Pushkin back. In twenty twelve, when Sam Bankman Freed was an undergraduate in MIT, he learned about a movement called effective altruism or EA for short. The argument behind EA, very roughly is that philanthropy is broken. People shouldn't be giving away their money based on emotional attachments to certain causes or institutions. Rather, they should lean more on evidence and reason in order to do as much good as possible in the world. Sam Bankman Freed soon became one
of the most famous proponents of EA. One of the things that interested me when I met him the first time was his interest in this. I found it curious. I had heard bits and pieces about EA, but I got the full throated version from him, And as I started to write about his world, I found his company FTX was filled with people who also considered themselves effective altruists. Then,
of course, Sam's cryptocurrency exchanged dramatically collapse last year. He and FTX had been possibly the best thing ever to happen to the effective altruist movement, but the best thing quickly transformed into the worst. This is on background from Against the Rules, I'm Michael Lewis. Effective altruism is running through the background of my forthcoming book, Going Infinite. The movement started just a few years before Sam Bankmanfreed encountered it.
I need to understand what effective altrus really believe and what it is about this movement the so appealing to smart young people, and also how these advocates are trying to pick up the pieces after ftx's collapse. So we found two college student who are leaders in effective altruism organizations to talk to me about this. Al Shin is a senior at Harvard studying statistics and Gabriel mccobe is
a senior at Stanford studying computer science. I started off asking them how they'd explain effective altruism to someone who knows nothing about it. Gabe answers, first.
We are like, at least I am like a person with a lot of privilege. I'm born in the US, I go to like a pretty good university. I'm a man who has grown up in a middle class family. Like I have a lot of privilege and resources to
do change and impact in the world. And maybe you want to, like actually try to figure out what's the way you can have the best positive impact and to me, effective altriism is both like a framework for trying to think about how we might do a whole lot of good with our with our careers at our time, with our other resources, and then a community of people who are actually trying to put that into practice and actively like push their careers and the resources towards doing a lot of good.
What kind of pushback do you get when you're talking to people your age about these ideas.
H I think one possible avenue of pushback is this very cynical, almost nihilist view that you can't actually enact positive change. The actual level of suffering in the world is not going to be reduced. There's just not enough people working on this.
Do you feel like what's under that objection is basic selfishness, that that I don't really want to have to think about the world this way. So if I can dismiss these arguments as saying as being preposterous, I can go about my selfish life.
Certainly there's some people like that, and I would not say though, that everyone is like that. I think there is genuinely people who have some level of very cynical, nihilistic outlook as to what humanity can accomplish, and that bleeds into not taking people seriously when they tend to
have a more hopeful, optimistic attitude. And even for people who are very involved in EA, at some point, these also just tend to be people who are philosophically inclined, and the philosophically inclined also tend toward nihilisa at some point in their lives. So maybe they'll come.
Back around.
And like about the point of like people being selfish, Like I don't know when I was like first, like thinking about the ideas, it can feel overwhelming. Sometimes they give about like oh wow, like maybe the default thing we're grown up with. As all said, is the world kind of beats into you that you're just a tiny little ant in this universe. You can't really do anything. They are all these big systems. It's pretty hopeless to
actually do any change. And then EA is all like whoa people can have an impact, You can be like dispropersonally impactful, you can do all this stuff That feels like a lot of responsibility. It also feels like maybe a lot of pressure thinking about like, oh, do I
actually want to change the trajectory of my career. I'm just like a young college student like I thought I was going to like do these other like fun interesting things, but maybe I actually want to like change totally what I would work on, and that can be kind of
scary for me. I think I had some of that maybe cognitive dissonance when I was first getting involved and trying to think of like how much I wanted to trade off, like what I would otherwise do if I was like totally egoistic, versus what I wanted to prioritize in terms of altruism and helping others and all this.
When I first heard the ideas, I had encountered them in a very casual way because people had told me about young people going to Wall Street to make money to give it away, and I thought that that was
really interesting, what a curious subversion of Wall Street. But when I first got the full blast from the people at FTX, I remember thinking, this is so alien to anything I heard or felt, or any impulse I had when I was a college student, And I asked myself like why, And I think the answer that the honest answer was I didn't want to change the world. I
liked the world just the way I found it. There was a kind of idiot happiness that I experienced when I was a college student that would have inoculated me against any kind of intellectual assault from an effective altruist. You probably don't really run across that as much. I bet.
