Hello and sorry for the delay! We finally got together with Fin and Luca from the excellent HearThisIdea podcast for a nice roundtable discussion on longtermism. We laughed, we cried, we tried our best to communicate across the divide.
Material referenced in the discussion:
- 80k Hours Problem Profiles
- Jon Hamm imprisons us in an Alexa
- The Case for Strong Longtermism
- A Case Against Strong Longtermism
- Nick Bostrom's seminal paper on existential risks
Quote: "[Events like Chernobyl, Bhopal, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, draughts, World War I, World War II, epidemics of influenza, smallpox, black plague, and AIDS. ] have occurred many times and our cultural attitudes towards risk have been shaped by trial-and-error in managing such hazards. But tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things – from the perspective of humankind as a whole – even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life. (italics added)"
- Nick Bostrom's "A survey of expert opinion" (errata: Vaden incorrectly said this paper was coauthored by Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord. It's actually authored by Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom - Toby Ord and Anders Sandberg are acknowledged on page 15 for having helped design the questionnaire.)
Send us a survey of expert credences over at [email protected]

Special Guests: Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti.

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Vaden has selfishly gone on vacation with his family, leaving beloved listeners to fend for themselves in the wide world of epistemological confusion. To repair some of the damage, we're releasing an episode of The Theory of Anything Podcast from last June in which Vaden contributed to a roundtable discussion on the principle of optimism. Featuring Bruce Nielson, Peter Johansen, Sam Kuypers, Hervé Eulacia, Micah Redding, Bill Rugolsky, and Daniel Buchfink. Enjoy!

From The Theory of Anything Podcast description: Are all evils due to a lack of knowledge? Are all interesting problems soluble? ALL the problems, really?!?! And what exactly is meant by interesting? Also, should “good guys” ignore the precautionary principle, and do they always win? What is the difference between cynicism, pessimism, and skepticism? And why is pessimism so attractive to so many humans?

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Which unsolvable problem would you most like to solve? Send your answer via quantum tunneling to [email protected]

Special Guests: Bruce Nielson and Sam Kuypers.

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Close your eyes, and think of a bright and pristine, clean and immaculately run recycling center, green'r than a giant's thumb. Now think of a dirty, ugly, rotting landfill, stinking in the mid-day sun. Of these two scenarios, which, do you reckon, is worse for the environment?

In this episode, Ben and Vaden attempt to reduce and refute a few reused canards about recycling and refuse, by rereading Rob Wiblin's excellent piece which addresses the aformentioned question: What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong. Steel yourselves for this one folks, because you may need to paper over arguments with loved ones, trash old opinions, and shatter previous misconceptions.
Check out more of Rob's writing here.

We discuss

• The origins of recycling and some of the earliest instances
• Energy efficiency of recycling plastics, aluminium, paper, steel, and electronic waste (e-waste)
• Why your peanut butter jars and plastic coffee cups are not recyclable
• Modern landfills and why they're awesome
• How landfills can be used to create energy
• Building stuff on top of landfills
• Why we're not even close to running out of space for landfills
• Economic incentives for recycling vs top-down regulation
• The modern recycling movement and its emergence in the 1990s > - Guiyu, China, where e-waste goes to die.
• That a lot of your "recycling" ends up as garbage in the Philippines

Error Correction

• Vaden misremembered what Smil wrote regarding four categories of recycling (Metals and Aluminum / Plastics / Paper / Electronic Waste ("e-waste")). He incorrectly quoted Smil as saying these four categories were exhaustive, and represented the four major categories recycling into which the majority of recycled material can be bucketed. This is incorrect- what Smil actually wrote was:

I will devote the rest of this section (and of this chapter) to brief appraisals of the recycling efforts for four materials — two key metals (steel and aluminum) and plastics and paper—and of electronic waste, a category of discarded material that would most benefit from much enhanced rates of recycling.
- Making the Modern World: Materials and De-materialization, Smill, p.179

A list of the top 9 recycled materials can be found here: https://www.rd.com/list/most-recyclable-materials/

Sources / Citations

• Share of plastic waste that is recycled, landfilled, incinerated and mismanaged, 2019
• Source for the claim that recycling glass is not energy efficient (and thus not necessarily better for the environment than landfilling):

  Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy to manufacture and recycle. Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process. Of course, if the extra energy required by glass were produced from emissions-free sources, it wouldn’t necessarily matter that glass bottles required more energy to make and move. “If the energy is nuclear power or renewables there should be less of an environmental impact,” notes Figgener.
  - Apocalypse Never, Shellenburger, p.66

• Cloth bags need to be reused 173 times to be more eco-friendly than a plastic bag:
• Source for claim that majority of e-waste ends up in China:

  Puckett’s organization partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside old computers, TVs and printers. They dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs — enterprises that advertise themselves as “green,” “sustainable,” “earth friendly” and “environmentally responsible.” ...
  About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas — some as far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 tracker-equipped electronics that Puckett’s group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and Oregon.

  The tracked electronics ended up in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada and Kenya. Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong. <...

