Interview, Podcast
Is it more effective help strangers or people you know? | Russ Roberts (2020)
- Rob Wiblin anticipates working through a back catalog of 750 EconTalk episodes running weekly since 2006, potentially over a multi-year period, while planning to curate a top 100 list to assist listeners overwhelmed by the full collection.
- Wiblin predicts that prolonged intellectual engagement often leads to convergence of views on specific topics among smart individuals and expects a dedicated community of well-meaning people to make progress on low-probability challenges like preventing nuclear war or improving US-China relations.
- Wiblin outlines plans for the 80,000 Hours project to advise building career capital early in professional lives, predicting that individuals who reflect on this factor will marginally improve their decision-making and that educated, privileged groups could achieve greater net positive impacts by prioritizing altruism over personal career enjoyment.
- Wiblin expects that expanding moral concern to include all conscious beings will yield net positive outcomes, though he acknowledges a potential risk that such expansion could eventually undermine human motivations and worsen global conditions.
- Russ Roberts predicts humanity faces danger as technology has outpaced human prudence, wisdom, and moral development, noting that historical trends like the 20th century's ideological deaths of 100 million people contradict narratives of inevitable moral progress.
- Roberts expects cognitive decline or death to occur within approximately the next 10 years, limiting his personal capacity for mastery in complex fields like international relations or marriage, which he argues are not subject to the same linear improvement curves as skills like golf.
- Roberts foresees that attempts to solve global problems via centralized international bodies, such as a single international government, would likely result in tyranny or enslavement, predicting that the "worst will rise to the top" under such authority and that historical precedents like the State Department show a pattern of unintended negative consequences.
- Roberts predicts that the current public discourse on race and pandemics has fractured into two opposing ideological consensuses with no shared middle ground, and expects that the general public is increasingly realizing that social science and medical research lack the consistent reliability previously portrayed by media.
- Roberts expects that empirical fields like macroeconomics are insufficient for detailed policy-making due to flawed aggregate methods and a lack of granular data, leading to a skepticism that micro-level solutions like helping a family member can be successfully scaled to national or international levels.
- Roberts anticipates that future policies may facilitate parenthood through technological advancements such as external wombs, but fears that a society driven by utilitarian metrics or capricious public execution would reduce overall welfare by creating an unjust and unstable environment.
- Roberts expects that the modern unmooring of the traditional "unwritten" practice of having children makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions from aggregate surveys, such as one where 92% of 10,000 parents report satisfaction, because the result depends entirely on survey methodology rather than the intrinsic value of the experience.
- Roberts predicts that the pleasant era of democracy and economic freedom is at risk of reversal, noting that most of human history has been ugly and that reducing the complex "giant matrix" of parenting identity to a single happiness scalar is a fundamental error.
- Wiblin expects the 80,000 Hours podcast to continue featuring deep conversations regarding pressing global problems and career advice as a core part of its ongoing mission.