#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism

80,000 Hours Podcast

In today’s episode, Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript.

On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk-taking, and willing to be contrarian. It’s a tendency he considers himself a part of, and the River has been doing well for itself in recent decades — gaining cultural influence through success in finance, technology, gambling, philanthropy, and politics, among other pursuits.

But on Nate’s telling, it’s a group particularly vulnerable to oversimplification and hubris. Where Riverians’ ability to calculate the “expected value” of actions isn’t as good as they believe, their poorly calculated bets can leave a trail of destruction — aptly demonstrated by Nate’s discussion of the extended time he spent with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried before and after his downfall.

Given this show’s focus on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them, we narrow in on Nate’s discussion of effective altruism (EA), which has been little covered elsewhere. Nate met many leaders and members of the EA community in researching the book and has watched its evolution online for many years.

Effective altruism is the River style of doing good, because of its willingness to buck both fashion and common sense — making its giving decisions based on mathematical calculations and analytical arguments with the goal of maximising an outcome.

Nate sees a lot to admire in this, but the book paints a mixed picture in which effective altruism is arguably too trusting, too utilitarian, too selfless, and too reckless at some times, while too image-conscious at others.

But while everything has arguable weaknesses, could Nate actually do any better in practice? We ask him:

• How would Nate spend $10 billion differently than today’s philanthropists influenced by EA?
• Is anyone else competitive with EA in terms of impact per dollar?
• Does he have any big disagreements with 80,000 Hours’ advice on how to have impact?
• Is EA too big a tent to function?
• What global problems could EA be ignoring?
• Should EA be more willing to court controversy?
• Does EA’s niceness leave it vulnerable to exploitation?
• What moral philosophy would he have modelled EA on?

Rob and Nate also talk about:

• Nate’s theory of Sam Bankman-Fried’s psychology.
• Whether we had to “raise or fold” on COVID.
• Whether Sam Altman and Sam Bankman-Fried are structurally similar cases or not.
• “Winners’ tilt.”
• Whether it’s selfish to slow down AI progress.
• The ridiculous 13 Keys to the White House.
• Whether prediction markets are now overrated.
• Whether venture capitalists talk a big talk about risk while pushing all the risk off onto the entrepreneurs they fund.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Rob's intro (00:01:03)
• The interview begins (00:03:08)
• Sam Bankman-Fried and trust in the effective altruism community (00:04:09)
• Expected value (00:19:06)
• Similarities and differences between Sam Altman and SBF (00:24:45)
• How would Nate do EA differently? (00:31:54)
• Reservations about utilitarianism (00:44:37)
• Game theory equilibrium (00:48:51)
• Differences between EA culture and rationalist culture (00:52:55)
• What would Nate do with $10 billion to donate? (00:57:07)
• COVID strategies and tradeoffs (01:06:52)
• Is it selfish to slow down AI progress? (01:10:02)
• Democratic legitimacy of AI progress (01:18:33)
• Dubious election forecasting (01:22:40)
• Assessing how reliable election forecasting models are (01:29:58)
• Are prediction markets overrated? (01:41:01)
• Venture capitalists and risk (01:48:48)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Video engineering: Simon Monsour
Transcriptions: Katy Moore