Podcasts about burkean

In his perpetual quest to mildly trigger his Straussian pals, Josh invites fellow Millennial and Burkean conservative Greg Collins on to discuss how Leo Strauss misconstrued Edmund Burke's political views and lasting impact.  Also discussed are Burke's complex views on natural rights, manners, reform, revolution, social contract theory, classical liberalism, and Rousseau.  Fair warning, dear listener, this one gets nerdy in a hurry!   About Greg Collins From The Kirk Center Dr. Gregory Collins is one of the most celebrated Burke scholars of the rising generation. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. He recently received the Buckley Institute's 2024 Lux and Veritas Faculty Prize. His first book, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke's Political Economy, examined Edmund Burke's understanding of the connection between markets and morals. Greg has also published articles on Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, Frederick Douglass, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Britain's East India Company. His additional writings and book reviews can be found in Modern Age, Law & Liberty, National Affairs, National Review, and University Bookman.  You can follow Greg on Twitter @GregCollins111   About the Russell Kirk Center's School of Conservative Studies As is noted in the episode, Josh met Greg during a recent virtual course on Burke. In the month of February, the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal hosted two of the nation's foremost Burke scholars, Ian Crowe and Gregory Collins, as they taught a special class on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was a pilot course offered in anticipation of the official launch of the Russell Kirk Center's School of Conservative Studies in the Fall of 2025. For information about the School and future courses, sign up for the Center's e-letter and print newsletter, Permanent Things. https://kirkcenter.org/permanent-things/  

This lecture by Madhavan K. Palat, Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and editor of the forthcoming comprehensive online edition of the Nehru Archives, explores the complex and often paradoxical dimensions of Nehru's engagement with democracy. Nehru presented himself as a liberal and a socialist. Yet, while he did not explicitly identify as a conservative, he frequently employed Burkean and traditionalist arguments to legitimize Indian democracy. At the same time, he repeatedly warned that democracy risked self-destruction through the emergence of a democratic dictatorship or the tyranny of the majority. Palat examines how Nehru derived the ethos of democracy from traditional panchayats and 19th-century nationalist movements, asserting that democracy had become the yugadharma—the defining moral order—after Independence. Nehru insisted that democracy had to be dynamic, propelled by movements but grounded in stable institutions. When conflicts inevitably arose between these two forces, he consistently prioritized movement, seeing it as a continuation of nationalist mobilization, while institutions embodied the legacy of the Constituent Assembly and its Constitution. Yet, Nehru never saw the Constitution as a sacred text. Democracy, he believed, could only be safeguarded through democratic practice, not constitutional rigidity—a stance that effectively repudiated the idea of a “Basic Structure” doctrine. Seeking to deepen democracy, Nehru championed Panchayati Raj, arguing that democracy required a broad, pyramid-like foundation to prevent its collapse. However, as Palat highlights, Nehru's vision was fraught with ambiguities. He viewed panchayats as both democratic and bureaucratic extensions, expressed dismay over the rise of opportunists in the electoral system, and feared that democracy was breeding an elective aristocracy and oligarchy. Nehru lamented the absence of a two-party system in India but keenly observed an ideological dichotomy between Congress and Hindutva, presciently suggesting that these ideologies could evolve into distinct parties. While Nehru valued moral ideals, his inspirations—Buddha, Ashoka, Akbar, and Gandhi—were not unequivocal democrats. Gandhi, though a democratic mobilizer, was autocratic in his methods. Nehru himself emerged as the most consistent symbol of democratic idealism but rejected the notion of a personality cult as vulgar and absurd. Palat's lecture delves into Nehru's ambivalence towards democracy: he despised its tendency to favor mediocrity yet feared that inspiration and charisma often led to right-wing politics, which he deplored. Nehru's political philosophy lay in reconciling contradictions and embracing ambiguities, favoring the pragmatism of a conservative over the ideological rigidity of a socialist. By drawing on his extensive work with the Nehru Archives, Palat offers fresh insights into Nehru's thought and legacy, portraying him as a leader navigating the complex interplay of ideals and realities with remarkable dexterity, even as he remained a figure defined by paradoxes and inconsistencies. Presented by: National Law School Of India University, Bangalore   In this episode of BIC Talks, Madhvan K Palat will deliver a talk. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in January 2025. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favorite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible, and Amazon Music.

Jonah Goldberg is joined by Virginia Postrel, the former editor of Reason magazine, best-selling author, and contributing editor for Works In Progress to discuss technocrat schadenfreude, selective dynamism, and Jonah's Burkean sympathies. Plus: a discussion on the right-wing version of utopia and the myths of American nostalgia. Show Notes: —Virginia's latest book, Fabric of Civilization —Virginia's Substack —A Video Introduction to Dynamism The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including Jonah's G-File newsletter, weekly livestreams, and other members-only content—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan talks to Jack Jacobs about the influence of Burke on his political thought and why he describes himself as an old whig in the mould of Burke.

After a stint of episodes taking deep dives into obscure topics, Josh returns to some conservative first-principles by inviting long-time friend of the podcast Cal Davenport on for a wide-ranging discussion on whether or not the fusionist consensus is truly dead, why all the energy in the Right seems to be going towards the NatCons, what's leading to the rise of populism, how to repackage conservative ideas into digestible slogans, who belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of conservative thought, and how Edmund Burke factors into all of this.  Trigger warning for the Straussian listener: this episode gets a bit Burke-y.   About Cal Davenport Cal Davenport is a veteran podcaster and writer.  He has written for The Wasington Examiner, RedState, The Resurgent and more.  He has worked in Congress, for political campaigns, for think tanks, and in political consulting.  Cal received his M.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Witten/Herdecke University.  You can follow Cal on Twitter @jcaldavenport  

The name Edmund Burke is used quite liberally on the Saving Elephants podcast as host Josh Lewis makes no bones about being a “Burkean” conservative.  But who was this Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher?  What were his contributions to conservative thought?  Why does Josh hold him in such high regard?  And why do some conservatives argue there's no place for Burke in conservatism?   Rather than inviting one guest to tackle these pressing questions, Josh explores the various conversations had on the podcast with past guests about Burke to help us navigate this rather complex and often misunderstood political thinker.  The lineup includes:   Wes Siler Podcast appearance: 71 – Exploring Burke with Wes Siler   Wes is the founder and Director of The Burkean Conservative, a website, social media presence, and video platform that produces content focused on educating and expanding the conservative movement on the basis of Edmund Burke's principles.  You can follow The Burkean Conservative on Twitter @TheBurkeanCon.   Yuval Levin Podcast appearance: 73 – Formative Institutions with Yuval Levin   Yuval Levin is a political analyst, public intellectual, academic, and journalist.  He is the founding editor of National Affairs, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing editor of National Review, and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.  He also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy.   Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush.  He was also executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.   Yuval's essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, among them, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary.  He is the author of five books, two of which are discussed in detail in the episode: A Time to Build and The Great Debate.   Jonah Goldberg Podcast appearance: 82 – Ruminating Remnants with Jonah Goldberg   Jonah Goldberg hosts The Remnant, a podcast featuring a “Cannonball Run”-style cast of stars, has-beens, and never-weres to address the most pressing issues of the day and of all-time, mixing history, pop culture, rank-punditry, political philosophy, and, at times, shameless book-plugging, and the nudity is (almost) always tasteful.  In October of 2019 Goldberg co-launched and became founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch.  He was the founding editor of National Review Online, and from 1998 until 2019 he was an editor at National Review.   A prolific writer, Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times as well as a frequent “newsletter” The G-File.  He has authored three books, the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas; and Suicide of the West, which also became a New York Times bestseller.   Goldberg is also a regular contributor on news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, appearing on various television programs including Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, and The Daily Show.  Goldberg is an occasional guest on a number of Fox News shows and a frequent panelist on Special Report with Bret Baier.   Bo Winegard Podcast appearance: 104 – Armchair Burkeans with Bo Winegard   Bo Winegard obtained his PhD in social psychology from Florida State University, under the tutelage of Roy Baumeister.  Formerly a professor at a small college in the Midwest, Bo is now an independent scholar interested in human evolution, human variation, the rise of political order, and political conservatism.  He also enjoys literature, film, sports, and mediocre detective fiction.   Bo has many peer-reviewed publications on motley topics and often writes for the online media publication Quillette.  He is currently working on the first of several books on human nature and political ideology.   Visit Bo's website: https://www.bmwinegard.com/   And his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8mHb9VLBbrlvzRRwwGgL5w   You can also find Bo on Twitter @EPoe187   David Bahnsen Podcast appearance: 119 – Inflating the Apocalypse with David Bahnsen   David L. Bahnsen is the founder, Managing Partner, and Chief Investment Officer of The Bahnsen Group, a bi-coastal private wealth management firm with offices in Newport Beach, CA, New York City, Minneapolis, and Nashville managing over $3.5 billion in client assets.  David is consistently named as one of the top financial advisors in America by Barron's, Forbes, and the Financial Times.  He is a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business and is a regular contributor to National Review and Forbes.  He has written his own political viewpoint blog for over a decade.   David serves on the Board of Directors for the National Review Institute and was the Vice-President of the Lincoln Club of Orange County for eight years.  He is a committed donor and activist across all spectrums of national, state, and local politics, and views the cause of Buckley and Reagan as the need of the hour.   David is passionate about opposition to crony capitalism, and has lectured and written for years about the need for pro-growth economic policy.  Every part of his political worldview stems from a desire to see greater freedom as a catalyst to greater human flourishing.   He is the author of the book, Crisis of Responsibility: Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It and his most recent book, There's No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths.   His ultimate passions are his lovely wife of 18+ years, Joleen, their gorgeous and brilliant children, sons Mitchell and Graham, and daughter Sadie, and the life they've created together in Newport Beach, California.   Jeff Nelson Podcast appearance: 130 – Cultivating Kirk with Jeff Nelson   Jeff Nelson co-founded the Kirk Center with Annette Kirk and is currently Vice Chairman of the Center's Board of Trustees.  He served in 1986 and again in 1989 as Dr. Kirk's personal assistant.   Dr. Nelson is Executive Vice President of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Wilmington, Delaware).  He also served as president of the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, NH).  He received his B.A. at the University of Detroit, an M.A. at Yale University Divinity School, and was awarded his Ph.D. in American History at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.   Dr. Nelson founded ISI Books, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's now nationally recognized publishing imprint, in 1993.  Under his direction, more than 110 books were published.  During that time he also edited two respected journals of thought and opinion: The Intercollegiate Review and The University Bookman, and is publisher of Studies in Burke and His Time.  He also is senior fellow of both the International G. K. Chesterton Institute (Toronto, ON) and the Centre for the Study of Faith and Culture in Oxford, England; and he is secretary of the Edmund Burke Society of America.   Dr. Nelson has edited two book collections: Redeeming the Time by Russell Kirk, and Perfect Sowing: Reflections of a Bookman by Henry Regnery; he co-edited an award-winning treasury of the historian John Lukacs' writings entitled Remembered Past; and was project director of the popular national college guide, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America's Top Schools.  Dr. Nelson was featured in a New York Times front-page news article about a major reference work he co-edited, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia; and he is series editor of The Library of Modern Thinkers.  Jeff Nelson is a frequent and popular guest on radio and television talk shows across the country.   You can follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffOttoNelson  

Hoo boy! This week’s fiery episode takes up the argument leftover from last week about whether conservatism—and especially the new “national” variety that is sparking so much energy and enthusiasm right now—should conceive of its mission as Burkean in character, as “restorationist” or revolutionary. We cover a lot of ground, with Lucretia beating up on […]

Hoo boy! This week's fiery episode takes up the argument leftover from last week about whether conservatism—and especially the new “national” variety that is sparking so much energy and enthusiasm right now—should conceive of its mission as Burkean in character, as “restorationist” or revolutionary. We cover a lot of ground, with Lucretia beating up on Steve for his suspicious Burkean sympathies... Source

Hoo boy! This week’s fiery episode takes up the argument leftover from last week about whether conservatism—and especially the new “national” variety that is sparking so much energy and enthusiasm right now—should conceive of its mission as Burkean in character, as “restorationist” or revolutionary. We cover a lot of ground, with Lucretia beating up on Steve for his suspicious Burkean sympathies... Source

Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast Episode: Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & TechnologyRelease date: 2022-08-09Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse, technological & moral change, problems of academia, who changes history, and much more.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Episode website + Transcript here.Follow Will on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Timestamps(00:23) - Effective Altruism and Western values(07:47) - The contingency of technology(12:02) - Who changes history?(18:00) - Longtermist institutional reform(25:56) - Are companies longtermist?(28:57) - Living in an era of plasticity(34:52) - How good can the future be?(39:18) - Contra Tyler Cowen on what's most important(45:36) - AI and the centralization of power(51:34) - The problems with academiaPlease share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!TranscriptDwarkesh Patel 0:06Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.Will MacAskill 0:20Thanks so much for having me on.Effective Altruism and Western valuesDwarkesh Patel 0:23My first question is: What is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?Will MacAskill 0:32Yeah, I think it is contingent. Maybe not on the order of, “this would never have happened,” but at least on the order of decades. Evidence that Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is that similar ideas have been promoted many times during history, and not taken on.We can go back to ancient China, the Mohists defended an impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to help all people. In particular, providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, there were early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Even Peter Singer in the 70s had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor — and didn't get a lot of traction until early 2010 after GiveWell and Giving What We Can launched.What explains the rise of it? I think it was a good idea waiting to happen. At some point, the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people which wasn't possible otherwise. There were some particularly lucky events like Alex meeting Holden and me meeting Toby that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.Dwarkesh Patel 1:49If it's true, as you say, in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't that good? They're mediocre, or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with a median of all the values we could have had at this point. Obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.Will MacAskill 2:09Absolutely. Taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, “wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then!” That's a terrifying thought. I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth.One of the lessons I draw in the book is that we should not think we're at the end of moral progress. We should not think, “Oh, we should lock in the Western values we have.” Instead, we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than whichever happened to win out.Dwarkesh Patel 2:56So that makes a lot of sense. But I'm asking a slightly separate question—not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values - we have the sense that we've made moral progress (things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2200)- should we not expect that to be the case? Should our priors be that these are ‘meh' values?Will MacAskill 3:19Our priors should be that our values are as good as expected on average. Then you can make an assessment like, “Are other values of today going particularly well?” There are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming—which I think is a moral atrocity. Having said that, my view is to think that we're doing better than average.If civilization were just a redraw, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes. The abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy—these are all things that we could have lost and are huge gains.Dwarkesh Patel 4:14If that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection dangerous? If moral progress is a random walk, and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're possibly reversing. Maybe you're risking regression to the mean if you just have 1,000 years of progress.Will MacAskill 4:30Moral progress isn't a random walk in general. There are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. One of them is, “What's right, morally speaking? What's their best arguments support?” I think it's a weak force, unfortunately.The idea of lumbar flexion is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and goodhearted model inquiry to guide which values we end up with.Are we unwise?Dwarkesh Patel 5:05In the book, you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often. And so, do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way, and suggest that we should be Burkean Longtermists and reject these inside-view esoteric threats?Will MacAskill 5:32My view goes the opposite of the Burkean view. We are cultural creatures in our nature, and are very inclined to agree with what other people think even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms. It works well in a low-change environment. The environment we evolved towards didn't change very much. We were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of years.Now, we're in this period of enormous change, where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year. That's unprecedented. It means that we should be trying to figure things out from first principles.Dwarkesh Patel 6:34But at current margins, do you think that's still the case? If a lot of EA and longtermist thought is first principles, do you think that more history would be better than the marginal first-principles thinker?Will MacAskill 6:47Two things. If it's about an understanding of history, then I'd love EA to have a better historical understanding. The most important subject if you want to do good in the world is philosophy of economics. But we've got that in abundance compared to there being very little historical knowledge in the EA community.Should there be even more first-principles thinking? First-principles thinking paid off pretty well in the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. From January 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or taking it very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't. The existing institutions weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.The contingency of technologyDwarkesh Patel 7:47In your book, you point out several examples of societies that went through hardship. Hiroshima after the bombings, Europe after the Black Death—they seem to have rebounded relatively quickly. Does this make you think that perhaps the role of contingency in history, especially economic history is not that large? And it implies a Solow model of growth? That even if bad things happen, you can rebound and it really didn't matter?Will MacAskill 8:17In economic terms, that's the big difference between economic or technological progress and moral progress. In the long run, economic or technological progress is very non-contingent. The Egyptians had an early version of the steam engine, semaphore was only developed very late yet could have been invented thousands of years in the past.But in the long run, the instrumental benefits of tech progress, and the incentives towards tech progress and economic growth are so strong, that we get there in a wide array of circumstances. Imagine there're thousands of different societies, and none are growing except for one. In the long run, that one becomes the whole economy.Dwarkesh Patel 9:10It seems that particular example you gave of the Egyptians having some ancient form of a steam engine points towards there being more contingency? Perhaps because the steam engine comes up in many societies, but it only gets turned into an industrial revolution in one?Will MacAskill 9:22In that particular case, there's a big debate about whether quality of metalwork made it actually possible to build a proper steam engine at that time. I mentioned those to share some amazing examples of contingency prior to the Industrial Revolution.It's still contingency on the order of centuries to thousands of years. Post industrial-revolution world, there's much less contingency. It's much harder to see technologies that wouldn't have happened within decades if they hadn't been developed when they were.Dwarkesh Patel 9:57The model here is, “These general-purpose changes in the state of technology are contingent, and it'd be very important to try to engineer one of those. But other than that, it's going to get done by some guy creating a start-up anyways?”Will MacAskill 10:11Even in the case of the steam engine that seemed contingent, it gets developed in the long run. If the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in Britain in the 18th century, would it have happened at some point? Would similar technologies that were vital to the industrial revolution developed? Yes, there are very strong incentives for doing so.If there's a culture that's into making textiles in an automated way as opposed to England in the 18th century, then that economy will take over the world. There's a structural reason why economic growth is much less contingent than moral progress.Dwarkesh Patel 11:06When people think of somebody like Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. It's like, “If you could have done something that, you'd be the greatest person in the 20th century.” Obviously, he's still a very good man, but would that not be our view? Do you think the green revolution would have happened anyways?Will MacAskill 11:22Yes. Norman Borlaug is sometimes credited with saving a billion lives. He was huge. He was a good force for the world. Had Norman Borlaug not existed, I don't think a billion people would have died. Rather, similar developments would have happened shortly afterwards.Perhaps he saved tens of millions of lives—and that's a lot of lives for a person to save. But, it's not as many as simply saying, “Oh, this tech was used by a billion people who would have otherwise been at risk of starvation.” In fact, not long afterwards, there were similar kinds of agricultural development.Who changes history?Dwarkesh Patel 12:02What kind of profession or career choice tends to lead to the highest counterfactual impact? Is it moral philosophers?Will MacAskill 12:12Not quite moral philosophers, although there are some examples. Sticking on science technology, if you look at Einstein, theory of special relativity would have been developed shortly afterwards. However, theory of general relativity was plausibly decades in advance. Sometimes, you get surprising leaps. But, we're still only talking about decades rather than millennia. Moral philosophers could make long-term difference. Marx and Engels made an enormous, long-run difference. Religious leaders like Mohammed, Jesus, and Confucius made enormous and contingent, long-run difference. Moral activists as well.Dwarkesh Patel 13:04If you think that the changeover in the landscape of ideas is very quick today, would you still think that somebody like Marx will be considered very influential in the long future? Communism lasted less than a century, right?Will MacAskill 13:20As things turned out, Marx will not be influential over the long term future. But that could have gone another way. It's not such a wildly different history. Rather than liberalism emerging dominant in the 20th century, it was communism. The better technology gets, the better the ruling ideology is to cement its ideology and persist for a long time. You can get a set of knock-on effects where communism wins the war of ideas in the 20th century.Let's say a world-government is based around those ideas, then, via anti-aging technology, genetic-enhancement technology, cloning, or artificial intelligence, it's able to build a society that possesses forever in accordance with that ideology.Dwarkesh Patel 14:20The death of dictators is especially interesting when you're thinking about contingency because there are huge changes in the regime. It makes me think the actual individual there was very important and who they happened to be was contingent and persistent in some interesting ways.Will MacAskill 14:37If you've got a dictatorship, then you've got single person ruling the society. That means it's heavily contingent on the views, values, beliefs, and personality of that person.Scientific talentDwarkesh Patel 14:48Going back to the second nation, in the book, you're very concerned about fertility. It seems your model about scientific and technological progress happens is number of people times average researcher productivity. If resource productivity is declining and the number of people isn't growing that fast, then that's concerning.Will MacAskill 15:07Yes, number of people times fraction of the population devoted to R&D.Dwarkesh Patel 15:11Thanks for the clarification. It seems that there have been a lot of intense concentrations of talent and progress in history. Venice, Athens, or even something like FTX, right? There are 20 developers making this a multibillion dollar company—do these examples suggest that organization and congregation of researchers matter more than the total amount?Will MacAskill 15:36The model works reasonably well. Throughout history, you start from a very low technological baseline compared to today. Most people aren't even trying to innovate. One argument for why Baghdad lost its Scientific Golden Age is because the political landscape changed such that what was incentivized was theological investigation rather than scientific investigation in the 10th/11th century AD.Similarly, one argument for why Britain had a scientific and industrial revolution rather than Germany was because all of the intellectual talent in Germany was focused on making amazing music. That doesn't compound in the way that making textiles does. If you look at like Sparta versus Athens, what was the difference? They had different cultures and intellectual inquiry was more rewarded in Athens.Because they're starting from a lower base, people trying to do something that looks like what we now think of as intellectual inquiry have an enormous impact.Dwarkesh Patel 16:58If you take an example like Bell Labs, the low-hanging fruit is gone by the late 20th century. You have this one small organization that has six Nobel Prizes. Is this a coincidence?Will MacAskill 17:14I wouldn't say that at all. The model we're working with is the size of the population times the fraction of the population doing R&D. It's the simplest model you can have. Bell Labs is punching above its weight. You can create amazing things from a certain environment with the most productive people and putting them in an environment where they're ten times more productive than they would otherwise be.However, when you're looking at the grand sweep of history, those effects are comparatively small compared to the broader culture of a society or the sheer size of a population.Longtermist institutional reformDwarkesh Patel 18:00I want to talk about your paper on longtermist institutional reform. One of the things you advocate in this paper is that we should have one of the houses be dedicated towards longtermist priorities. Can you name some specific performance metrics you would use to judge or incentivize the group of people who make up this body?Will MacAskill 18:23The thing I'll caveat with longtermist institutions is that I'm pessimistic about them. If you're trying to represent or even give consideration to future people, you have to face the fact that they're not around and they can't lobby for themselves. However, you could have an assembly of people who have some legal regulatory power. How would you constitute that? My best guess is you have a random selection from the population? How would you ensure that incentives are aligned?In 30-years time, their performance will be assessed by a panel of people who look back and assess the policies' effectiveness. Perhaps the people who are part of this assembly have their pensions paid on the basis of that assessment. Secondly, the people in 30-years time, both their policies and their assessment of the previous 30-years previous assembly get assessed by another assembly, 30-years after that, and so on. Can you get that to work? Maybe in theory—I'm skeptical in practice, but I would love some country to try it and see what happens.There is some evidence that you can get people to take the interests of future generations more seriously by just telling them their role. There was one study that got people to put on ceremonial robes, and act as trustees of the future. And they did make different policy recommendations than when they were just acting on the basis of their own beliefs and self-interest.Dwarkesh Patel 20:30If you are on that board that is judging these people, is there a metric like GDP growth that would be good heuristics for assessing past policy decisions?Will MacAskill 20:48There are some things you could do: GDP growth, homelessness, technological progress. I would absolutely want there to be an expert assessment of the risk of catastrophe. We don't have this yet, but imagine a panel of super forecasters predicting the chance of a war between great powers occurring in the next ten years that gets aggregated into a war index.That would be a lot more important than the stock market index. Risk of catastrophe would be helpful to feed into because you wouldn't want something only incentivizing economic growth at the expense of tail risks.Dwarkesh Patel 21:42Would that be your objection to a scheme like Robin Hanson's about maximizing the expected future GDP using prediction markets and making decisions that way?Will MacAskill 21:50Maximizing future GDP is an idea I associate with Tyler Cowen. With Robin Hanson's idea of voting on values but betting on beliefs, if people can vote on what collection of goods they want, GDP and unemployment might be good metrics. Beyond that, it's pure prediction markets. It's something I'd love to see tried. It's an idea of speculative political philosophy about how a society could be extraordinarily different in structure that is incredibly neglected.Do I think it'll work in practice? Probably not. Most of these ideas wouldn't work. Prediction markets can be gamed or are simply not liquid enough. There hasn't been a lot of success in prediction markets compared to forecasting. Perhaps you can solve these things. You have laws about what things can be voted on or predicted in the prediction market, you could have government subsidies to ensure there's enough liquidity. Overall, it's likely promising and I'd love to see it tried out on a city-level or something.Dwarkesh Patel 23:13Let's take a scenario where the government starts taking the impact on the long-term seriously and institutes some reforms to integrate that perspective. As an example, you can take a look at the environmental movement. There're environmental review boards that will try to assess the environmental impact of new projects and repeal any proposals based on certain metrics.The impact here, at least in some cases, has been that groups that have no strong, plausible interest in the environment are able to game these mechanisms in order to prevent projects that would actually help the environment. With longtermism, it takes a long time to assess the actual impact of something, but policymakers are tasked with evaluating the long term impacts of something. Are you worried that it'd be a system that'd be easy to game by malicious actors? And they'd ask, “What do you think went wrong with the way that environmentalism was codified into law?”Will MacAskill 24:09It's potentially a devastating worry. You create something to represent future people, but they're not allowed to lobby themselves (it can just be co-opted). My understanding of environmental impact statements has been similar. Similarly, it's not like the environment can represent itself—it can't say what its interests are. What is the right answer there? Maybe there are speculative proposals about having a representative body that assesses these things and elect jobs by people in 30-years time. That's the best we've got at the moment, but we need a lot more thought to see if any of these proposals would be robust for the long term rather than things that are narrowly-focused.Regulation to have liability insurance for dangerous bio labs is not about trying to represent the interests of future generations. But, it's very good for the long-term. At the moment, if longtermists are trying to change the government, let's focus on a narrow set of institutional changes that are very good for the long-term even if they're not in the game of representing the future. That's not to say I'm opposed to all such things. But, there are major problems with implementation for any of them.Dwarkesh Patel 25:35If we don't know how we would do it correctly, did you have an idea of how environmentalism could have been codified better? Why was that not a success in some cases?Will MacAskill 25:46Honestly, I don't have a good understanding of that. I don't know if it's intrinsic to the matter or if you could've had some system that wouldn't have been co-opted in the long-term.Are companies longtermist?Dwarkesh Patel 25:56Theoretically, the incentives of our most long-term U.S. institutions is to maximize future cash flow. Explicitly and theoretically, they should have an incentive to do the most good they can for their own company—which implies that the company can't be around if there's an existential risk…Will MacAskill 26:18I don't think so. Different institutions have different rates of decay associated with them. So, a corporation that is in the top 200 biggest companies has a half-life of only ten years. It's surprisingly short-lived. Whereas, if you look at universities Oxford and Cambridge are 800 years old. University of Bologna is even older. These are very long-lived institutions.For example, Corpus Christi at Oxford was making a decision about having a new tradition that would occur only every 400 years. It makes that kind of decision because it is such a long-lived institution. Similarly, the legends can be even longer-lived again. That type of natural half-life really affects the decisions a company would make versus a university versus a religious institution.Dwarkesh Patel 27:16Does that suggest that there's something fragile and dangerous about trying to make your institution last for a long time—if companies try to do that and are not able to?Will MacAskill 27:24Companies are composed of people. Is it in the interest of a company to last for a long time? Is it in the interests of the people who constitute the company (like the CEO and the board and the shareholders) for that company to last a long time? No, they don't particularly care. Some of them do, but most don't. Whereas other institutions go both ways. This is the issue of lock-in that I talked about at length in What We Owe The future: you get moments of plasticity during the formation of a new institution.Whether that's the Christian church or the Constitution of the United States, you lock-in a certain set of norms. That can be really good. Looking back, the U.S. Constitution seems miraculous as the first democratic constitution. As I understand it, it was created over a period of four months seems to have stood the test of time. Alternatively, lock-in norms could be extremely dangerous. There were horrible things in the U.S. Constitution like the legal right to slavery proposed as a constitutional amendment. If that had locked in, it would have been horrible. It's hard to answer in the abstract because it depends on the thing that's persisting for a long time.Living in an era of plasticityDwarkesh Patel 28:57You say in the book that you expect our current era to be a moment of plasticity. Why do you think that is?Will MacAskill 29:04There are specific types of ‘moments of plasticity' for two reasons. One is a world completely unified in a way that's historically unusual. You can communicate with anyone instantaneously and there's a great diversity of moral views. We can have arguments, like people coming on your podcast can debate what's morally correct. It's plausible to me that one of many different sets of moral views become the most popular ultimately.Secondly, we're at this period where things can really change. But, it's a moment of plasticity because it could plausibly come to an end — and the moral change that we're used to could end in the coming decades. If there was a single global culture or world government that preferred ideological conformity, combined with technology, it becomes unclear why that would end over the long-term? The key technology here is Artificial Intelligence. The point in time (which may be sooner than we think) where the rulers of the world are digital rather than biological, that [ideological conformity] could persist.Once you've got that and a global hegemony of a single ideology, there's not much reason for that set of values to change over time. You've got immortal leaders and no competition. What are the other kind of sources of value-change over time? I think they can be accounted for too.Dwarkesh Patel 30:46Isn't the fact that we are in a time of interconnectedness that won't last if we settle space — isn't that bit of reason for thinking that lock-in is not especially likely? If your overlords are millions of light years away, how well can they control you?Will MacAskill 31:01The “whether” you have is whether the control will happen before the point of space settlement. If we took to space one day, and there're many different settlements and different solar systems pursuing different visions of the good, then you're going to maintain diversity for a very long time (given the physics of the matter).Once a solar system has been settled, it's very hard for other civilizations to come along and conquer you—at least if we're at a period of technological maturity where there aren't groundbreaking technologies to be discovered. But, I'm worried that the control will happen earlier. I'm worried the control might happen this century, within our lifetimes. I don't think it's very likely, but it's seriously on the table - 10% or something?Dwarkesh Patel 31:53Hm, right. Going back to the long-term of the longtermism movement, there are many instructive foundations that were set up about a century ago like the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation. But, they don't seem to be especially creative or impactful today. What do you think went wrong? Why was there, if not value drift, some decay of competence and leadership and insight?Will MacAskill 32:18I don't have strong views about those particular examples, but I have two natural thoughts. For organizations that want to persist a long time and keep having an influence for a long time, they've historically specified their goals in far too narrow terms. One fun example is Benjamin Franklin. He invested a thousand pounds for each of the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to pay out after 100 years and then 200 years for different fractions of the amount invested. But, he specified it to help blacksmith apprentices. You might think this doesn't make much sense when you're in the year 2000. He could have invested more generally: for the prosperity of people in Philadelphia and Boston. It would have had plausibly more impact.The second is a ‘regression to the mean' argument. You have some new foundation and it's doing an extraordinary amount of good as the Rockefeller Foundation did. Over time, if it's exceptional in some dimension, it's probably going to get closer to average on that dimension. This is because you're changing the people involved. If you've picked exceptionally competent and farsighted people, the next generation are statistically going to be less so.Dwarkesh Patel 33:40Going back to that hand problem: if you specify your mission too narrowly and it doesn't make sense in the future—is there a trade off? If you're too broad, you make space for future actors—malicious or uncreative—to take the movement in ways that you would not approve of? With regards to doing good for Philadelphia, what if it turns into something that Ben Franklin would not have thought is good for Philadelphia?Will MacAskill 34:11It depends on what your values and views are. If Benjamin Franklin only cared about blacksmith's apprentices, then he was correct to specify it. But my own values tend to be quite a bit more broad than that. Secondly, I expect people in the future to be smarter and more capable. It's certainly the trend over time. In which case, if we're sharing similar broad goals, and they're implementing it in a different way, then they have it.How good can the future be?Dwarkesh Patel 34:52Let's talk about how good we should expect the future to be. Have you come across Robin Hanson's argument that we'll end up being subsistence-level ems because there'll be a lot of competition and minimizing compute per digital person will create a barely-worth-living experience for every entity?Will MacAskill 35:11Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument. But, we should distinguish the idea that ems are at subsistence level from the idea that we would have bad lives. So subsistence means that you get a balance of income per capita and population growth such that being poorer would cause deaths to outweigh additional births.That doesn't tell you about their well-being. You could be very poor as an emulated being but be in bliss all the time. That's perfectly consistent with the Malthusian theory. It might seem far away from the best possible future, but it could still be very good. At subsistence, those ems could still have lives that are thousands of times better than ours.Dwarkesh Patel 36:02Speaking of being poor and happy, there was a very interesting section in the chapter where you mentioned the study you had commissioned: you were trying to find out if people in the developing world find life worth living. It turns out that 19% of Indians would not want to relive their life every moment. But, 31% of Americans said that they would not want to relive their life at every moment? So, why are Indians seemingly much happier at less than a tenth of the GDP per capita?Will MacAskill 36:29I think the numbers are lower than that from memory, at least. From memory, it's something more like 9% of Indians wouldn't want to live their lives again if they had the option, and 13% of Americans said they wouldn't. You are right on the happiness metric, though. The Indians we surveyed were more optimistic about their lives, happier with their lives than people in the US were. Honestly, I don't want to generalize too far from that because we were sampling comparatively poor Americans to comparatively well-off Indians. Perhaps it's just a sample effect.There are also weird interactions with Hinduism and the belief in reincarnation that could mess up the generalizability of this. On one hand, I don't want to draw any strong conclusion from that. But, it is pretty striking as a piece of information, given that you find people's well-being in richer countries considerably happier than poorer countries, on average.Dwarkesh Patel 37:41I guess you do generalize in a sense that you use it as evidence that most lives today are living, right?Will MacAskill 37:50Exactly. So, I put together various bits of evidence, where approximately 10% of people in the United States and 10% of people in India seem to think that their lives are net negative. They think they contain more suffering than happiness and wouldn't want to be reborn and live the same life if they could.There's another scripture study that looks at people in United States/other wealthy countries, and asks them how much of their conscious life they'd want to skip if they could. Skipping here means that blinking would reach you to the end of whatever activity you're engaging with. For example, perhaps I hate this podcast so much that I would rather be unconscious than be talking to you. In which case, I'd have the option of skipping, and it would be over after 30 minutes.If you look at that, and then also asked people about the trade offs they would be willing to make as a measure of intensity of how much they're enjoying a certain experience, you reach the conclusion that a little over 10% of people regarded their life that day as being surveyed worse than if they'd been unconscious the entire day.Contra Tyler Cowen on what's most importantDwarkesh Patel 39:18Jumping topics here a little bit, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, you said that you expect scientists who are explicitly trying to maximize their impact might have an adverse impact because they might be ignoring the foundational research that wouldn't be obvious in this way of thinking, but might be more important.Do you think this could be a general problem with longtermism? If you were trying to find the most important things that are important long-term, you might be missing things that wouldn't be obvious thinking this way?Will MacAskill 39:48Yeah, I think that's a risk. Among the ways that people could argue against my general set of views, I argue that we should be doing fairly specific and targeted things like trying to make AI safe, well-govern the rise of AI, reduce worst-case pandemics that can kill us all, prevent a Third World War, ensure that good values are promoted, and avoid value lock-in. But, some people could argue (and people like Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison do), that it's very hard to predict the future impact of your actions.It's a mug's game to even try. Instead, you should look at the things that have done loads of good consistently in the past, and try to do the same things. In particular, they might argue that means technological progress or boosting economic growth. I dispute that. It's not something I can give a completely knock-down argument to because we don't know when we will find out who's right. Maybe in thousand-years time. But one piece of evidence is the success of forecasters in general. This also was true for Tyler Cowen, but people in Effective Altruism were realizing that the Coronavirus pandemic was going to be a big deal for them. At an early stage, they were worrying about pandemics far in advance. There are some things that are actually quite predictable.For example, Moore's Law has held up for over 70 years. The idea that AI systems are gonna get much larger and leading models are going to get more powerful are on trend. Similarly, the idea that we will be soon be able to develop viruses of unprecedented destructive power doesn't feel too controversial. Even though it's hard to predict loads of things, there are going to be tons of surprises. There are some things, especially when it comes to fairly long-standing technological trends, that we can make reasonable predictions — at least about the range of possibilities that are on the table.Dwarkesh Patel 42:19It sounds like you're saying that the things we know are important now. But, if something didn't turn out, a