"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think stories are the best way to bring them in." — Elizabeth Cox

In today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent production company Should We Studio — about the case that storytelling can improve the world.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• How TV shows and movies compare to novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction if you’re trying to do good.
• The existing empirical evidence for the impact of storytelling.
• Their competing takes on the merits of thinking carefully about target audiences.
• Whether stories can really change minds on deeply entrenched issues, or whether writers need to have more modest goals.
• Whether humans will stay relevant as creative writers with the rise of powerful AI models.
• Whether you can do more good with an overtly educational show vs other approaches.
• Elizabeth’s experience with making her new five-part animated show Ada — including why she chose the topics of civilisational collapse, kidney donations, artificial wombs, AI, and gene drives.
• The pros and cons of animation as a medium.
• Career advice for creative writers.
• Keiran’s idea for a longtermist Christmas movie.
• And plenty more.

Material you might want to check out before listening:

• The trailer for Elizabeth’s new animated series Ada — the full series will be available on TED-Ed’s YouTube channel in early January 2025
• Keiran’s pilot script and a 10-episode outline for his show Bequest, and his post about the show on the Effective Altruism Forum

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:01:04)
• The interview begins (00:02:52)
• Is storytelling really a high-impact career option? (00:03:26)
• Empirical evidence of the impact of storytelling (00:06:51)
• How storytelling can inform us (00:16:25)
• How long will humans stay relevant as creative writers? (00:21:54)
• Ada (00:33:05)
• Debating the merits of thinking about target audiences (00:38:03)
• Ada vs other approaches to impact-focused storytelling (00:48:18)
• Why animation (01:01:06)
• One Billion Christmases (01:04:54)
• How storytelling can humanise (01:09:34)
• But can storytelling actually change strongly held opinions? (01:13:26)
• Novels and short stories (01:18:38)
• Creative nonfiction (01:25:06)
• Other promising ways of storytelling (01:30:53)
• How did Ada actually get made? (01:33:23)
• The hardest part of the process for Elizabeth (01:48:28)
• Elizabeth’s hopes and dreams for Ada (01:53:10)
• Designing Ada with an eye toward impact (01:59:16)
• Alternative topics for Ada (02:05:33)
• Deciding on the best way to get Ada in front of people (02:07:12)
• Career advice for creative writers (02:11:31)
• Wikipedia book spoilers (02:17:05)
• Luisa's outro (02:20:42)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “I’m going to take a bunch of bets. I’m going to take some risky bets that have really high upside.” And this is a winning strategy in life, but maybe it’s not a winning strategy for any given hand. So the fact of the matter is that I believe that intellectually, but l do not believe that emotionally. And I have now met a bunch of people who are really good at doing that emotionally, and I’ve realised I’m just not one of those people. I think I’m more entrepreneurial than your average person; I don’t think I’m the maximally entrepreneurial person. And I also think it’s just human nature to not like failing." —Sarah Eustis-Guthrie

