YouSaid · the spoken record

Will MacAskill

lines on the record
137
first
2015-11-22
most recent
2015-11-22
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Beyond that, if you want to do good with Chavity, see givewell.org for top recommended charities. If you want to do good for your career choice, 80,000 hours.org, again, sign up for the newsletter. And if you're really feeling inspired and you want to make an even bigger commitment than that founder's pledge, giving what we can is a pledge of 10% or more. And you can join the community and it's really kind of worthwhile and worthwhile things to do that will make your life more meaningful and also have a huge impact at the same time. But key of those is effectivealtism.com.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “So Kiask is going to effectivealaltism.com and you can sign up for the Effective Altruism newsletter there. That's also if you're interested, you can buy my book on that as well, doing good better. That's all about the ideas we've talked about, at least some of the ideas we've talked about, about doing the most good.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Well, that's the thing. Actually, that's one of the mistakes we think people make is thinking about Kyrios. Clearly, you should just be thinking about stages in your life, because very few people nowadays just do one thing and then stick at it for the rest of their life.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Korea guide. It's just 80,000 hours.org. 80,000 was the number hours.org. Then there's a career guide and actually we've kind of built an interactive tool to help you apply this framework in your own career decisions. It takes about 30 minutes to how to choose that. And we'll also kind of recommend you ideas as you go through Because I think we don't often think about this in a very structured way at all, that it's the most important decision of our lives.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Then you can transition to non profits quite easily, much harder to do it, vice versa. And then also how much do you learn about yourself in the course of this work? And then the third aspect is personal fit. So how uniquely good am I at doing this compared to other people? And so that's the kind of framework, basically just like a big checklist that I'll use if I'm evaluating different sorts of Large scale pieces of work I could be doing”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “create a Google Doc that I share with fans or people I particularly respect who then provide comments and often do several iterations of this. There's a framework So the 80,000 hours, which is what 80,000 hours promotes as well, where, because I'm thinking about the impact I can ultimately make, you can break that down into kind of three components, impact you have. So this is for job decisions, but it actually applies quite widely. Impact you'll have on the job where you can think about impact you'll have through your direct labor, through your ability to advocate for important causes, through your donations as well, but then also impact later on in life where that's skills, credentials, network, then also how does this keep my options open. So academia is a great example of this. If you leave academia, it's very hard to come back, whereas if you go and do something before going into academia, doing a PhD, it's easy to transition back in. Similarly, if you go into a for-profit,”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I think four years of total time weighted towards the front of your career, I think. I think we should be spending a lot of time, and I do this, any sort of big decision I make, I spend a very large amount of time. Thinking about is this the best thing I could be doing? What other things could I be doing instead? Are there ways I can change my plans?”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “did that with your career that would be 4000 hours or two working years and actually i think that's pretty legitimate as a thing to do spending that length of time in a workout how should you be spending the rest of your life”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “my 20 year old self. The biggest, I think there's two, I think. So one is emphasizing you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. Incredibly important to work out how best to spend them. And what you're doing at the moment, 20-year-old Will, is just kind of drifting and thinking. Not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about how can I do my coursework as well as possible trying to micro-optimization, but not really thinking about, okay, what are actually my ultimate goals in life and how can I optimize towards them? Analogy I use is You know, if you're going out for dinner, it's going to take you a couple of hours. You might spend five minutes working out where to go for dinner. Seems reasonable to spend sort of 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “we could be doing to try and mitigate these unknown unknowns. But that's exactly the sort of thing we're going to be biased against because it's like you're spending money doing something that you don't even know what's going to help with. It's quite an absec kind of sell. I suspect the biggest risks are ones we haven't even thought of.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And we should expect, again, there's going to be developments that happen over the next 50 or 100 years, but no one's even thought of at the moment. And so I think that means, but you can still make some sorts of progress on mitigating those risks, because there's some things you can do, greater political coordination across the world. It's just going to be really good across a very wide range of scenarios. having research institutes working on the frontiers of technological development doing horizon scanning to try and identify sort of risks like this. Those are some of the things”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, so I guess Until recently, I would have said, actually, yeah, okay, I have an answer for most undulated. What is me the most? So, yeah, development of new pathogens. So once we start being able to build viruses and bacteria, It will become very easy to potentially build. Pathogens that could kill billions of people or the entire world or just almost everyone in the world, that's fairly worrying as is AI. Those kind of two big ones, I think. In terms of most undoated, I think are the ones we don't even know about. predicting future technology Is extremely difficult to do. Everyone basically agrees with this. And many of the developments that have happened over the last 50, 100 years have been completely unpredictable 50 or 100 years before that.