Interview
#42 - Dr Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
- Participants predict that individuals influenced by randomized control trial advice will report higher happiness levels six months post-intervention.
- The podcast team plans to soon publish data analyzing which demographic profiles yield the most accurate guesses on psychology paper replication quizzes.
- Future world-building efforts aim to reduce chaos to mitigate the "cluelessness" problem, though predictions remain imperfect due to random factors with massive causal ramifications.
- Establishing precise credences for long-term uncertainty is anticipated to significantly increase the value of information, necessitating new decision theories if only imprecise credences are available.
- Information-gathering strategies favor experimental interventions with less evidential support if they enable learning that improves future investment decisions.
- Science and technology spending is expected to be prioritized for beneficial long-term consequences, despite skepticism regarding its ability to resolve fundamental uncertainty issues.
- Securing the near-term lives of the current population is viewed as a prerequisite for future work on fundamental ethical problems.
- Multi-armed bandit problems with changing probabilities are identified as extremely difficult, with no current complete solutions in existing literature.
- Broad-scale policy experiments, such as positive discrimination, are recommended to gather evidence on whether such measures improve lives.
- Societal adjustments are anticipated to favor long-term incremental changes rather than immediate two-year fixes.
- Tensions between social justice activists and analytic philosophers are attributed to communication styles and political tribalism rather than core disagreements.
- Discourse quality is predicted to suffer if views are expressed without ownership of implications, while assuming good faith and reconstructing opposing views is expected to enhance moral debates.
- A norm of "soft freedom of speech" is advocated to allow controversial views to be voiced and corrected, countering the chilling effect of disproportionate online negative feedback.
- Effective altruism is expected to benefit from including diverse backgrounds and avoiding obscure technical language to prevent alienating potential allies.
- Infinite ethics problems are predicted to generate inconsistencies with fundamental axioms, suggesting a need to abandon some axioms or aggregate over space-time regions rather than agents.
- The current state of infinite ethics is described as paralysis rather than fanaticism, with long-term reflection deemed more critical than immediate prevention.
- Academic philosophy faces a shrinking job market with few permanent positions, requiring extensive time investments (approximately nine years including master's, PhD, and postdoc) for high risk of non-tenure outcomes.
- Pursuing a PhD in philosophy is considered risky for those uncertain about academic careers, particularly given the low stipend relative to alternative earnings.
- Future research will likely prioritize topics balancing urgency and importance over pure intellectual puzzles, focusing on the edge of ability to maximize skill acquisition.
- Research freedom is anticipated to be higher in value-aligned think tanks compared to academic departments constrained by top journal publication requirements.
- Specific research focus is shifting toward AI policy and related ethical questions due to their increasing tractability, importance, and urgency.
- Teaching strategies are expected to improve by using tools and empathetic conceptualizations to help students understand argument structures, countering assumptions of innate inability.
- Personal strategies include memorizing exam answers to mitigate nervousness and balancing risk-aversion with risk-neutrality to optimize impact.