems to, kind of, strongly implicate the controversial view. So an example of this might be saying something like, “Oh, most of the wage gap between men and women can be explained by women’s choices.”

And so someone might post something about a study that just talks about the fact that women take more time off work to do childcare, explains the different in income. And this can seem to imply that there’s no problem basically. So there’s no bias against women in the workplace, nor is there any need for systematic change of the way that we do childcare or the nature of taking time off for maternity leave or anything.

And they might not want to assert, there is no problem and there is no bias against women in the workplace and there is no need for change, but that’s often, kind of, implicated if you don’t cancel it, if you don’t say, “I’m not saying that this explains everything or that there’s no need for change, but we should note that some of this is explained by this other phenomenon.” And so if you express your values and you show that you really care about women and that this is just a way of finding out the best way to improve the lives of women, I think a lot of people are actually really sympathetic to that kind of claim.

So if I were to say, “Oh, it turns out that this is the thing that’s causing women to earn less, so we should be focusing on that thing and how to improve it and what we can do here.” That’s just a very different thing than just asserting the fact with the full awareness that what people are going to pick up on is the standard, kind of, cluster views that people who assert those facts have. And so I think that this is quite damaging because you want to just engage with people at the level of their actual views and to be able to criticize those views.

And doing this, kind of, thing where you implicate a controversial view without asserting it and then if someone says, “I don’t believe in the controversial view,” you say, “I never said that. I just said this fact.” It just means that people can’t actually engage at the right level with one another. And so, I guess, when I see that kind of thing happening, it makes me sad because it just doesn’t lead to, kind of, good discourse.

And so I think that one thing that I … It’s maybe a kind of obscure thing that I want to see happen a bit more, is people kind of taking ownership over the things that are implicated by what they say and either canceling it by saying I don’t actually think that thing or just embracing it and saying the thing that I think is this more controversial thing and I think it’s supported by this piece of evidence that I just gave you. Because it just feels like a more honest discourse then.

I know what someone’s view is and I like to think I try to do that. I try to strongly express my values before I state something and if I’m aware that the thing that I could say could be interpreted in a way that is not consistent with my values, then I try and eliminate that interpretation or try to clarify it later. If I say something and people are like, oh, it sounds like you’re saying that this terrible thing. Then, I’ll be like, “Oh, I totally didn’t mean that. I see how you thought I was saying that.

It seems like an important part of good discourse to me. It seems like an important part of honest discourse and so I would want to see people not doing, kind of, yeah, this discourse via implication or something.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, because this is consistent with like … one way of shortening that advice is, kind of, the more controversial, the more you’re talking about a hot button issue, the more you have to be extremely careful to be clear about exactly what you are saying and what you are not saying?

Amanda Askell: Yeah. I think that’s right. I-

Robert Wiblin: And I guess, also, show concern for the other side and they’re interest. So you can completely disagree about … you might share more values and more goals than might be immediately apparent.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, yeah. And strongly share your values. In some ways, the thing that I don’t like is when I think someone’s values are bad. So if I think that someone genuinely cares about all of the people that I care about and they just think that there’s a different way of helping them, our disagreement is in many way, much less strong, right? That’s a productive disagreement to have where they’re like, “Look, I really want these people to flourish, but this policy just isn’t helping them right now. So I want the poor to flourish, but this taxation policy is actually harming them and so I don’t agree with this taxation policy.”

That’s a much better discourse to have than having a discourse with someone where you’re like, “I’m not even sure you care about these people.” So I think both being very clear about your views, but also being really clear about your values can be very helpful here.

Robert Wiblin: That reminds me of this blog post you wrote a while back, which I really loved about vegetarianism and abortion and, I guess, trying to get good moral discourse between groups with actually different values, I guess, in this case. Do you want to explain the argument that you were making then?

Amanda Askell: Yes. The argument was basically that we often seem to betray a kind of complete lack of what I call moral empathy, where moral empathy is trying to get inside the mindset of someone who expresses views that we disagree with and see that from their point of view, what they’re talking about is a moral issue and not merely a preference. The first example is vegetarianism where you’ll sometimes see people basically get very annoyed, say, with their vegetarian family member because the person doesn’t want to eat meat at a family gathering or something like that. I think the example I give is, this makes sense if you just think of vegetarianism like a preference.