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “United Nations. And basically all parties were in favor of this because it's the best outcome for everyone. But it still wasn't able to happen just because there wasn't sufficient trust between the two countries. And then we get this incentive, this kind of arms face. And that's, I think, why we kind of want, you know, and, you know, not just for AI, other sorts of risky technologies as well, you know, the ability to develop pathogens, ability to do geoengineering. We're on the frontier of developing many different technologies that have very large potential upsides and very large potential costs. And in each case, we want to have coordinated approach so that we can sure that we don't get those sort of base dynamics i think”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “And there, again, it's just not even a matter of people getting corrupted, perhaps as you talk about the people, you know, the lawyers being happy about an oil spill being. But just as a matter of economic incentives. Then you can get these dynamics. And, you know, that was the case. It was exactly the case between the US and Russia Nuclear weapons. And definitely not saying it's a perfect analogy at all. But there was the BADIC plan, which was a proposal after the Second World War for complete... complete abandonment of all nuclear weapons and all fissile material would be kind of kept a check on by”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Yeah, yeah. So yeah, sadly. If you're going to have multiple people To build the same thing. And where whoever gets their first wins basically is just has much more power. And then some people think, oh, yeah, we should be doing this more cautiously. That would slow progress, but we'd have a greater chance of positive upside. Fewer misks, then they're just going to kind of lose the race. And yeah, sadly, I think it's not, and maybe you can even have that, even if everyone's acting altruistically, maybe they disagree slightly on how things should be done, and that's enough for them not to trust each other in the absence of coordination.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Then the rate of agreement is just kind of very high indeed. If instead you were saying something narrower, which is like, well, AI is going to happen in 20 years and then it's going to be Terminator scenario and we're all gone for sure. That's a much smaller percentage of people.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So it depends exactly on who the reference class is, but on some accounts it's the large majority actually, where then the media just completely distorts the debate because the media loves to distort the debates. where if you're flaming it as this is a really important issue, it's not something that's going to happen tomorrow. It's something that's a long-term speculative issue. But obviously we need to have a sensible rational approach to this and like a proactive approach such that we're aware of what's coming. Have taken precautions so that we use this new technology in a way that is going to lead to the good outcomes and avoid bad outcomes.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Power and also huge potential for harm through use of nuclear weapons. I think the case of development of artificial intelligence, you know, it's not going to happen tomorrow. We're thinking about like 30 years or 50 years or by the end of the century. It's clearly really pretty likely it's going to be one of the most important development of essentially when it does happen. Like in the case, you know, if we could have known about nuclear weapons or development fission much earlier, we could have had policies in place so we're really prepared for that and we wouldn't have maybe had a nuclear arms face. The world would have been a much better place. I think that's the situation we're potentially in with developments of artificial intelligence as well.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Yeah, very important book where sometimes I think we just have, it's very hard to predict the future. Sometimes I think you have a bit of an inkling into you're able to make really clear educated guesses about what are going to be really big transformative technologies in the future, the sort of things like development efficient that has huge potential to do.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah. Big debate in the media. But yeah, I think just this is another Oxford professor, Nick Bostom, writing about this in a book called Superintelligence”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “question. So I think it would be outside the Gates Foundation, or maybe outside Bill Gates' house. I don't know where it is. Seattle, where he's going to, ultimately he's going to donate $100 billion. And it would say... You've spoken about The risks and potential upside in the long run developments of artificial general intelligence, yet you're not doing anything about it yet. You haven't got involved. You have the power to make a massive difference here. You should do something about it. I think that's what I would say”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Have a regular And I think politics is the one that's the biggest influence here where I don't know, people will identify very strongly as very left-wing and very light-wing. But all the very strange thing to do because there's this package of very different ideas that are associated with a left or associated with the right that don't have any resemblance to each other. Why on earth should your views on abortion be related to your views on optimal taxation policy? There's completely distinct issues, yet they come in these packages. And I think it's because people, we're all monkeys walking around wearing suits. We want to form tribes and then we start forming tribes based around, say, political identities. But then that means you'll just start to buy a package of views rather than just... Looking at each one on their own. On the lone”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think most people don't tend to act that way. They're much more to accepting of the status quo.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “apart from them. And it makes you think, yeah, well, maybe the things that I believe myself that are just, you know, in the future will be looked back upon as, you know, as crazy as I'm looking at these communities and thinking that they're crazy.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “The T-H-E-R-O-X, that's right. And it's incredibly powerful because you see him interacting with these neo-Nazis. And they're grilling him on whether he's Jewish and he just keeps telling them he doesn't want to answer. And, you know, and you see them, the parents are getting their children to dance around swastika as kind of morning playtime. And you think, wow, I'm so happy I'm not one of these people and so enlightened because they're so mind-killed. They're so completely captured by this own ideology. But it makes you think, wow, well, maybe the things I believe just because of the people that I'm surrounded by, all these kind of cultural things, because they're just completely convinced of this worldview of people who are looking for UFOs all day or people who are certain that the government is going to come and crack down or the West with the Baptist Church that thinks that literally everyone is going to hell.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Okay, so he, I mean, the most interesting is Louisa Lou's wild weekends. He tends to go to places in the US, to these weird subcultures. And he does exceptionally well at becoming involved in those subcultures. So examples of neo-Nazis, survivalists, the West of the Baptist Church, swingers often goes to prisons, porn, cosmetic surgeons, and black power movement. And he comes across just so bumbling and naive that the people he's filming then completely reveal everything about their own crazy lives.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “So I think by far my favorite documentary maker is Louis Tharu. I don't know how popular he is in the US. He's a bit of a UK institution. Have you heard of him before?”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Yeah, actually, I really don't have an evening routine. I mean, except insofar I always take an hour or two off before going to bed because I used to work until I wanted to fall asleep. But that's just, again, this false economy because it means you just wake up much less energized. And again, it's just eating into peak productivity time. I travel a lot, so if I need to reset my sleep, then I take melatonin. And then I focus a lot on getting high quality sleep if I can. So most important there, just being completely shutting out light so that you're not waking up in the middle of the night at all. But in terms of something to decompress myself, normally just the regular things of seeing friends or eating generally trying to avoid watching TV or anything that's kind of unnatural”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Well, it's a big deal. I mean, so many people, it's like a plague or something. A number of people who suffer from back pain. And then it just can be completely debilitating. I've lost. months of productivity as a result.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Yeah, people think it's about setting up British Slate and very rigidly, whereas actually it's more about getting the curve of your spine right. So having your hips tilted too far forward so that your lower spine makes your belly stick out. That's a very common problem. And then also having your shoulders kind of hunched forward and then your neck and head up kind of like a duck. Another very common problem. And so actually, if you want to test your posture, you can just stand against a wall and you should only have two inches between, so just standing up straight against a wall. You should only have two inches between your spine and the wall and between the kind of curve of your neck and the wall. And for almost everyone who does that, they'll find that especially at the neck there's just much bigger gaps than there should be.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “And you're going to stick out your belly like beer belly style. And so for there, the key is to really strengthen your glutes and your abs, stretch out your hip flexors and your lower back so that you're strengthening the muscles that are pulling your pelvis back and stretching out those that are pulling it forward. And you get all these problems from sitting all day. I would have terrible posture as well. So don't include that a lot using ergonom Kneeling check experimented with standing desk. And in general learning a lot about posture because really I think the kind of common conceptions of what good posture consists in are just completely wrong actually.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Yeah, I don't actually know. I think most cases of back pain actually don't have a clear problem, but I think it was bad posture. So my best guess as to what's going on is anterior pelvic tilt. So where your pelvis just tilts forward too much.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “About an hour. I initially, if my back's bad, then I try and focus it to more like an hour and a half. But that's a lot of that time is spent doing physio exercises.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And it's the most, you feel like an entire body is just completely spent by the end of it. Yeah, so it's my favorite exercise.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “It for folks describe it. So wooden bars forming a ladder that are on kind of conveyor belts, so they're constantly going down and you're constantly climbing up. So it's about 45 degrees, so it's not vertical. But if you know if you've ever just tried to climb up a ladder, you get pretty tired pretty quickly. You're attached to the machine so that you're able to set the pace as well. So it's kind of like a treadmill, except you're just climbing up these bars. And it's great for me because it's low impact because I can't do high impact stuff at the moment. But it's incredibly tiring. I remember when I first did it, I could do about two minutes and then I would be completely conked out. And then I would build that up. I built that up over time.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, so now I've suffered some fairly severe back pain over the last year and a half. So that's changed things quite a lot. And now, so my favorite exercise, which I was able to do when I was in Cambridge, but not here because I don't have the machine, is called a Jacobs ladder. Do you know it?”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Again, because I feel like in terms of my life and what I've contributed, almost all of it is in terms of the highest quality work I'm producing above and how many hours I'm producing. So the thought of like, oh, I can sleep less and then produce more hours is just completely false economy. Set it says, How can I produce the highest quality work? And for that, again, just exercising in the morning is the most important thing.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, I typically about 9 a.m. So I'm not a super early visor either. Really not much of a morning person actually. So typically about 9am. And then, yeah, it's just about getting up and going. So I eat things that I can hold in my hand. I really hate cereal. I hate things where I have to spend a lot of my time because also the morning is my peak time in terms of mental performance. And so I typically eat breakfast bars, which I'm sure you're going to chastise me for being unhealthy. That's what I do in the morning. Go to the gym. Again, then that's probably the second most important piece of productivity advice is just like it will exercise.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah, so in terms of morning routine, I think the biggest... maybe the single piece of productivity advice or productivity improvement I made was sleeping enough. People's needs for sleep just varies massively from person to person. Some people can just sleep four hours a night and they're very lucky. I'm not one of those people. And coming to accept that was very important. I aim to sleep nine hours a night. And then when I wake up, it's really about getting up and going.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Yeah, basically. I mean, it's just, it comes up absolutely everywhere. And it's just very far, very in-depth, and really goes to the level of breaking down into really concrete principles. Like earlier, I mentioned you want to aggregate harms and disaggregate benefits. So it's more enjoyable for you to win $50 one day and $25 the next than it is to win $75 one day. Whereas if that was a cost, then it would be, you'd prefer to just lose $75 at once and have two distinct losses. So again, it goes to the level of very specific recommendations. And then also has amazing case studies of, you know, it does go to stories of working with the very best salespeople. All different areas of life. So it's the best book that I've read on that topic.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “The key aspects of being persuasive honesty and authority. And many people, they think, oh, well, I want to become someone who can be persuasive. They then turn into these kind of sleazy second-hand car salesman types. And that's exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, it's actually about being this. transvalent person who really knows their stuff. And yeah, I found that kind of very useful, especially as someone who has found a life is about selling people on certain ideas, ideas of effective altruism.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Power of persuasion. And it's not, I don't think it became that popular, but it's the best book and persuasion that I know of, actually. Yeah, and it's quite a lot more in depth than things like Caldini's Power of the Persuasion. Some of the other books in that Sean Le. But it's incredibly interesting and really lays out different principles for the key ideas for persuading someone. So like norms of their sociosity or escalating commitment. And it also just really shows how Being persuasive a lot is often just about being a really nice, authoritative, genuine, honest person.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “The second book is The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. So I'm really in favor of meta skills. Just these kind of general purpose skills that can improve your effectiveness in all areas of life. And just the ability to be convincing, to sell ideas and to persuade other people is one of the Most important of these skills, I think. I like to think of myself as taking laziness and making it into a virtue because Why do something when someone else could do it if you can make that into a virtue, then suddenly you find you have all these volunteers helping you with this thing you're trying to create and they turn into employees and then they're the way doing the sort of stuff that you could have instead just been slogging away in yourself for years.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “go to activity that you can do to kind of put yourself kind of reset yourself but then also the other thing is just it starts to affect your entire approach to life so you know you start to feel the rising panic and you're much more in tune with your bodily reactions that then turn into thoughts and then again you can kind of catch those bodily reactions to begin with again kind of slow down your breathing focus on the breath and then realize that It's up to you how you want to respond. And that can be very powerful because it means you have much more choice about your emotional reactions to things”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “I actually don't, but I'm going to start again. I mean, I think there's two things. Yeah, I think I'm going to start again. Just after, probably just after the gym. To the gym first thing every morning. And then after that point just do, you know, it can just be 20 minutes believing where you first focus on your breath and then extend that feeling of awareness to your whole body. I still meditate if I'm feeling stressed or anxious about something. It's a really nice kind of go-to.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Then really good if you feel kind of intuitively a bit skeptical of that sort of thing because it's a fairly friendly accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation and it provides you with a course over eight weeks where you do a series of guided meditations. And I did that course and it's one of the things I think has a really significant impact on my life.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “As a kind of journalistic, but also promoter of these ideas. And it's just a really good course for it. I liked it because I'm a big science fan, so I hear something like meditation and I get a little bit freaked out. It sounds a bit hippie for me. Whereas this is just, it's almost comically dull, in fact. I mean, they give these kind of guided meditations and you're used to hearing this kind of female, high-pitched beamy voice, and instead you get this broad Midlands English accent saying, now sit on a rug or a chair, I'm on a bed, and close your eyes. It's really very kind of surprising when you first listen.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “I know, I know. It's also nepotistic. That was a coincidence though. actually one of the few authors I went into just to say look this book had just significantly improved my life you should be very happy what you've achieved and then Danny Perlman I think his name is who”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “The current thoughts and emotions are not you. They don't define you. They're like propaganda, and it's up to you to choose how you react to them. And our instinctive way, which is to fight with them, is actually counterproductive. Instead, you want to accept them with warm and welcome curiosity almost. And then that means you have the ability to deal with them as you like. And that's got the most amazing evidence base in terms of basically seems to improve everything, but in particular mood and self-control.”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Yeah, so we talked a bit about the moral philosophy. That was Peter Singer and Dedic Parfit. So I definitely give them, but in terms of just improving your life and to being more effective are the two I'd mentioned. One is mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Poleman and having had Sam Harris on the show obviously your listeners will know about this but mindfulness meditation was the most I don't know it's kind of like this magic bullet technique that kind of science has just recently conned onto where in effect you train yourself to be more in control of your thoughts and emotions by realizing that”

    2015-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT