YouSaid · the spoken record

Fin Moorhouse

lines on the record: 147
first: 2022-07-27
most recent: 2022-07-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That was like 10 to the something many more people tomorrow. So it's probably wrong and wrong for reasons I don't have a very good handle on because I don't know what I'm talking about. I mean, I can kind of try parroting the reasons, but like it's something I'm, you know, I'm interested in trying to really crock those reasons a bit more.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you think you're just like randomly drawn from all the people who ever lived, it's like absolutely mind blowing that we get drawn from like today rather than tomorrow.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then okay, there is also this slightly more out there thought, which is, here's the thing you could say. Money Worlds is true, then there is at least a sense in which there are very, very many more people in the future compared to the past, like just unimaginably many more. And even like the next second from now, there are many more people. So you might think that should make us have a really steep negative discount rate on the future, which is to say we should value future times much more than present times. And in a way, which would just kind of, it wouldn't modify how we should act. It just like explodes how we should think about this. This definitely doesn't seem right. Maybe one way to think about this is that if this thought was true, or like what kind of directionally true, then that might also be a reason for being extremely surprised that we're both speaking at like an earlier time rather than a later time.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer the question of how should you kind of benefit this person who is you in the future, who is one person. It's more like how do you benefit this like cloud of people who are all success of you? There's just kind of like diffusing into the future. And I think you point out that you could just like basically salvage a lot of basically all decision theory, even if that's true. But the picture of what's going on changes. And in particular, I think just intuitively, like it feels to me like the gap between acting in a self-interested way and then acting in an impartial way where you're like helping other people, it kind of closes in a way. You're already benefiting many people by doing the thing that's kind of rational to benefit you, which isn't so far from benefiting people who aren't continuous with you in this special way. So I kind of like that as a thing.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the important uncertainties about the world are still subjective uncertainties about how most worlds will in fact turn out. But it's kind of interesting and notable that you kind of like convert between overall uncertainty about how things turn out to like more certainty about the fraction of ways things turn out. I think another interesting feature of this is that so the question of like how you should act”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About having a measure over worlds in some sense, there's actually a problem of how you get probabilities or how you make sense of probabilities on the many worlds view, and there's a kind of neat way of doing that, which makes use of questions about how you should make decisions. That is, you should just kind of weigh future use according to, in some sense, how likely they are. But it's really the reverse. You're like explaining what it means for them to be more likely in terms of how it's rational to weigh them. And then I think it's like a ton of very vague things I can try saying. Some people just try doing a brain dump of things. You might think that many worlds being true could push you towards being more risk neutral in certain cases if you weren't before. Because in certain cases you're like translating from some chance of this thing happening or it doesn't into some fraction of worlds this thing does happen and another fraction it doesn't that's kind of like I do think it's worth reading too much into that because I think”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dissolving into this like cloud of me's and like just kind of unimaginably large number of me's and that each of those me's is kind of in some sense dissolving into more clouds This is just like wild also seems somewhat likely to be true as like far as I can tell okay so like what does this mean You point out that you can.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, all right, there's a lot there. I guess rather than doing a terrible job at trying to explain this MiniWorlds thing is about, maybe it's worth just kind of pointing people towards just Googling it. I should also add this enormous caveat that I don't really know what I'm talking about. This is just kind of an outsider who's taken this kind of, I know, this stuff seems interesting. Yeah, okay, so there's this question of like what... The many worlds view is true. What if anything could that mean with respect to questions about what should we do or what's important? And one thing I want to say is just like without zooming into anything, it just seems like a huge deal. Every second, every day, I'm in some sense just kind of...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's give it away, or otherwise just like have a positive effect in some impartial sense, then you're going to be less risk averse, which means maybe you fail more often, but it also means that people who succeed really hard. So I don't know if that's in some sense, I'm just recycling what you said, but I think it's like a really kind of neat observation.