It’s just like, “Oh, they’re being awkward. They just have this random preference that they want me to try and accommodate.” It’s much less acceptable if you think of it as a moral view. You see this where people are a bit more respectful of religious views. So if someone eats halal, I think that it would be seen as unacceptable to … people wouldn’t have the same attitude of, oh, how annoying and how terrible of them, but I also think that this is … So, I wanted to use a couple of examples in this post of this phenomenon.

And the one on the other side is the issue of abortion, where a lot of people who are anti-abortion, the criticisms of them are things like, people will respond to anti-abortion arguments by saying things like, “Well, if you don’t like abortions, just don’t have one.” And you’re like, “But this doesn’t make any sense because if I take this person at their word and they genuinely believe that abortion is murder, it doesn’t make sense to say, if you’re against murder, just don’t murder people.”

That’s not an argument that anyone would find convincing. We’re like, “No, we think this is morally wrong and so we should all be against it.” And I think that when you engage with people at the level of their actual moral views, you can actually find ways of having a productive dialogue. You might think that they are being disingenuous and that is something that you should definitely … you should assign some probability to, that sometimes people will say, “Oh, this person says that they’re anti-abortion and they’re actually just misogynistic or something.”

But it’s like, absolutely, that’s a possibility, but it also is just possible that they genuinely just believe that abortion is murder and then you have to try and engage with them at that level and actually engage with that belief. And I think that when you do that, you can just have a slightly more productive dialogue, where you’re not treating … I think it must be frustrating for someone with that genuine belief to have people treat them like they’re being disingenuous or that they just have some preference against abortion and it’s probably much more productive to just assume, kind of, good faith on the part of the person you disagree with. I think it’s probably more productive.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s highly likely to be more persuasive.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, because you can engage with them at the level of the arguments that they actually agree with so-

Robert Wiblin: Or, at least the arguments that they are giving.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And like-

Robert Wiblin: Do you think people are too quick to produce these alternative explanations for why people who disagree with them are doing what they’re doing?

Amanda Askell: I mean, sometimes I think that it can look … and maybe I’m inclined to be overly charitable towards people because I’m kind of like, if I can find the best version of this person’s argument and I can show that that’s wrong, then I’m safe. We’ve just changed their mind, ideally. Sometimes I think it’s that people see, kind of, inconsistencies and their best explanation is some kind of disingenuousness. So in the case of abortion, an example is that a lot of people who are anti-abortion are also anti-contraception, even if the contraception doesn’t result in fertilization.

And that can seem a bit strange because it’s like, well, even if you’re against abortion and contraception, you surely think that abortion is much worse than contraception and so surely, here’s a point of agreement. We can all just agree to have much more contraception available. Why can’t we just move forward with that being roughly the policy? I think a more charitable explanation of this is that the people who are anti-abortion and anti-contraception are kind of thinking about what, in their minds, is the best possible world.

And the best possible world is one, for them, where people don’t use contraception and people don’t get abortions. There are positions in ethics that say that that’s the relevant world, is the best possible world. And if that’s correct, that kind of charitable interpretation where it’s like, they’re not malicious.

And if that’s correct, that kind of charitable interpretation where it’s like they’re not malicious, you can again engage with that because I think that belief is false. I don’t think that the best possible world is the one that’s relevant. And so maybe by breaking down that belief, you can actually find convergence on a key point of agreement.

Sometimes, people are just seeing consistencies and things that they don’t and in the position of their opponents and they’re treating it as evidence of bad faith. And it’s like sometimes people can’t in good faith argue for things that are ethically wrong and it’s fine to just engage with them on the assumption that they’re arguing in good faith.

Robert Wiblin: Well, one thing is that they could be mistaken for a complicated reason that they haven’t realized. Another thing would be when you’re debating with people who come from a very different school of philosophy, perhaps like a more theological and religious one, then there may just be all kinds of arguments on that terrain that you are not familiar with and you don’t understand.

And so for you to say, “Well, I looked at these things and I couldn’t find a way of making them consistent,” might just be a measure of your ignorance rather than a measure of the inconsistency of their view.