Also at Stanford there's like definitely a like people call it the Stanford bubble. It's easy to like feel like you're in this little utopia separated from the universe, and a lot of people just like, I don't know, life is good here and let's just go work in fintech or something. But also there are like quite a lot of people here who do recognize that the world has quite a lot of issues, and a lot of people here,
I think do want to do things about that. Whether that's like I don't know, there's like a lot of people interested in climate change or social justice or things like this. I think it's very much the case that many young people now are at least very broadly in with helping others.
After a short break, Gabe All and I get into what sets effective altruism apart from ordinary altruism on background, will be right back. I'm back with Harvard senior Al Shin and Stanford senior Gabriel Mukobe on background, I would love you both to explain to someone who's never heard of these ideas, like, what's the difference between effective altruism and just altruism ordinary philanthropy.
Yeah. So, Peter Wldeford, who's one of the co founders of Rethink Priorities, has a recent.
Post that I quite like.
It's called eas three radical ideas I want to protect, and the three ideas are radical empathy, trying to think about the ways that society might be wrong in not extending moral consideration to others. The second is scope sensitivity. A lot of people are bad at actually estimating the
amount of impact certain things will do. If you like survey people on like, hey, you could do this one intervention and it would like save a thousand chicken lives versus this other thing and it would save like one hundred thousand chicken lives. And you ask the people like, hey, how good is this thing compared to the other, and then they like, way to un upscale. The difference is like, oh, it's like goes from like a six to a seven.
So like, emotionally, a lot of people have a hard time, like empirically or objectively evaluating the impact of things.
Of the things they do right or the money they give. And EA is measuring this so that you have scope sensitivity.
Measuring or like at least just trying to be aware of this effect and trying to actually do things that seem to have more of an impact on others rather than just like more impact on how we feel good inside of our heads about us doing things. And then the third thing is scout mindset. And this is the idea of like thinking of your arguments and the ways you approach the world, not as like soldiers. Like a
lot of people argue with each other as soldiers. Their arguments are soldiers is the term, I guess where you are on the right side. You're like fighting for your kingdom or whatever, and you're going to say the things in order to win the battle. This is different from how scouts approach the world, where you don't know about the territory and a landscape and you're trying to maintain uncertainty over different possibilities and taking different evidence and try
to figure out what the truth is. Maybe this is just a better way of approaching thinking about the world that can enable us to be closer to the truth, more honest and more objective and hopefully mess up less when we're trying to do a lot of impactful things.
A can I ask you the same question, just like if you're just explaining the difference between general do goodism or philanthropy and effective altruism, how do you go about it?
I think effective in effective altruism is not to contrast it with ineffective altruism, but to make it seem like this is altruism that is really focused on the effects of what we're doing, that isn't about how the do gooder necessarily feels about the actions that they're doing, but what amount of good do those actions put into the world.
How big a part of your life is it? Is there anything you've done differently with your life because this movement exists?
Hmm? I think it has altered the course of what I chose to study. I mean I basically change from some interest in computer science and machine learning and protein folding coming into college into getting a more broader statistical and probability base that could be generalized to more problems depending on what seemed more urgent at the time, which is forever changing. So I thought, like a more broad
probability basis would be good for that. I think there is some reasonable limit you have to impose on your self before you find yourself over optimizing to doing the most good and ending up not necessarily operating like a human being, but just like a little ball of stress that is constantly tormented with the amount of suffering that
you're putting into the world. This is something that the effective Altruism movement is trying to discourage among especially young people who get involved, because again the philosophically minded, in addition to going through a nihilist phase, also go through like several neurotic phases in their life.
Probably what would be going too far with effective altruism in your mind?
Hmm?
What line when someone crosses it in the movement do you think I wouldn't do that?