thousand years ago, looking back to be very important, it wouldn't be salient to us now?Will MacAskill 42:31What I was saying with me versus Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, who is correct? We will only get that information in a thousand-years time because we're talking about impactful strategies for the long-term. We might get suggestive evidence earlier. If me and others engaging in longtermism are making specific, measurable forecasts about what is going to happen with AI, or advances in biotechnology, and then are able to take action such that we are clearly reducing certain risks, that's pretty good evidence in favor of our strategy.Whereas, they're doing all sorts of stuff, but not make firm predictions about what's going to happen, but then things pop out of that that are good for the long-term (say we measure this in ten-years time), that would be good evidence for their view.Dwarkesh Patel 43:38You were saying earlier about the contingency in technology implies that given their worldview, even if you're trying to maximize what in the past is at the most impact, if what's had the most impact in the past is changing values, then economic growth might be the most important thing? Or trying to change the rate of economic growth?Will MacAskill 43:57I really do take the argument seriously of how people have acted in the past, especially for people trying to make a long-lasting impact. What things that they do that made sense and whatnot. So, towards the end of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians had this longtermist wave where they started taking the interests of future generations very seriously. Their main concern was Britain running out of coal, and therefore, future generations would be impoverished. It's pretty striking because they had a very bad understanding of how the economy works. They hadn't predicted that we would be able to transition away from coal with continued innovation.Secondly, they had enormously wrong views about how much coal and fossil fuels there were in the world. So, that particular action didn't make any sense given what we know now. In fact, that particular action of trying to keep coal in the ground, given Britain at the time where we're talking about much lower amounts of coal—so small that the climate change effect is negligible at that level—probably would have been harmful.But, we could look at other things that John Stuart Mill could have done such promoting better values. He campaigned for women's suffrage. He was the first British MP. In fact, even the first politician in the world to promote women's suffrage - that seems to be pretty good. That seems to have stood the test of time. That's one historical data point. But potentially, we can learn a more general lesson there.AI and the centralization of powerDwarkesh Patel 45:36Do you think the ability of your global policymakers to come to a consensus is on net, a good or a bad thing? On the positive, maybe it helps around some dangerous tech from taking off, but on the negative side, prevent human challenge trials that cause some lock-in in the future. On net, what do you think about that trend?Will MacAskill 45:54The question of global integration, you're absolutely right, it's double-sided. One hand, it can help us reduce global catastrophic risks. The fact that the world was able to come come together and ban Chlorofluorocarbons was one of the great events of the last 50 years, allowing the hole in the ozone layer to to repair itself. But on the other hand, if it means we all converge to one monoculture and lose out on diversity, that's potentially bad. We could lose out on the most possible value that way.The solution is doing the good bits and not having the bad bits. For example, in a liberal constitution, you can have a country that is bound in certain ways by its constitution and by certain laws yet still enables a flourishing diversity of moral thought and different ways of life. Similarly, in the world, you can have very strong regulation and treaties that only deal with certain global public goods like mitigation of climate change, prevention of development of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction without having some very strong-arm global government that implements a particular vision of the world. Which way are we going at the moment? It seems to me we've been going in a pretty good and not too worrying direction. But, that could change.Dwarkesh Patel 47:34Yeah, it seems the historical trend is when you have a federated political body that even if constitutionally, the Central Powers constrain over time, they tend to gain more power. You can look at the U.S., you can look at the European Union. But yeah, that seems to be the trend.Will MacAskill 47:52Depending on the culture that's embodied there, it's potentially a worry. It might not be if the culture itself is liberal and promoting of moral diversity and moral change and moral progress. But, that needn't be the case.Dwarkesh Patel 48:06Your theory of moral change implies that after a small group starts advocating for a specific idea, it may take a century or more before that idea reaches common purchase. To the extent that you think this is a very important century (I know you have disagreements about that with with others), does that mean that there isn't enough time for longtermism to gain by changing moral values?Will MacAskill 48:32There are lots of people I know and respect fairly well who think that Artificial General Intelligence will likely lead to singularity-level technological progress and extremely rapid rate of technological progress within the next 10-20 years. If so, you're right. Value changes are something that pay off slowly over time.I talk about moral change taking centuries historically, but it can be much faster today. The growth of the Effective Altruism movement is something I know well. If that's growing at something like 30% per year, compound returns mean that it's not that long. That's not growth. That's not change that happens on the order of centuries.If you look at other moral movements like gay rights movement, very fast moral change by historical standards. If you're thinking that we've got ten years till the end of history, then don't broadly try and promote better values. But, we should have a very significant probability mass on the idea that we will not hit some historical end of this century. In those worlds, promoting better values could pay off like very well.Dwarkesh Patel 49:59Have you heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet?Will MacAskill 50:03I have indeed heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet, and I was tempted as a gimmick to try it. As I'm sure you know, potato is close to a superfood, and you could survive indefinitely on butter mashed potatoes if you occasionally supplement with something like lentils and oats.Dwarkesh Patel 50:25Hm, interesting. Question about your career: why are you still a professor? Does it still allow you to the things that you would otherwise have been doing like converting more SBF's and making moral philosophy arguments for EA? Curious about that.Will MacAskill 50:41It's fairly open to me what I should do, but I do spend significant amounts of time co-founding organizations or being on the board of those organizations I've helped to set up. More recently, working closely with the Future Fund, SBF's new foundation, and helping them do as much good as possible. That being said, if there's a single best guess for what I want to do longer term, and certainly something that plays to my strengths better, it's developing ideas, trying to get the big picture roughly right, and then communicating them in a way that's understandable and gets more people to get off their seats and start to do a lot of good for the long-term. I've had a lot of impact that way. From that perspective, having an Oxford professorship is pretty helpful.The problems with academiaDwarkesh Patel 51:34You mentioned in the book and elsewhere that there's a scarcity of people thinking about big picture questions—How contingent is history? How are people happy generally?—Are these questions that are too hard for other people? Or they don't care enough? What's going on? Why are there so few people talking about this?Will MacAskill 51:54I just think there are many issues that are enormously important but are just not incentivized anywhere in the world. Companies don't incentivize work on them because they're too big picture. Some of these questions are, “Is the future good, rather than bad? If there was a global civilizational collapse, would we recover? How likely is a long stagnation?” There's almost no work done on any of these topics. Companies aren't interested too grand in scale.Academia has developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems. Partly, that's because they fall through the cracks of different disciplines. Partly because they seem too grand or too speculative. Academia is much more in the mode of making incremental gains in our understanding. It didn't always used to be that way.If you look back before the institutionalization of academic research, you weren't a real philosopher unless you had some grand unifying theory of ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Probably the natural sciences too and economics. I'm not saying that all of academic inquiry should be like that. But should there be some people whose role is to really think about the big picture? Yes.Dwarkesh Patel 53:20Will I be able to send my kids to MacAskill University? What's the status on that project?Will MacAskill 53:25I'm pretty interested in the idea of creating a new university. There is a project that I've been in discussion about with another person who's fairly excited about making it happen. Will it go ahead? Time will tell. I think you can do both research and education far better than it currently exists. It's extremely hard to break in or creating something that's very prestigious because the leading universities are hundreds of years old. But maybe it's possible. I think it would could generate enormous amounts of value if we were able to pull it off.Dwarkesh Patel 54:10Excellent, alright. So the book is What We Owe The Future. I understand pre-orders help a lot, right? It was such an interesting read. How often does somebody write a book about the questions they consider to be the most important even if they're not the most important questions? Big picture thinking, but also looking at very specific questions and issues that come up. Super interesting read.Will MacAskill 54:34Great. Well, thank you so much!Dwarkesh Patel 54:38Anywhere else they can find you? Or any other information they might need to know?Will MacAskill 54:39Yeah, sure. What We Owe The Future is out on August 16 in the US and first of September in the United Kingdom. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @WillMcCaskill. If you want to try and use your time or money to do good, Giving What We Can is an organization that encourages people to take a pledge to give a significant fraction of the income (10% or more) to the charities that do the most good. It has a list of recommended charities. 80,000 Hours—if you want to use your career to do good—is a place to go for advice on what careers have the biggest impact at all. They provide one-on-one coaching too.If you're feeling inspired and want to do good in the world, you care about future people and I want to help make their lives go better, then, as well as reading What We Owe The Future, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 hours are the sources you can go to and get involved.Dwarkesh Patel 55:33Awesome, thanks so much for coming on the podcast! It was a lot of fun.Will MacAskill 54:39Thanks so much, I loved it. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 30 · TOP 5% )Episode: Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & TechnologyRelease date: 2022-08-09Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse, technological & moral change, problems of academia, who changes history, and much more.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Episode website + Transcript here.Follow Will on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Timestamps(00:23) -Effective Altruism and Western values(07:47) -The contingency of technology(12:02) -Who changes history?(18:00) -Longtermist institutional reform(25:56) -Are companies longtermist?(28:57) -Living in an era of plasticity(34:52) -How good can the future be?(39:18) -Contra Tyler Cowen on what's most important(45:36) -AI and the centralization of power(51:34) -The problems with academiaPlease share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!TranscriptDwarkesh Patel 0:06Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.Will MacAskill 0:20Thanks so much for having me on.Effective Altruism and Western valuesDwarkesh Patel 0:23My first question is: What is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?Will MacAskill 0:32Yeah, I think it is contingent. Maybe not on the order of, “this would never have happened,” but at least on the order of decades. Evidence that Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is that similar ideas have been promoted many times during history, and not taken on.We can go back to ancient China, the Mohists defended an impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to help all people. In particular, providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, there were early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Even Peter Singer in the 70s had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor — and didn't get a lot of traction until early 2010 after GiveWell and Giving What We Can launched.What explains the rise of it? I think it was a good idea waiting to happen. At some point, the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people which wasn't possible otherwise. There were some particularly lucky events like Alex meeting Holden and me meeting Toby that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.Dwarkesh Patel 1:49If it's true, as you say, in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't that good? They're mediocre, or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with a median of all the values we could have had at this point. Obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.Will MacAskill 2:09Absolutely. Taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, “wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then!” That's a terrifying thought. I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth.One of the lessons I draw in the book is that we should not think we're at the end of moral progress. We should not think, “Oh, we should lock in the Western values we have.” Instead, we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than whichever happened to win out.Dwarkesh Patel 2:56So that makes a lot of sense. But I'm asking a slightly separate question—not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values - we have the sense that we've made moral progress (things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2200)- should we not expect that to be the case? Should our priors be that these are ‘meh' values?Will MacAskill 3:19Our priors should be that our values are as good as expected on average. Then you can make an assessment like, “Are other values of today going particularly well?” There are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming—which I think is a moral atrocity. Having said that, my view is to think that we're doing better than average.If civilization were just a redraw, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes. The abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy—these are all things that we could have lost and are huge gains.Dwarkesh Patel 4:14If that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection dangerous? If moral progress is a random walk, and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're possibly reversing. Maybe you're risking regression to the mean if you just have 1,000 years of progress.Will MacAskill 4:30Moral progress isn't a random walk in general. There are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. One of them is, “What's right, morally speaking? What's their best arguments support?” I think it's a weak force, unfortunately.The idea of lumbar flexion is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and goodhearted model inquiry to guide which values we end up with.Are we unwise?Dwarkesh Patel 5:05In the book, you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often. And so, do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way, and suggest that we should be Burkean Longtermists and reject these inside-view esoteric threats?Will MacAskill 5:32My view goes the opposite of the Burkean view. We are cultural creatures in our nature, and are very inclined to agree with what other people think even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms. It works well in a low-change environment. The environment we evolved towards didn't change very much. We were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of years.Now, we're in this period of enormous change, where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year. That's unprecedented. It means that we should be trying to figure things out from first principles.Dwarkesh Patel 6:34But at current margins, do you think that's still the case? If a lot of EA and longtermist thought is first principles, do you think that more history would be better than the marginal first-principles thinker?Will MacAskill 6:47Two things. If it's about an understanding of history, then I'd love EA to have a better historical understanding. The most important subject if you want to do good in the world is philosophy of economics. But we've got that in abundance compared to there being very little historical knowledge in the EA community.Should there be even more first-principles thinking? First-principles thinking paid off pretty well in the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. From January 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or taking it very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't. The existing institutions weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.The contingency of technologyDwarkesh Patel 7:47In your book, you point out several examples of societies that went through hardship. Hiroshima after the bombings, Europe after the Black Death—they seem to have rebounded relatively quickly. Does this make you think that perhaps the role of contingency in history, especially economic history is not that large? And it implies a Solow model of growth? That even if bad things happen, you can rebound and it really didn't matter?Will MacAskill 8:17In economic terms, that's the big difference between economic or technological progress and moral progress. In the long run, economic or technological progress is very non-contingent. The Egyptians had an early version of the steam engine, semaphore was only developed very late yet could have been invented thousands of years in the past.But in the long run, the instrumental benefits of tech progress, and the incentives towards tech progress and economic growth are so strong, that we get there in a wide array of circumstances. Imagine there're thousands of different societies, and none are growing except for one. In the long run, that one becomes the whole economy.Dwarkesh Patel 9:10It seems that particular example you gave of the Egyptians having some ancient form of a steam engine points towards there being more contingency? Perhaps because the steam engine comes up in many societies, but it only gets turned into an industrial revolution in one?Will MacAskill 9:22In that particular case, there's a big debate about whether quality of metalwork made it actually possible to build a proper steam engine at that time. I mentioned those to share some amazing examples of contingency prior to the Industrial Revolution.It's still contingency on the order of centuries to thousands of years. Post industrial-revolution world, there's much less contingency. It's much harder to see technologies that wouldn't have happened within decades if they hadn't been developed when they were.Dwarkesh Patel 9:57The model here is, “These general-purpose changes in the state of technology are contingent, and it'd be very important to try to engineer one of those. But other than that, it's going to get done by some guy creating a start-up anyways?”Will MacAskill 10:11Even in the case of the steam engine that seemed contingent, it gets developed in the long run. If the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in Britain in the 18th century, would it have happened at some point? Would similar technologies that were vital to the industrial revolution developed? Yes, there are very strong incentives for doing so.If there's a culture that's into making textiles in an automated way as opposed to England in the 18th century, then that economy will take over the world. There's a structural reason why economic growth is much less contingent than moral progress.Dwarkesh Patel 11:06When people think of somebody like Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. It's like, “If you could have done something that, you'd be the greatest person in the 20th century.” Obviously, he's still a very good man, but would that not be our view? Do you think the green revolution would have happened anyways?Will MacAskill 11:22Yes. Norman Borlaug is sometimes credited with saving a billion lives. He was huge. He was a good force for the world. Had Norman Borlaug not existed, I don't think a billion people would have died. Rather, similar developments would have happened shortly afterwards.Perhaps he saved tens of millions of lives—and that's a lot of lives for a person to save. But, it's not as many as simply saying, “Oh, this tech was used by a billion people who would have otherwise been at risk of starvation.” In fact, not long afterwards, there were similar kinds of agricultural development.Who changes history?Dwarkesh Patel 12:02What kind of profession or career choice tends to lead to the highest counterfactual impact? Is it moral philosophers?Will MacAskill 12:12Not quite moral philosophers, although there are some examples. Sticking on science technology, if you look at Einstein, theory of special relativity would have been developed shortly afterwards. However, theory of general relativity was plausibly decades in advance. Sometimes, you get surprising leaps. But, we're still only talking about decades rather than millennia. Moral philosophers could make long-term difference. Marx and Engels made an enormous, long-run difference. Religious leaders like Mohammed, Jesus, and Confucius made enormous and contingent, long-run difference. Moral activists as well.Dwarkesh Patel 13:04If you think that the changeover in the landscape of ideas is very quick today, would you still think that somebody like Marx will be considered very influential in the long future? Communism lasted less than a century, right?Will MacAskill 13:20As things turned out, Marx will not be influential over the long term future. But that could have gone another way. It's not such a wildly different history. Rather than liberalism emerging dominant in the 20th century, it was communism. The better technology gets, the better the ruling ideology is to cement its ideology and persist for a long time. You can get a set of knock-on effects where communism wins the war of ideas in the 20th century.Let's say a world-government is based around those ideas, then, via anti-aging technology, genetic-enhancement technology, cloning, or artificial intelligence, it's able to build a society that possesses forever in accordance with that ideology.Dwarkesh Patel 14:20The death of dictators is especially interesting when you're thinking about contingency because there are huge changes in the regime. It makes me think the actual individual there was very important and who they happened to be was contingent and persistent in some interesting ways.Will MacAskill 14:37If you've got a dictatorship, then you've got single person ruling the society. That means it's heavily contingent on the views, values, beliefs, and personality of that person.Scientific talentDwarkesh Patel 14:48Going back to the second nation, in the book, you're very concerned about fertility. It seems your model about scientific and technological progress happens is number of people times average researcher productivity. If resource productivity is declining and the number of people isn't growing that fast, then that's concerning.Will MacAskill 15:07Yes, number of people times fraction of the population devoted to R&D.Dwarkesh Patel 15:11Thanks for the clarification. It seems that there have been a lot of intense concentrations of talent and progress in history. Venice, Athens, or even something like FTX, right? There are 20 developers making this a multibillion dollar company—do these examples suggest that organization and congregation of researchers matter more than the total amount?Will MacAskill 15:36The model works reasonably well. Throughout history, you start from a very low technological baseline compared to today. Most people aren't even trying to innovate. One argument for why Baghdad lost its Scientific Golden Age is because the political landscape changed such that what was incentivized was theological investigation rather than scientific investigation in the 10th/11th century AD.Similarly, one argument for why Britain had a scientific and industrial revolution rather than Germany was because all of the intellectual talent in Germany was focused on making amazing music. That doesn't compound in the way that making textiles does. If you look at like Sparta versus Athens, what was the difference? They had different cultures and intellectual inquiry was more rewarded in Athens.Because they're starting from a lower base, people trying to do something that looks like what we now think of as intellectual inquiry have an enormous impact.Dwarkesh Patel 16:58If you take an example like Bell Labs, the low-hanging fruit is gone by the late 20th century. You have this one small organization that has six Nobel Prizes. Is this a coincidence?Will MacAskill 17:14I wouldn't say that at all. The model we're working with is the size of the population times the fraction of the population doing R&D. It's the simplest model you can have. Bell Labs is punching above its weight. You can create amazing things from a certain environment with the most productive people and putting them in an environment where they're ten times more productive than they would otherwise be.However, when you're looking at the grand sweep of history, those effects are comparatively small compared to the broader culture of a society or the sheer size of a population.Longtermist institutional reformDwarkesh Patel 18:00I want to talk about your paper on longtermist institutional reform. One of the things you advocate in this paper is that we should have one of the houses be dedicated towards longtermist priorities. Can you name some specific performance metrics you would use to judge or incentivize the group of people who make up this body?Will MacAskill 18:23The thing I'll caveat with longtermist institutions is that I'm pessimistic about them. If you're trying to represent or even give consideration to future people, you have to face the fact that they're not around and they can't lobby for themselves. However, you could have an assembly of people who have some legal regulatory power. How would you constitute that? My best guess is you have a random selection from the population? How would you ensure that incentives are aligned?In 30-years time, their performance will be assessed by a panel of people who look back and assess the policies' effectiveness. Perhaps the people who are part of this assembly have their pensions paid on the basis of that assessment. Secondly, the people in 30-years time, both their policies and their assessment of the previous 30-years previous assembly get assessed by another assembly, 30-years after that, and so on. Can you get that to work? Maybe in theory—I'm skeptical in practice, but I would love some country to try it and see what happens.There is some evidence that you can get people to take the interests of future generations more seriously by just telling them their role. There was one study that got people to put on ceremonial robes, and act as trustees of the future. And they did make different policy recommendations than when they were just acting on the basis of their own beliefs and self-interest.Dwarkesh Patel 20:30If you are on that board that is judging these people, is there a metric like GDP growth that would be good heuristics for assessing past policy decisions?Will MacAskill 20:48There are some things you could do: GDP growth, homelessness, technological progress. I would absolutely want there to be an expert assessment of the risk of catastrophe. We don't have this yet, but imagine a panel of super forecasters predicting the chance of a war between great powers occurring in the next ten years that gets aggregated into a war index.That would be a lot more important than the stock market index. Risk of catastrophe would be helpful to feed into because you wouldn't want something only incentivizing economic growth at the expense of tail risks.Dwarkesh Patel 21:42Would that be your objection to a scheme like Robin Hanson's about maximizing the expected future GDP using prediction markets and making decisions that way?Will MacAskill 21:50Maximizing future GDP is an idea I associate with Tyler Cowen. With Robin Hanson's idea of voting on values but betting on beliefs, if people can vote on what collection of goods they want, GDP and unemployment might be good metrics. Beyond that, it's pure prediction markets. It's something I'd love to see tried. It's an idea of speculative political philosophy about how a society could be extraordinarily different in structure that is incredibly neglected.Do I think it'll work in practice? Probably not. Most of these ideas wouldn't work. Prediction markets can be gamed or are simply not liquid enough. There hasn't been a lot of success in prediction markets compared to forecasting. Perhaps you can solve these things. You have laws about what things can be voted on or predicted in the prediction market, you could have government subsidies to ensure there's enough liquidity. Overall, it's likely promising and I'd love to see it tried out on a city-level or something.Dwarkesh Patel 23:13Let's take a scenario where the government starts taking the impact on the long-term seriously and institutes some reforms to integrate that perspective. As an example, you can take a look at the environmental movement. There're environmental review boards that will try to assess the environmental impact of new projects and repeal any proposals based on certain metrics.The impact here, at least in some cases, has been that groups that have no strong, plausible interest in the environment are able to game these mechanisms in order to prevent projects that would actually help the environment. With longtermism, it takes a long time to assess the actual impact of something, but policymakers are tasked with evaluating the long term impacts of something. Are you worried that it'd be a system that'd be easy to game by malicious actors? And they'd ask, “What do you think went wrong with the way that environmentalism was codified into law?”Will MacAskill 24:09It's potentially a devastating worry. You create something to represent future people, but they're not allowed to lobby themselves (it can just be co-opted). My understanding of environmental impact statements has been similar. Similarly, it's not like the environment can represent itself—it can't say what its interests are. What is the right answer there? Maybe there are speculative proposals about having a representative body that assesses these things and elect jobs by people in 30-years time. That's the best we've got at the moment, but we need a lot more thought to see if any of these proposals would be robust for the long term rather than things that are narrowly-focused.Regulation to have liability insurance for dangerous bio labs is not about trying to represent the interests of future generations. But, it's very good for the long-term. At the moment, if longtermists are trying to change the government, let's focus on a narrow set of institutional changes that are very good for the long-term even if they're not in the game of representing the future. That's not to say I'm opposed to all such things. But, there are major problems with implementation for any of them.Dwarkesh Patel 25:35If we don't know how we would do it correctly, did you have an idea of how environmentalism could have been codified better? Why was that not a success in some cases?Will MacAskill 25:46Honestly, I don't have a good understanding of that. I don't know if it's intrinsic to the matter or if you could've had some system that wouldn't have been co-opted in the long-term.Are companies longtermist?Dwarkesh Patel 25:56Theoretically, the incentives of our most long-term U.S. institutions is to maximize future cash flow. Explicitly and theoretically, they should have an incentive to do the most good they can for their own company—which implies that the company can't be around if there's an existential risk…Will MacAskill 26:18I don't think so. Different institutions have different rates of decay associated with them. So, a corporation that is in the top 200 biggest companies has a half-life of only ten years. It's surprisingly short-lived. Whereas, if you look at universities Oxford and Cambridge are 800 years old. University of Bologna is even older. These are very long-lived institutions.For example, Corpus Christi at Oxford was making a decision about having a new tradition that would occur only every 400 years. It makes that kind of decision because it is such a long-lived institution. Similarly, the legends can be even longer-lived again. That type of natural half-life really affects the decisions a company would make versus a university versus a religious institution.Dwarkesh Patel 27:16Does that suggest that there's something fragile and dangerous about trying to make your institution last for a long time—if companies try to do that and are not able to?Will MacAskill 27:24Companies are composed of people. Is it in the interest of a company to last for a long time? Is it in the interests of the people who constitute the company (like the CEO and the board and the shareholders) for that company to last a long time? No, they don't particularly care. Some of them do, but most don't. Whereas other institutions go both ways. This is the issue of lock-in that I talked about at length in What We Owe The future: you get moments of plasticity during the formation of a new institution.Whether that's the Christian church or the Constitution of the United States, you lock-in a certain set of norms. That can be really good. Looking back, the U.S. Constitution seems miraculous as the first democratic constitution. As I understand it, it was created over a period of four months seems to have