Amanda Askell: And you should obviously … as with all things, it’s almost certainly the case that sometimes it’s just that there is no good argument. Someone’s just seeing something on the Internet. But I tend to think that a good procedure is to try as much as possible find the best version of these arguments. And be aware that some people are just operating with different assumptions and different pieces of evidence than you, and that you’re just in a much better position to convince people if you can demonstrate.

I find people in conversation much more happy and just much more willing to discuss with you if you show that you actually have cared enough to go away and research their worldview and you might be like, “Look, I looked into your worldview and I don’t agree with it, but I’ll demonstrate to you that I understand it.” It just makes for a much more friendly discussion basically because it shows that you’re not like, “I don’t even need to look at the things that you’ve been raised with or understood or researched. I just know better without even looking at them.”

Robert Wiblin: I’m going to tell you that you don’t believe what you believe are the reasons that you say-

Amanda Askell: Exactly. Yeah. It’s really bad dynamic for debate, I think. So in terms of things that would improve discourse, this is like assuming, generally, that people are operating in good faith and trying to then reconstruct their view given that assumption can just be like really helpful in a lot of moral debates.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. There’s been a few cases in the media recently of people expressing very controversial moral views and very distinctively moral views, which I disagreed with actually all of them. But I really didn’t like them getting shut down because I felt like if they were right, then it was extremely important that they be able to voice these views because it would mean that we were making a huge moral mistake.

And there’s areas where I have controversial views where I think society is making a big moral errors and people might shut me down and I feel, Well, I’m happy to let other people express their controversial moral views for the sake of us or learning from one another and potentially correcting these errors and as much as they’re wrong in part because they might be right.” But also because I want to have a social norm that allows me to express my controversial views as well without being shut down.

And it is like when these are moral issues is might be like the most important kind of things going on in as much as we can identify a moral catastrophe that people aren’t recognizing. It’d be so important that it might be worth accepting some degree of discomfort or some degree of controversy in order to ensure there is a process that will allow us to bring those to life.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. I’m inclined to agree. Most people actually to some extent agree on this issue where it’s like there’s this important norm of soft freedom of speech so not the stuff that’s like guaranteed by government, but rather that we allow people to like express controversial views without having disproportionate responses to them in a way that just dis-incentivizes them from talking.

And now one thing that I think has really unfortunate about the Internet generally or maybe there’s this really difficult transition that people have to make from the known Internet era to the Internet era. And one example of this is that people don’t often think about proportionate feedback. So sometimes, I’ve expressed this before where I say, I will often look at what someone said and I might think the thing that you said was wrong and I disagree with it, and then I look at the amount of feedback you’ve had from people already.

And often if they’ve expressed it publicly on the Internet, they’ve had this huge amount of negative feedback. They basically had people swarming them, telling them that they hate them and I’m like that actually like you … in as far as you deserve to be punished for say they express something that was actually a moral. It’s like I don’t want to just add to that because it can really have this damaging effect where people are so scared of saying anything that people might disagree with because they know that they’re going to get this disproportionate response.

And so I then just choose not to add to it even though I disagree with them, and even though I agree with the people who are saying this view is false. And I think that there’s not a lot of norms that we currently have, which tell people. They indicate that we should do that and that we should be proportionate and our response to people and that’s unfortunate.

A further thought that I have on that is just the thing that I’m inclined to criticize often more than just the content of someone’s view is how they express it. Because one thing is that if you do express a controversial view and you do it without care and you do the thing that I was talking about earlier where you do it via implicature and in this indirect way, you create this huge amount of work for the person who wants to disagree with you.

So I’ve had views where I wanted to disagree with them, but I’m aware that in order to disagree with their 300 word statement, I’d have to give like 2000 word response. That’s like, “Look, here’s precisely what you’re seeing because you weren’t clear. Here’s precisely what your statements implicate because that wasn’t clear. And here’s why all those things are false.” And so there is this thing where I’m like also people need to take responsibility for the way that they say things and that’s why I’m often inclined to criticize much more than even the content of the views.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I like that. But I have this half formed thought that I’ve been having recently which is like … so I think for the sake of being able to like figure out what’s true, we should have a lot of forbearance towards people who express things that we don’t like that even if it makes us angry, we should try to stay calm. But I realized that this also implies that when someone says … … this is kind of this outrage cycle, right?