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where one consideration we've just talked about, which is a risk of just like losing your bankroll, which is where Kelly betting becomes relevant. Another consideration is that as an individual, just like trying to do the best for yourself, you have pretty steeply diminishing returns from money or just like how well your life goes without extra money. Right. So like if you have like 10 million in the bank and you make another 10 million, does your life get twice as good? Obviously not, right? And as such, you should be kind of risk averse when you're thinking about the possibility of making a load of money. If on the other hand, you just care about making the world go well, then the world's an extremely big place. And so you basically don't run into these diminishing returns like at all. And for that reason, like if you're making money, at least in part to, in some”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I really liked it, by the way, and it was great. One thing that made me think of is that there's quite an important difference between trying to maximize returns for yourself and then trying to get the most returns just like for the world, which is to say just doing the most good.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're only a relatively marginal actor, then that's unlike being like an individual investor where you're more sensitive to the risk of just running out of money. And when you're more like an individual investor, then you want to pay attention to what the size of the Kelly bet is. You're acting at margins, then maybe that is less of like a big consideration. Although, it is obviously still a very important point.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you think that there's a kind of a pool of resources from which you're drawing, which is something like maybe philanthropic funding for the kind of work that you're interested in doing.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. That's a great point. Like, I guess in some cases, you want to take something which looks a bit more like the Kelly bet. But if you're acting on your margins, like relatively small margins compared to the kind of pot of resources you have, then I think it often makes sense to take just that, do the best thing but not worry too much about what's the kind of size of the Kelly bet. But yeah, it's a great point. And I guess a naive version of doing this is just kind of losing your bank role very quickly because you've taken to enormous bets and forgotten that it might not pan out. Yeah, so I appreciate that.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's really important not to be misguided by this kind of feature of the minimax regret strategy where you look back and kind of feel a bit better about yourself in many cases, if that makes sense.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could choose to take a strategy which looks something like mini max regrets, right? So you have a bunch of options. You can ask about the kind of roughly worst case outcome or just kind of like default outcome on each option. And one strategy is just choose the option with the least bad kind of meh case. And if you take the strategy, you should expect to look back on the decisions you make and not see as many failures. So that's one point in favor of it. Another strategy is just like do the best thing in expectation. Like if I made these decisions constantly, what in the long run just ends up like making the world best? And this looks a lot like just taking the highest EV option. Maybe you don't want to run the risk of causing harm. So that's okay to include. And, you know, I happen to think that kind of second strategy is very often going to be a lot better.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On whether that was the correct strategy because it didn't pan out. And so, I don't know, if something like EA type thinking was in the water and was like. Thought through very well. Yep, I think it would go wrong a bunch of times, and that shouldn't be kind of terrible news. When I say go wrong, I mean not pan out rather than do harm. If it did harm, okay, that's like a different thing. I think one thing this points to, by the way, is like...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we get to the first part of the question, which as I understand it, is something like can we think about what some kind of effective altruism Movement, or if these ideas were in the water, like significantly earlier, whether they might have misfired sometimes, or maybe they might have succeeded. In fact, how do we think about that at all? I guess one thing I want to say is that very often the correct decision ex ante is a decision which might do really well in some possible outcomes, but you might still expect to fail, right? The kind of mainline outcome is this doesn't really pan out, but it's a moonshot, and if it goes well, it goes really well. This is, I guess, similar to certain kinds of investing, where if that's the case, then you should expect, even if you follow the exact correct strategy, you should expect to look back on the decisions you make and see a bunch of failures where failure is, you know, you just have very little impact. And I think it's important not to kind of resist the temptation to really kind of negatively update.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just agree that, yeah, I would want to resist a framing of doing good, which just leaves out like also doing some successful for-profit company. Like there are just a ton of really excellent examples of where that's just been a huge success. And yeah, should be celebrated. So yeah, I think I disagree with the spirit. Maybe we disagree somewhat on the how much we should kind of relatively emphasize these different things, but doesn't seem like a kind of very deep disagreement.