stood the test of time. Alternatively, lock-in norms could be extremely dangerous. There were horrible things in the U.S. Constitution like the legal right to slavery proposed as a constitutional amendment. If that had locked in, it would have been horrible. It's hard to answer in the abstract because it depends on the thing that's persisting for a long time.Living in an era of plasticityDwarkesh Patel 28:57You say in the book that you expect our current era to be a moment of plasticity. Why do you think that is?Will MacAskill 29:04There are specific types of ‘moments of plasticity' for two reasons. One is a world completely unified in a way that's historically unusual. You can communicate with anyone instantaneously and there's a great diversity of moral views. We can have arguments, like people coming on your podcast can debate what's morally correct. It's plausible to me that one of many different sets of moral views become the most popular ultimately.Secondly, we're at this period where things can really change. But, it's a moment of plasticity because it could plausibly come to an end — and the moral change that we're used to could end in the coming decades. If there was a single global culture or world government that preferred ideological conformity, combined with technology, it becomes unclear why that would end over the long-term? The key technology here is Artificial Intelligence. The point in time (which may be sooner than we think) where the rulers of the world are digital rather than biological, that [ideological conformity] could persist.Once you've got that and a global hegemony of a single ideology, there's not much reason for that set of values to change over time. You've got immortal leaders and no competition. What are the other kind of sources of value-change over time? I think they can be accounted for too.Dwarkesh Patel 30:46Isn't the fact that we are in a time of interconnectedness that won't last if we settle space — isn't that bit of reason for thinking that lock-in is not especially likely? If your overlords are millions of light years away, how well can they control you?Will MacAskill 31:01The “whether” you have is whether the control will happen before the point of space settlement. If we took to space one day, and there're many different settlements and different solar systems pursuing different visions of the good, then you're going to maintain diversity for a very long time (given the physics of the matter).Once a solar system has been settled, it's very hard for other civilizations to come along and conquer you—at least if we're at a period of technological maturity where there aren't groundbreaking technologies to be discovered. But, I'm worried that the control will happen earlier. I'm worried the control might happen this century, within our lifetimes. I don't think it's very likely, but it's seriously on the table - 10% or something?Dwarkesh Patel 31:53Hm, right. Going back to the long-term of the longtermism movement, there are many instructive foundations that were set up about a century ago like the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation. But, they don't seem to be especially creative or impactful today. What do you think went wrong? Why was there, if not value drift, some decay of competence and leadership and insight?Will MacAskill 32:18I don't have strong views about those particular examples, but I have two natural thoughts. For organizations that want to persist a long time and keep having an influence for a long time, they've historically specified their goals in far too narrow terms. One fun example is Benjamin Franklin. He invested a thousand pounds for each of the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to pay out after 100 years and then 200 years for different fractions of the amount invested. But, he specified it to help blacksmith apprentices. You might think this doesn't make much sense when you're in the year 2000. He could have invested more generally: for the prosperity of people in Philadelphia and Boston. It would have had plausibly more impact.The second is a ‘regression to the mean' argument. You have some new foundation and it's doing an extraordinary amount of good as the Rockefeller Foundation did. Over time, if it's exceptional in some dimension, it's probably going to get closer to average on that dimension. This is because you're changing the people involved. If you've picked exceptionally competent and farsighted people, the next generation are statistically going to be less so.Dwarkesh Patel 33:40Going back to that hand problem: if you specify your mission too narrowly and it doesn't make sense in the future—is there a trade off? If you're too broad, you make space for future actors—malicious or uncreative—to take the movement in ways that you would not approve of? With regards to doing good for Philadelphia, what if it turns into something that Ben Franklin would not have thought is good for Philadelphia?Will MacAskill 34:11It depends on what your values and views are. If Benjamin Franklin only cared about blacksmith's apprentices, then he was correct to specify it. But my own values tend to be quite a bit more broad than that. Secondly, I expect people in the future to be smarter and more capable. It's certainly the trend over time. In which case, if we're sharing similar broad goals, and they're implementing it in a different way, then they have it.How good can the future be?Dwarkesh Patel 34:52Let's talk about how good we should expect the future to be. Have you come across Robin Hanson's argument that we'll end up being subsistence-level ems because there'll be a lot of competition and minimizing compute per digital person will create a barely-worth-living experience for every entity?Will MacAskill 35:11Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument. But, we should distinguish the idea that ems are at subsistence level from the idea that we would have bad lives. So subsistence means that you get a balance of income per capita and population growth such that being poorer would cause deaths to outweigh additional births.That doesn't tell you about their well-being. You could be very poor as an emulated being but be in bliss all the time. That's perfectly consistent with the Malthusian theory. It might seem far away from the best possible future, but it could still be very good. At subsistence, those ems could still have lives that are thousands of times better than ours.Dwarkesh Patel 36:02Speaking of being poor and happy, there was a very interesting section in the chapter where you mentioned the study you had commissioned: you were trying to find out if people in the developing world find life worth living. It turns out that 19% of Indians would not want to relive their life every moment. But, 31% of Americans said that they would not want to relive their life at every moment? So, why are Indians seemingly much happier at less than a tenth of the GDP per capita?Will MacAskill 36:29I think the numbers are lower than that from memory, at least. From memory, it's something more like 9% of Indians wouldn't want to live their lives again if they had the option, and 13% of Americans said they wouldn't. You are right on the happiness metric, though. The Indians we surveyed were more optimistic about their lives, happier with their lives than people in the US were. Honestly, I don't want to generalize too far from that because we were sampling comparatively poor Americans to comparatively well-off Indians. Perhaps it's just a sample effect.There are also weird interactions with Hinduism and the belief in reincarnation that could mess up the generalizability of this. On one hand, I don't want to draw any strong conclusion from that. But, it is pretty striking as a piece of information, given that you find people's well-being in richer countries considerably happier than poorer countries, on average.Dwarkesh Patel 37:41I guess you do generalize in a sense that you use it as evidence that most lives today are living, right?Will MacAskill 37:50Exactly. So, I put together various bits of evidence, where approximately 10% of people in the United States and 10% of people in India seem to think that their lives are net negative. They think they contain more suffering than happiness and wouldn't want to be reborn and live the same life if they could.There's another scripture study that looks at people in United States/other wealthy countries, and asks them how much of their conscious life they'd want to skip if they could. Skipping here means that blinking would reach you to the end of whatever activity you're engaging with. For example, perhaps I hate this podcast so much that I would rather be unconscious than be talking to you. In which case, I'd have the option of skipping, and it would be over after 30 minutes.If you look at that, and then also asked people about the trade offs they would be willing to make as a measure of intensity of how much they're enjoying a certain experience, you reach the conclusion that a little over 10% of people regarded their life that day as being surveyed worse than if they'd been unconscious the entire day.Contra Tyler Cowen on what's most importantDwarkesh Patel 39:18Jumping topics here a little bit, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, you said that you expect scientists who are explicitly trying to maximize their impact might have an adverse impact because they might be ignoring the foundational research that wouldn't be obvious in this way of thinking, but might be more important.Do you think this could be a general problem with longtermism? If you were trying to find the most important things that are important long-term, you might be missing things that wouldn't be obvious thinking this way?Will MacAskill 39:48Yeah, I think that's a risk. Among the ways that people could argue against my general set of views, I argue that we should be doing fairly specific and targeted things like trying to make AI safe, well-govern the rise of AI, reduce worst-case pandemics that can kill us all, prevent a Third World War, ensure that good values are promoted, and avoid value lock-in. But, some people could argue (and people like Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison do), that it's very hard to predict the future impact of your actions.It's a mug's game to even try. Instead, you should look at the things that have done loads of good consistently in the past, and try to do the same things. In particular, they might argue that means technological progress or boosting economic growth. I dispute that. It's not something I can give a completely knock-down argument to because we don't know when we will find out who's right. Maybe in thousand-years time. But one piece of evidence is the success of forecasters in general. This also was true for Tyler Cowen, but people in Effective Altruism were realizing that the Coronavirus pandemic was going to be a big deal for them. At an early stage, they were worrying about pandemics far in advance. There are some things that are actually quite predictable.For example, Moore's Law has held up for over 70 years. The idea that AI systems are gonna get much larger and leading models are going to get more powerful are on trend. Similarly, the idea that we will be soon be able to develop viruses of unprecedented destructive power doesn't feel too controversial. Even though it's hard to predict loads of things, there are going to be tons of surprises. There are some things, especially when it comes to fairly long-standing technological trends, that we can make reasonable predictions — at least about the range of possibilities that are on the table.Dwarkesh Patel 42:19It sounds like you're saying that the things we know are important now. But, if something didn't turn out, a thousand years ago, looking back to be very important, it wouldn't be salient to us now?Will MacAskill 42:31What I was saying with me versus Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, who is correct? We will only get that information in a thousand-years time because we're talking about impactful strategies for the long-term. We might get suggestive evidence earlier. If me and others engaging in longtermism are making specific, measurable forecasts about what is going to happen with AI, or advances in biotechnology, and then are able to take action such that we are clearly reducing certain risks, that's pretty good evidence in favor of our strategy.Whereas, they're doing all sorts of stuff, but not make firm predictions about what's going to happen, but then things pop out of that that are good for the long-term (say we measure this in ten-years time), that would be good evidence for their view.Dwarkesh Patel 43:38You were saying earlier about the contingency in technology implies that given their worldview, even if you're trying to maximize what in the past is at the most impact, if what's had the most impact in the past is changing values, then economic growth might be the most important thing? Or trying to change the rate of economic growth?Will MacAskill 43:57I really do take the argument seriously of how people have acted in the past, especially for people trying to make a long-lasting impact. What things that they do that made sense and whatnot. So, towards the end of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians had this longtermist wave where they started taking the interests of future generations very seriously. Their main concern was Britain running out of coal, and therefore, future generations would be impoverished. It's pretty striking because they had a very bad understanding of how the economy works. They hadn't predicted that we would be able to transition away from coal with continued innovation.Secondly, they had enormously wrong views about how much coal and fossil fuels there were in the world. So, that particular action didn't make any sense given what we know now. In fact, that particular action of trying to keep coal in the ground, given Britain at the time where we're talking about much lower amounts of coal—so small that the climate change effect is negligible at that level—probably would have been harmful.But, we could look at other things that John Stuart Mill could have done such promoting better values. He campaigned for women's suffrage. He was the first British MP. In fact, even the first politician in the world to promote women's suffrage - that seems to be pretty good. That seems to have stood the test of time. That's one historical data point. But potentially, we can learn a more general lesson there.AI and the centralization of powerDwarkesh Patel 45:36Do you think the ability of your global policymakers to come to a consensus is on net, a good or a bad thing? On the positive, maybe it helps around some dangerous tech from taking off, but on the negative side, prevent human challenge trials that cause some lock-in in the future. On net, what do you think about that trend?Will MacAskill 45:54The question of global integration, you're absolutely right, it's double-sided. One hand, it can help us reduce global catastrophic risks. The fact that the world was able to come come together and ban Chlorofluorocarbons was one of the great events of the last 50 years, allowing the hole in the ozone layer to to repair itself. But on the other hand, if it means we all converge to one monoculture and lose out on diversity, that's potentially bad. We could lose out on the most possible value that way.The solution is doing the good bits and not having the bad bits. For example, in a liberal constitution, you can have a country that is bound in certain ways by its constitution and by certain laws yet still enables a flourishing diversity of moral thought and different ways of life. Similarly, in the world, you can have very strong regulation and treaties that only deal with certain global public goods like mitigation of climate change, prevention of development of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction without having some very strong-arm global government that implements a particular vision of the world. Which way are we going at the moment? It seems to me we've been going in a pretty good and not too worrying direction. But, that could change.Dwarkesh Patel 47:34Yeah, it seems the historical trend is when you have a federated political body that even if constitutionally, the Central Powers constrain over time, they tend to gain more power. You can look at the U.S., you can look at the European Union. But yeah, that seems to be the trend.Will MacAskill 47:52Depending on the culture that's embodied there, it's potentially a worry. It might not be if the culture itself is liberal and promoting of moral diversity and moral change and moral progress. But, that needn't be the case.Dwarkesh Patel 48:06Your theory of moral change implies that after a small group starts advocating for a specific idea, it may take a century or more before that idea reaches common purchase. To the extent that you think this is a very important century (I know you have disagreements about that with with others), does that mean that there isn't enough time for longtermism to gain by changing moral values?Will MacAskill 48:32There are lots of people I know and respect fairly well who think that Artificial General Intelligence will likely lead to singularity-level technological progress and extremely rapid rate of technological progress within the next 10-20 years. If so, you're right. Value changes are something that pay off slowly over time.I talk about moral change taking centuries historically, but it can be much faster today. The growth of the Effective Altruism movement is something I know well. If that's growing at something like 30% per year, compound returns mean that it's not that long. That's not growth. That's not change that happens on the order of centuries.If you look at other moral movements like gay rights movement, very fast moral change by historical standards. If you're thinking that we've got ten years till the end of history, then don't broadly try and promote better values. But, we should have a very significant probability mass on the idea that we will not hit some historical end of this century. In those worlds, promoting better values could pay off like very well.Dwarkesh Patel 49:59Have you heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet?Will MacAskill 50:03I have indeed heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet, and I was tempted as a gimmick to try it. As I'm sure you know, potato is close to a superfood, and you could survive indefinitely on butter mashed potatoes if you occasionally supplement with something like lentils and oats.Dwarkesh Patel 50:25Hm, interesting. Question about your career: why are you still a professor? Does it still allow you to the things that you would otherwise have been doing like converting more SBF's and making moral philosophy arguments for EA? Curious about that.Will MacAskill 50:41It's fairly open to me what I should do, but I do spend significant amounts of time co-founding organizations or being on the board of those organizations I've helped to set up. More recently, working closely with the Future Fund, SBF's new foundation, and helping them do as much good as possible. That being said, if there's a single best guess for what I want to do longer term, and certainly something that plays to my strengths better, it's developing ideas, trying to get the big picture roughly right, and then communicating them in a way that's understandable and gets more people to get off their seats and start to do a lot of good for the long-term. I've had a lot of impact that way. From that perspective, having an Oxford professorship is pretty helpful.The problems with academiaDwarkesh Patel 51:34You mentioned in the book and elsewhere that there's a scarcity of people thinking about big picture questions—How contingent is history? How are people happy generally?—Are these questions that are too hard for other people? Or they don't care enough? What's going on? Why are there so few people talking about this?Will MacAskill 51:54I just think there are many issues that are enormously important but are just not incentivized anywhere in the world. Companies don't incentivize work on them because they're too big picture. Some of these questions are, “Is the future good, rather than bad? If there was a global civilizational collapse, would we recover? How likely is a long stagnation?” There's almost no work done on any of these topics. Companies aren't interested too grand in scale.Academia has developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems. Partly, that's because they fall through the cracks of different disciplines. Partly because they seem too grand or too speculative. Academia is much more in the mode of making incremental gains in our understanding. It didn't always used to be that way.If you look back before the institutionalization of academic research, you weren't a real philosopher unless you had some grand unifying theory of ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Probably the natural sciences too and economics. I'm not saying that all of academic inquiry should be like that. But should there be some people whose role is to really think about the big picture? Yes.Dwarkesh Patel 53:20Will I be able to send my kids to MacAskill University? What's the status on that project?Will MacAskill 53:25I'm pretty interested in the idea of creating a new university. There is a project that I've been in discussion about with another person who's fairly excited about making it happen. Will it go ahead? Time will tell. I think you can do both research and education far better than it currently exists. It's extremely hard to break in or creating something that's very prestigious because the leading universities are hundreds of years old. But maybe it's possible. I think it would could generate enormous amounts of value if we were able to pull it off.Dwarkesh Patel 54:10Excellent, alright. So the book is What We Owe The Future. I understand pre-orders help a lot, right? It was such an interesting read. How often does somebody write a book about the questions they consider to be the most important even if they're not the most important questions? Big picture thinking, but also looking at very specific questions and issues that come up. Super interesting read.Will MacAskill 54:34Great. Well, thank you so much!Dwarkesh Patel 54:38Anywhere else they can find you? Or any other information they might need to know?Will MacAskill 54:39Yeah, sure. What We Owe The Future is out on August 16 in the US and first of September in the United Kingdom. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @WillMcCaskill. If you want to try and use your time or money to do good, Giving What We Can is an organization that encourages people to take a pledge to give a significant fraction of the income (10% or more) to the charities that do the most good. It has a list of recommended charities. 80,000 Hours—if you want to use your career to do good—is a place to go for advice on what careers have the biggest impact at all. They provide one-on-one coaching too.If you're feeling inspired and want to do good in the world, you care about future people and I want to help make their lives go better, then, as well as reading What We Owe The Future, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 hours are the sources you can go to and get involved.Dwarkesh Patel 55:33Awesome, thanks so much for coming on the podcast! It was a lot of fun.Will MacAskill 54:39Thanks so much, I loved it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse, technological & moral change, problems of academia, who changes history, and much more.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Read the full transcript here.Follow Will on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Timestamps(00:23) - Effective Altruism and Western values(07:47) - The contingency of technology(12:02) - Who changes history?(18:00) - Longtermist institutional reform(25:56) - Are companies longtermist?(28:57) - Living in an era of plasticity(34:52) - How good can the future be?(39:18) - Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most important(45:36) - AI and the centralization of power(51:34) - The problems with academiaPlease share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!TranscriptDwarkesh Patel 0:06Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.Will MacAskill 0:20Thanks so much for having me on.Effective Altruism and Western valuesDwarkesh Patel 0:23My first question is: What is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?Will MacAskill 0:32Yeah, I think it is contingent. Maybe not on the order of, “this would never have happened,” but at least on the order of decades. Evidence that Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is that similar ideas have been promoted many times during history, and not taken on.We can go back to ancient China, the Mohists defended an impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to help all people. In particular, providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, there were early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Even Peter Singer in the 70s had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor — and didn’t get a lot of traction until early 2010 after GiveWell and Giving What We Can launched.What explains the rise of it? I think it was a good idea waiting to happen. At some point, the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people which wasn’t possible otherwise. There were some particularly lucky events like Alex meeting Holden and me meeting Toby that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.Dwarkesh Patel 1:49If it's true, as you say, in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't that good? They're mediocre, or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with a median of all the values we could have had at this point. Obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.Will MacAskill 2:09Absolutely. Taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, “wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then!” That's a terrifying thought. I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth.One of the lessons I draw in the book is that we should not think we're at the end of moral progress. We should not think, “Oh, we should lock in the Western values we have.” Instead, we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than whichever happened to win out.Dwarkesh Patel 2:56So that makes a lot of sense. But I'm asking a slightly separate question—not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values - we have the sense that we've made moral progress (things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2200)- should we not expect that to be the case? Should our priors be that these are ‘meh’ values?Will MacAskill 3:19Our priors should be that our values are as good as expected on average. Then you can make an assessment like, “Are other values of today going particularly well?” There are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming—which I think is a moral atrocity. Having said that, my view is to think that we're doing better than average.If civilization were just a redraw, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes. The abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy—these are all things that we could have lost and are huge gains.Dwarkesh Patel 4:14If that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection dangerous? If moral progress is a random walk, and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're possibly reversing. Maybe you're risking regression to the mean if you just have 1,000 years of progress.Will MacAskill 4:30Moral progress isn't a random walk in general. There are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. One of them is, “What’s right, morally speaking? What's their best arguments support?” I think it's a weak force, unfortunately.The idea of lumbar flexion is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and goodhearted model inquiry to guide which values we end up with.Are we unwise?Dwarkesh Patel 5:05In the book, you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often. And so, do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way, and suggest that we should be Burkean Longtermists and reject these inside-view esoteric threats?Will MacAskill 5:32My view goes the opposite of the Burkean view. We are cultural creatures in our nature, and are very inclined to agree with what other people think even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms. It works well in a low-change environment. The environment we evolved towards didn't change very much. We were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of years.Now, we're in this period of enormous change, where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year. That's unprecedented. It means that we should be trying to figure things out from first principles.Dwarkesh Patel 6:34But at current margins, do you think that's still the case? If a lot of EA and longtermist thought is first principles, do you think that more history would be better than the marginal first-principles thinker?Will MacAskill 6:47Two things. If it's about an understanding of history, then I'd love EA to have a better historical understanding. The most important subject if you want to do good in the world is philosophy of economics. But we've got that in abundance compared to there being very little historical knowledge in the EA community.Should there be even more first-principles thinking? First-principles thinking paid off pretty well in the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. From January 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or taking it very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't. The existing institutions weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.The contingency of technologyDwarkesh Patel 7:47In your book, you point out several examples of societies that went through hardship. Hiroshima after the bombings, Europe after the Black Death—they seem to have rebounded relatively quickly. Does this make you think that perhaps the role of contingency in history, especially economic history is not that large? And it implies a Solow model of growth? That even if bad things happen, you can rebound and it really didn't matter?Will MacAskill 8:17In economic terms, that's the big difference between economic or technological progress and moral progress. In the long run, economic or technological progress is very non-contingent. The Egyptians had an early version of the steam engine, semaphore was only developed very late yet could have been invented thousands of years in the past.But in the long run, the instrumental benefits of tech progress, and the incentives towards tech progress and economic growth are so strong, that we get there in a wide array of circumstances. Imagine there're thousands of different societies, and none are growing except for one. In the long run, that one becomes the whole economy.Dwarkesh Patel 9:10It seems that particular example you gave of the Egyptians having some ancient form of a steam engine points towards there being more contingency? Perhaps because the steam engine comes up in many societies, but it only gets turned into an industrial revolution in one?Will MacAskill 9:22In that particular case, there's a big debate about whether quality of metalwork made it actually possible to build a proper steam engine at that time. I mentioned those to share some amazing examples of contingency prior to the Industrial Revolution.It's still contingency on the order of centuries to thousands of years. Post industrial-revolution world, there's much less contingency. It's much harder to see technologies that wouldn't have happened within decades if they hadn't been developed when they were.Dwarkesh Patel 9:57The model here is, “These general-purpose changes in the state of technology are contingent, and it'd be very important to try to engineer one of those. But other than that, it's going to get done by some guy creating a start-up anyways?”Will MacAskill 10:11Even in the case of the steam engine that seemed contingent, it gets developed in the long run. If the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in Britain in the 18th century, would it have happened at some point? Would similar technologies that were vital to the industrial revolution developed? Yes, there are very strong incentives for doing so.If there’s a culture that's into making textiles in an automated way as opposed to England in the 18th century, then that economy will take over the world. There's a structural reason why economic growth is much less contingent than moral progress.Dwarkesh Patel 11:06When people think of somebody like Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. It's like, “If you could have done something that, you'd be the greatest person in the 20th century.” Obviously, he's still a very good man, but would that not be our view? Do you think the green revolution would have happened anyways?Will MacAskill 11:22Yes. Norman Borlaug is sometimes credited with saving a billion lives. He was huge. He was a good force for the world. Had Norman Borlaug not existed, I don’t think a billion people would have died. Rather, similar developments would have happened shortly afterwards.Perhaps he saved tens of millions of lives—and that's a lot of lives for a person to save. But, it's not as many as simply saying, “Oh, this tech was used by a billion people who would have otherwise been at risk of starvation.” In fact, not long afterwards, there were similar kinds of agricultural development.Who changes history?Dwarkesh Patel 12:02What kind of profession or career choice tends to lead to the highest counterfactual impact? Is it moral philosophers?Will MacAskill 12:12Not quite moral philosophers, although there are some examples. Sticking on science technology, if you look at Einstein, theory of special relativity would have been developed shortly afterwards. However, theory of general relativity was plausibly decades in advance. Sometimes, you get surprising leaps. But, we're still only talking about decades rather than millennia. Moral philosophers could make long-term difference. Marx and Engels made an enormous, long-run difference. Religious leaders like Mohammed, Jesus, and Confucius made enormous and contingent, long-run difference. Moral activists as well.Dwarkesh Patel 13:04If you think that the changeover in the landscape of ideas is very quick today, would you still think that somebody like Marx will be considered very influential in the long future? Communism lasted less than a century, right?Will MacAskill 13:20As things turned out, Marx will not be influential over the long term future. But that could have gone another way. It's not such a wildly different history. Rather than liberalism emerging dominant in the 20th century, it was communism. The better technology gets, the better the ruling ideology is to cement its ideology and persist for a long time. You can get a set of knock-on effects where communism wins the war of ideas in the 20th century.Let’s say a world-government is based around those