So someone says something outrageous and then someone gets outraged at them and then people get outraged to the outrage and then this outrage of the outrage of the outrage and just goes on. I realized that I should also have a lot of forbearance potentially for the people who were hurt by the original claim, who were made very angry and perhaps shattered at them or like said it said things that someone else finds offensive, and that it’s understandable.

Someone says something that’s particularly that might be hurtful to an individual because it affects them directly and they get angry. I should also have forbearance towards that. I might not try to get too angry in response. If more people tried to adopt this view maybe at every point in the outrage cycle, you could potentially be tempting things down a little bit. But at the same time, some people might respond that you need to have outrage to the outrage to preserve the freedom at the first level of discussion. I don’t know. It gets very complicated.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. I often think that … I wish we could probably, and maybe already exists, but like your norms here that are friendly and so when I say things that people should take responsibility for the way that they express things. I also think we should have like a lot tolerance for people who fail to do that and give them an opportunity to clarify. So one thing I would never do is just be like, “Your statement implicated this thing. This thing is morally repugnant. You’re more morally repugnant and no one should ever listen to anything you say.”

I would just say, “Hey, the reason why people are disagreeing with you so strongly is because the thing that you said implicated this thing and then you can clarify it and you can remove that implication.” And so we find it very difficult to know where to draw the line between some friendliness and outrage. And the danger that you talked about is a kind of real one where sometimes we can find it hard to see whether a view that is controversial or out there is in fact just on the edge of current ethics and we’re not even seeing it.

So if historically arguments that like, “Hey, maybe animals actually matter and we shouldn’t just harm them arbitrarily,” might have looked really absurd. Similarly, for arguments that you should favor people regardless of whether they’re from your own country or not. We’d have looked anti-patriotic and possibly we’d be perceived as really controversial and bad.

Robert Wiblin: Seditious.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. And so because we know that in the past some views that we now think are correct, were extremely controversial and would have been shut you down, we should have attitude of risk. We’re really understand that any view that someone puts forward is of that form. It could be over that form. And so we do want to protect some ability for people to talk controversially. And then, is there a line at which you simply refuse to engage with someone? And I think there is.

It’s just that what we’re trying to determine is where that line is and some people are seeing views that they disagree with and shutting them down and it’s like, “Well, maybe even if we feel like that’s appropriate, we should step back the lane and allow for more room for some views of this form or for people to clarify their views or whatever and reserve extreme outreach for genuinely and obviously religious views.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Yeah. Although I’m in favor of forbearance, it’s certainly not absolute. You do see people who stir controversy or say things that are predictably will make people feel threatened or insulted, and they’re not even driving a potentially some really important moral truth. Then the thing may not even really be relevant to any decisions that we could make.

And they don’t seem to be in good faith trying to reduce the amount of threatening us of what they’re saying as much as possible, which is what that do. If they were really just concerned with the truth of the matter and the offense they were causing was just not unintended and unavoidable consequence. So in those cases, maybe we shouldn’t just stoke the average cycle, but you should be strongly discouraged during that kind of thing.

Amanda Askell: Yeah, and I think this is the thing about responsibility over the way that you see things because it can feel like disingenuous if it seems like you’re just trying to create kind of intellectual clickbait and it’s like you could have views that are a little bit out there. But whenever I have views of that form, I like to think that I try and put them carefully. I try and explain precisely why and bring people.

You reached this point where you thought that this controversial thing was true and ideally you reached it with values that were good and from an earlier starting point and I’m like, “If you genuinely think that that controversial thing is true, you can give these reasoned arguments from the starting point that you started at to that conclusion.”

That’s what I think a lot of the good work. If you look at the kind of controversial views that turned out to be we now think are correct like, “Hey, you should actually care about people in other countries and you should care about animals and you should expand your moral circle far beyond like just your kin.” A lot of the work that went into that wasn’t like intellectual clickbait. It wasn’t like a high from this fun thing and super controversial, but I’m going to claim it’s true.

