Ben and Vaden attempt to justify why the world needs another podcast, and fail.

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Like moths to a flame, we come back to longtermism once again. But it's not our fault. Will MacAskill published a new book, What We Owe the Future, and billions (trillions!) of lives are at stake if we don't review it. Sisyphus had his task and we have ours. We're doing it for the (great great great ... great) grandchildren.

We discuss:

• Whether longtermism is actionable
• Whether the book is a faithful representation of longtermism as practiced
• Why humans are actually cool, despite what you might hear
• Some cool ideas from the book including career advice and allowing vaccines on the free market
• Ben's love of charter cities and whether he's is a totalitarian at heart
• The plausability of "value lock-in"
• The bizarro world of population ethics

References:
"Bait-and-switch" critique from a longtermist blogger: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9Y6Y6qoAigRC7A8eX/my-take-on-what-we-owe-the-future

Quote: "For instance, I’m worried people will feel bait-and-switched if they get into EA via WWOTF then do an 80,000 Hours call or hang out around their EA university group and realize most people think AI risk is the biggest longtermist priority, many thinking this by a large margin."

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

How long is your termist? Tell us at [email protected]

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Part two on Chapter 19 of Conjectures and Refutations! Last time we got a little hung up arguing about human behavior and motivations. Putting that disagreement aside, like mature adults, we move on to the rest of the chapter and Popper's remaining theses. In particular, we focus on Popper's criticism of the idea of a nation's right to self-determination. Things were going smoothly ... until roughly five minutes in, when we start disagreeing about what the "nation" in "nation state" actually means.

(Note: Early listeners of this episode have commented that this one is a bit hard to follow - highly suggest reading the text to compensate for our many confusing digressions. Our bad, our bad).

We discuss

• Are there any benefits of being bilingual?
• Popper's attack on the idea of national self-determination
• Popper's second thesis: that out own free world is by far the best society thus far
• Reductions in poverty, unemployment, sickness, pain, cruelty, slavery, discrimination, class differences
• Popper's third thesis: The relation of progress to war
• Whether Popper was factually correct about his claim that democracies do not wage wars of aggression
• Self-accusation: A unique feature to Western societies
• Popper's fourth thesis about the power of ideas
• And his fifth thesis that truth is hard to come by

References

• Conjectures and Refutations
• Definition of self-determination from Cornell Law School
• The UN Charter
• Wilson's 14 Points

Quotes

The absurdity of the communist faith is manifest. Appealing to the belief in human freedom, it has produced a system of oppression without parallel in history.

But the nationalist faith is equally absurd. I am not alluding here to Hitler’s racial myth. What I have in mind is, rather, an alleged natural right of man— the alleged right of a nation to self-determination. That even a great humanitarian and liberal like Masaryk could uphold this absurd- ity as one of the natural rights of man is a sobering thought. It suffices to shake one’s faith in the wisdom of philosopher kings, and it should be contemplated by all who think that we are clever but wicked rather than good but stupid. For the utter absurdity of the principle of national self-determination must be plain to anybody who devotes a moment’s effort to criticizing it. The principle amounts to the demand that each state should be a nation-state: that it should be confined within a natural border, and that this border should coincide with the location of an ethnic group; so that it should be the ethnic group, the ‘nation’, which should determine and protect the natural limits of the state.

But nation-states of this kind do not exist. Even Iceland—the only exception I can think of—is only an apparent exception to this rule. For its limits are determined, not by its ethnic group, but by the North Atlantic—just as they are protected, not by the Icelandic nation, but by the North Atlantic Treaty. Nation-states do not exist, simply because the so-called ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ of which the nationalists dream do not exist. There are no, or hardly any, homogenous ethnic groups long settled in countries with natural borders. Ethnic and linguistic groups (dialects often amount to linguistic barriers) are closely intermingled everywhere. Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia was founded upon the principle of national self-determination. But as soon as it was founded, the Slovaks demanded, in the name of this principle, to be free from Czech domination; and ultimately it was destroyed by its German minority, in the name of the same principle. Similar situations have arisen in practically every case in which the principle of national self- determination has been applied to fixing the borders of a new state: in Ireland, in India, in Israel, in Yugoslavia.

There are ethnic minorities everywhere. The proper aim cannot be to ‘liberate’ all of them; rather, it must be to protect all of them. The oppression of national groups is a great evil; but national self-determination is not a feasible remedy. Moreover, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, are four obvious examples of states which in many ways violate the nationality principle. Instead of having its borders determined by one settled group, each of them has man- aged ...

Want to make everyone under 30 extremely angry? Tell them you don't like proportional representation. Tell them proportional representation sucks, just like recycling. In this episode, we continue to improve your popularity at parties by diving into Sir Karl's theory of democracy, and his arguments for why the first-past-the-post electoral system is superior to proportional representation systems. And if you find anyone left at the party who still wants to talk to you, we also cover Chapter 13 of Beginning of Infinity, where Deutsch builds upon Popper's theory. And always remember,

First-Past-The-Post: If it's good enough for the horses, it's good enough for us.

We discuss

• Why democracy should be about the removal of bad leaders
• How Popper's conception of democracy differs from the usual conception
• Why Popper supports first-past-the-post (FPP) over proportional representation (PR)
• How PR encourages backroom dealing and magnifies the influence of unpopular leaders
• The sensitivity of FPP to changes to popular will
• How FPP makes it easier to obtain majorities
• How majorities make it easier to trace the consequences of policies
• Deutsch and his criticism of compromise-policies.

References

• Popper on democracy (economist piece).
• Vaden's blog post
• Chapter 13: Choices of The Beginning of Infinity

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us form a majority and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

What's the first post you past? Tell us over at [email protected].

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Don't leave yet - we swear this will be more interesting than it sounds ...
... But a drink will definitely help. Ben and Vaden dive into the interpretations behind probability. What do people mean when they use the word, and why do we use this one tool to describe different concepts. The rowdiness truly kicks in when Vaden releases his pent-up critique of Bayesianism, thereby losing both his friends and PhD position. But at least he's ingratiated himself with Karl Popper.
References:

• Vaden's Slides on a 1975 paper by Irving John Good titled Explicativity, Corroboration, and the Relative Odds of Hypotheses. The paper is I.J. Good’s response to Karl Popper, and in the presentation I compare the two philosophers’ views on probability, epistemology, induction, simplicity, and content.
• Diversity in Interpretations of Probability: Implications for Weather Forecasting
• Andrew Gelman, Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics
• Popper quote: "Those who identify confirmation with probability must believe that a high degree of probability is desirable. They implicitly accept the rule: ‘Always choose the most probable hypothesis!’ Now it can be easily shown that this rule is equivalent to the following rule: ‘Always choose the hypothesis which goes as little beyond the evidence as possible!’ And this, in turn, can be shown to be equivalent, not only to ‘Always accept the hypothesis with the lowest content (within the limits of your task, for example, your task of predicting)!’, but also to ‘Always choose the hypothesis which has the highest degree of ad hoc character (within the limits of your task)!’" (Conjectures and Refutations p.391)

Get in touch at [email protected].
audio updated 13/12/2020

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