they. 6 are. 6 going down to the wire the us presidential election has still not delivered the final results but both donald trump and joe biden feel very confident they'll end up the victor. if you count the legal votes easily won in the counties should be shown in hers and i would be declared the winner gets a corrupt system democracy sometimes mr. president trumps team is filing one lawsuit after another across the country over quote plenty of proof of a lack of voter fraud.

and what you're seeing now is how the 2020 u.s. presidential election is shaping up so far lawsuits calls to stop ballot counts on allegations of fraud draw angry crowds to the streets. make sure to check out our website r t dot com for faster than light updates on anything and everything surrounding the u.s. elections i'll be back with more of your world new news headlines in just about half an hour in just about an hour thanks for watching and i hope to see you then. no one. looking at the white house. i don't think if the phone. and then. call tom that come on a full. one. sorry

very sorry 6 6 2. welcome to so think of visionaries may sophie shevardnadze in times of uncertainty and the our moral compass and altruism is our way through but how to make sure that our good intentions are not pave the road to how i ask effective altruism evangelist professor of philosophy at oxford university william mccaskill. william macaskill professor off the loss of a at oxford university and the co-founder of the center of for effective altruism it's really great to have you with us today welcome to our show well as case being

i thank you for inviting me on so all right so the movement here associated with is called a sect of altruism i mean the very notion of this active altruism makes me wonder can altruism be in the effect of or even harmful and in what cases yes i think soundly isn't very often as ineffective or even harmful so there are many attempts where people try and do some out of good but actually end up. achieving very little or just achieving far less than they could have done so for example a program in the united states called scared straight takes juvenile delinquents and shows them around prisons in order to scare them out of a life of crime but this is been studied many times over and actually it turns out that this program increases the rates of criminal activity among those teenagers in the years following the program so this is actually an example of an activity that

is actively harmful not just in affective but most of the time things do sentiment of good is just that the very best things we can focus our time and money on do a normal amount to improve the world let's not about the inefficient ways to quench my desire to do something outrageous to like i read an example in one of your interviewees a charity that for instance sends books to africa for kids to learn with but there's no teachers there so the books aren't really making much difference so your money sort of waste it give me other causes that aren't effective enough to be donating to if i spend money on for instance alzheimer's research is it like money well spent is it effective. so i mean something like funding out same as the search or funding treatment for illnesses that affects some of it just countries in the world you know these are good things to do and making the world better but the question is are they the most effective things you can be doing and i think

generally not and the reason being that illnesses that affects people in which comes these well there's already an enormous amount of money and resources going towards those causes so that includes you know many important issues like outsiders cancer. and so on but when you look at of course people in the world you know those living on less than a couple of dollars per day well they don't have the very very most basic lifesaving. you know medical treatments so a long lasting insecticide treated bed net costs just $4.00 can for x. 2 children for 2 years. and statistically speaking you'll save a life there for just a few $1000.00 that's incredibly cheap whereas if you're trying to save a life in which currency then. you know some of these other causes you'll be spending more like millions of dollars to save a life. well the tourism is traditionally defined as unselfish behavior for the

benefit of the others but it's no secret like doing good for others it actually makes you feel good right and it gives you the sense of fulfillment self-respect that you often look for do you agree that altruism has an element of egoism to it i mean even in this case the desire to just feel very good about oneself the reason for as being altruistic. well i think we should divorce the idea of else was and some unselfish behavior if i can help lots of people and then also get a benefit from it myself that's a bonus that's not a good thing that's not a reason against doing that thing and in fact i and others in the effects notices and community more often make you know quite significant decisions like to donate 10 percent when incomes are more. we often feel good about this you know it sort of warding way to live a life and that's something we should feel good about i think because if you feel good about acting out so astutely well that's great that's going to motivate you to do even more over the long term. what about this 3rd of all donations in the united

states for instance goes to religious organizations and i found that very interesting how effective is a church as a charitable organization is giving to a church in your opinion that's a fact of donation. well i think many people give to the church not on the grounds of you know pure effectiveness the doing or some other reason perhaps it's you know a mark of loyalty to their community their part of if you want to look at these organizations in terms of their effect on us i think often you can just do a lot better so 'd these kind of large church based organizations even when they're focused on the right cause areas late into the lives of the poorest people in the world it's often very hard to know exactly what the money is being used for what change they're making that wouldn't otherwise happened whereas. we have some organizations like the against malaria foundation that provides bed nets that we

