Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours (April 2021)

Six: Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

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Apr 12, 2021

Could humanity’s future hold trillions of lives, or are we closer to extinction than we think? Ajeya Cotra explores the unsettling doomsday argument, the possibility of vast futures beyond Earth, and how philanthropists can balance competing worldviews without betting everything on one speculative idea. She also discusses forecasting transformative AI and the uncertainties behind those predictions.

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INSIGHT

Worldviews Guide Big Philanthropic Bets

Open Phil frames major giving choices as "worldviews" that mix philosophy, heuristics and empirical views.
They research which worldviews to fund and how much to allocate to each based on comparative impact.

INSIGHT

Why Longtermists Prioritize Existential Risks

Longtermist views prioritize reducing existential risk because large future populations dominate total-value calculations.
Neartermist views remain skeptical of privileging speculative philosophical arguments and emphasize tractable, evidence-driven interventions.

INSIGHT

Three Ways To Resolve Cause Disagreements

When causes disagree, choices are: give to the largest-stake worldview, split by credence, or use fairness agreements negotiated ex ante.
Fairness agreements hedge philosophical extremism by trading future shares under uncertainty.

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Imagine that humanity has two possible futures ahead of it: Either we’re going to have a huge future like that, in which trillions of people ultimately exist, or we’re going to wipe ourselves out quite soon, thereby ensuring that only around 100 billion people ever get to live.

If there are eventually going to be 1,000 trillion humans, what should we think of the fact that we seemingly find ourselves so early in history? If the future will have many trillions of people, the odds of us appearing so strangely early are very low indeed.

If we accept the analogy, maybe we can be confident that humanity is at a high risk of extinction based on this so-called ‘doomsday argument‘ alone.

There are many critics of this theoretical ‘doomsday argument’, and it may be the case that it logically doesn’t work. This is why Ajeya Cotra — a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy — spent time investigating it, with the goal of ultimately making better philanthropic grants.

In this conversation from 2021, Ajeya and Rob discuss both the doomsday argument and the challenge Open Phil faces striking a balance between taking big ideas seriously, and not going all in on philosophical arguments that may turn out to be barking up the wrong tree entirely.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on January 19, 2021. Some related episodes include:

#45 – Prof Tyler Cowen's stubborn attachments to maximising economic growth, making civilization more stable & respecting human rights
#40 – Katja Grace on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions.
#42 – Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
#3 – Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
#41 – David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher
#10 – Dr Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction
#62 – Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brain.

Series produced by Keiran Harris.