It was like careful reasoned arguments that people were giving. And so that’s more powerful and that we should probably really praise that. And as a result, we should focus more on … it’s fine to just be the way that you did this was wrong, even if your conclusion turns out to be correct via these reasoned arguments, the fact that you didn’t give them, it’s actually in and of itself, something that we should be giving you negative feedback about it.

Robert Wiblin: So that’s a nice segue to the next section of three questions that I ask a lot of guests. And then the first one is, what’s your most unusual view, kind of philosophical or otherwise, and perhaps especially relative to our potentially the listeners to the show?

Amanda Askell: My most unusual view is very hard for me to say because I do have some unusual views. I’ve argued for things. I don’t think there’s an obvious distinction between things like prison and just corporal punishment. And so I find it a bit strange that people are so fine with prison and not okay with corporal punishment.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Flesh this one out. I mentioned a lot of people wouldn’t have had this argument.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. So the idea is just think about … there are various things that punishment is intended to do and so one of the argument for prison is it’s intended to keep people isolated from society where they can’t do harm. But there are all these other functions that punishment is supposed to serve. So it’s supposed to merely punishing the person for having done something wrong, for example.

Robert Wiblin: It’s kind of retribution.

Amanda Askell: Retribution and also preventing other people from doing the wrong in future. So creating these disincentives and a lot of people … if you just care about keeping people away from society, then it doesn’t seem obvious that the prisons should in any way be bad places. But a lot of people seem okay with the idea that you can group together all of the punitive aspects of punishment and put them into the prison system.

And that is what prison is. It’s like there’s very punitive thing where a lot of people … the thought experiment I sometimes give is like you can have three years in a US prison or you can lose your pinky finger. And which would you prefer? I would prefer to lose my pinky finger and you can do this like trade off with people where you’re like, “How much corporal punishment would you be willing to take on in order to avoid being in a US prison for like many years?”

And we can use that to measure roughly how punitive it is to be sent to prison. And then a lot of people seem to think that the idea of corporal punishment is really terrible. But that somehow prison is okay even though it’s like the imprisonment has this extremely detrimental effect on the lives of the people who goes to prison. And I don’t quite see how you can maintain that view. And so you can go in many directions with this. The direction I tend to go in is, we should think that the punitive aspects of prison.

If we think that corporal punishment is bad and I think we should, then we should have this equal attitude towards the way that we run prison systems so that they’re extremely harmful for the people who go there. I come at this from this kind of consistency thing of, “I just can’t maintain a difference there.” If I would prefer to lose my pinky finger than go to prison and why hasn’t society harmed me more by sending me to prison for three years? Then it would have just cut off my finger.

Robert Wiblin: I mentioned that some people might attack you for this thing. How can you say that corporal punishment could possibly be acceptable? You might say, how can you say that prison can possibly be acceptable?

Amanda Askell: Yeah. To my mind, this isn’t an argument for the acceptability of corporal punishment. It’s really to emphasize that we’re not taking into account how bad prison is for people and maybe you think it’s fine and maybe you think the punishment is justified. But it’s like when you see a new story and it’s like someone has gone to prison for like 10 years, think about what you would be willing to undergo and way of physical harm to yourself in order to avoid that punishment and remember that what is happening to them is as bad as that.

So my thought is I want to take the visceral negative reaction that people have to corporal punishment and attribute that to a prison sentence and be like, “If you think that it would be really terrible to lose your left hand, but you’d be willing to lose your left hand to avoid eight years in prison, then when you hear that someone received an eight-year prison sentence, that same feeling of horror should apply to that sentence.

And obviously, that isn’t always going to mean that you don’t think that the sentence is just. It’s just to say like, let’s make sure that we’re being proportional in our understanding of this punishment and not pretend that there is nothing and that we’re just hearing these numbers. This is more true of more minor crimes, for example. And you might hear a sentence that’s extremely high for a fairly minor offense. And ideally, this would get more emotions, more in tune with what’s actually happening to the person in question.

Robert Wiblin: I recall you wrote some article about this years ago so we can try to dig that up and-

Amanda Askell: Yeah, I think I have a blog post on it.

Robert Wiblin: I think that this topic is also discussed in a book called When Brute Force Fails by an academic who studies Criminal Justice Reform, Mark Kleiman. So I’ll stick up a link to that book if you’re interested in learning more. Okay. So second common question, what do you think effective altruism is doing wrong and it doesn’t have to be the worst thing that’s happening, but something that you think is under appreciated that you’ve noticed?

Amanda Askell: I say don’t give too much confidence to what I see on this issue because I would need to reflect more on it to give better views. My immediate response is like there are two conceptions of effective altruism. There’s a thin one and a thick one. And on the thin conception, it’s just that you want to do the most good and you want to use evidence to do the most good.

For me, it’s hard to object to that. People might disagree about what in fact does the most good and so some people who think that more systematic changes is feasible. They’re not disagreeing necessarily with effective altruism, they’re just disagreeing with what is effective. But there’s thicker notion is more like the way that the beliefs in the community and the way that the community operates.

I suspect I would like to see more inclusion of people with different backgrounds and views. Effective altruism has attracted to this certain type of person and I hope that broadens out because that would really increase the general level of expertise that the community can appeal to and it would also potentially increase it’s broader appeal.

I also think that being a bit more careful about how things are presented would be good because you can alienate potential allies. I’ve talked a bit about the fact that I think that a lot of very altruistically motivated people might look at effective altruism and think that you don’t care about social issues for example. And you can actually just correct that by making clear that you do think that these issues are really important.

It’s just that you think that there are other areas that are really neglected and that’s why you’re working on them. So you can cancel some of that stuff that is going to alienate people like, “Oh, you only care about this course area and you think everything else is rubbish.” And related to the issue of appealing to a broader group of people or at least bridging gaps. I think that it’s easy for this in-group talk to start occurring within effective altruism and it’s a really natural thing to have. People want to start using technical language, but one has to be aware that you’re trying to talk to many people.

Effective altruism is not just trying to appeal to see one set of academics who already have technical language is trying to appeal to both members of the public and members of various different disciplines. And I think that in order to do that effectively, you really have to keep your communication as accessible as possible. And that means avoiding terms that are just no common English terms, for example, without fully explaining them. And so I think that trying to be more inclusive in the way that things are described could also be quite good for effective altruism.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I’m also pretty worried about jargon. It’s not that unusual for me to hear conversations between people involved in the community that I can’t follow because they’re just using all of these skewer terms. One thing that particularly bothers me is coming up with new terms that don’t have any natural meaning where there’s already a word like a short phrase that could be used to describe them, which I see happening reasonably often now. It seems almost deliberately exclusionary to come up with these and really unnecessary.

Amanda Askell: I understand the instinct. I do like the fact that in philosophy, it’s really common to … if you think that an English language term just doesn’t quite describe the thing that you mean to just make up a term and then attach meaning to it and the idea is just to avoid ambiguity. But really that’s only okay within certain discourses. And really it’s only okay if you actually define the term very commonly even if people are doing this in talks, it’ll actually give the explicit definition.

And so when people just start using these terms in a kind of offhand way, the cost to that is exclusion and it really has to be worth the cost. There is no other way of describing this term. So I’m going to take on the burden of every time I use this term explaining to people what I mean by it because it’s so useful. And that’s true of some things. There’s certainly some concepts that are just like that, but they’re not that common. And so I feel quite negatively about discourse that I can’t just enter and understand.

And I don’t think it’s like a mark of a good writer or a good communicator that it takes a huge amount of effort to understand them. In fact, I often think that we should have norms where if you don’t understand people relatively quickly, you’re not required to continue to engage with it because for many reasons, but it’s the job of communicators to clearly tell you what they mean. And if they feel like it’s not your job to-

Robert Wiblin: They impose such large demands on other people.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. And actually it can be damaging. So people can do this in ways that are not just about jargon but about ambiguity. And so if you communicate in a way that’s ambiguous or that uses a lot of jargon, what you do is you force people to spend a lot of time thinking about what you might mean and suppose that the January like 14 interpretations of what you mean. If they’re smart and conscientious reader, they’re going to be charitable and they’re going to attribute the best interpretation to you.