Have you ever wanted to be more rich? Have you considered just working a bit harder? Welcome to part III of our libertarian series, where we discuss Part B: Social Issues of Scott Alexander's Anti-Libertarian FAQ, which critiques the libertarian view that if you're rich, you deserve it, and if you're poor, well, you deserve that too. As always, the estimable Bruce Nielson (@bnielson) helps guide is through the thorny wicket of libertarian thought.

We discuss

• Do the poor deserve to be poor? Waddabout the rich?
• Is dogmatism ever a good thing?
• Is social mobility determined in part by parental wealth?
• Is this due to genetics, culture, upbringing or something else?
• The chances of escaping the lower class
• Does government regulation increase social mobility?
• Why progressive taxation makes sense

References

• David Friedman's response
• Bruce's Theory Of Anything podcast
• Popperian/Deutschian FB group: Many Worlds of David Deutsch
• On dogmatism:
  • Bruce's episode: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/episodes/Episode-51-Was-Karl-Popper-Dogmatic-e1obs0m/a-a2hb64g
  • Ben's blog post: https://benchugg.com/writing/dogmatism/
• Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism:
  • First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
  • Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall

Quotes

The Argument:

Those who work hardest (and smartest) should get the most money. Not only should we not begrudge them that money, but we should thank them for the good they must have done for the world in order to satisfy so many consumers.

People who do not work hard should not get as much money. If they want more money, they should work harder. Getting more money without working harder or smarter is unfair, and indicative of a false sense of entitlement.

Unfortunately, modern liberal society has internalized the opposite principle: that those who work hardest are greedy people who must have stolen from those who work less hard, and that we should distrust them at until they give most of their ill-gotten gains away to others. The “progressive” taxation system as it currently exists serves this purpose.

This way of thinking is not only morally wrong-headed, but economically catastrophic. Leaving wealth in the hands of the rich would “make the pie bigger”, allowing the extra wealth to “trickle down” to the poor naturally.

The Counterargument:

Hard work and intelligence are contributory factors to success, but depending on the way you phrase the question, you find you need other factors to explain between one-half and nine-tenths of the difference in success within the United States; within the world at large the numbers are much higher.

If a poor person can’t keep a job solely because she was lead-poisoned from birth until age 16, is it still fair to blame her for her failure? And is it still so unthinkable to take a little bit of money from everyone who was lucky enough to grow up in an area without lead poisoning, and use it to help her and detoxify her neighborhood?

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Do your part to increase social mobility by sending your hard-earned money to: [email protected]

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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Alright people, we made it. Six months, a few breaks, some uncontrollable laughter, some philosophy, many unhinged takes, a little bit of diarrhea and we're here, the last Ask Us Anything. After this we're never answering another God D*** question. Ever.

We discuss

• Do you wish you could change your own interests?
• Methods of information ingestion
• Taking books off their pedestal bit
• Intellectual influences
• Veganism (why Ben is, why Vaden isn't)
• Anti-rational memes
• Fricken Andrew Huberman again
• Stoicism
• Are e-fuels the best of the best or the worst of the worst?

Questions

1. (Andrew) Any suggested methods of reading Popper (or others) and getting the most out of it? I'm not from a philosophy background, and although I get a lot out of the books, I think there's probably ways of reading them (notes etc?) where I could invest the same time and get more return.
2. (Andrew) Any other books you'd say added to your personal philosophical development as DD, KP have? Who and why?
3. (Alex) Are you aware of general types of insidious anti-rational memes which are hard to recognise as such? Any ideas on how we can go about recognising them in our own thinking? (I do realise that perhaps no general method exists, but still, if you have any thoughts on this...)
4. (Lorcan) What do you think about efuels? Listen to this take by Fully Charged.

References

• Lying and Free Will by Sam Harris
• Doing Good Better by MacAskill
• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
• Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel
• Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• Peace is Every Step and True Love by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Seeing like a State by James Scott
• The Truth Behind Cage-Free and Free-Range | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

People

Producers of rational memes:

• Everything: Christopher Hitchens, Vladimir Nabokov, Sam Harris, George Orwell, Scott Alexander, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Steven Pinker
• Sex and Relationships: Dan Savage
• Environment/Progress: Vaclav Smil, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenburger, Alex Epstein
• Race: Glenn Loury, John Mcwhorter, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Chloe Valdery
• Woke: John Mcwhorter, Yasha Mounk, Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris, Douglas Murrey, Jordan Peterson, Steven Hicks, James Lindsay, Ben Shapiro
• Feminism: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Summers, Camille Paglia (Note: Then follow each thinker's favorite thinker, and never stop. )

Producers of anti-rational memes:

• Eric Weinstein
• Bret Weinstein
• Noam Chomsky (See A Potpourri Of Chomskyan Nonsense: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/001592/v6.pdf)
• Glenn Greenwald
• Reza Aslan
• Medhi Hassan
• Robin Diangelo
• Ibraam x Kendi
• George Galloway
• Judith Butler

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 fund the anti-book campaign and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help therapy costs here.
• Click dem like buttons on