ideas, then, via anti-aging technology, genetic-enhancement technology, cloning, or artificial intelligence, it's able to build a society that possesses forever in accordance with that ideology.Dwarkesh Patel 14:20The death of dictators is especially interesting when you're thinking about contingency because there are huge changes in the regime. It makes me think the actual individual there was very important and who they happened to be was contingent and persistent in some interesting ways.Will MacAskill 14:37If you've got a dictatorship, then you've got single person ruling the society. That means it's heavily contingent on the views, values, beliefs, and personality of that person.Scientific talentDwarkesh Patel 14:48Going back to the second nation, in the book, you're very concerned about fertility. It seems your model about scientific and technological progress happens is number of people times average researcher productivity. If resource productivity is declining and the number of people isn't growing that fast, then that's concerning.Will MacAskill 15:07Yes, number of people times fraction of the population devoted to R&D.Dwarkesh Patel 15:11Thanks for the clarification. It seems that there have been a lot of intense concentrations of talent and progress in history. Venice, Athens, or even something like FTX, right? There are 20 developers making this a multibillion dollar company—do these examples suggest that organization and congregation of researchers matter more than the total amount?Will MacAskill 15:36The model works reasonably well. Throughout history, you start from a very low technological baseline compared to today. Most people aren't even trying to innovate. One argument for why Baghdad lost its Scientific Golden Age is because the political landscape changed such that what was incentivized was theological investigation rather than scientific investigation in the 10th/11th century AD.Similarly, one argument for why Britain had a scientific and industrial revolution rather than Germany was because all of the intellectual talent in Germany was focused on making amazing music. That doesn't compound in the way that making textiles does. If you look at like Sparta versus Athens, what was the difference? They had different cultures and intellectual inquiry was more rewarded in Athens.Because they're starting from a lower base, people trying to do something that looks like what we now think of as intellectual inquiry have an enormous impact.Dwarkesh Patel 16:58If you take an example like Bell Labs, the low-hanging fruit is gone by the late 20th century. You have this one small organization that has six Nobel Prizes. Is this a coincidence?Will MacAskill 17:14I wouldn't say that at all. The model we’re working with is the size of the population times the fraction of the population doing R&D. It's the simplest model you can have. Bell Labs is punching above its weight. You can create amazing things from a certain environment with the most productive people and putting them in an environment where they're ten times more productive than they would otherwise be.However, when you're looking at the grand sweep of history, those effects are comparatively small compared to the broader culture of a society or the sheer size of a population.Longtermist institutional reformDwarkesh Patel 18:00I want to talk about your paper on longtermist institutional reform. One of the things you advocate in this paper is that we should have one of the houses be dedicated towards longtermist priorities. Can you name some specific performance metrics you would use to judge or incentivize the group of people who make up this body?Will MacAskill 18:23The thing I'll caveat with longtermist institutions is that I’m pessimistic about them. If you're trying to represent or even give consideration to future people, you have to face the fact that they're not around and they can't lobby for themselves. However, you could have an assembly of people who have some legal regulatory power. How would you constitute that? My best guess is you have a random selection from the population? How would you ensure that incentives are aligned?In 30-years time, their performance will be assessed by a panel of people who look back and assess the policies’ effectiveness. Perhaps the people who are part of this assembly have their pensions paid on the basis of that assessment. Secondly, the people in 30-years time, both their policies and their assessment of the previous 30-years previous assembly get assessed by another assembly, 30-years after that, and so on. Can you get that to work? Maybe in theory—I’m skeptical in practice, but I would love some country to try it and see what happens.There is some evidence that you can get people to take the interests of future generations more seriously by just telling them their role. There was one study that got people to put on ceremonial robes, and act as trustees of the future. And they did make different policy recommendations than when they were just acting on the basis of their own beliefs and self-interest.Dwarkesh Patel 20:30If you are on that board that is judging these people, is there a metric like GDP growth that would be good heuristics for assessing past policy decisions?Will MacAskill 20:48There are some things you could do: GDP growth, homelessness, technological progress. I would absolutely want there to be an expert assessment of the risk of catastrophe. We don't have this yet, but imagine a panel of super forecasters predicting the chance of a war between great powers occurring in the next ten years that gets aggregated into a war index.That would be a lot more important than the stock market index. Risk of catastrophe would be helpful to feed into because you wouldn't want something only incentivizing economic growth at the expense of tail risks.Dwarkesh Patel 21:42Would that be your objection to a scheme like Robin Hanson’s about maximizing the expected future GDP using prediction markets and making decisions that way?Will MacAskill 21:50Maximizing future GDP is an idea I associate with Tyler Cowen. With Robin Hanson’s idea of voting on values but betting on beliefs, if people can vote on what collection of goods they want, GDP and unemployment might be good metrics. Beyond that, it's pure prediction markets. It's something I'd love to see tried. It’s an idea of speculative political philosophy about how a society could be extraordinarily different in structure that is incredibly neglected.Do I think it'll work in practice? Probably not. Most of these ideas wouldn't work. Prediction markets can be gamed or are simply not liquid enough. There hasn’t been a lot of success in prediction markets compared to forecasting. Perhaps you can solve these things. You have laws about what things can be voted on or predicted in the prediction market, you could have government subsidies to ensure there's enough liquidity. Overall, it's likely promising and I'd love to see it tried out on a city-level or something.Dwarkesh Patel 23:13Let’s take a scenario where the government starts taking the impact on the long-term seriously and institutes some reforms to integrate that perspective. As an example, you can take a look at the environmental movement. There're environmental review boards that will try to assess the environmental impact of new projects and repeal any proposals based on certain metrics.The impact here, at least in some cases, has been that groups that have no strong, plausible interest in the environment are able to game these mechanisms in order to prevent projects that would actually help the environment. With longtermism, it takes a long time to assess the actual impact of something, but policymakers are tasked with evaluating the long term impacts of something. Are you worried that it'd be a system that'd be easy to game by malicious actors? And they'd ask, “What do you think went wrong with the way that environmentalism was codified into law?”Will MacAskill 24:09It's potentially a devastating worry. You create something to represent future people, but they're not allowed to lobby themselves (it can just be co-opted). My understanding of environmental impact statements has been similar. Similarly, it's not like the environment can represent itself—it can't say what its interests are. What is the right answer there? Maybe there are speculative proposals about having a representative body that assesses these things and elect jobs by people in 30-years time. That's the best we've got at the moment, but we need a lot more thought to see if any of these proposals would be robust for the long term rather than things that are narrowly-focused.Regulation to have liability insurance for dangerous bio labs is not about trying to represent the interests of future generations. But, it's very good for the long-term. At the moment, if longtermists are trying to change the government, let's focus on a narrow set of institutional changes that are very good for the long-term even if they're not in the game of representing the future. That's not to say I'm opposed to all such things. But, there are major problems with implementation for any of them.Dwarkesh Patel 25:35If we don't know how we would do it correctly, did you have an idea of how environmentalism could have been codified better? Why was that not a success in some cases?Will MacAskill 25:46Honestly, I don't have a good understanding of that. I don't know if it's intrinsic to the matter or if you could’ve had some system that wouldn't have been co-opted in the long-term.Are companies longtermist?Dwarkesh Patel 25:56Theoretically, the incentives of our most long-term U.S. institutions is to maximize future cash flow. Explicitly and theoretically, they should have an incentive to do the most good they can for their own company—which implies that the company can’t be around if there’s an existential risk…Will MacAskill 26:18I don't think so. Different institutions have different rates of decay associated with them. So, a corporation that is in the top 200 biggest companies has a half-life of only ten years. It’s surprisingly short-lived. Whereas, if you look at universities Oxford and Cambridge are 800 years old. University of Bologna is even older. These are very long-lived institutions.For example, Corpus Christi at Oxford was making a decision about having a new tradition that would occur only every 400 years. It makes that kind of decision because it is such a long-lived institution. Similarly, the legends can be even longer-lived again. That type of natural half-life really affects the decisions a company would make versus a university versus a religious institution.Dwarkesh Patel 27:16Does that suggest that there's something fragile and dangerous about trying to make your institution last for a long time—if companies try to do that and are not able to?Will MacAskill 27:24Companies are composed of people. Is it in the interest of a company to last for a long time? Is it in the interests of the people who constitute the company (like the CEO and the board and the shareholders) for that company to last a long time? No, they don't particularly care. Some of them do, but most don't. Whereas other institutions go both ways. This is the issue of lock-in that I talked about at length in What We Owe The future: you get moments of plasticity during the formation of a new institution.Whether that’s the Christian church or the Constitution of the United States, you lock-in a certain set of norms. That can be really good. Looking back, the U.S. Constitution seems miraculous as the first democratic constitution. As I understand it, it was created over a period of four months seems to have stood the test of time. Alternatively, lock-in norms could be extremely dangerous. There were horrible things in the U.S. Constitution like the legal right to slavery proposed as a constitutional amendment. If that had locked in, it would have been horrible. It's hard to answer in the abstract because it depends on the thing that's persisting for a long time.Living in an era of plasticityDwarkesh Patel 28:57You say in the book that you expect our current era to be a moment of plasticity. Why do you think that is?Will MacAskill 29:04There are specific types of ‘moments of plasticity’ for two reasons. One is a world completely unified in a way that's historically unusual. You can communicate with anyone instantaneously and there's a great diversity of moral views. We can have arguments, like people coming on your podcast can debate what's morally correct. It's plausible to me that one of many different sets of moral views become the most popular ultimately.Secondly, we're at this period where things can really change. But, it's a moment of plasticity because it could plausibly come to an end — and the moral change that we're used to could end in the coming decades. If there was a single global culture or world government that preferred ideological conformity, combined with technology, it becomes unclear why that would end over the long-term? The key technology here is Artificial Intelligence. The point in time (which may be sooner than we think) where the rulers of the world are digital rather than biological, that [ideological conformity] could persist.Once you've got that and a global hegemony of a single ideology, there's not much reason for that set of values to change over time. You've got immortal leaders and no competition. What are the other kind of sources of value-change over time? I think they can be accounted for too.Dwarkesh Patel 30:46Isn't the fact that we are in a time of interconnectedness that won't last if we settle space — isn't that bit of reason for thinking that lock-in is not especially likely? If your overlords are millions of light years away, how well can they control you?Will MacAskill 31:01The “whether” you have is whether the control will happen before the point of space settlement. If we took to space one day, and there're many different settlements and different solar systems pursuing different visions of the good, then you're going to maintain diversity for a very long time (given the physics of the matter).Once a solar system has been settled, it's very hard for other civilizations to come along and conquer you—at least if we're at a period of technological maturity where there aren't groundbreaking technologies to be discovered. But, I'm worried that the control will happen earlier. I'm worried the control might happen this century, within our lifetimes. I don't think it’s very likely, but it's seriously on the table - 10% or something?Dwarkesh Patel 31:53Hm, right. Going back to the long-term of the longtermism movement, there are many instructive foundations that were set up about a century ago like the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation. But, they don't seem to be especially creative or impactful today. What do you think went wrong? Why was there, if not value drift, some decay of competence and leadership and insight?Will MacAskill 32:18I don't have strong views about those particular examples, but I have two natural thoughts. For organizations that want to persist a long time and keep having an influence for a long time, they’ve historically specified their goals in far too narrow terms. One fun example is Benjamin Franklin. He invested a thousand pounds for each of the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to pay out after 100 years and then 200 years for different fractions of the amount invested. But, he specified it to help blacksmith apprentices. You might think this doesn't make much sense when you’re in the year 2000. He could have invested more generally: for the prosperity of people in Philadelphia and Boston. It would have had plausibly more impact.The second is a ‘regression to the mean’ argument. You have some new foundation and it's doing an extraordinary amount of good as the Rockefeller Foundation did. Over time, if it's exceptional in some dimension, it's probably going to get closer to average on that dimension. This is because you’re changing the people involved. If you've picked exceptionally competent and farsighted people, the next generation are statistically going to be less so.Dwarkesh Patel 33:40Going back to that hand problem: if you specify your mission too narrowly and it doesn't make sense in the future—is there a trade off? If you're too broad, you make space for future actors—malicious or uncreative—to take the movement in ways that you would not approve of? With regards to doing good for Philadelphia, what if it turns into something that Ben Franklin would not have thought is good for Philadelphia?Will MacAskill 34:11It depends on what your values and views are. If Benjamin Franklin only cared about blacksmith's apprentices, then he was correct to specify it. But my own values tend to be quite a bit more broad than that. Secondly, I expect people in the future to be smarter and more capable. It’s certainly the trend over time. In which case, if we’re sharing similar broad goals, and they're implementing it in a different way, then they have it.How good can the future be?Dwarkesh Patel 34:52Let's talk about how good we should expect the future to be. Have you come across Robin Hanson’s argument that we’ll end up being subsistence-level ems because there'll be a lot of competition and minimizing compute per digital person will create a barely-worth-living experience for every entity?Will MacAskill 35:11Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument. But, we should distinguish the idea that ems are at subsistence level from the idea that we would have bad lives. So subsistence means that you get a balance of income per capita and population growth such that being poorer would cause deaths to outweigh additional births.That doesn't tell you about their well-being. You could be very poor as an emulated being but be in bliss all the time. That's perfectly consistent with the Malthusian theory. It might seem far away from the best possible future, but it could still be very good. At subsistence, those ems could still have lives that are thousands of times better than ours.Dwarkesh Patel 36:02Speaking of being poor and happy, there was a very interesting section in the chapter where you mentioned the study you had commissioned: you were trying to find out if people in the developing world find life worth living. It turns out that 19% of Indians would not want to relive their life every moment. But, 31% of Americans said that they would not want to relive their life at every moment? So, why are Indians seemingly much happier at less than a tenth of the GDP per capita?Will MacAskill 36:29I think the numbers are lower than that from memory, at least. From memory, it’s something more like 9% of Indians wouldn't want to live their lives again if they had the option, and 13% of Americans said they wouldn’t. You are right on the happiness metric, though. The Indians we surveyed were more optimistic about their lives, happier with their lives than people in the US were. Honestly, I don't want to generalize too far from that because we were sampling comparatively poor Americans to comparatively well-off Indians. Perhaps it's just a sample effect.There are also weird interactions with Hinduism and the belief in reincarnation that could mess up the generalizability of this. On one hand, I don't want to draw any strong conclusion from that. But, it is pretty striking as a piece of information, given that you find people's well-being in richer countries considerably happier than poorer countries, on average.Dwarkesh Patel 37:41I guess you do generalize in a sense that you use it as evidence that most lives today are living, right?Will MacAskill 37:50Exactly. So, I put together various bits of evidence, where approximately 10% of people in the United States and 10% of people in India seem to think that their lives are net negative. They think they contain more suffering than happiness and wouldn't want to be reborn and live the same life if they could.There's another scripture study that looks at people in United States/other wealthy countries, and asks them how much of their conscious life they'd want to skip if they could. Skipping here means that blinking would reach you to the end of whatever activity you're engaging with. For example, perhaps I hate this podcast so much that I would rather be unconscious than be talking to you. In which case, I'd have the option of skipping, and it would be over after 30 minutes.If you look at that, and then also asked people about the trade offs they would be willing to make as a measure of intensity of how much they're enjoying a certain experience, you reach the conclusion that a little over 10% of people regarded their life that day as being surveyed worse than if they'd been unconscious the entire day.Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most importantDwarkesh Patel 39:18Jumping topics here a little bit, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, you said that you expect scientists who are explicitly trying to maximize their impact might have an adverse impact because they might be ignoring the foundational research that wouldn't be obvious in this way of thinking, but might be more important.Do you think this could be a general problem with longtermism? If you were trying to find the most important things that are important long-term, you might be missing things that wouldn't be obvious thinking this way?Will MacAskill 39:48Yeah, I think that's a risk. Among the ways that people could argue against my general set of views, I argue that we should be doing fairly specific and targeted things like trying to make AI safe, well-govern the rise of AI, reduce worst-case pandemics that can kill us all, prevent a Third World War, ensure that good values are promoted, and avoid value lock-in. But, some people could argue (and people like Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison do), that it's very hard to predict the future impact of your actions.It's a mug's game to even try. Instead, you should look at the things that have done loads of good consistently in the past, and try to do the same things. In particular, they might argue that means technological progress or boosting economic growth. I dispute that. It's not something I can give a completely knock-down argument to because we don’t know when we will find out who's right. Maybe in thousand-years time. But one piece of evidence is the success of forecasters in general. This also was true for Tyler Cowen, but people in Effective Altruism were realizing that the Coronavirus pandemic was going to be a big deal for them. At an early stage, they were worrying about pandemics far in advance. There are some things that are actually quite predictable.For example, Moore's Law has held up for over 70 years. The idea that AI systems are gonna get much larger and leading models are going to get more powerful are on trend. Similarly, the idea that we will be soon be able to develop viruses of unprecedented destructive power doesn’t feel too controversial. Even though it’s hard to predict loads of things, there are going to be tons of surprises. There are some things, especially when it comes to fairly long-standing technological trends, that we can make reasonable predictions — at least about the range of possibilities that are on the table.Dwarkesh Patel 42:19It sounds like you're saying that the things we know are important now. But, if something didn't turn out, a thousand years ago, looking back to be very important, it wouldn't be salient to us now?Will MacAskill 42:31What I was saying with me versus Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, who is correct? We will only get that information in a thousand-years time because we're talking about impactful strategies for the long-term. We might get suggestive evidence earlier. If me and others engaging in longtermism are making specific, measurable forecasts about what is going to happen with AI, or advances in biotechnology, and then are able to take action such that we are clearly reducing certain risks, that's pretty good evidence in favor of our strategy.Whereas, they're doing all sorts of stuff, but not make firm predictions about what's going to happen, but then things pop out of that that are good for the long-term (say we measure this in ten-years time), that would be good evidence for their view.Dwarkesh Patel 43:38You were saying earlier about the contingency in technology implies that given their worldview, even if you're trying to maximize what in the past is at the most impact, if what's had the most impact in the past is changing values, then economic growth might be the most important thing? Or trying to change the rate of economic growth?Will MacAskill 43:57I really do take the argument seriously of how people have acted in the past, especially for people trying to make a long-lasting impact. What things that they do that made sense and whatnot. So, towards the end of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians had this longtermist wave where they started taking the interests of future generations very seriously. Their main concern was Britain running out of coal, and therefore, future generations would be impoverished. It's pretty striking because they had a very bad understanding of how the economy works. They hadn't predicted that we would be able to transition away from coal with continued innovation.Secondly, they had enormously wrong views about how much coal and fossil fuels there were in the world. So, that particular action didn't make any sense given what we know now. In fact, that particular action of trying to keep coal in the ground, given Britain at the time where we're talking about much lower amounts of coal—so small that the climate change effect is negligible at that level—probably would have been harmful.But, we could look at other things that John Stuart Mill could have done such promoting better values. He campaigned for women's suffrage. He was the first British MP. In fact, even the first politician in the world to promote women's suffrage - that seems to be pretty good. That seems to have stood the test of time. That's one historical data point. But potentially, we can learn a more general lesson there.AI and the centralization of powerDwarkesh Patel 45:36Do you think the ability of your global policymakers to come to a consensus is on net, a good or a bad thing? On the positive, maybe it helps around some dangerous tech from taking off, but on the negative side, prevent human challenge trials that cause some lock-in in the future. On net, what do you think about that trend?Will MacAskill 45:54The question of global integration, you're absolutely right, it's double-sided. One hand, it can help us reduce global catastrophic risks. The fact that the world was able to come come together and ban Chlorofluorocarbons was one of the great events of the last 50 years, allowing the hole in the ozone layer to to repair itself. But on the other hand, if it means we all converge to one monoculture and lose out on diversity, that's potentially bad. We could lose out on the most possible value that way.The solution is doing the good bits and not having the bad bits. For example, in a liberal constitution, you can have a country that is bound in certain ways by its constitution and by certain laws yet still enables a flourishing diversity of moral thought and different ways of life. Similarly, in the world, you can have very strong regulation and treaties that only deal with certain global public goods like mitigation of climate change, prevention of development of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction without having some very strong-arm global government that implements a particular vision of the world. Which way are we going at the moment? It seems to me we've been going in a pretty good and not too worrying direction. But, that could change.Dwarkesh Patel 47:34Yeah, it seems the historical trend is when you have a federated political body that even if constitutionally, the Central Powers constrain over time, they tend to gain more power. You can look at the U.S., you can look at the European Union. But yeah, that seems to be the trend.Will MacAskill 47:52Depending on the culture that's embodied there, it's potentially a worry. It might not be if the culture itself is liberal and promoting of moral diversity and moral change and moral progress. But, that needn't be the case.Dwarkesh Patel 48:06Your theory of moral change implies that after a small group starts advocating for a specific idea, it may take a century or more before that idea reaches common purchase. To the extent that you think this is a very important century (I know you have disagreements about that with with others), does that mean that there isn't enough time for longtermism to gain by changing moral values?Will MacAskill 48:32There are lots of people I know and respect fairly well who think that Artificial General Intelligence will likely lead to singularity-level technological progress and extremely rapid rate of technological progress within the next 10-20 years. If so, you’re right. Value changes are something that pay off slowly over time.I talk about moral change taking centuries historically, but it can be much faster today. The growth of the Effective Altruism movement is something I know well. If that's growing at something like 30% per year, compound returns mean that it's not that long. That's not growth. That's not change that happens on the order of centuries.If you look at other moral movements like gay rights movement, very fast moral change by historical standards. If you're thinking that we've got ten years till the end of history, then don't broadly try and promote better values. But, we should have a very significant probability mass on the idea that we will not hit some historical end of this century. In those worlds, promoting better values could pay off like very well.Dwarkesh Patel 49:59Have you heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet?Will MacAskill 50:03I have indeed heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet, and I was tempted as a gimmick to try it. As I'm sure you know, potato is close to a superfood, and you could survive indefinitely on butter mashed potatoes if you occasionally supplement with something like lentils and oats.Dwarkesh Patel 50:25Hm, interesting. Question about your career: why are you still a professor? Does it still allow you to the things that you would otherwise have been doing like converting more SBF’s and making moral philosophy arguments for EA? Curious about that.Will MacAskill 50:41It's fairly open to me what I should do, but I do spend significant amounts of time co-founding organizations or being on the board of those organizations I've helped to set up. More recently, working closely with the Future Fund, SBF’s new foundation, and helping them do as much good as possible. That being said, if there's a single best guess for what I want to do longer term, and certainly something that plays to my strengths better, it's developing ideas, trying to get the big picture roughly right, and then communicating them in a way that's understandable and gets more people to get off their seats and start to do a lot of good for the long-term. I’ve had a lot of impact that way. From that perspective, having an Oxford professorship is pretty helpful.The problems with academiaDwarkesh Patel 51:34You mentioned in the book and elsewhere that there's a scarcity of people thinking about big picture questions—How contingent is history? How are people happy generally?—Are these questions that are too hard for other people? Or they don't care enough? What's going on? Why are there so few people talking about this?Will MacAskill 51:54I just think there are many issues that are enormously important but are just not incentivized anywhere in the world. Companies don't incentivize work on them because they’re too big picture. Some of these questions are, “Is the future good, rather than bad? If there was a global civilizational collapse, would we recover? How likely is a long stagnation?” There’s almost no work done on any of these topics. Companies aren't interested too grand in scale.Academia has developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems. Partly, that's because they fall through the cracks of different disciplines. Partly because they seem too grand or too speculative. Academia is much more in the mode of making incremental gains in our understanding. It didn't always used to be that way.If you look back before the institutionalization of academic research, you weren't a real philosopher unless you had some grand unifying theory of ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Probably the natural sciences too and economics. I'm not saying that all of academic inquiry should be like that. But should there be some people whose role is to really think about the big picture? Yes.Dwarkesh Patel 53:20Will I be able to send my kids to MacAskill University? What's the status on that project?Will MacAskill 53:25I'm pretty interested in the idea of creating a new university. There is a project that I've been in discussion about with another person who's fairly excited about making it happen. Will it go ahead? Time will tell. I think you can do both research and education far better than it currently exists. It's extremely hard to break in or creating something that's very prestigious because the leading universities are hundreds of years old. But maybe it's possible. I think it would could generate enormous amounts of value if we were able to pull it off.Dwarkesh Patel 54:10Excellent, alright. So the book is What We Owe The Future. I understand pre-orders help a lot, right? It was such an interesting read. How often does somebody write a book about the questions they consider to be the most important even if they're not the most important questions? Big picture thinking, but also looking at very specific questions and issues that come up. Super interesting read.Will MacAskill 54:34Great. Well, thank you so much!Dwarkesh Patel 54:38Anywhere else they can find you? Or any other information they might need to know?Will MacAskill 54:39Yeah, sure. What We Owe The Future is out on August 16 in the US and first of September in the United Kingdom. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @WillMcCaskill. If you want to try and use your time or money to do good, Giving What We Can is an organization that encourages people to take a pledge to give a significant fraction of the income (10% or more) to the charities that do the most good. It has a list of recommended charities. 80,000 Hours—if you want to use your career to do good—is a place to go for advice on what careers have the biggest impact at all. They provide one-on-one coaching too.If you're feeling inspired and want to do good in the world, you care about future people and I want to help make their lives go better, then, as well as reading What We Owe The Future, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 hours are the sources you can go to and get involved.Dwarkesh Patel 55:33Awesome, thanks so much for coming on the podcast! It was a lot of fun.Will MacAskill 54:39Thanks so much, I loved it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

