The Importance of Choosing the Right Type of Transformation

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L a paul: Responsibility is being aware of the externalities of your actions and then seeking, or being beholden to reduce the negative externalities. She says even if you don't know details, there's a principal reason for you to not strike that match and drop it into the pool of oil. The more omniconsiderate people can be, the more trust they might have in their decision-making system., she says. L a Paul: We need an incredible humility for what we might be doing as we interact in the world at all.

How do we decide whether to undergo a transformative experience when we don’t know how that experience will change us? This is the central question explored by Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist L.A. Paul.

Paul uses the prospect of becoming a vampire to illustrate the conundrum: let's say Dracula offers you the chance to become a vampire. You might be confident you'll love it, but you also know you'll become a different person with different preferences. Whose preferences do you prioritize: yours now, or yours after becoming a vampire? Similarly, whose preferences do we prioritize when deciding how to engage with technology and social media: ours now, or ours after becoming users — to the point of potentially becoming attention-seeking vampires?

In this episode with L.A. Paul, we're raising the stakes of the social media conversation — from technology that steers our time and attention, to technology that fundamentally transforms who we are and what we want. Tune in as Paul, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin explore the complexity of transformative experiences, and how to approach their ethical design.