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Sarah Eustis-Guthrie — cofounder of the now-shut-down Maternal Health Initiative, a postpartum family planning nonprofit in Ghana — about her experience starting and running MHI, and ultimately making the difficult decision to shut down when the programme wasn’t as impactful as they expected.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• The evidence that made Sarah and her cofounder Ben think their organisation could be super impactful for women — both from a health perspective and an autonomy and wellbeing perspective.
• Early yellow and red flags that maybe they didn’t have the full story about the effectiveness of the intervention.
• All the steps Sarah and Ben took to build the organisation — and where things went wrong in retrospect.
• Dealing with the emotional side of putting so much time and effort into a project that ultimately failed.
• Why it’s so important to talk openly about things that don’t work out, and Sarah’s key lessons learned from the experience.
• The misaligned incentives that discourage charities from shutting down ineffective programmes.
• The movement of trust-based philanthropy, and Sarah’s ideas to further improve how global development charities get their funding and prioritise their beneficiaries over their operations.
• The pros and cons of exploring and pivoting in careers.
• What it’s like to participate in the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program, and how listeners can assess if they might be a good fit.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa’s intro (00:00:58)
• The interview begins (00:03:43)
• The case for postpartum family planning as an impactful intervention (00:05:37)
• Deciding where to start the charity (00:11:34)
• How do you even start implementing a charity programme? (00:18:33)
• Early yellow and red flags (00:22:56)
• Proof-of-concept tests and pilot programme in Ghana (00:34:10)
• Dealing with disappointing pilot results (00:53:34)
• The ups and downs of founding an organisation (01:01:09)
• Post-pilot research and reflection (01:05:40)
• Is family planning still a promising intervention? (01:22:59)
• Deciding to shut down MHI (01:34:10)
• The surprising community response to news of the shutdown (01:41:12)
• Mistakes and what Sarah could have done differently (01:48:54)
• Sharing results in the space of postpartum family planning (02:00:54)
• Should more charities scale back or shut down? (02:08:33)
• Trust-based philanthropy (02:11:15)
• Empowering the beneficiaries of charities’ work (02:18:04)
• The tough ask of getting nonprofits to act when a programme isn’t working (02:21:18)
• Exploring and pivoting in careers (02:27:01)
• Reevaluation points (02:29:55)
• PlayPumps were even worse than you might’ve heard (02:33:25)
• Charity Entrepreneurship (02:38:30)
• The mistake of counting yourself out too early (02:52:37)
• Luisa’s outro (02:57:50)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them.

Links to learn more and full transcript.

After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about:

• Which of these resonate the most with Rob, now that he’s been a dad for six months (plus an update at nine months).
• What have been the biggest surprises for Rob in becoming a parent.
• How Rob's dealt with work and parenting tradeoffs, and his advice for other would-be parents.
• Rob's list of recommended purchases for new or upcoming parents.

This bonus episode includes excerpts from:

• Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children (from episode #157)
• Holden Karnofsky on freezing embryos and being surprised by how fun it is to have a kid (#110 and #158)
• Parenting expert Emily Oster on how having kids affect relationships, careers and kids, and what actually makes a difference in young kids’ lives (#178)
• Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids (#87)
• Spencer Greenberg on his surveys of parents (#183)
• Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing global problems (#153)
• Bryan Caplan on homeschooling (#172)
• Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently with kids (#174)

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Rob & Luisa’s intro (00:00:19)
• Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children (00:03:34)
• Holden Karnofsky on preparing for a kid and freezing embryos (00:07:41)
• Emily Oster on the impact of kids on relationships (00:09:22)
• Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids (00:14:44)
• Spencer Greenberg on parent surveys (00:23:58)
• Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing problems (00:27:40)
• Emily Oster on careers and kids (00:31:44)
• Holden Karnofsky on the experience of having kids (00:38:44)
• Bryan Caplan on homeschooling (00:40:30)
• Emily Oster on what actually makes a difference in young kids' lives (00:46:02)
• Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently (00:51:16)
• Rob’s first impressions of parenthood (00:52:59)
• How Rob has changed his views about parenthood (00:58:04)
• Can the pros and cons of parenthood be studied? (01:01:49)
• Do people have skewed impressions of what parenthood is like? (01:09:24)
• Work and parenting tradeoffs (01:15:26)
• Tough decisions about screen time (01:25:11)
• Rob’s advice to future parents (01:30:04)
• Coda: Rob’s updated experience at nine months (01:32:09)
• Emily Oster on her amazing nanny (01:35:01)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going on in some way out there in the world. And that’s the claim that I’ve taken on board as a general hypothesis for consciousness: that all our perceptual experiences are inferences about something we don’t and cannot have direct access to." —Anil Seth