And this is actually really bad because it can mean that … ambiguous communication can actually be really attractive to people who are excited about generating interpretations of texts. And so you can end up having these really perverse incentives to not be clear in a way that’s just going to alienate a bunch of people and make some people really attracted to the message that you’re putting across.

And so there’s a lot of things operating here that I’m super wary of and I think that there are norms in philosophy. They’re not always followed, but it’s one thing that I always liked about the discipline is you’re told to always just basically state the thing that you mean to state as clearly as possible. And I think that’s like a norm that I live by. And I also think that people appreciate when reading.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, this is getting close to a hobby horse of mine quite an extremist on this communication issues. So when I notice people who I think of being vague or obscurantist that they’re not communicating as clearly as they could, my baseline assumption is that they’re pulling a scam. They’re pulling the scam where they’re expecting other people to do the work for them and they’re trying to cover up weaknesses in what they’re saying by not being clear. Maybe that’s too cynical.

Maybe that’s too harsh and interpretation. I were saying we should be charitable to other people but honestly my experience very often just has been even after looking into it more, that has been my conclusion that especially people who can’t express things clearly but claim that they have some extremely clear idea of what you’re trying to say. I feel that they’re just pulling a con.

Amanda Askell: Yeah. Something that happens is things can be very difficult to read or understand because it involves a lot of prior knowledge or assumes a lot of prior knowledge. And so if you come to something without that knowledge, it can be really hard to interpret what the person is saying. And so this can be in some ways through very little fault of the person who is communicating. It’s just like this is a really technical area of engineering and if you’re new in engineer and you’ve never read any papers in this field, you might not understand this paper.

But it will refer you back to things. It will continuously refer you back until you can basically give yourself the education that you need to understand it. But if you’re coming from the outside, it can be hard to differentiate between someone who’s just so far ahead of you that you just don’t understand what they’re writing and someone who is just being obscure.

Even if you understood everything relevant to this area, you would still think that this person is being obscure. Taking advantage of the difficulty of differentiating those things is really bad. And in a lot of ways, I’m pretty good at telling the difference between the two things. Some of the papers I have to do a lot of literature reviews for my thesis and some of the papers they are quite technical and shorter than they need to be.

Now, I read them and I’m like, “I wish you had made this three pages longer and just explained everything because that would really help the reader a lot. But I know that the thing that you were saying was true and you referred me back to lots of things. You gave me the citations, you made reference to the theorems that I needed to know to be able to understand this and so on. And so you gave me the tools and you weren’t being obscure. It was just difficult to read you without that background.

As a result, I both think that actually we should kind of criticize it and academic work can be inclined to make her work much more accessible to people, not just within our field but in other fields and that we should be extra inclined to criticize it with people who are writing to a general audience because there’s just no need to do it then.

Robert Wiblin: One pattern I noticed that makes me especially annoyed is when they did criticize the people who can’t understand they look down on them. And that’s a real red flag for me that something odd socially is going on here. Maybe one reason why I’m particular skeptical here, I just rarely find that I encountered this problem myself.

But even in quite complicated areas, I usually find that I can at least get people to grasp what I’m pointing towards even if I can’t explain all the technical details. There’s usually some core that people can conceptualize.

Amanda Askell: I think that’s right. And sometimes it can be hard to communicate in one medium and easier in other. So I find a lot of the work that I do easier to communicate if I have diagrams, for example. And so harder to communicate verbally, easier to communicate on paper. But I’ve almost never met a topic where I’m like, “I could in no way describe this to someone so that they have a basic understanding of it.”

And I would see as a failing on my part if I couldn’t. I wouldn’t assume that this was just some there. They’re just these mysterious areas there too obscure to ever bring someone up to speed on. I would just assume that … often when I am in that position, I don’t fully understand the issue.

And so I’m quite inclined to be like, “It’s really our job to make things clear to people and people appreciate it and then understand it.” And also, it’s completely acceptable for people to ask what things mean and to ask really simple questions. Maybe this is too much of an aside. But there’s this interesting phenomenon that I think does happen, which is like when people become sort of secure that people aren’t going to look down on them, they start asking really simple questions again.

So a question I often ask, when someone says t