Something like if you're forcing yourself to do something that you hate, like absolutely despise, because of some abstract reasoning that this is the most good that you, in particular can do. I think sacrificing a lot of personal happiness for like very uncertain future outcomes when there are options that like you could do that you would be happy
with that aren't bad. It's like not impossible that someone hears that, oh, this particular uh, like biosecurity or pandemic preparedness or bio risk is a really important cause area, and then they force themselves to go work in the wet lab even though they hate lab work. They absolutely despise it. They don't like the like PPA, they don't like the protocols, they don't like working with chemicals or organisms,
et cetera. But for some reason they have decided based on their reasoning, and this is the most important thing that they can do. I would say that, like, this extreme sacrifice of personal happiness and ability to enjoy the work that you do is probably indicative that you like. This is not something that the movement wants to induce in people who are exposed to its ideas.
Right, gave, let me ask you this same question, like how it's affected your life, your actual decisions you've made or things you've done that you would not otherwise have done if effective altruism didn't exist.
Yeah, Like, now I'm for my career, I'm like primarily considering working in AI safety or policy or field building. I think, like most directly, probably it's like accelerated my like thinking of this and trying to critically analyze the trajectory I want to set my personal career on and what I should be doing to get there. So maybe it's more of like a speed up effect than like a drastic turn. I think it's been useful to have both like this framework, this intellectual thing and the community.
And the community has been like really helpful and I've made a lot of friends, and I'm like very thankful to have a lot of people who are supporting me and can talk to to discuss these very hard questions.
But this must come up in the community, Like where do you draw the line? Yeah, yeah, definitely, And I'm thinking not just like choice of career, but how about a question like do you have kids? Is it a selfish and ineffective pursuit having kids? I mean you hear people talk about that.
Yeah, definitely. I hang out with people who are like mostly too young to be having kids right now.
So what you're thinking about you But it's gonna come up someone.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's certainly, like a lot of people writing on the forum dot effective ulstulism dot org. There's one post they had decided not to have kids, and they're like, wow, this is this is just the rational thing to do, like it's it would be selfish for us to do as and they like committed to this, and they were miserable.
Yeah, And the argument argument is, you have you'll have less of an impact on the problems that threaten humanity and less of an impact on totally human happiness if if you have to spend so many hours raising a child.
That was the general idea, the or like at least the naive utilitarian idea perhaps, But it turns out they were miserable. They like really didn't like it. So they talked about it and decided like, yeah, it's actually, like IL said, this is something we actually care about a lot. That's like really integral to our personal happiness and to our life satisfaction. We do want to have kids, And they decided to have kids. And I think now they
have kids and they're much happier. They're also like more productive, they said, and like this has actually been an increase to their productivity and they're like self reported ability to do a lot of good. So certainly, like people think about this a lot and try to talk about it, but it seems like there are no clear answers. Universally, a lot of this stuff just depends on the individual.
Perhaps, how do you have anything to say about having kids?
Yeah, I would say on the flip side of this problem, probably a lot of people have kids for the wrong reasons too, like social pressure, familial pressure, et cetera. And maybe being an effective altruism makes them more likely to identify like these pressures that are causing them to make a decision that wouldn't be good for them, either in terms of personal happiness or even in terms of their Do you solve the problem?
Do you all have these discussions about kids?
Not really?
Not really? What about kidneys? What about giving a kidney? So the first my characters had big talks about kids and mostly came down on the side you're not supposed to have them. They were arguing, that's where they settled. Mostly. The kidney question was another one, like do you have an obligation to give away your kidney? Yeah?
It seems like there's like a lot of discussion about this several years ago in the EA community, at least like what I've read online. I was not involved, Like back then.
You were your post, you're a post.
Post kidney yeah post. A lot of people were thinking about this and it seems like there is like quite a compelling case. Maybe like a lot of people just die from being on the kidney wait list, and like there aren't enough kidneys, and uh, seems like generally it's somewhat safe to survive on one kidney for a lot of people. Maybe this just like is a very direct way to mostly kind of factually save someone's life. So I think that's like, I don't know pretty any strong case.
I've not thought about this a lot. I've not given a kidney. I don't know anyone else of like my ea friends who has. It seems like for for various reasons, this is like falling out of favor in the in the conversations. It's also just like a very extreme kind of commitment, Like it's it's a very bad recruiting strategy to be like, hey have you heard of effective autism?
By the way, can we have your kidney? This is this is like I don't know, it's not the best way to like approach people, I think, And yeah, maybe it's.
Really this it's kind of a second date conversation.
Yeah, you got to give it a little time to do, perhaps, right.
I've had some friends bring up the discussion of kidney's it still seems mostly like I throw away philosophical argument then necessarily a direct moral imperative. I don't think there's ever been a instance where someone who's like, I'm going to donate my kidney unless someone gives me a good argument to stop me.
Right now, I'm curious, are there still debates with NEA about focusing on immediate suffering versus focusing on big, long term existential threats, current lives versus lives in the future.
Oh yeah, definitely, definitely.
Is it kind of still an urgent top of your conversation, Anya.
I would say yes, but it's not stopping people from doing work in either of those areas. While the debate is not settled, certainly people are still pushing forward and no solving or alleviating tuberculosis burden versus working on these like accidential threats that might happen in the future.
We're going to take a break here. When we return, Gave and Al talk about effective altruism and the idea of the bank Shop. It's interesting to me because after my main character in the book, after Sam Bankman freed, he does collide with THEA and in its very early incarnation, and in its early and its first incarnation, it really is about like taking some of your salary and giving it to an effective charity, that is, you know, saving
the most lives in poor countries. And a year into it, there's a kind of intellectual revolution inside of the in the minds of the very people who who brought him EA, and they are starting to argue that actually the more impactful thing to do is try to prevent humanity from being wiped out by some pathogen or by you know,
unaligned AI or or whatever it is. And I'm just kind of wondering how alive that debate still is, or if it's just kind of a dead letter, or if it's affecting the way you're thinking about what you're doing with your lives.
Yeah, I think a big unsettled question here is being able to prioritize these very different moral responsibilities we have around harm. So I think this is something Elizabeth Ashford introduced a few years ago, this idea of like primary, secondary, and tertiary moral responsibilities. Primary is you personally don't do harm, Secondary is you prevent other people from doing harm to others, And third is if someone has experienced harm you work
to alleviate that harm. So in terms of this, it's really a very difficult prioritization scheme when you have all
these different responsibilities toward harm. And if one of these categories, which for example, would be like alleviating as I mentioned before, tuberculosis burden that affects millions of people, is still a leading infectious disease killer versus preventing a pandemic from being engineered that could kill everybody, it's very difficult to see where the moral prioritization lines up in terms of what
you should personally work on. And it's also something that like might not necessarily be solvable with doing like a probability calculation, because like moral responsibility is not necessarily something that you can like boil down to numbers.
It's also hard to make probability calculations about a lot of the existential threats.
Yeah, it's like certainly it's probably like harder than you're like more likely to be wrong than like a randomized control trial of malaria interventions. Right at the same time, I think a lot of people can make pretty good educated guesses, perhaps based on the evidence we have and the reasoning we have about things like a lot of people in the EA movement perhaps predicted something like COVID
before it happened. A lot of people are like raising the fire alarms of we should have much better pandemic preparedness and monitoring and rapid vaccine development programs, and then they like, for various reasons, messed up and weren't listened
to and COVID happened. Anyway, Maybe like similar things are happening with with AI risk now too, where if you survey like leading machine learning experts who are like not focused on these risks and are just like people publishing top papers that some of the top machine learning conferences.
The result from the most recent AI impact survey was, like the median respondent gives like a ten percent chance that the development of AI will like destroy everyone, like results in catastrophic outcomes, including human extinction.
They're real things, They're possibly real.
I definitely agree with Gabe on this point that the difficulty and maybe the lack of clarity on an exact number of people that might be killed by AI in the future is not a counter argument to the fact that this could be a really big problem. Like the uncertainty, isn't that like there's a super super super high probability
that nothing is going to happen. There's definitely lots of fairly fairly good analysis on things that may come to pass if we don't do anything to regulate or do solve certain issues.
The characters in my book did this bank shot that effective altruism kind of dreamed up They all earned to give idea that you go do a job that you might not necessarily do to maximize the dollars you make that you can then give away to people like you so you can do what you're doing.
Yeah, so certainly a lot of early EA stuff was kind of focused on, hey, we're just a very small movement, maybe we should like figure out ways to more effectively direct philanthropic funds towards more impactful organizations. Over time, as the community has grown, as people have engaged in these ideas further, now people are like, hey, what if we are the philanthropic organizations, what if we actually do this direct work and try to have more of an impact.
There's certainly like a lot of current issues, like a lot of perhaps global health and developments and animal welfare, things that can just benefit from a lot of money. Maybe that's where a lot of this funding still goes to. But certainly they are like a lot of within there, within those fields and within other causes, there's like still a very big need for people doing direct work, and so it's maybe more of the current focus.
Is that true, it's Harvard too, ol I would say so.
Certainly we do have some aspects of even our introductory fellowship that is more of this classic If you have like spare money and a lot of people would benefit from donating it, then you probably should and you should make sure it goes to highly effective charities that can make that money go as far as possible and save the most people. What we don't really encourage is making lots of money and then expecting people to donate it
for a lot of the same reasons that Gabe has outlined. Generally, like the people who are coming into Harvard EA tend to have like very specialized skill sets and ability to acquire like lots of really really cool cool skills basically, and if it we didn't like direct them to doing like the very best things that they could do with like these very specific and unique talents, then this would also be like quite a quite a waste.
It's a interesting because it's very different from what was being pitched by the leaders of effective altruism back when Sam Beckman Free was MT he listened to speech where it was really encouraging the audience to go to Wall Street or go into some high paying job and channel the dollars. You know, instead of being a doctor in Africa, you could pay for ten doctors in Africa. And that's that idea is not kicking around in the same way.
I think it's also much harder perhaps now to be like really successful at earning to give compared to some of this other stuff. Like maybe earning to give is much more heavy tailed in the sense that it's just the very few people who make like, like the very extreme amounts of money who can like pay for a lot of this stuff.
It's funny because he earn to give idea originates with Toby Ord doing it himself, and he's a He's on an Oxford professor's salary and arguing and making the point that just by donating an oversized chunk of his salary not so much that he couldn't survive, that he would save like eighty thousand children from likeness in Africa, and it's that idea was intoxicating to Sam and to the people around him, but it doesn't sound like it's really
it's as infectious with you all. The reason that's odd to me is that you're both sitting in institutions that are pipelines to very high paying jobs in tech and finance, and it's sort of like that it would be a it would be a natural step.
So I wouldn't say it's like gone away, but I would like distinguish that kind of earning to give from like the oh, let's actually try to like get into the very tail end of the highest paying jobs, particularly not through the thing you're going to do otherwise, but do the thing that earns the most money as possible and donate. And that seems like much much harder to me to succeed at compared to like directing people to direct work in fields that they might be really competent at.
For a brief period, Sam Beckman Freed made it look very easy, And I'm wondering when FTX blew up, if it reverberated around your organizations and people talk about it.
Yeah, there was definitely a lot of shock waves that went through every organization affiliated with Effective Altruism in some way, some more than others. It really did cause a lot of people, including college organizers, to step back and just feel like, did why did this happen? Basically in terms of like how how responsible should the EA community as
a whole be for making this happen? As like one guy who got affiliated with EA and is like now in a position of huge monetary influence, felt empowered to make a lot of like very very very poor decisions.
Gabe, do you have some thoughts on this?
Yeah, Like, certainly like that resonates a lot there if you especially, like look online, So people in EA really like the scout mindset thing as like a part of that is considering where you might be wrong, and so maybe affect Rautism more than a lot of other communities really likes to criticize itself, try to think of ways are wrong in order to improve our our like our
strategy and framework and whatever. So there certainly, like has been a lot of online discourse about this, a lot of people, especially like older people in the community discussing like whoa is this our fault? Like all said, did did we go wrong? Is this eas fold? Or is Sam just a bad person and we like missed him or something. Certainly, like like the online discussion within the EA community seems to have been like even larger than
the media discussion of this. Like I don't know, maybe the new cycle just moves fast and people move on to new things, but like it feels like still they're like every couple of weeks or something, the new community posts about like hey, how could we have prevented the FTX situation? But among like college students, it seems like
that's quite different. They're like some of some of our like new EA intro fellows who are like doing the fellowship in the fall when this happened, I was like, oh, so you did you hear about the news about FTX and SBF What do you think about that? And they're like, Oh, who's Sam Bigmanfreed?
Have you heard anybody in these forums or anybody in your groups try to justify Sam's behavior, saying that actually this was he's Robin hood, that we don't mind him having tried to take taken this risk with depositors' money because the money was going to go to these other things and it could have worked out. Don't blame him.
People in effective Elshism seem to want to always try to consider both sides of any kind of situation and try to like yep, as all said, like think about a thing and then immediately think about the current arguments. Certainly, when FTX first happened, there's I remember seeing some comments about like, oh, maybe maybe this was because of X reasons and why, or at least like we should be like cutting Sam some slack because he must feel like
really shitty right now, which is probably true. I think generally, now the sentiment has changed a lot, and everyone's like, Wow, you're really messed up. This seems like very clearly bad.
This was hugely useful to me, more useful than you know, And I really appreciate you giving me the time. Thanks so much.
Yeah, thank you too, Thank you so much for chatting Michael.
Yeah, yeah, all right, bye bye. Al Shinn is a senior at Harvard and Gabriel mccobe is a senior at Stanford. Let's end today with a letter we got from a listener about a little snippet of conversation I had in the previous episode. I was chatting with Molly White, the noted crypto critic. Molly got her start in public life at the age of thirteen when she edited a Wikipedia article about unicycles. At the very end of the episode, we tucked in the little exchange that I had with Molly,
mainly because my producers thought it was funny. We call this an easter egg. It ran after the episode's credits, so probably a lot of you didn't even hear it. What did you edit on the unicycle Wikipedia page?
I'm pretty sure that I added information about the existence of other types of unicycles. You know, so there's like the very standard unicycle, but there's also ones that like arement for going off road, and there are ones that have like really big wheels that let you go long distance.
You know, an off road unicycle is is is to cycling what bitcoin is to money. It's sort of it's sort of like a solution in search of the problem. Absolutely well. Listener Chris Holme heard that, and she wrote in her professional title is writer in chief at Chris Holme Unicycles Limited. Chris writes, I think Michael might need a bit of context on mountain unicycling. It is hardly the Bitcoin of mountain biking. Even if he doesn't find
the sport interesting. I suspect he might find it intriguing to find the reality of the sport so very different from the perception. Well, Chris, I want to apologize, because I never want to offend anybody. But actually, when I said that, the response I got was even more disturbed than yours was from bitcoiners who didn't want bitcoin to be seen as off road unicycling. So I had got it from both sides. I obviously should not have made
this connection. Obviously, like off road unicycling is dicycling with something else is to something else, but not bitcoin is to money, And one day, if I summon the nerve I might get on an actual unicycle. I kind of doubt I'm ever going to get to the mountain unicycling, and I kind of doubt that I'm ever going to have a reason to actually explore the reality of the sport. So I apologize. I apologize for being so cavalier about something that is obviously important to other people. If you
have a question, I'd love to hear it. You can contact me with it by clicking on our show notes or going to ATR podcast dot com. On Background is hosted by me Michael Lewis, and produced by Catherine Girardeau and Lydia gene Kott. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguier. Thanks to our SVP of production, Greta Cone, our show is recorded by Toper Ruth at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios. Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet. My old
friend Nick Brittel composed our theme song. On Background is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you'd like to listen ad free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at Pushkin dot Fm, Backslash Plus or on our Apple show page. Al I'm going to be at your graduation? Oh be cause you're
cause you're graduating with Quinn. Have you seen her around?
I have not used a career dance studio recent, which is where I would most likely see Quinn. When Quinn knew me in the first year arts program, I had not started dancing. I started breakdancing in the fall after the program.
Do you consider yourself an effective breakdancer?
I think this falls squarely in the realm of things that I'm not optimizing in my life.