know saves lives saved lives for thousands of you know thousands of dollars and given that there are these organizations well we should target our money towards them rather than taking this much more kind of lowered shotgun approach that church based organizations typically take. what's given to charity aid is so very widespread and part of the culture in the united states but much less if i say europe for instance or i don't know in china why is that why do you think are americans more soft than other nations where is this coming from i think there's a couple of reasons so one is just the. effect of christianity so the united states among its currencies has a much larger. appearance to the christian faith certainly than european cultures and in a 2nd i think is the history and culture of social problems in a matter of you know tackling social problems being

a matter of individual action rather than state action so in europe there's a larger goal for the state or at least that's how it's perceived and so people actually think well the right way of helping those who are poor those my taxes whether it's in the u.s. it's more likely to be by a flat fee. and then kind of as you said just check space donations an enormous part of giving simply or giving back to one's own the mater the university you graduated from and that accounts for a large portion of it to. like i told you before the interview i'm also like on a board of trustees for a hospice charity fund can i consider myself an effective odd tourist i wonder what you think of that you know so i think the question you should ask yourself is how did i come to engage in the sort of activity was it really just stood back and saw what all the times the world faces were those. you know the biggest in scale yet

the most neglected yet i think i can make have real traction on and then chose you know that organization on the basis of thinking yes this is where we think they can make the biggest difference or alternatively was is just you know an opportunity that 10 of those and i think it is the case. in general if you're going to aim to benefit the poorest people well the very poorest people in the world are those in the poorest countries than in you know middle income or the chip companies and so that's why i tend to think that the most effective organizations lie if we're going to benefit people like today so in one of your books you proposes really interesting ethical tests when you have like a burning house in front of you with 2 rooms and one room there is a child in another one there's a picasso and of course if the choice was up to me i would save the child because i think that any human life is priceless but if we look at the standpoint of

a suspected autism you'd say it's better to say the picasso because then you can sell the because you know and save millions more lives around you is a fact is autism or about calculus rather than emotional intentions. so. i think affects thousands about both emotions and calculating so your emotional impulse that you get when you see say a child settling that's extremely important and that you know motivates you to do good but we need to use reason in order to guide our motivations and we need to use a kind of more logical part of our brains and so in this thought experiment that giles peters. directed towards me the only you know it was a thought experiment it's a philosophical ready. idea not necessarily something that plays into the real world but the thought was well if you can save someone who's right and some of you

or by the small and direct means save the painting that you can then save you know thousands of other lives well my response is that the way we should think about that is just is that just as a child in a store experiment right there in front of you in this burning building you can save well also just thousands of children around the world and millions of children and the world you could potentially save it where it's like we're in this situation you know being facing a burning building just all the time and that's why our ability to use our money in the right ways is so important. and that's leads to the conclusion of this that. where does the calculus actually stop because when i compare the bangle and i clip analyzing things through the prism effect of altruism you know i could come up to a conclusion the one i heard from many politicians in africa that actually aid in general is a in the is a really bad thing in the long term because it. because it's free it's free stuff

and free stuff kills industries and actually it creates dependencies so for efficiency's sake i should be contributing to any charities let say that sense to africa or sudha. yes so i think the issue of aids in the cases where it can be actively harmful i think is really important you need to think about it and it's true that many government to government aid programs in the past have you know sometimes underage helping to plop are in fact about dictation ships and so on. but as you have yet to that i think the 1st is if we look at global health spending this is just been enormously beneficial to have allocations no clocks to save something like 60000000 lives if we look at malaria tuberculosis diarrheal diseases these nodes are vastly down and global health spending has been a big part of that and i don't know any serious academic who disputes that and then the 2nd is looking at. aid money that's going to nongovernmental organizations are

going to government to government organizations so the literature is critical of aid spending that's normally focused on government to government spending rather than via non-profits and so i think even if you are relatively skeptical of the value of aid in general that doesn't mean that these very best nonprofits that you can be funding on doing an enormous amount of good and in fact we have positive evidence for thinking that they are doing just a huge amount to improve the lives of the poorest people in the world well. i had another one let's say i give money to charity and it's safe to drive in a poor country right but i have no control over what these children are going to do with their life like my generation did not address ethnic hatred or unemployment it only saved lives and the kids who are say they grew up in the same sort of a mess that their parents did become angry at their neighbors go fighting in

a war except how is the world a better place thanks to my donation in base hypothetical scenario. yes i think there's 2 ways in which the world's better those of a so. so one is just that i think even among the poorest people in the world and even though you are saving lives you're not addressing all the problems at once and such a thing is impossible these people still have good lives on balance they're happy legs assist. and the world is better for their contribution to it and so one thing is you just directly benefiting them you're also benefiting their family you don't have to mourn the loss of a child dying young. but then secondly i think it also comes beating to the long run disparity of that 20 so these issues like ethnic segmentation and unemployment and other issues they tend to go away as a country gets which of the more developed and your you know making just a little difference then. it's too big. you know what's a big country

a kludge ect and so you're hoping to get these countries to higher living standards early on and along with that these other problems dissipate much more well we're going to take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to professor of philosophy at oxford university and the co-founder for center of effective altruism we're macaskill stay with us. people say general powell is untalented in worthless but you see how difficult it is to blast the money got it takes some skill he had to go to ivy league college

he's got to get up. for. some control for a middle. of the night most of them are very hard working people who want to get ahead that either have some some health issues or have some of it out of stricken bad luck the whole time joel moon told me he's paying for a place to live and missing just a month's rent can get you a victim to gunpoint if anything bad happens to any thing that just throws your budget off slightly. better catch up real quick or you're going to have a judgment of possession against you and get addicted anyone that's homeless is history like garbage people look at you like a monster or someone bad or you chose to be there most of the time it's not the case see how it is to be put on in the world's richest country.

and we're talking to al tourist evangelist professor of philosophy at oxford university william at mccaskey well just recently i spoke to a loss of for i'm sure you know him and he actually tells me that charity work while it is ing some lives somewhat basically perpetuates the system that makes this live miserable in the 1st place right so as if we're like guided by the principle of effectiveness it is in the end it seems much more effective for me to join let's say a political organization that would tackle inequality or other fault so the system instead of giving to charities that it will only fix the symptoms but not the illness do you know what i mean or not that it's really being snotty isn't yet. so

i think the key thing here is to say that you just can direct charitable money towards fixing the root talking rather just the symptoms so this has a long history. even i coul marks when writing does capital he was funded by as a single as acting as a philanthropist marx wouldn't have been able to do the work he did whether or not that's own stuff a contribution and so similarly if you're looking at some of the big problems in the world well activists you know obviously they need people to help but they also need money for their running costs to organize to provide pamphlets and so on and so if you're more worried by the systemic issues facing the world and getting mixing who are you can find organizations like the center for global development that's helping to get you know standards they deal with the world's poorest countries. or many other organizations that are tackling the correspondents in the world so i think it's important not to generalize across all of france be a very big tent. well this active our tourism line of reasoning calls upon is to

treat a charitable donation as an investment right and to put the money where the most return on investment will occur but with some causes i mean it's tricky to calculate the return in may mean if i donate to my local symphony right well it's not as a fact of as donating to as slick untied anti-party ngo but that again maybe having a symphony around is just as good as helping a 3rd world country kid somewhere so far away how do we measure the level of goodness so i think in many areas which are just very hard to get meaningful quantitative comparisons on and we have a general framework looking at. courses where it's harder to. get precise numbers which we call the importance neglect in this respect ability framework where you look at a problem you look at how big is this problem that's the importance of it how to collect it is it how much money is already flowing towards this. and how tax was at

how much kind of progress can we be making and all things being up all things being equal you want to look at the biggest problems yet are being very neglected so i think that's to china global health and development i think it's flu for. animal welfare i think it's 2 for issues that. might imperil civilization. such as extension desks. but then the other thing he can do is also just creates what we might call back of the envelope calculation so just actually start looking ok if i found a symphony how much money if i give them but say $10000.00 what will actually happen as a result and how plausible is it that this could be comparable to saving several children's lives i think if you did this calculation you would always find that maybe you can help a few more people go and see a symphony. that is going to be hard to make the claim that well that is as

important in terms of its contribution to human well being and flourishing. as several i saved you know we're talking about doing good and using charitable donations as an example and when we talk about effective altruism when you explain it everywhere what you really mean by altruism is basically giving money right but is doing good is autism really just about the money i mean sometimes it seems that you're paid in whole in the notion of altruism into the choice of charity to donate to is that really all there is to it. yeah that's a great question and i think this is an important misunderstanding your checked out with him so way back in 2011 i actually co-founded an organization called 80000 hours which is the not ours he typically work over the course of your works and invite his people. on what careers they can pursue if they want to have the biggest

difference so how can you use your time to do good lauzon just your money and in fact most people in effect arts and community are choosing to do good primarily by the time by working in the search of poesy or for non-profits where i think and i'm merely 'd giving money so often with these issues is you know somewhat easier to think about. in terms of charity or friends and certainly where we've had a huge amount of success as a movement. but i just absolutely agree that's what you can do with your money is only a small part of the question of what you can of how to do the most good in general here i just came out with a book called the future is now and together with my guests in this book we're actually discuss the disease new post co that reality and we all come to conclusion that in order to navigate these times of uncertainty you need certain qualities like added to belittle and emotional intelligence and empathy. and well i was

wondering what do you think what about you do you expect people to actually become more empathic and therefore maybe more altruistic now that we're all in this diplomat's together. i think it is the case that when there's global crises. people do tend to band together you get greater kind of community bonding and that's something that's you know really good really positive and in this particular case i hope that we each know what great lessons where we appreciate just how bad this is being how we want this to never happen again and that could be even worse and i think we should be worried about in the coming decades the possibility of even worse pandemics again including when we look to technology like. create new pathogens not just national pandemics but manmade pandemics as well this is some should be off the table is not to feed manatee and i hope you can respond

in that way and i think you're brave. you know place the levels of empathy in this . and it has caused canadian nature help us ensure that we take for actions one thing i'd like to take the covert situation for instance as an example is wearing a mask guests and social this to say actually more effective than donating a ventilator to a hospital because there's only so much you can buy like want to ok if you really really rich 100 but if you wear a mask you're really saving far more people from getting infected than if you were to buy them to later is where the hospital so what's what's more effective here in terms of altruism. yes good question i mean i think the thing is you can do both so wearing a mask and social distancing is just something one can do in addition to any donations that you choose to make. but then secondly again when we're thinking about importance the greatness electability. in 1000 enormous issue

it's you know will tell has killed over a 1000000 people will kill probably millions more. and well 6 women on the great sort of a moment is the most well known issue in the world at the moment and enormous amounts of funding tens of billions of dollars and going towards it and so it seems relatively unlikely that unless you're very well informed and unless you have. you know an unusually good opportunity in front of you it's unlikely that an individual slants best in my view could do an enormous amount to improve the situation now. the thing that would be more neglected more promising is. based on what john hopkins center for health security based in the us asked which would be willing to design policies such that we're not we learn the right lessons and in the future. don't allow such terrible penton extra. you know presently where faith was so many

challenges at once so we have the climate change the cline biodiversity going to quality extremism being just like most obvious ones but there are so many more and you say getting priorities right is what utter importance so what problem in your opinion should be the center of focus right now. so the general way. of thinking about the top priorities in my view is that we should look for one of those issues that nosed impacts the very long about well that's thinking about centuries or thousands of years hence and that's because future generations matter just in the same way the present generation in matters and. the future is just so long so big so if there's anything we can do to fix the very long run that's of enormous importance and then there are 2 issues i think we stand out there one is service goes you know even worse spender mix the sort of thing so endemic that if

we imperil socialization there in particular might come from the development of climate as a chance. perhaps it was altered as a result of war and then the 2nd is developments not a clue and that's where. artificial intelligence is bouncing very rapidly and i think could bring about a point where. a single clue port city is able to get much greater power over others and kind of lock in their values of idea which he and i could be very bad for very long but. well that's like a whole new big topic that i would like to discuss with you separately in a separate program but are that interested in fixing our rob our top it's been great speaking to you thanks for sharing your presence being here because i will everything will and hope will speak to it so. thank you right right.

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