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use the success of that first thing to then just think squarely like, how do I just do the most good without worrying about whether there's some kind of profit mechanism? I think often that strategy is going to pan out well. There's a thought about the kind of the tales coming apart, if you've heard this thought that at the extremes of either kind of scalability in terms of opportunity to make a lot of profit and at the extreme of doing like a huge amount of good you might expect that to be like not such a strong correlation. Again, one reason, like in particular, that you might think that is because you might think that like future really matters like your humanity's future. And sorry to be like a stuck record, but like there's not really like a natural market there because these people don't haven't been born yet. That is like a rambly way of saying that, okay, that's not always going to be true, but I basically”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think my high level thought is I'm not sure how much we disagree, but I guess one thing I want to say is, again, thinking about in general, what should you expect the real biggest opportunities to typically be for just having a kind of impact? One thing you might think of is if you can optimize for two things separately, that is optimize for the first thing and then use that to optimize for the second thing versus trying to optimize for some like combination of the two at the same time you might expect to do better if you do the first thing. So for instance, you can do a thing which looks a bit like trying to do good in the world and also like make a lot of money like social enterprise and often that goes very well but you can also do a thing which is try to make a lot of money and just just you know make a useful product that is not directly aimed at you know proving humanity's prospects or anything but it's just kind of just great and then”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, man, we've gone so async here. I should have just said one thing and then I'm sorry for throwing lots of things at you. There's a lot there.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For something, it could also be because maybe you want to or get a really impactful technology off the ground. In those cases, you get a kind of free rider dynamic, I think, where there's less reason to protect the IP and patent something. There's less reason to be the first mover. And so this is, maybe it's not for profit, but starting or helping kind of get a technology off the ground, which could eventually be a space for a bunch of for-profit companies to make a lot of money. That seems really exciting. Also creating markets where there aren't markets seems really exciting. So for instance, setting up like AMCs, advanced market commitments or prizes or just giving, yeah, creating incentives where there aren't any. So you get the efficiency and competition kind of gains that you get from a for-profit space. That seems great. But that's not really answering your question because the question is like, what about actual for-profit companies? I don't know what I have to say here. Like, in terms of whether they're being under...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some sense, taking opportunities to help people where there isn't a profit opportunity, they're going to be weaker. And so if you're thinking about the difference you make compared to whether you do something or whether you don't do it, in general, you might expect that to be bigger where you're doing something nonprofit.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. And there is really a sense in which some of the more innovative big for-profit companies just are doing an incredibly useful thing for the world. They're like providing a service that wouldn't otherwise exist and people are obviously using it because they are a successful for-profit company. Yeah, so I guess the question is something like, you know, you're stepping back, you're asking, how can I have a ton of impacts with what I do? The question is, are we like underrating just starting a company? So I felt like I want to throw a bunch of kind of disconnected observations. We'll see if they like tie together. There is a reason why you might in general expect a non-profit route to do well. And this is like obviously very naive and simple, but where there is a for-profit opportunity, you should just expect people to kind of take it. Like, this is why we don't see $20 bills lying on the sidewalk. But the natural incentives for...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we at least have some kind of bounce on how bad certain things can be. And so if you ask this question, like, what is worth worrying about most in terms of what kinds of risks might reach this level of potentially posing an existential risk? Well, it's going to be the kinds of things we haven't done yet that we haven't got some experience with. And so you can ask this question, like, what things are there in the space of kind of big seeming, but totally novel precedent-free changes or events? And it actually does seem like you can kind of try generating that list and getting at answers. This is why maybe, or at least one reason why, AI sticks out, because it's like fulfills his criteria of being pretty potentially big and transformative. And also the kind of thing we don't have any experience with yet. But again, it's not as if that list is like in some sense endless. Like there are only so many things we can.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one thing, one of angle you could put on this is you can ask this question, we have precedent for a lot of things. We know now that igniting nuclear weapons does not ignite the atmosphere, which was a worry that some people had.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, table something, practical reason for focusing on the things which are most salient, and like definitely spending some time thinking about the things we haven't thought of yet. It's not like that list is just completely endless. And there's a kind of, I guess, a reason for that. And then you said the second thing, which I don't actually know if I have a ton of. Interesting thing to say about, although maybe you could try like kind of zooming in on what you're interested in there.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess first one is even if you think that preventing these kind of very large scale risks that might curtail human potential, even if you think that's just incredibly important, you might miss some of those risks because you just aren't able to articulate them or really like conceptualize them. I feel like I just want to say at some point we have a pretty good understanding of kind of roughly what looks most important. Like for instance, if you kind of, I don't know, get stranded on a camping trip and you're like, we need to just survive long enough to make it out. And it's like, okay, what do we look out for? I don't really know what the wildlife is here because I haven't been here before, but probably it's going to look a bit like this. I can at least imagine, you know, the risk of dying of thirst, even though I've never died of thirst before. And then it's like, what if we haven't even...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to find these kind of, again, totally left field ideas soon. But I think a second thing, which is maybe more important, is like, I also buy this idea that in some sense progress about thinking about what's most important is really kind of boundless. Like David Deutsch talks about this kind of thought a lot. When you come up with new ideas, that just generates new problems, new questions, which leads to more ideas. That's very well and good. I think there's some sense in which one priority now could just be framed as giving us time to like make that progress. And even if you thought that we have this kind of boundless capacity to come up with a bunch of new important ideas, it's pretty obvious that that's like a prerequisite. And therefore...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like maybe, I want to say two things. If you imagined lining up like every person who ever lived just like in a row, and then you kind of walks along that line and saw how much progress people have made across the line. So you're going across people rather than across time. And I think progress in how people think about stuff looks a lot more. And in fact, started earlier, then maybe you might think by just looking at progress over time. And if it was faster early on, then if you're kind of following the very long run trend, then maybe you should expect like.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. I think one thing I want to say there is it seems pretty likely that the most important, like kind of useful concepts for finding important things are also going to be the lowest hanging. And I don't know, I think it's like very roughly correct that we did in fact, like over the course of building out kind of conceptual frameworks, we picked them the most important ideas first and now we're kind of like refining things and adding maybe somewhat more peripheral things. That's at least if that like trend is roughly going to hold and that's a reason for not expecting to find like some kind of earth shattering new concept from left field. Although I think that's like a very weak and vague argument to be honest”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools are in place and the like conclusions fall out pretty quickly, but it's not easy, and I agree that I appreciate that. That actually wasn't a very good answer just because it's such a hard question.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or easy, I should say, to underrate just how much, I guess it's somewhat related to what I mentioned in the last question, just how much kind of conceptual apparatus we have going on that's a bit like the water we swim in now, and so it's hard to notice. So one example that comes to mind is thinking about probability as this thing we can talk formally about. This is like a shockingly new thought. Also the idea that human history might end and furthermore that that might be within our control, that is to decide or to prevent that happening prematurely. These are all really surprisingly new thoughts. I think it just like requires a lot of imagination and effort to put yourself into the shoes of people living earlier on who didn't have the kind of, yeah, like I said, the kind of tools for thinking that make these ideas pop out much more naturally. And of course, as soon as those had those...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's like such a good question, I think. One name that comes to mind straight away is this historian called Tom Moynihan, who, so he wrote this book about something like the history of how people think about existential risk. And then more recently, he's been doing work on the question, you are, which is like what took people so long to reach this, like what now seems like a fairly natural thought. I think part of what's going on here is it's really hard.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I guess one framing that I like as well is not just thinking about here is a set of claims we have we want to like figure out what's wrong, but some really good criticism can look like, look, you just missed this distinction, which is like a really important distinction to make, or you miss this addition to this kind of naive conceptual framework you're using. And it's really important to make that addition. A lot of people are like skeptical about progress in kind of non-empirical fields, so like philosophy, for instance. It's like, oh, we've been thinking about these questions for thousands of years, but we're still kind of unsure. And I think that misses a really important kind of progress, which is something you might call like conceptual engineering or something, which is finding these really useful distinctions and then like building structures on top of them. And so it's not like you're making claims, which are necessarily true or false, but there are other kinds of useful criticism which include just like getting your kind of models more useful.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How excited you are about the idea, you can very quickly learn whether the world is as excited, which is to say you can just fail. And that's like a tight, useful feedback loop to figure out what you're doing is worth doing. Those feedback loops don't, by default, exist if you don't expect to get anything back when you're doing these projects. And so that's like a reason to want to implement those things like artificially. Like one way you can do this is Third exit that's kind of assessing whether you're getting it. But I think that framing, I mean, we can try about it, but that's like a really useful framing, I think, to me anyway.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess one thing I want to say is the proof is in the pudding here it's one thing to kind of make noises to the effect that you're like interested in being criticized and I'm sure lots of movements make that. Another thing to really follow through on them. And EA is a fairly young movement. So I guess Tai will tell whether it really does that well. I'm very hopeful. I also want to say that this particular prize is like one kind of part of a much bigger thing, hopefully. That's a great question. I actually don't know if I have good answers, but that's not to say that there are none. I'm sure there are. Like political liberalism as a strand of thought, like in political philosophy comes to mind, maybe an example. One other random thing I want to point out or mention, you mentioned profits and just like doing the maths and what's the like EV of like investing in just red teaming an idea like shooting an idea down. I think thinking about the difference between the for-profit and non-profit space is quite an interesting analogy here. You have this very obvious feedback mechanism in for-profit land, which is you have an idea.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feedback looks more negative than you expected, and so you stop doing the project. And in some important sense, that is like a success. Like, you did the correct thing. And it's important to celebrate that. So I think these are some of the things that go through my. My head just like framing criticism in like this kind of positive way, yeah, seems pretty important”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rewarded to hold in some sense you feel like you need to hold certain beliefs in order to kind of get credit from certain people and the costs to publicly questioning some practices or beliefs become too high and that is just like a failure mode and it seems like one of the more salient failure modes for a movement like this so it just seems really important to like be quite quite proactive about celebrating this dynamic where you notice you're doing something wrong and then you change track and then maybe that means shutting something down, right? You set up a project seem really exciting. You get some like feedback back from the world.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, I know, this is just like a kind of prima facie obvious case for wanting to incentivize criticism. But you might also ask, why now? There's a few things going on there. One is, I think the effective altruism movement overall has reached this place where it's actually beginning to do a lot of really incredible things. There's a lot of funders now kind of excited to find kind of fairly ambitious, scalable projects. And so it seems like if there's a kind of an inflection point, you want to get the criticism out the door and you want to respond to it like earlier rather than later because you want to set the path in the right direction rather than a just course, which is more expensive later on. One McCasko made this point a few months ago, you can also point to this dynamic in some other social movements where the kind of really exciting beliefs that kind of have this like period of plasticity in the early days, they kind of ossify and you end up with this like set of beliefs that's kind of like trendy or socially.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, yeah. Find myself with the time to kind of get these things over the line, which I'm, yeah, I'm pretty happy with. So yeah, the criticism thing, let's start with that. I want to say something like, in general, being receptive to criticism is just obviously really important. And if as a movement you want to succeed, where succeed means not just like achieve things in the world, but also end up having just close to correct beliefs as you can get and having this kind of property of being anti-fragile with respect to being wrong, like really celebrating and endorsing, changing your mind in a kind of loud and public way. That just seems really important.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a good question. I want to say I'm reluctant to frame this as me personally. Oh, sure. I certainly have helped set up these initiatives.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I just thought, well, I might as well wing it. There are some things I could apply to. I don't really rate my chances, but the cost to applying to these things is so low. It just seems worth it. And then, yeah, I guess I got very lucky, and here I am.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I got lucky with the timing of the pandemic, which is not something I suppose many people can say. I did my degree. I was quite unsure about what I wanted to do. There was some option of taking some kind of close to default path of maybe something like consulting or whatever. And then I was kind of, I guess, forced into this natural break where I had time to step back. figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And that space was enough to like maybe start like reading more about these ideas also to try kind of teaching myself skills I hadn't really tried yet so try to you know learn to code for a lot of this time so on”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of people I really get on with and have all these incredibly interesting kind of personalities and interests. So those two things, I think.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You nailed the broad strokes there. I think, yeah, I've kind of failed to specialize in a particular thing. And so I found myself just dabbling in projects that seem interesting to me, trying to help get some projects off the ground and just doing research on, you know, things which seem maybe underrated. I probably won't bore you with the list of things. And then, yeah, how did I get into EA? Actually, also a fairly boring story, unfortunately. I really loved philosophy. I really loved kind of pestering people by asking them all these questions, you know, why are you not, why are you still eating meat? Red's kind of Peter Singer and Will McEskell. And I realized I just wasn't actually living these things out myself. I think there are some just like force of consistency that pushed me into really getting involved. I think the second piece was just the people. I was lucky enough to have this student group where I went to university. And I think there's some dynamic of realizing that this isn't just a kind of free-floating set of ideas, but there's also just like a community.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source