Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours

Four: Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions

Apr 12, 2021

02:17:12

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Episode notes

[[Value traps are evolutionary mismatches]]

01:47

Learning For Its Own Sake

02:42

World-making requires integrating a lot of intrinsic values

02:31

[[Update your priors to avoid counter-evidence creep]]

04:38

Introduction

2min

How to Reason Through Difficult Questions

5min

How to Get More Happy Thoughts Everyday?

2min

Is There a Value for Its Own Sake?

2min

Are You a Conservative or a Liberal?

2min

What Are the Differences Between Universal and None Universal Values?

2min

What Do Inte Rial Values Really Mean?

2min

How to Find Your Own Intrinsic Values

2min

Do You Think That Money Is Inherently Valuable?

2min

10.

Learning for Its Own Sake

3min

11.

The Human Brain Doesn't Clearly Differ Between Value and Integrity

6min

12.

I'm Going on Vacation, I'll Value My Own Wealtare Mo Ham It

3min

13.

The Best World Is Just Hook Aryone Up to Happiness Machine in Riting

3min

14.

Human Brains Have Multiple Integrative Values

2min

15.

Are You Over Confident?

2min

16.

Are You Over Confident?

3min

17.

The Martial Arts One Lines Up Pretty Well

2min

18.

Are You Confident?

2min

19.

The Five Trades That Were Able to Discover

3min

20.

Is There a Myth About Spinach?

2min

21.

How Much Should You Change Your Belief Based on Evidence?

4min

22.

Do You Work With Odds or Opponents?

3min

23.

Is It Subject of Judgment?

5min

24.

What Is the Base Factor?

3min

25.

When Should We Trust Common Sense?

3min

26.

Are You Good at Reading Social Information?

4min

27.

The Fallacy of Aggregation

2min

28.

Is There a Replica of Power Posing?

3min

29.

Is It a Small Effect?

2min

30.

Do You Believe That Possibility Can Affect Mood?

3min

31.

How to Optimize a Reference Class?

3min

32.

How Long Will It Take You to Finish a Project?

2min

33.

Do You Have a Planning Fallacy?

2min

34.

Predicting the Future With Models and Theories

2min

35.

Using Multiple Models to Predict a Thing

2min

36.

Is There Evidence That Chocolate Reduces or Improves Cardiovascular Health?

2min

37.

Is the Base Factor a Hundred?

2min

38.

Qualitative Frameworks Can Be Used to Destimate Things

3min

39.

Is There a Difference Between a Number and Nothing?

3min

40.

How Many Presidents Have Colluded With Foreign Powers?

2min

41.

Is He a Russa Colluder?

2min

42.

The Probability of China and the United States Going to War in the 20th Century

2min

43.

What's the Bas Factor of War?

2min

44.

Are They Going to Give Up Their Nuclear Weapons?

2min

45.

The Right Model Isn't Quite the Right Model

3min

46.

Is There a Base Factor in Sugar?

2min

47.

Is the Diet Change the Cause of the Arthritis Going Away?

2min

48.

How to Estimate the Odds of a Trump Being Reelected?

2min

49.

Can You Beat the Production Market?

2min

50.

I Think the Effect Size of the Study Goes Up, and the Probability of a Real Result Goes Down.

2min

51.

Liquid Prediction Markets

2min

52.

Is This Really a Fraud?

2min

53.

Faith Healer

2min

54.

Is It Really That Unforgivable?

3min

55.

Do You Feel Better Now?

3min

56.

Is This Really a Dodgy Company?

2min

57.

Is There a Smoke Detector Alarm?

2min

58.

The Importance of Rethinking Your Expectations

2min

Will SpaceX land people on Mars in the next decade? Will North Korea give up their nuclear weapons? Will your friend turn up to dinner?

Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org has a process for working out such real life problems.

In this conversation from 2018, Spencer walks us through how to reason through difficult questions more accurately, and when we should expect to be overconfident or underconfident.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on August 7, 2018. Some related episodes include:

• #7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
• #11 – Dr Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm.
• #15 – Prof Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise
• #30 – Dr Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another
• #40 – Katja Grace on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions.
• #48 – Brian Christian on better living through the wisdom of computer science
• #78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and measuring some of the most important drivers of AI progress

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

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Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours

Four: Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions

[[Value traps are evolutionary mismatches]]

Learning For Its Own Sake

World-making requires integrating a lot of intrinsic values

[[Update your priors to avoid counter-evidence creep]]

Get the Snipdpodcast app

AI-poweredpodcast player

Discoverhighlights

Save anymoment

Share& Export

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Discoverhighlights

Get the Snipd
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moment

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& Export

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