India Policy Watch #1: Futility Of Fighting Lies Insights on burning policy issues in India— RSJI have been following the case of Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of the fact-checking site Alt News with interest. He was granted interim bail by the Supreme Court a couple of weeks back. You can read more about the story here. I border on free speech absolutism, so my opinion on this case, as with many other similar cases in India, is simple. No one should be jailed for any speech unless they are violating Mill’s harm principle. In his essay On Liberty, Mill wrote:“That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind is warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”But free speech is not the only reason I have brought up the case of Mohammed Zubair here. The case illustrates a point I have made before in this newsletter: while countering lies with fact checks is a noble, worthwhile endeavour, it means nothing in an environment where people are intoxicated with half-truths and grand illusions about a ‘real’ past or an ‘imagined’ future.A few years back, I came across this wonderful essay ‘Monopolize the Pretty Lies’ by Bryan Caplan. While I understood it back then, reading it again now is insightful. Caplan writes:What then is the primary purpose of censorship?  It’s not to suppress the truth – which has little mass appeal anyway.  The primary purpose of censorship is to monopolize the pretty lies.  Only the powers-that-be can freely make absurdly self-aggrandizing claims. Human beings like to say – and think – whatever superficially sounds good.  Strict censorship allows rulers to exploit this deep mental flaw.  If no one else can make absurd lies, a trite slogan like, “Let’s unite to fight for a fantastic future!” carries great force.  Truthful critics would have to make crowd-displeasing objections like, “Maybe competition will bring us a brighter future than unity,” “Who exactly are we fighting?,” or “Precisely how fantastic of a future are we talking about?”  A rather flaccid bid for power!  Existing rulers tremble far more when rebels bellow, “Join us to fight for a fantastic future!”This is why I think this case won’t go anywhere. It will fizzle out here because fact-checkers don’t really matter. What will matter is if there is a counter-narrative based on dubious claims of an equally fantastic future. It explains why AAP is seen as a credible threat by the BJP.Caplan ends his essay with a rather pessimistic view of free speech:Doesn’t this imply that free speech is overrated?  Yes; I’ve said so before.  While I’d like to believe that free speech leads naturally to the triumph of truth, I see little sign of this.  Instead, politics looks to me like a Great Liars’ War.  Viable politicians defy literal truth in virtually every sentence.  They defy it with hyperbole.  They defy it with overconfidence.  They defy it with wishful thinking.  Dictators try to make One Big Political Lie mandatory.  Free speech lets a Thousand Political Lies Bloom.Yes, freedom of speech lets me make these dour observations without fear. I’m grateful for that.  Yet outside my Bubble, dour observations fall on deaf ears.  Psychologically normal humans crave pretty lies, so the Great Liars’ War never ends.I guess once you’ve gotten into the chakravyuha of the Mahabharata of lies, there’s no way of getting out. You will only find an avalanche of prettier lies from all sides engulfing you in future. India Policy Watch #2: Nature Of Representation Insights on burning policy issues in India— RSJDroupadi Murmu, the NDA presidential nominee, was elected as the 15th President of India a couple of weeks back. Murmu, a tribal leader from Mayurbhanj, Odisha, had earlier served as the governor of Jharkhand. That a woman from a historically marginalised section of the society now occupies the highest constitutional post is a moment to celebrate in the 75th year of Indian independence. It shows a kind of deepening of democracy. This is because we associate democracy with representation. It was no surprise therefore that a lot of opinion pieces reflected this sentiment while talking about her. Here’s Aditi Narayani Paswan writing for the Indian Express:“Droupadi Murmu is not just a source of inspiration for us; her life and struggle, determination and success in the face of great odds represent the hope and promise of New India.Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Indian democracy has become more representative and inclusive. The BJP represents the New India of prosperity, equality and socio-economic mobility, reflecting the true embodiment of samajik samarasta (social harmony). A tribal woman succeeding a Dalit to the highest constitutional post of the nation is a remarkable testimony to the deepening roots of Indian democracy.”And here’s a piece in Outlook:“What is really significant for us to understand here is that Murmu’s victory is not merely the victory of a specific party to power. Rather its implications can be drawn deep down to the very philosophy of what India as an independent nation has been striving to practically achieve. Whether or not her victory can bring goals of that philosophy to fruition is a matter of time to tell. But at the moment, from the point of view of a modern, multicultural, multi-ethnic nation-state, Murmu’s victory is the victory of representation.”Origin StorySince we are all talking about the victory of representation, I thought it would be useful to go deeper into the idea itself. What does representation mean in a democracy? How useful is it? Does an increasing emphasis on identity in society mean a greater opportunity for democracies to be truly representative? Is there such a thing as too much representation? To understand this, we will go back to the modern conception of the state and, therefore, to Hobbes. There are good reasons to go back to ancient history and the Roman republic or the Roman empire while talking about representation. But the political theory of the time concerned itself with the question of who was fit to rule us from among the people who should be ruling us. It didn’t answer the question of how we find who was fit to rule us. The process didn’t matter much then. So, we start with Hobbes again. This is a familiar territory for this newsletter so forgive me for going over it again. For Hobbes, human life in the state of nature is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. We would be a ‘fractious multitude’ forever at war with each other for scarce resources because there would be no powerful force to keep us in order. The solution, Hobbes wrote, was for people to come together to form a pact, let’s call it the ‘commonwealth’, where they voluntarily give up some of their freedoms to a powerful entity called the ‘sovereign’ in exchange for protection against the violence that’s inevitable in the state of nature. So that’s how the State worked. There were the multitudes, a notion of the commonwealth, and then there was the sovereign. The sovereign was all-powerful but ruled because of the legitimacy of the commonwealth. If the sovereign itself became brutish, the multitudes might dismantle the commonwealth and look for another. Hobbes didn’t care much about how to search for the sovereign. It could be through a parliament, or it could be a monarch; it didn’t matter so long as it had absolute power to maintain order which was in turn voluntarily offered to them by the people. The enlightenment thinkers who followed Hobbes concerned themselves with two big ideas. One was individual liberty and how it should be protected and championed in the face of a powerful sovereign. The other was the separation of the ‘church’ from the State or how to ensure the sovereign doesn’t bow down to another power in the name of God. The revolutions and political reforms in the late 18th century Europe and North America were a result of the excesses of the sovereign and the propagation of these ideas within those societies. The primacy of individual liberty, the weakening of monarchy and the separation of the church led to the evolution of the modern, representative democracy where the people chose who would lead them. The people would be sovereign through the mode of representation. A system of checks and balances between the legislature, executive and judiciary would limit the concentration of power in any one person. This became the democratic model to emulate. The Problem Of RepresentationThe problem of representation wasn’t too difficult to solve in the early days of democracy. There was no universal suffrage, people lived in villages over generations, their representatives knew their issues well, and the people chose someone who presented the best option to address their concerns. There was very little information asymmetry. This model started fraying with increasing industrialisation and deepening of capitalism leading to greater social and geographic mobility. Cities with diverse populations, new professions, break down of the feudal structure in the countryside and universal suffrage followed. This meant it was difficult for any representative to know their people as well as before. Even the people couldn’t keep pace with all the information around them. Like Walter Lippman would write, there was a world outside, and there was a picture of it inside our heads. We make our decisions based on this picture which is a second-hand view of the world because we cannot see all of the world. Because of this, we search for an authentic messenger who can explain the real world to us. The elites use the media to present themselves as the authentic messengers and shape public opinion. It is this elite then who influence representation for the public. Once this model got established, we saw the elites dominate representation in democracies for most of the 20th century. This wheel turned in the last decade when the excesses of the financial system, the concentration of the benefits of globalisation, the proliferation of media and greater disparity in opportunities led to a populist backlash against the elites.The Three NarrativesThere are now three competing narratives on representation today. The first is the old Burkean point on the role of a representative of people. His speech to the electors of Bristol in 1774 is a classic on the role of a representative:“Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”This is the model of an independent representative with a mind of his own. They work with autonomy using their judgment to do what they think is best for their people.The second narrative is about the representative being either an expert or who will rely on experts for finding the best answers to the concerns of the public. This narrative strengthens when a nation is in crisis because of a war, economic failure or an emergency (health or environment, for instance). These don’t last long, and an expert eventually falls out of favour unless they reinvent themselves. The last narrative is that of a representative who is like you and me, the proverbial US politician who you could have a chat with over a beer. This is the literal interpretation of representation where fealty to someone is drawn because of how closely they resemble us. In a world where every expertise can be questioned, where independent thinking is viewed with suspicion, and tribal loyalty is the highest virtue, this literal view of representation is the strongest. Of course, this isn’t to say that these narratives of representation cannot come together in the shape of a single person who could satisfy all of them. But that looks increasingly rare around the world these days. What’s easier is for a representative to fashion themselves in closer affiliation to a particular identity among the people and use that to come to power. Over-indexing on any one of these narratives and choosing representatives on that basis is bad for democracy. It weakens the state. It is something we must keep in mind while celebrating representation.  Matsyanyaaya: A New East Asian TransitionBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action— Pranay KotasthaneThis week’s news was dominated by the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. If you weren’t sleeping under a rock, you would have already read many views, claims, blames, and counter-claims around this event. Here’s another one, but from an Indian realist perspective.The dominant narrative sees this visit as another episode of the ongoing US-China great power rivalry. In this narrative, Taiwan by itself, is secondary. All that matters is to place the blame either on China or the US for the escalations. One framing is that this visit was unnecessary, provocative, and irresponsible. The argument goes that the US has worsened the security situation of China’s neighbours by inviting the latter’s aggression. The opposite framing suggests that the blame rests solely on China’s expansionist tendencies over the last five years. China’s response of activating a military response ahead of the upcoming 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party only shows what this event is really about.Both frames of the dominant narrative are missing a crucial element: the choices of the Taiwanese people. The great power rivalry framing often ignores that other nation-states also have the agency to make their sovereign choices, even if doing so sometimes involves playing one great power against another. Ukraine’s case is similar. Some people blame NATO’s expansion on Russia’s borders, while others point out that an invasion has no justification (I share this view). But we forget that most Ukrainians themselves want to move away from Russia and get closer to the West. Any final analysis needs to take this factor into account. My colleague Nitin Pai made a critical argument in early March: ““NATO/EU shouldn’t have expanded” is an insult to the agency of countries that have willingly exercised their choice to join. Accepting their sovereign decisions is also realism. Pretty silly to call yourself a ‘realist’ while pretending sovereign states don’t exist/lack agency.”So is the case with Taiwan. Some analysts are stuck in the old times, believing that Taiwan is China’s “internal issue”. They haven’t been paying enough attention to Taiwan’s domestic polity. The Taiwanese “nation”—the imagined community in Benedict Anderson’s conception— has been carefully constructed over the last few years. Democracy, freedom, and deep connections with the broader world are key foundations of Taiwanese nationalism. This kind of nationalism is antithetical to the mainland’s nationalism. The two consecutive electoral victories of the ruling party—Tsai Ing-wen’s DPP—is a sign that this Taiwanese identity has taken shape. The DPP defeated the grand old Guomindang, a party that has been soft on China. This is what Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu said in a BBC interview a couple of days ago:"We want to maintain the status quo, which is that Taiwan has no jurisdiction over mainland China and the People's Republic of China (CCP) has no jurisdiction over Taiwan. That is the reality… On the index of freedom Taiwan is ranked number one, on economic freedom Taiwan is also at the top. Taiwanese people enjoy democracy, freedom and the value of human rights, that put Taiwan in the democratic world…. We have the will and the capability. We need other countries to provide Taiwan with defensive articles, but defending Taiwan is our responsibility, we are not asking other countries to sacrifice their lives to protect Taiwan."Read the lines again. They are definitely not about a small internal issue or a minor historical, ideological tussle. What About Pelosi’s VisitHaving understood the categorical shift in Taiwan’s politics, we can better understand Ms Pelosi’s visit. The Taiwanese government knew what they were getting into. Taiwan orchestrated the visit precisely to clarify to the world that its differences with China are irreconcilable. Even the Guomindang came out in support of the visit. Having been under the threat of a mainland invasion for over 73 years, the Taiwanese know China’s intentions and actions better than most others.The visit, by itself, was just symbolic. It didn’t involve a leader from the Biden administration. Moreover, both Pelosi and the Biden administration made it clear that they are not reversing the “One China” principle. It was China that raised the stakes. China could’ve opted to let it pass by with a strong statement alone. But it chose to ratchet tensions, hoping that this tried-and-tested strategy would stare down Taiwan.But that was not to be. Taiwan and Pelosi called China’s bluff. And when that happened, China began conducting massive military drills, fired missiles and withdrew from important dialogue forums with the US. All this in response to just a symbolic visit by a legislators’ group! Just like the unsportsmanlike kid who walks away with his bat, ball and wickets after being adjudged out. (I know I’m breaking my injunction against anthropomorphising international relations.)How Should We in India Process This?Thus far, we have opted for our favourite position of taking a stance by not taking a stance. Foreign ministers of the US, Australia, and Japan jointly condemned China’s launch of missiles. The fourth Quad member was conspicuous by its absence.From an Indian perspective, Taiwan standing up to China’s expansionism is encouraging. India is familiar with China’s tantrums over visits by foreign diplomats. On every occasion a US Ambassador to India visits Arunachal Pradesh, the Chinese government gets riled up. Pelosi’s visit should be seen in the same context. China’s unreasonable demands and the disproportionate escalation when the demands aren’t heeded, deserve strong criticism short of any change in the “One China” formulation. At the same time, India should close the long-pending free-trade agreement with Taiwan. Its strategic value far outweighs the benefits of haggling over import duties.These words from Joseph Wu serve as a useful reminder to India and Indians:“Look at their[China’s] behaviour over Hong Kong, or claiming the East China Sea and the South China Sea. It is the typical expansionism of an authoritarian state.. Countries in this region need to watch out for what China is trying to do. Taiwan is not going to be the last piece in Chinese dream of expansionism.”Want to find out more about India and Taiwan? Start with this Puliyabaazi episode we recorded with Sana Hashmi, an Indian scholar of East Asian international relations (it’s in Hinglish). Earlier this year, Sana also anchored a comprehensive policy report analysing the India-Taiwan partnership for the Taiwan Asia Exchange Foundation. The report has twenty chapters on various facets of the relationship. I have co-written a chapter on semiconductors, while my colleague Shambhavi has a chapter on bilateral cooperation to tackle future pandemics. Finally, my colleagues have analysed a few cross-strait scenarios from an Indian national interest perspective in an excellent Takshashila Intelligence Estimate. Course Advertisement: Admissions for the Sept 2022 cohort of Takshashila’s Graduate Certificate in Public Policy programme are now open! Visit this link to apply.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Blog] If you are interested in the semiconductor angle in the Taiwan-PRC tensions, we have a post on it in our High-tech Geopolitics newsletter. [Book] Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel is necessary reading to understand China better. [Tweet thread] Common mistakes we make in pronouncing Chinese names. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

On a special episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, Dr. Robert Malone—the most dangerous man in podcasting according to tech censors and silicon valley oligarchs—joins Charlie for a fascinating and thoughtful discussion that goes beyond COVID and deeper than just another conversation on the vaccine. As the conversation progresses, Dr. Malone shares his thoughts on the art of the Renaissance Era and the important structural values we can still garner by looking back and embracing an almost Burkean three-tied knot approach at rebuilding civilization post-virus. To that end, Dr. Malone caps the conversation with an inspiring insight into the three things that must be reclaimed and nurtured back to health and prevalence by the American populace if we expect to break free from the chains of Mass Psychosis.    Learn more about the sponsors who, along with our Supporters and listeners like you, make The Charlie Kirk Show possible: https://charliekirk.com/show-sponsors Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

theory stream I tap into is Burkean conservatism. Because I'm doing a series on Burke right now, I thought I'd read the section from the draft introduction that has to do with classical conservatism. … More Edmund Burke vs. US Conservatives. Reading From My Latest Book Project: The Gap in God’s Country

Photo: Edmund Burke. CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow Praising the bold AUKUS with Burkean caution. @AmbJohnBolton @TheEconomist https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/09/22/john-bolton-on-how-a-new-era-of-american-alliances-is-under-way

We get letters. And one from a regular listener baited us with the proposition that since FDR's New Deal—decried here on a recent episode—is now nearly 90 years old, the duty of Burkean conservatives is now to preserve the New Deal rather than pine romantically for the good old days of Calvin Coolidge. To which Steve responded, well, I guess we should do a seminar-style episode about Edmund Burke... Source

We get letters. And one from a regular listener baited us with the proposition that since FDR’s New Deal—decried here on a recent episode—is now nearly 90 years old, the duty of Burkean conservatives is now to preserve the New Deal rather than pine romantically for the good old days of Calvin Coolidge. To which Steve responded, well, I guess we should do a seminar-style episode about Edmund Burke, the putative founder of modern conservatism. And guess what “Lucretia” thinks of Burke? “Not much” would be an understatement. But Steve thinks there’s a lot of commendable things to Burke, and that he’s worth reading. The ensuing argument bids to turn this episode into the “Three Whisky Grumpy Hour,” as it maps neatly on the long-running divide between peaty and sweet single malt whiskies. If this had been an actual fight in the ring, the referee might have stopped the fight after about the fifth round. Lucretia isn’t buying Steve’s contention that Burke was sound on natural law, and that his view that practical wisdom (or the prudence of the statesman) is superior to theoretical wisdom didn’t pass Lucretia’s exacting standards, despite a cleverly-planned ambush early in the episode. But Steve gets his revenge at the every end, by selecting exit music certain to make Lucretia mad—a contemporary “progressive” rock tune with a Burkean message. It can hardly get any worse than that!

We get letters. And one from a regular listener baited us with the proposition that since FDR’s New Deal—decried here on a recent episode—is now nearly 90 years old, the duty of Burkean conservatives is now to preserve the New Deal rather than pine romantically for the good old days of Calvin Coolidge. To which […]

…as Leninist, Noah Smith as Burkean. We neoliberals and neoliberal-adjacents need to come up with five significant discrete policies to make the world economy work better to reduce not just extreme but regular poverty over the next generation, rather than rest on fictitious laurels…Max Roser: “Most people in the world live in poverty. 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day, two-thirds live on less than $10 per day, and every tenth person lives on less than $1.90 per day. In each of these statistics price differences between countries are taken into account to adjust for the purchasing power in each country…”References:Robert Allen: Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction James Ferguson: The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depolitization, & Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho James Ferguson: Expectations of Modernity: Myths & Meanings of Urban Life in the Zambian Copper Belt Jason Hickel: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality & its Solutions Noah Smith: Against Hickelism: Poverty Is Falling, & It Isn't Because of Free-Market Capitalism Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time Max Roser & al.: Our World in Data &, of course:Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here: There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.) Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with John Wood Jr. about race, ethnicity, and conservatism. They discuss John's background both publicly and personally and the Braver Angels Organization. They dialogue about how biracial/multiracial people view race differently from people that are not biracial. They talk about the individual as a starting line for understanding people and then moving outward towards their group identity. They also talked about conservatism and how he identifies with black conservatism. They also talk about how he reconciles Burkean conservatism with modern-day conservatism and many other topics.  John Wood Jr. is a writer, speaker, and National leader for Braver Angels. He is a former nominee for congress, former Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County. He is also a musical artist. You can find his page with his articles here. Twitter: @johnrwoodjr

On this weeks show, we tackle one, very important question: do we actually need to read anymore? Can you simply learn Marxist theory, Burkean philosophy or Dostoyevsky simply by understanding its vibe? It might sound like a straightforward question, but think a little deeper and it will be clear that nobody online has the attention span to read books, let alone think about them critically - leading to endless cycles of weird discourse about whether ordering an extra naan with your Deliveroo order is a form of anti-worker oppression.   We also talk about why the best way to sustain a long and loving friendship is by making sure you secretly record and document their worst behaviours and traits, that can be used against them at any point. We might be anti-nuclear weapons, but sometimes, toxic behaviour and cancel culture need to be encouraged for the good of society. -------- Follow us on Twitter @10kpostspod. Follow Hussein on Twitter @hkesvani, Phoebe on Instagram at @phoebe_rosa_holly and Drew at @mydrewd. -------- For bonus content, subscribe to us on patreon at www.patreon.com/10kpostspodcast. We produce new exclusive content every two weeks, although we'll be doing weekly content soon.

In this crossover episode friend of the podcast Justin Stapley invites Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis onto his show Self-Evident to discuss self-evident truths and what it means to hold truth in tension. The conversation includes thoughts on whether or not our inalienable rights are “self-evident”, the genius of American founders, Jeffersonian, Lockean liberalism vs. Hamiltonian, Burkean conservatism, why John Adams didn’t make a good president, whether the 1619 Project or 1776 Project is “right” or if the truth is somewhere in-between, whether America’s founding perfect or problematic, whether truth is to be found in reason or prescription, can Burkean conservatism be found in Burke alone or is he only the starting-point for conservative thought, the challenges conservative fusionism faces today, and a surprisingly lengthy and unexpected conversation about American slavery. This conversation was originally released on the Self-Evident show.  Self-Evident is a weekly newsletter and intermittent podcast where Justin Stapley discusses both timely political topics as well as the timeless values and first principles of limited government and free society.   Justin Stapley has been writing politically since 2016.  His writing has been featured by ALEC, The Federalist Coalition, and the personal blogs and platforms he has operated over the years, which include Never Tyranny, The Millennial Federalist, and The Liberty Hawk.   Justin considers himself a liberty-minded conservative with principles and beliefs grounded in the idea of ordered liberty as expressed in the traditions of classical liberalism, federalism, and modern conservatism.   Justin currently studies Political Science at Utah Valley University with an emphasis in Political Theory and Constitutional Studies.  He is a staunchly independent voice and is unafraid to call balls and strikes as he sees them.  His calm but pointed writing style is often flavored with humor as he analyzes and discusses both news cycle driven topics as well as deeper philosophical considerations.   Justin appeared previously on Saving Elephants on the following episodes:   Episode 30 - Fusionism with Justin Stapley   Episode 55 – The New Centrist with Justin Stapley   Bonus Episode – The 2020 Elections – Now What?   You can follow Justin on Twitter @JustinWStapley  

In this episode, Stephen interviews Jamie Weinstein, independent journalist and host of the Jamie Weinstein show (http://www.jamieweinstein.com/). They discuss: Weinstein's version of Burkean conservatism the mostly-interview, sometimes-a-conversation style of his podcast, which does not have a pretense of neutrality, but is open to a wide range of viewpoints the difference between opinion, analysis, and reporting, and whether the media does a good job in distinguishing between the three -- and how the American public could do a better job of recognizing the difference Weinstein's take on the first and second impeachments whether what Donald Trump did leading up to January 6th was "incitement" whether Democrats should have taken a slightly different tack on impeachment whether Joe Biden is a "moderate Democrat" how things might go with the COVID relief bill, how bipartisan it will be, and how that will affect Congress moving forward Weinstein's favorite interview of his podcast, the episode with Ta-Nehisi Coates (http://www.jamieweinstein.com/episode-50-ta-nehisi-coates/) the relative rarity of respectful conversations between two people who do not share a similar worldview or ideology the extent to which Weinstein agrees with Coates on different forms of systemic racism times when Weinstein heard an argument he disagreed with and thought, "you know, you might have a point" "You Might Have a Point" is a podcast that features interviews with guests who specialize in one or more of a broad range of subjects, including philosophy, psychology, politics, public policy, journalism, and culture. All views expressed on this podcast are the opinions of those expressing them and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization. You can reach Stephen on Twitter at @StephenDause (https://twitter.com/StephenDause) or subscribe to notifications about new blog posts and podcast episodes at @have_point (https://twitter.com/have_point). You can also email him at stephen@youmighthaveapoint.com.

Last week cohosts Cal Davenport and Seth Root of the In The Trenches podcast invited Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis on their show for some no holds barred discourse around the topic of whether David French’s recommendations for addressing the growing political divide in the country are sufficient, achievable, and ideal or fail to go far enough.  Throughout the conversation Cal and Josh appeal to Burkean arguments while Seth holds his own defending a Straussian viewpoint.  What are the solutions to the nation’s political divide?  Are David French’s solutions too Frenchist?  Is nationalist populism a viable alternative to Frenchism?  Take a listen!  

In this bonus episode, Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is interviewed by Wes Siler, director and founder of The Burkean Conservative.  This conversation was originally broadcast on Facebook Live under The Burkean Conservative’s weekly video series Conservatism on Tap LIVE.  The conversation centers around how Saving Elephants came to be and the ongoing project to reignite conservatism for Millennials in hopes of restoring the Republican party. The Burkean Conservative is a website, social media presence, and series of frequently updated videos focused on educating and expanding the conservative movement on the basis of Edmund Burke's principles.  They define a “Burkean Conservative” one who ascribes to conservative political philosophy in the tradition of Edmund Burke, an 18th century philosopher and statesman widely credited for developing classical conservatism. According to The Burkean Conservative website, Edmund Burke took strong stances against the violence and progressivism of the French Revolution while also taking a position of sympathy and leniency towards the more justified impulses of the American Revolution.  Today the ideas, speeches, and political stances of Edmund Burke serve to philosophically differentiate conservatism from other beliefs.  However, Burke's ideas are still too often ignored and disregarded by leading American intellectuals today.  Far too many conflate conservatism with libertarianism or simple nostalgia, and in doing so they ignore the true intellectual roots and maturity of the conservative perspective.  

Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an English journalist and author. Hitchens writes for The Mail on Sunday and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. He has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, and the New Statesman. Hitchens began his political career as a revolutionary socialist but now describes himself as a Burkean conservative. His confrontational and opinionated debating style often makes him a controversial figure. He is deeply critical of the modern UK Conservative Party and has opposed many of their policies, including the party's handling of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Hitchens has published nine books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. His latest book is The Phoney Victory.

The Virgin Burkean. As Covid19 shuts down Ireland and Germany the comrades communicate at a safe distance about the real issues of the day. Latest breaking events in the anglosphere around the virus. They check in on the cognitive wellbeing of one Joseph Robinette Biden jr. Seb delivers a Fashwatch while Kev takes a call. Then the boyos discuss the "Irish Antifa Project" an astroturfed anti-anti-Fascist plot by the so-called "Burkean Journal" to take down those most dangerous of scoundrels: College Students. Dickpics incoming. Storm Season // Shopocalypse Now // everyone must drink the Green Koolaid // the denial cycle // social distancing, solidarity and darwinism // spanish flu remix // worldometers.info/coronavirus // vaping to spread the virus // EVERYONES GONNA DIE!!!! // the economy is stupid // Diamond Joe's Brain is Missing!* // manufacturing consent // class is not woke! // FASH WATCH / der Flügel under the eye / Greywolves baying for Erdogan / Seb talk's Truthdig.com while Kev is on the phone / the BERKIAN! //// The Flame-Wars of the Enlightenment // what do you call anti-anti-fascists? // a locus for resistance! // advice for staying safe Music - Sometimes Antisocial, Always Antifascist by What We Feel Ignacio López-Goñi's article mentioned by Seb at aprox 12mins https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-ten-reasons-why-you-ought-not-to-panic-132941 *Joe Biden loses his temper with Iraq War Veteran https://twitter.com/sahouraxo/status/1237398939864895489 Joe Biden tells Auto-worker he "is full of shit". https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1237463056462106624 Diamond Joe responds to question about auto-worker by mumbling opponents' names. https://twitter.com/DjLots3/status/1237847715851063298

Frequent contributor Greg Weiner speaks with Richard Reinsch about his latest book, American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arguing that Moynihan’s liberalism combined a “stubborn optimism” in what government could and should do with a profound sense of limitations on “how it should attempt to do it.”

This Liberty Law Talk is with Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz on his new book Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation. The book deepens Frank Meyer’s conservative fusionist project by adding an Aristotelian and Burkean challenge to both libertarians and conservatives in America. Both groups must lead with political moderation, Berkowitz counsels. One example […]

The neoconservatives would have you believe that Abraham Lincoln was a conservative. This is blatantly false, but alas the myth persists. A new piece at the Kirk Center doubles down on the narrative. Lincoln, it seems, was not just a conservative, but a Burkean conservative. I discuss this lunacy in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanahan.com/support http://learntruehistory.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/brion-mcclanahan/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/brion-mcclanahan/support

The emergence of the modern conservative movement came about in the twentieth century with the fusion of multiple groups that found they not only had common interests, but they shared common foundational beliefs.  Free market advocates, libertarians, Burkean traditionalists, the religious Right, and foreign policy hawks found common ground that led to the high watermark of the conservative movement culminating with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.   What led to this?  Why do conservative interest groups today seem far more splintered?  Why is the conservative movement devolving into so much infighting when we were once more unified?  And how might we chart a course forward that reunites the shared interests of the various factions under the conservative umbrella?   Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is Justin Stapley, a freelance advocacy journalist whose writing has typically centered around federalism and classical liberalism.  Justin’s first political writings appeared in 2016 on his NeverTyranny blog which was revamped as The Millennial Federalist in 2017 and today his blog is entitled Unpopular Dissent.  He has written extensively on behalf of the Federalist Coalition and has also been published in the American Legislative Exchange Council website, featured at NOQ Report, and will soon be featured as a contributing opinion columnist at Porter Medium.  Justin’s writings have even been featured on the Saving Elephants blog.   While Justin is certainly a conservative, he describes himself as a federalist and a classical liberal, firmly in the camp of Jefferson and Madison and their view of a government of ordered liberty.  This will be evident in the conversation as Justin describes the special tension between order and liberty that has run throughout all American conservative movements.   A composite of Justin’s writings can be found at justinstapley.com.  His writings extend beyond politics and touch on philosophy, religion, and the great outdoors.  He was born and raised in the state of Utah and currently resides in Bluffdale.

For nearly 15 years, David Brooks has been a conservative columnist—for much of that time, the lone conservative columnist—on the New York Times op-ed page. In the latest episode of The Jamie Weinstein Show, Brooks talks about how his view of Trump has changed over the years, what he would focus on if he found himself in the Oval Office, his surprising relationship with Steve Bannon, how Bill Buckley helped propel his career, and much more. Show Roadmap How Brooks’s view of Trump has changed Grading Trump’s first year On the Russia investigation What David Brooks would focus on if president On the tension of being a Burkean and a “National Greatness Conservative” How Brooks feels the media has covered Trump On his surprising relationship with Steve Bannon Brooks’ view of drug legalization On Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Joe Scarborough, and Matt Drudge How Bill Buckley helped shape Brooks’s career Closing questions: the books that shaped Brooks, and what he feels is the most under-covered issue

The very fact that an unqualified, demagogic, racist could be close to the Presidency tells us less about the candidates and more about the shape and mood of America in the 21st Century.   The red/blue divide is after all, not about pure politics. It’s not about classical liberalism vs. Burkean or Randian conservatism.  It’s not Disraeli vs. Gladstone.   What we see in America today is a cultural divide. One in which our own personal experience breaks out and defines itself into a kind of moral and political matrix that both traps and defines us.   These principles are universal and enduring and perhaps if we can better understand them, we can, if not accept, at least have compassion for the better angels of our opponents.   That exactly what noted sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has tried to do in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right My Conversation with Arlie Russell Hochschild:

In this episode, EJ Dionne Jr., a columnist at the Washington Post, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and frequent commentator at NPR, MSNBC, and PBS, talks about his most recent book, Why the Right Went Wrong. In his book, EJ tracks the fracture of the Republican Party from the Goldwater Movement in the early 60s all the way up to Donald Trump. In our conversation, EJ outlines that fracture and emphasizes the significance of Trump’s revolt on the right. We discussed the Trumpification of the Right, the past and future of American conservatism, and what Burkean or moderate conservatives such as David Brooks or Michael Gerson should do in the face of a Trump takeover. This interview was recorded on May 17, 2016.

  Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke by Gregory Clark Welcome to Mere rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, terms and movements that shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and if you’ve like to get in touch with me you can email me at mererhetroicpodcast @gmail.com or tweet out atmererhetoricked. Today on Mere Rhetoric I have the weird experience of doing an episode on someone who isn’t just living, but someone who was my mentor. If you’ve ever had to do a book report on a book your teacher wrote, you understand the feeling. But I really do admire the work of Gregory Clark, especially his seminal work in Burkean Americana. Clark is was been the editor of the Rhetoric Society Quarterly for eight years and recently became the President Elect of the Rhetoric Society in America, which means, among other things, he’s responsible for the RSA conference, like the one I podcasted about earlier this summer. He also wrote a fantastic book called Rhetorical Landscapes inAmerica, that became the foundation for a lot of work that looks that the rhetoricality of things like museums, landscapes and even people. In the final chapter of Gregory Clark’s Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, he poses the question “where are we now?” (147). We’ve certainly been many wonderful places. In Rhetorical Landscapes, Clark has packed up Kenneth Burke’s identification theory of rhetoric and applied it to the national landscapes of America. Clark suggests that our identity as Americans comes, largely, from our experiences with common landmarks. To demonstrate this power of Burke’s concept of identification, Clark has taken us through more than a century of American tourism, from New York City in the early 19th century to Shaker Country to the Lincoln Memorial Highway. We’ve been convinced by Clark of the rhetorical power of these places to create a national identity. We’ve seen how mountains and parks and even people can evoke a feeling of identification. It’s been a long, lovely ramble by the time we get to Clark’s question. Reading his words, one can’t escape the image of a wanderer who, having ambled through one delightful landscape after another finds himself suddenly disoriented as to his current location. Clark himself describes his project as “a ramble” and it is this apt description that encapsulates both the dizzying strengths of the book (147). Surely one of the most striking strengths of this ramble is the remarkable company we keep. Clark has brought the human and extremely likable specter of Kenneth Burke along for this meander through American tourism. The Burke of this book has not only provided us with the language of identification in our community of travelers to “change the identities that act and interact with common purpose;” he’s consented to come along with us (3). Clark presents Burke as one who was “himself a persistent tourist in America” (5). Burke very charmingly has written about his traveling “’go   go    going West, the wife and I/.../ “Go West, elderly couple”’” (qtd. Clark 7). When Burke’s theories of national identification are presented to us chapter-by-chapter, we enjoy their application in the presence of a critic who is not cynically immune to the process of identification, only acutely aware of it. Presented as accessibly and understandable, Clark has written us a Burke we can road trip with. If Clark has presented for us a clear, insightful and accessible version of Burke through this rambleit is because of his own remarkable prowess as a teacher. He is willing to let Burke be a fellow-traveler with us and he is willing, himself, to join us personally in the ramble. We readers are fortunate to have Clark with us, just as much as we are to have his clear explanations of what Burke would say if the deceased were alongside us. Just as Burke is not immune to the seduction of American tourism, Clark gives us ample insight into how the American landscape affected his own identification as an American as a child. In the chapter on Yellowstone, Clark describes how, as a child from “a marginal place in America” he had been taught that “America was in faraway places like New York or Washington, D. C., or Chicago or California” (69). When Clark first went to Yellowstone National Park, he noticed the variety of license plates in the parking lot and could suddenly feel “at home among all those strangers in a new sort of way—at home in America” (69). While Clark gives us every possible reason to respect him as a serious, meticulous scholar of both rhetoric and American tourism history, he never lets us forget that he, like Burke, like us, is also another tourist in awe of the places we define as quintessentially American. With knowledgeable and accessible teachers like Burke and Clark at our sides, we readers feel comfortable seeing how we, too, fit into this landscape. While the scope of the book covers the extremely formidable years of American nation-making (from the days of “these” United States to when the country is solidly coalesced into “the” United States), the institutions then established are still foremost in the psyche of Americans of all generations. Readers of Rhetorical Landscapes in America will be hard-pressed to read a chapter without immediately applying the Burkean theories to their own individual experiences with these ensigns of American identity. Have you been to NYC? Have you been told that you have to see Yellowstone? All of these places are part of how we structure our American identity. Where are we going? Working topically, vaguely chronologically, Clark and Burke accompany us through New York City, Shaker country, Yellowstone, The Lincoln Highway, the Panama-Pacific world’s fair and the Grand Canyon. It’s almost like a car game on a long road trip: okay, what do these six things have in common? While each of these locations lead themselves to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a touring American (eg, in the chapter Shaker country we discover how guides to the region have lead to identification “not with the Shakers, but with the other touring Americans who gather to wonder at the spectacle the Shakers create” and thus objectified Shakers), (52). Including a city, a people, a park, a road, an event and a building in a park could arguably be a way to expand the definition of the “landscape.” Why are we rambling through these American landscapes with Burke and Clark, after all? The argument appears to be, after all, to situate a Big Rhetoric theory of identification into a series of Big Rhetoric artifacts—so big, in fact, that it includes mountains and highways. Those who are resistant to wholeheartedly adopting Burke’s expansion of rhetoric to include not just persuasion, but also identification, will find Clark’s scope of artifacts as unconvincing; those who are frosty towards opening the canon of rhetoric past the spoken word, and past the written word into the very land we travel will bristle at the idea of giving something as Big Rhetoric as a city, a people, a landscape a “meaning.” These two groups of reader are by-and-large impervious to the convincing and meticulous readings that Clark provides of these locations. They’ve already made up their minds and aren’t likely to change them, despite the quality of Clark’s argument. Clark and Burke are observant, meticulous and personable traveling companions, This is an excellent book, one that opens up rhetoric to more than just written texts, but something that can encompass views and groups of people as well. I love thinking about the implications of place on national identity and I’m not the only one: scholars from Diane Davis to Ekaterina Haskin have taken up the idea of how a tour of places and spaces and people can create an argument for national identity. So when you come back from your summer vacation this year, think about not just what you saw, but who it made you become.    

Is Donald Trump a conservative? We make the Burkean case in the affirmative, as Trump seems intent upon "conserving" America as a sovereign nation. Secure borders, fair trade, respect for the incrementalized traditions and "habits" of society. As conservative philosopher Edmund Burke has noted, "a society is better off if it can absorb novelty in small and manageable amounts." If the charges of the GOP Establishment are true to the contrary, why are conservative icons Phyllis Schlafly, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity generally supportive of Trump? Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton responds to the new Benghazi movie "13 Hours" by saying she's testified for "11 Hours" before a congressional committee. Moral equivalence? Victim? And as Bernie Sanders pulls ahead of Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire, is the Hillary campaign in trouble? Also, we look at the increasingly tense dispute between Trump and Ted Cruz on "natural born" citizenship and "New York Values." As Rudy Giuliani demands an apology, we ask whether or not Cruz has committed an "unforced error" in this case. And we ponder Iowa Governor Terry Branstad's hintings at support for Trump. With music and listener calls.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Direct link to MP3 file This week on GLoP Culture, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and Rob Long ruminate on filibusters and cloture, the Bluto-Burke connection, a look back at JFK, cellphones on planes, mockumentaries, and a few holiday movie picks. Best Photoshop since the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, EJHill. This podcast is brought to you by our good friends at Encounter Books. Source

This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposition to the national. It suggests that English Literature is stuck in this Burkean-organic-deep-conservative moment in terms of its methodology and its idea of a canonicity – but that the gradual crumbling of British empire after 1919, from the late 1950s, and then during devolution, has re-created England as a place able to overwhelm the British-imperial ideal space which was created for it. The presentation looks forward finally to a more open-ended and action-oriented, and less managerial and imperial, national literature of England.

This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposition to the national. It suggests that English Literature is stuck in this Burkean-organic-deep-conservative moment in terms of its methodology and its idea of a canonicity – but that the gradual crumbling of British empire after 1919, from the late 1950s, and then during devolution, has re-created England as a place able to overwhelm the British-imperial ideal space which was created for it. The presentation looks forward finally to a more open-ended and action-oriented, and less managerial and imperial, national literature of England.

In this listener mail episode of The Politics Guys, Mike and Jay respond to listener questions, including: * Why Congress gives the president so much power in authorizations for use of military force. * The lack of attention both Mike and Jay have paid to working conditions to healthcare workers, and how those conditions affect patients. * Why Jay seems so dismissive of young people's protests. * What Jay (and Mike) mean when they call themselves 'Burkean'. * Why political flip-flopping gets such a bad name. **Show Notes** - [Nuclear Jenga - in a Bouncy Castle](http://bit.ly/2tAzepU). Jesse Lawler - [Great Thinkers: Edmund Burke](http://bit.ly/2pXOyb0)  **Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible**. If you're interested in supporting the show, go to [politicsguys.com/support](http://www.politicsguys.com/support). Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this listener mail episode (really more of a listener mail, Facebook, Twitter, and politicsguys.com site comment episode) Mike and Jay respond to listener comments concerning: * Why Republicans like Jay aren't nearly as respectful of facts as Democrats are (Jay disagrees, as you might expect)  * Why The Politics Guys isn't more diverse, and whether or not the lack of a liberal further to the left of Mike is a problem.  * How Jay's Burkean ideals match up to the modern-day GOP. (And Mike points out that he's got Burkean ideals too!)  * Who Mike and Jay think might run for president in 2020  During this episode, Mike waxed rhapsodical about the amazing economic data site put together by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve - [here's the link](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/).  **Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible**. If you're interested in supporting the show, go to [politicsguys.com](http://www.politicsguys.com) and click on the Patreon or PayPal links. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Mike talks with Bryan Caplan, a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a blogger for EconLog ( https://www.econlib.org/econlog/ ). Professor Caplan is the author of multiple books, including two he and I have previously discussed on the show - The Myth of the Rational Voter ( http://pdcn.co/e/traffic.libsyn.com/politicsguys/Bryan_Caplan_2016-11-30_.mp3?dest-id=721884 ) , and The Case Against Education ( https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/8/6/3/863ff386e9ef2cfa/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education.mp3?c_id=21100238&cs_id=21100238&expiration=1579551784&hwt=17a2b332240ea11b65ebe44a197f0aee ). On this episode, they discussing Bryan's latest book, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration ( https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=open+borders+caplan&link_code=qs&qid=1579546928&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1 ). *Topics Mike & Bryan discuss include:* * ‘a world of global apartheid' * immigration and economic inequality * the moral presumption in favor of immigration * why Nobel Laureate Milton Freedom was wrong about immigration * how open borders could easily double world GDP * the cultural effects of open borders * immigration, crime, and terrorism * the partisan political calculus of immigration policy * open borders and global brain drain * a Burkean approach to immigration * and lots more! *Bryan Caplan on Twitter* ( https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan ) *Today's show is sponsored by SaneBox -* email management for any inbox. For a free two-week trial and $25 credit, go to sanebox.com/politicsguys ( https://www.sanebox.com/politicsguys ). *Be part of the discussion* on the Politics Guys ‘ BipartisanPolitics ( https://www.reddit.com/r/BipartisanPolitics/ ) ' community on Reddit. *Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible*. If you're interested in supporting the show, go to patreon.com/politicsguys ( https://www.patreon.com/politicsguys ) or politicsguys.com/support ( http://www.politicsguys.com/support ). The Politics Guys theme is ‘Rollin at 5' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ ) Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy