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Will MacAskill

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137
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2015-11-22
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2015-11-22
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  1. “And being in philosophy, I'm very familiar with this. So I'm one of the lucky in terms of the position I got. There's far more people wanting to do philosophy than as a career that actually make it. And you see so many people like this who go into it because they really love this subject. They just wanted to learn. They found it incredibly intensely satisfying. And then they find out that actually in the real world of work to do this, they've just got to jump through loads of hoops and do loads of networking and bureaucracy and admin just as if they were any other job. And it can be really pretty dissatisfying. You can end up, you know, it can be really actually pretty tragic where you end up hating the thing that you used to love the most above everything else.”

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

  2. “That's the final thing, it's just people's preferences and passions change massively in ways that people systematically underpredict. So if you think back 10 years, what were you like 10 years ago? What were the things you're really passionate about? Probably quite different from the things you're passionate about now. But yet when we think in 10 years' time, we think, oh no, I'm just set I'm the same person now. And so really what you want to be doing to begin with is building up like a broader array of skills Figuring out what are the things I can become good at. And that's the much better way to lead to kind of a successful and effective life.”

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

  3. “And then that's the final thing where you might think following a passion you turn that as, or do something you're good at. But the thing is, if you're just starting out on work, you're probably just not that good at many things that are work-related. When I was graduating, I hadn't done any really done any management or fundraising or marketing or any sort of anything of the skills that actually get used day to day in a work life. And so what you should be thinking when you're first coming out of university is you should be thinking like an experimental scientist or investigative journalist or something. You should be thinking, well, what am I hypotheses about the things I could become good at and then be actually going into the world and then testing that, finding out, hey, like maybe I could become good at coding and that's something that the world really needs at the moment. It's just huge demand for coders. And then actually going out and tying that because”

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

  4. “You up for kind of anxious soul searching or then kind of pursue this thing that just statistically speaking you're probably not going to be successful at. But I think it also just misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. So that's the nature of the job itself. It's not actually got that much to do with you, though obviously that is important to some extent. It's whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world. Is it meaningful? Is it actually making the world better? And also whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you've developed.”

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

  5. “Yeah, so when it comes to career advice, there's all these slogans that go around, the chief of which is follow your passion. And the idea is like it's kind of like the idea of having a soulmate or something. So you just look inside yourself and you've got this calling and it's like, oh, I should be an artist. And then you see that calling inside yourself and that's what you should go and do. And that's the way to be happy. And I just think this is terrible advice. And that's for a number of reasons. One is just that actually one is just that most people don't have work-related passions. So there was one study that found that most people were passionate study of students, but they were passionate about things like arts, music, sports, things that are incredibly difficult to actually work in, precisely because everyone's passionate about them. It's not really taking the world or what the world needs into account.”

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

  6. “So the way that works is you still can donate anywhere ultimately, but it has to have an entity in the contract just for legal purposes. So you donate to this organization the founder's pledge itself that would then be distribute the money wherever you wanted it to go. So you don't have to make a decision about where the money goes until you've actually making the donations.”

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

  7. “I'm an advisor of an organization called the Founders Pledge, which encourages provides you with a contract so you can legally bind yourself to give at least 2% of your income or 2% of the profits that you make when you exit your company. And I think that's, again, one of these things where you can say, okay, to begin with, I'm just going to focus on building this thing as much as possible. But I know that I've actually locked down my intention so that I'm going to follow through on this later on.”

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

  8. “And so you might want to wait until we've just got better information or you have better views or actually able to think about this. And I think that's maybe with a lot of entrepreneurs kind of what's going on. Maybe you feel this yourself as well. I've got so much going on. If I want to do a really good job of philanthropy, that takes time. And so I'm just not able to think about this. I'm going to have to punt it to a later stage. And so I do think there's a reasonable argument to be made there. Maybe the things you could do is start kind of binding yourself to the mast a little bit. Maybe you can... Make some public commitments, make some big declarations publicly such that you know that if you back out of them, it's going to be really embarrassing. Or you can take a pledge.”

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

  9. “And so I think minimally you should start donating a pretty significant percentage just to get yourself I think there are other thoughts as well. Donating has its own sort of compounding. It's like a sort of investment. So when someone in Kenya buys a metal roof, they get this amazing return on that investment. It's like 14% per year or something. So if you're giving to that poor household in Kenya who then buys the metal roof, That money that you've given compounds over time. You don't see it because the effects are kind of diffuse, but you've made the whole country that a little bit richer in a way that compounds just in the same way as if you put it in a bank On the other hand, though, you also just might really not know what the best ways of doing good are.”

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

  10. “80,000 hours, we think that people really underinvest in the long term because with their careers. Because most of the hours that you're going to be spending working is going to be after the age of 30. And also that's when you're more influential. So when you learn, like you're running an organization rather than interning for it, where there's a lot of people who want to do good, immediately go and work in a nonprofit where they're not going to get as good training or skills, network credentials, money as they would in other places like the for-profit world or sometimes further education as well. So I think a lot of the time actually people should be investing more than they do. When it comes to the idea of just, okay, I'm already earning a lot, but I'm just going to invest it all again in building up my own organization. I'll donate it at the end of my life. You know, alarm.”

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

  11. “Yeah, I mean, firstly, I think you can do, as Gates did, just a huge amount of good by what YCO learning to give and have promoted that, where you aim to do good through your ability to donate rather than through direct contribution of your labor. And I think it's not the right path for everybody, but I think a lot more people should consider that we currently do. But in terms of then, when should you be donating? I think there's just a few reasons on either side. So if you've got these amazing investment opportunities that are just going to really pay off, then you should definitely take them. Where going to college is the clearest example. If you're age 18 coming out of high school, then you could just start earning money and donating it right away, but that would be your mistake. Definitely get a degree, especially if you can go to a good university, just because of the impact it has for the rest of your life. And actually in general, when we give advice.”

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

  12. “So I actually just, it's such an interesting question. Actually, I often, when I'm giving talks, I often kind of judge audiences by whether this question comes up because I think this is a good audience. But no, it's so interesting. So I think like.”

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

  13. “It definitely made me appreciate the benefits of kind of for-profit models if you're wanting to have a really big impact.”

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

  14. “Something like only fifty charities have grown to more than fifty million dollars of revenue in the last forty years, whereas Airbnb, it's just less than 10 years close to $20 billion company. Many other examples of this as well. And given the kind of scale of our ambition, that's also something that makes me think, yeah, actually that's a really pretty good model. And then, yeah, the final thing is in terms of the sort of talent you can affect in as well. Working as a non-profit. You have the kind of It's much harder to be able to pay competitively to try and get in those people who are just super ambitious themselves. So then you've got a much smaller pool of people, those people who are just motivated, who are much more motivated by the kind of impact they're going to have. And that's like an extra difficulty as well.”

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

  15. “But I do feel definitely doing Y Combinator, I feel envious of a for-profit companies because in some ways the two ways I think are just, yeah, three ways maybe. One is just how quickly you can grow because you can get investment. So the top company to companies were getting $3 million of investment two days after demo day. Whereas if you're a non-profit, then you're just having to go around soliciting donations. We have really great donors who are just very rational not as arduous, nearly as arduous for us as it is for many other nonprofits, but even still it's just much slower as a process for glowing. Second is in terms of the scale you can reach. I think”

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

  16. “Yeah, so I think in terms of my personal motivation, it's almost the opposite, I think. I decided, okay, I really want to use my wife to make a big impact, including making this commitment to give away most of my income. That's made me way more motivated because now it's not just kind of me on the line. It's like all these people that I'm aiming to help. It's like, you know, not all the time because I burn out, but sometimes it's the feeling of kind of urgency you get in like a war situation or something like, whoa, no, this is a crisis. It's an emergency. You've got to do something. And if I was just out for... Doing myself, then I'd been, I think, much happier to have a somewhat more relaxed life.”

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

  17. “And it turned out actually loads of the search, Silicon Knappy, you really couldn't trust them in the way that it would have been hoped for. Instead, you've just got to go a lot more with... very in-depth independent investigations of the evidence yourself. And that was something where you got this kind of philosophical motivation and then you make an assumption, which is that the people doing the experimental work, the empirical work, that you can just kind of trust what they're doing turns out that's really sadly not the case. Science is a lot more broken than you'd think kind of coming into it. And so that was maybe like one case where Make certain assumptions about how best to do goods, but actually when you have to start confronting a really messy of real world, things get a lot more complicated.”

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

  18. “Yeah, I think all over the place probably. I mean, a big thing is just so like the real world is just so messy so if you've got this idea okay i just want to do the most good i want to um Help as many people as possible by as much as possible, then actually implementing that is much harder to do. In the early stages, for example, of giving what we can when we were doing the research into charity effectiveness, we make a certain assumptions about, say, the quality of academic evidence where this body of kind of research from economists that we were really pretty happy just to trust, because we're like, look, look, these are the scientists, they really know what they're talking about, they're giving these numbers, we're happy to go with those numbers.”

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

  19. “Similarly for the Clutement as well, that's something where they say don't, you know, you want to have this exceptionally high bar for who you hire. And you either want to be spending all your time going to hire because getting the best team, especially the early team, is just so vital. It's the most important thing that if you're going to be doing it, it has to be absolutely full time. And the Airbnb founders, it was six months before they hired their first employee, just because they wanted them to be so good. But again, there'd always be this question of, well, we could do more if we hired someone now. Is this one of these exception cases where we should violate that rule? So that was the kind of theme in terms of the debates that, or things that were on people's minds.”

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

  20. “That's exactly right. That was the ongoing thing. So, similarly, another piece of advice was don't take any investment during the period of Y combinator. It's just a faction, just focus on glowing, and then do all that after demo day, which is the big presentation when you pitch to 450 investors in a big boom. But then people would get approached by angel investors or VCs. The question would be, well, should actually we be taking this? It looks pretty good. So again, there'd be ongoing debates about when should they violate these rules. And Paul Wam even acknowledges this. He says every single year he gives the same advice to startup companies. Every year everyone ignores it. And then every year they say later, oh, I really wish you listened to this advice. And so that was kind of played out in many different ways, actually.”

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

  21. “So that was a really kind of ongoing thing. Actually, as were all the maybe a lot of the biggest debates were just, so Paul Gayam is the founder of Y Combinator and he has these essays. And Paul Graham is something of this kind of guru or gods amongst the Y combinator startup community. And he has these teachings through these essays. And then when do you deviate from the teachings of...”

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

  22. “Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, one thing Was fairly common how much time to spend On things that are going to grow your user-based rather than product. So they said, you know, I said the advice just always focus on the product. But then there's always going to be exceptions and you always wonder, well, is this one of these exceptionsal cases? And that was just definitely of a curving issue because it's kind of hard to make the judgment call of, well, actually, we've already got this thing and you're going to have to do some amount of distribution.”

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

  23. “And they're growing phenomenally fast at the moment. They've already got thousands of users and tens of thousands of users and are moving millions of dollars, even though they only just set this up. only launched about six months ago. And the potential there, you know, if you just do the math, if they're able to... Really make a significant change to the amount of money that's being to poorer countries and remittances. It's just tens of billions of dollars every single year going from richer countries to poorer countries and kind of not getting taken by these middlemen companies. So it's got an absolutely astonishing opportunity to have a really big impact.”

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

  24. “My favorite example of a for-profit company making a really big impact, again set by someone in the effective altruism community, is also Y Combinator alumnus is called WAVE. And it makes remittances cheaper, basically. So globally the remittances that are sending money from a country that you've immigrated to back to your home country, which is typically poorer, but to your family there, is an absolutely huge deal. So it's about half a trillion dollars in remittances every single year. And compare that to overseas development aid spending, it's actually remittances are several times as great. But if you're a Kenyan in Maryland and you want to send money back to Kenya, it's a real hassle. You have to go to a Western Union, a Western Union takes 10%. And what we're doing is enabling you to send money mobile to mobile. So it's much easier. And they'll also only take”

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

  25. “Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great example and one of the things with for-profits is you can just get so big and get so big so quickly. So being able to reach 100 million people, it's absolutely phenomenal and quite hard to do.”

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

  26. “The other thing is just focusing, picking your map. So for us, that's the number of people. Ultimately, that's just the number of people whose plans we've changed in a very significant way. And focus on growing that metric by 10% every week. So we'd been growing at something like doubling in size every year, and that makes us in the top 1% of chavity, I think. 10% every week, that's 142 times every year. It's just a totally different kind of level of ambition. And that really gives you focus so that you're insured on doing just what's going to make your company, or in our case, chavity bigger and better every single week, just doing whatever it takes, hit that 10% growth target.”

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

  27. “Yeah, so the whole thing felt like this exhilarating learning experience, a whole new lens on how you build something to get very big. So a lot of great pieces of advice. One is just to focus on the product basically exclusively. You will constantly be tempted to spend your time doing things that make yourself look cool to your friends and family but that aren't actually making a better product and that aren't therefore helping with growth. So you tend to do press. You'll be tempted to hire a lot of people because then you can say, oh, well, we've got 20 people in the team, whereas hiring actually just takes a lot of time away from just trying to build a better product.”

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

  28. “Yeah, exactly. And this is something that the way Comedy to partners was so good at every single week. We just had to give the one sentence description of what we do. And for us, now gives career advice for people who want to make a big social impact in their lives. So just actually explaining that and explaining exactly how you do it was absolutely the key thing.”

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

  29. “In that one minute video, you talk about, I mean, you can talk about anything. Sometimes it's just a conversation between the founders. But for us, we talked about actually included the warm-up that we were doing to get ourselves psyched up for a couple of 20 seconds. It was just us singing. But then talking about what exactly 80,000 hours does, what's the problem, how are we going to grow, why do we think we're a team that's good enough that we're actually going to be able to become an absolutely massive organization? That was kind of how we approached it. But the key thing is just, and this is amazing how often founders fail to do this, it's just actually conveying what you do. Because you get the curse of knowledge where you're so invested in this project that you've got so much detail and so much on your mind. But then when you actually try and convey it to someone”

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

  30. “Really pretty good home. So made the application, and it's a fairly funny process because there's the application form and a one-minute video. Everything is incredibly condensed in terms of what the partner is actually the view. Application form in a one-minute video of yourself. And we just got drunk and filmed it.”

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

  31. “A lot of people then contacted us. And we thought, yeah, this is just a perfect fit. We have the same sort of mentality. So the nonprofit space can be very stale, very unambitious, very unoriginal. Whereas we want to be really big, we think we can give the best advice in the world for people who want to make a difference with their careers. And we think we can reach, we want to reach everyone who's graduating from university. So you have big aims. We're focused on numbers. We actually are thinking in quite a similar way to a for-profit startup. Why Combinator does seem like...”

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

  32. “founded a dropbox or an Airbnb or something then you have huge financial resources that you can use to make an absolutely massive difference like as Bill Gates has done and so we were promoting that quite heavily and That meant that when Y combinator started to say, okay, we want to do nonprofits, we're going to open the doors to nonprofit applications where they'll just give a grant instead of”

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

  33. “Yeah, so the charity was 80,000 hours. That's the Kavira advice one that went to Y combinator. And we had been doing research into different career paths. And one we recommended really highly actually was tech entrepreneurship. And that was for the few reasons. One is because we think that early on in your careers you should be really just trying to think about the long term. You should think about trying to build up yourself as a person, your skills, your network, your credentials, how much you're learning. And finally on a startup is one of the best things you can possibly do for that. Or being in the early stages of a startup as an early employee also has potentially great payoffs in terms of the good you can do through entrepreneurship. I can tell you about some really amazing companies that are doing incredible things to improve the world. And then also if you do get really big, if you are”

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

  34. “The amount you should give is 2%, where everyone should give 2%. And then it's up to you where you give it, but that's what you should be aiming to do. And then it's just this one-off thing. It's just this one campaign. You don't get asked in all these, because I mean, this is part of classic bit of social psychology is you want to disaggregate costs and disaggregate benefits and aggregate costs, where kind of getting asked to make a donation as a kind of cost can be a bit unpleasant. But then you want the benefits, the kind of awards you get to be as recurving as possible. And so having different charities saying, look, this is the standard, 2% of your income, or, you know, maybe you could tie for more, but that I think would be a decent amount to publicly say. Then I think people could, you know, you can make a huge difference with this. I think people could really get behind that and would start to have more positive view of charity and help others.”

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

  35. “In terms of the amount that we'll ask for, I think there's also a race to the bottom in terms of different charities wanting to ask for less and less. Because if you've got a choice, oh, one advert's asking me to give $10 a month and others asking me to give $2 a month. I got the same feeling of guilt and I could resolve it either way, then I'm going to donate for $2 a month. But I think that's just not an appropriate reaction. If the images they're showing you are all of these starving children. And so again, I kind of... I'd rather if we campaign to say”

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

  36. “Particularly damaging. Another is these pictures that you get of children in poverty with bloated stomachs and flies on their face. And it does a couple of bad things. Just one is just that it makes people really not want to get involved because it's these kind of horrific images that very naturally want to steer away from. And then also just paints this really bleak picture of and kind of quite the disrespectful picture of people in poor countries as those who are just helpless. Whereas I think if you were, like you say, doing positively enforcement, so instead you're like, hey, this person donated a thousand dollars and was able to deworm two whole schools. Isn't that amazing? That's much more compelling. And if you could get charities to kind of band together to have that approach, then I think you do a lot more good. And then I think the second thing would be...”

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

  37. “Yeah, I mean, one thing for sure, so I used to work as a, in the UK we call them chuggers or charity muggers, people who were on the street who then harassed you for $10 a month. People seem to really hate that. As I know, having done it, and I think that's something that's particularly”

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

  38. “Yeah, that's exactly like Cabot's work and sticks don't, at least not in the long run. And the kind of worry I have about fundraising in general is that you get this competition between charities and you get this race to the bottom where they hold up bigger and bigger sticks and it means that people just end up getting annoyed or fatigued by these constant requests for donations.”

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

  39. “get consistent feedback in terms of whether that's from the community or from the people you can actually see who you're benefiting.”

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

  40. “Probably donations within your own community or where you can see the kind of tangible benefits of what you're doing, that's going to be a really big factor. And then I guess if donations, if you're part of like a peer network where you've got a number of people kind of all doing the same thing, that's also going to be. And so, and those people who are kind of self-reinforcing. So also saying, like, yeah, that's really awesome what you're doing. You're this really good person as a result. I suspect that's also going to be one of the biggest ones in terms of increasing your level of happiness. Whereas purely, I suspect that donating to someone just on the street where you never hear from them again, that's going to be among the worst because that tends to sell you by making you feel guilty for a time and then you donate in order to alleviate the guilt rather than there's this positive kind of ongoing thing where you”

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

  41. “Yeah, so I don't know if there's any search done on this, but I suspect it would be, if I'm honest, not exactly the sort of things I tend to promote, it would be things where it's fairly, you know, your donation's quite public, but not in a way that comes across as sanctimonious, but just that people know you're doing a lot of good and where you get the kind of positive feedback.”

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

  42. “Feel really good about this decision. Another thing is just the dialect effect of giving. You get a kind of warm glow. So people do tend to feel, like, and they've done little psychology experiments on this as well, looking at people who donate rather than spending money on themselves. And people tend to feel happier after having donated. They feel better about themselves.”

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

  43. “Yeah, so I think, I mean, the psychology evidence itself does suggest actually that giving, I mean, it suggests a couple of things. One is just that money is actually way less important than we'd think to making ourselves better off. The relationship between higher levels of income and higher levels of happiness is really very low indeed. Whereas other things like having a really good community around you is actually very important. having a group of friends that really like you is very important to being better off. And so one thing is just, yeah, if you want to start doing good, especially the effect of altruism community, suddenly you find you've got thousands of new friends who really want to support you and make you do better than life. And that's, I think, one reason where the people who have, like in my peers who have started giving, actually feel, including myself, just actually”

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

  44. “Improve the world both by having more motivation to do good and using that motivation as effective a way as possible. And so those are the couple of ways in which I think you can do a lot of good by focused on areas other than the very poorest of the poor at the moment.”

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

  45. “Well of people and kind of direct them in a way that's going to do more social good. So that's, I mean, the approach 80,000 hours takes my non-profit advisors on career choice. We explicitly, with small operation, we need to focus. And so we focus on those elite students, the kids coming out via the league schools. Not because we think it's comparatively important to make Harvard grads a little bit better off, but rather because they're the people that are really going to be the leaders of tomorrow. They're going to be shaping the world. You want them to be doing more to...”

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

  46. “Do get this kind of over the long term trickle down effect as a result of the research and innovation. And that tends to get underfunded by the market. And then a second thing is if you can kind of harness these incredible resources, which are these fairly talented or very ambitious or”

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

  47. “An additional resources to people in richer countries. In my book that just came out doing good, better, I talk about this as the 100-fold multiplier. A dollar to me is going to do less than a hundredth as much good as a dollar going to some of the poorest people in the world. But I think there are a couple of ways in which there can be things that focus on people that are already competitively well off, that can do a huge amount of good. One is through research and innovation, so if you're increasing that, so huge amount of good has been done in the past through developments in science and technology and medical research. So mobile phones got developed by Motorola in the 70s and now across sub-Saharan Africa the majority of people own a mobile phone.”

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

  48. “Yeah, so I think a couple of good arguments here. So one is, yeah, so in terms of the argument for focusing on the poorest, it's just because of diminishing marginal returns for money and the fact that, so in rich countries, if you're earning above $10,000 per year, you're in the richest 15%, 10% of the world's population, even taking account the fact that money goes further overseas. If you're learning above about $50,000 per year, then you're in the purchase 1% of the world's population. And the poorest people in the world are only on about 60 cents per day or the equivalent of $1.50 could buy in the US. And for that reason you just”

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

  49. “Improving criminal justice policy to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated while at the same time maintaining the same level of better levels of public safety. And then also risks of kind of global catastrophe from new technologies or from climate change or from developments in biology and so on.”

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

  50. “And there they're looking into a much wider variety of causes beyond just global health and global development, including things like climate change, fundamental research, policy reform, especially immigration reform and criminal justice reform, and trying to look for comparing across all different causes you could be interested in, what are those that are particularly great in scale, so it's just a very big problem, particularly neglected, so there aren't very many other philanthropists or actors trying to solve this problem so it's not very crowded, or particularly tractable, so where there's just really great programs that Haven't yet been funded, but we know are going to make a really big difference. And some of the ones they're championing are improving conditions of animals and factory farms, improving immigration policy.”

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