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Anil Seth — director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science — about how much we can learn about consciousness by studying the brain.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• What groundbreaking studies with split-brain patients and blindsight have already taught us about the nature of consciousness.
• Anil’s theory that our perception is a “controlled hallucination” generated by our predictive brains.
• Whether looking for the parts of the brain that correlate with consciousness is the right way to learn about what consciousness is.
• Whether our theories of human consciousness can be applied to nonhuman animals.
• Anil’s thoughts on whether machines could ever be conscious.
• Disagreements and open questions in the field of consciousness studies, and what areas Anil is most excited to explore next.
• And much more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa’s intro (00:01:02)
• The interview begins (00:02:42)
• How expectations and perception affect consciousness (00:03:05)
• How the brain makes sense of the body it’s within (00:21:33)
• Psychedelics and predictive processing (00:32:06)
• Blindsight and visual consciousness (00:36:45)
• Split-brain patients (00:54:56)
• Overflow experiments (01:05:28)
• How much can we learn about consciousness from empirical research? (01:14:23)
• Which parts of the brain are responsible for conscious experiences? (01:27:37)
• Current state and disagreements in the study of consciousness (01:38:36)
• Digital consciousness (01:55:55)
• Consciousness in nonhuman animals (02:18:11)
• What’s next for Anil (02:30:18)
• Luisa’s outro (02:32:46)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key things that determine the impact of your vote:

1. The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome.
2. How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others.

He then discusses a couple of the best arguments against voting in important elections, namely:

1. If an election is competitive, that means other people disagree about which option is better, and you’re at some risk of voting for the worse candidate by mistake.
2. While voting itself doesn’t take long, knowing enough to accurately pick which candidate is better for the world actually does take substantial effort — effort that could be better allocated elsewhere.

Finally, Rob covers the impact of donating to campaigns or working to "get out the vote," which can be effective ways to generate additional votes for your preferred candidate.

We last released this article in October 2020, but we think it largely still stands up today.

Chapters:

• Rob's intro (00:00:00)
• Introduction (00:01:12)
• What's coming up (00:02:35)
• The probability of one vote changing an election (00:03:58)
• How much does it matter who wins? (00:09:29)
• What if you’re wrong? (00:16:38)
• Is deciding how to vote too much effort? (00:21:47)
• How much does it cost to drive one extra vote? (00:25:13)
• Overall, is it altruistic to vote? (00:29:38)
• Rob's outro (00:31:19)

Producer: Keiran Harris

"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the other tank as well. If the fish takes the blue triangle, this fish will receive food, but nothing will be delivered in the other tank. So we have a prosocial choice and antisocial choice. When there is no one in the other part of the tank, the male is choosing randomly. If there is a male, a possible rival: antisocial — almost 100% of the time. Now, if there is his wife — his female, this is a prosocial choice all the time.

"And now a question: Is it just because this is a female or is it just for their female? Well, when they're bringing a new female, it’s the antisocial choice all the time. Now, if there is not the female of the male, it will depend on how long he's been separated from his female. At first it will be antisocial, and after a while he will start to switch to prosocial choices." —Sébastien Moro

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to science writer and video blogger Sébastien Moro about the latest research on fish consciousness, intelligence, and potential sentience.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• The insane capabilities of fish in tests of memory, learning, and problem-solving.
• Examples of fish that can beat primates on cognitive tests and recognise individual human faces.
• Fishes’ social lives, including pair bonding, “personalities,” cooperation, and cultural transmission.
• Whether fish can experience emotions, and how this is even studied.
• The wild evolutionary innovations of fish, who adapted to thrive in diverse environments from mangroves to the deep sea.
• How some fish have sensory capabilities we can’t even really fathom — like “seeing” electrical fields and colours we can’t perceive.
• Ethical issues raised by evidence that fish may be conscious and experience suffering.
• And plenty more.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript.

On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk-taking, and willing to be contrarian. It’s a tendency he considers himself a part of, and the River has been doing well for itself in recent decades — gaining cultural influence through success in finance, technology, gambling, philanthropy, and politics, among other pursuits.

But on Nate’s telling, it’s a group particularly vulnerable to oversimplification and hubris. Where Riverians’ ability to calculate the “expected value” of actions isn’t as good as they believe, their poorly calculated bets can leave a trail of destruction — aptly demonstrated by Nate’s discussion of the extended time he spent with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried before and after his downfall.

Given this show’s focus on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them, we narrow in on Nate’s discussion of effective altruism (EA), which has been little covered elsewhere. Nate met many leaders and members of the EA community in researching the book and has watched its evolution online for many years.

Effective altruism is the River style of doing good, because of its willingness to buck both fashion and common sense — making its giving decisions based on mathematical calculations and analytical arguments with the goal of maximising an outcome.

Nate sees a lot to admire in this, but the book paints a mixed picture in which effective altruism is arguably too trusting, too utilitarian, too selfless, and too reckless at some times, while too image-conscious at others.

But while everything has arguable weaknesses, could Nate actually do any better in practice? We ask him:

• How would Nate spend $10 billion differently than today’s philanthropists influenced by EA?
• Is anyone else competitive with EA in terms of impact per dollar?
• Does he have any big disagreements with 80,000 Hours’ advice on how to have impact?
• Is EA too big a tent to function?
• What global problems could EA be ignoring?
• Should EA be more willing to court controversy?
• Does EA’s niceness leave it vulnerable to exploitation?
• What moral philosophy would he have modelled EA on?

Rob and Nate also talk about:

• Nate’s theory of Sam Bankman-Fried’s psychology.
• Whether we had to “raise or fold” on COVID.
• Whether Sam Altman and Sam Bankman-Fried are structurally similar cases or not.
• “Winners’ tilt.”
• Whether it’s selfish to slow down AI progress.
• The ridiculous 13 Keys to the White House.
• Whether prediction markets are now overrated.
• Whether venture capitalists talk a big talk about risk while pushing all the risk off onto the entrepreneurs they fund.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Rob's intro (00:01:03)
• The interview begins (00:03:08)
• Sam Bankman-Fried and trust in the effective altruism community (00:04:09)
• Expected value (00:19:06)
• Similarities and differences between Sam Altman and SBF (00:24:45)
• How would Nate do EA differently? (00:31:54)
• Reservations about utilitarianism (00:44:37)
• Game theory equilibrium (00:48:51)
• Differences between EA culture and rationalist culture (00:52:55)
• What would Nate do with $10 billion to donate? (00:57:07)
• COVID strategies and tradeoffs (01:06:52)
• Is it selfish to slow down AI progress? (01:10:02)
• Democratic legitimacy of AI progress (01:18:33)
• Dubious election forecasting (01:22:40)
• Assessing how reliable election forecasting models are (01:29:58)
• Are prediction markets overrated? (01:41:01)
• Venture capitalists and risk (01:48:48)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Video engineering: Simon Monsour
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1' — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total… And I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well… There are achievements, there are experiences, there are things that can be done in the face of difficulty that might be seen as having the same kind of redemptive role, as casting into a different light the difficult events that led up to it.

"The example I use is watching some birds successfully raising some young, fighting off a couple of rather aggressive parrots of another species that wanted to fight them, prevailing against difficult odds — and doing so in a way that was so wholly successful. It seemed to me that if you wanted to do an accounting of how things had gone for those birds, you would not want to do the naive thing of just counting up difficult and less-difficult hours. There’s something special about what’s achieved at the end of that process." —Peter Godfrey-Smith

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Peter Godfrey-Smith — bestselling author and science philosopher — about his new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• Why octopuses and dolphins haven’t developed complex civilisation despite their intelligence.
• How the role of culture has been crucial in enabling human technological progress.
• Why Peter thinks the evolutionary transition from sea to land was key to enabling human-like intelligence — and why we should expect to see that in extraterrestrial life too.
• Whether Peter thinks wild animals’ lives are, on balance, good or bad, and when, if ever, we should intervene in their lives.
• Whether we can and should avoid death by uploading human minds.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:00:57)
• The interview begins (00:02:12)
• Wild animal suffering and rewilding (00:04:09)
• Thinking about death (00:32:50)
• Uploads of ourselves (00:38:04)
• Culture and how minds make things happen (00:54:05)
• Challenges for water-based animals (01:01:37)
• The importance of sea-to-land transitions in animal life (01:10:09)
• Luisa's outro (01:23:43)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore