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 affective or even harmful in what cases yes i think sadly 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's 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 norma's them out into the world let's talk about the inefficient ways to quench my desire to do something outrageous to what 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. ok 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 they're 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 outside was 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 a very very most basic life saving. 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 and if it's currency then. you know some of these other causes you'll be spending more like millions of dollars to save a life. well other 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 altruism pflum 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 notice in community who 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's a warning 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 it'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 they're part of if you want to look at these organizations in terms of they have affected us i think a huge can just do a lot better so 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 a history and culture of social problems being 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 as i attack 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 that i 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 of the new and 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 affective autism you'd say it's better to save 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. idea not necessarily something that plays into the real world but the thought was well if you can save someone who's white and some of you or by the

small and direct means save a 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 there's 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 the 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. the where does the calculus actually stop because when i compare the bangle and i keep analyzing things through the prism of affective 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's 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 we have allocations no clocks to save something like 60000000 lines 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

larger than the 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've dealt every 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 this huge amount to improve the lives of the poorest people in the world well. had another one let's say i give money to charity and save general drive in a poor country right but i have no control over what these children are going to do with their lives like my generation did not address s. take a trade 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 sliding in

a war except how is the world a better place thanks to my donation in they say hypothetical scenario. yes i think there's 2 ways in which the world's best to those of the so. so one is just that i think even among the poorest people in the world and even though you know by saving lives you're not as are saying all the problems at once and such a thing is impossible these people still have good lives on balance they're happy they exist. and the world is better for their contribution to it and so one thing is you just directly benefiting them you 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 ethnics like mentation unemployment and other issues they tend to go away as a country gets richer the more developed and your you know making just a little difference then let's debate. 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 you professor of philosophy at oxford university and the co-founder for center of effective altruism will make ask stay with us.

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our disdain comes to educate and in the game equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground. and we're talking to al trist evangelists professor of philosophy at oxford university william at mccaskey well just recently i spoke to the 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 dawkins' rather than just the symptoms so this has a long history. even i call marks when writing does capital he was funded by educating girls acting as a philanthropist marx will be able to do the work he did whether or not that philanthropic contribution and so similarly if you're looking at some of the big problems in the world well activists you know obviously 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

including mixing poor you don't fund organizations like the center for global development that's helping to get you know standards they deal with the world's poorest countries. many other organizations that are tackling the course problems in the world so i think it's important not to generalize across all of france be a very big tent. well this active author is in line of reasoning calls upon is to treat a charitable donation as an investment rate 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 i mean if i donate to my local symphony right well it's not as a fact of as donating to as slick in tide anti-party angio but then 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. causes where it's harder to. get a slice 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 get to does it how much money is already flowing towards this. and how tax was that 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 share a global health and development i think it's legal 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 a back of the envelope calculation so just actually start looking ok if i fund a symphony how much money if i give them let's 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 lives saved you know we're talking about doing good and using charitable donations as an example and when we talk about a fact of altruism and you explain it everywhere what you really mean by altruism is basically giving money right but is doing good is odd too isn't 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 nor going to ization called 80000 hours which is the not hours 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 giving money so often with these issues is you know somewhat easier to think about. in terms of charity or flint and that's certainly where we've had a huge amount of success as a movement. but i just absolutely agree that 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 vocal it's called the future is now and together with my guests and this book will actually discuss the does new postcode it reality and we all come to a conclusion that in order to navigate these times of uncertainty you need certain qualities like added to billy 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 these diplomats 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 blow it right 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 we can respond in that way and i think you're right. you know glacial levels m.c. of this. and it has caused canadian nature and it helps 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 are one 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 to the 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 slant 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 in the design policy such that we're not we learn the right lessons and in the future. don't allow such terrible pandemics to her. you know presently where faith was so many challenges at once so we have the climate change the kleine biodiversity growing inequality extremism thing just like most obvious ones but there are so many more and you say getting priorities right is of utter importance so which problem in your opinion should be the center of focus right now. so the general way i was thinking about the top priorities in my view was 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 generally 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 the other scarce you know even worst spender mix sourcing the soap undemocratically we imperil socialization there in particular might come from development of climate as a chance. perhaps it was altered as a result of war and then the 2nd is developments not as a tool 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 all of that interest interesting thought i want to wrap our top it's been great we continue thanks for sharing your progress existence being here because i will everything will you thank you so much and hope will speak to. thank you right right. is you'll be d. a reflection of reality. in a world transformed. what will make you feel safe.

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a judgment of possession against you and get addicted by 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 paul in the world's richest country. in the wild. why don't you go down with the white house. in the swamp on how you would think if the phone local. top that come on a full $2.00 man. one of. sorrow 6 6. join me every thursday on the elec so i'm unsure

and i'll be speaking to get us to the world of politics or business i'm show business i'll see you the. battleground america the democrats put one foot in the door of the white house up to 3 tense days joe biden looks set to become the 42nd u.s. president as key states in the vote as close a twin outs and the results meanwhile if you count the legal votes easily would be counted through the sure it hurts and i would be declared the winner. it could still be a bumpy road ahead though as both candidates clash over results with some in the republican camp claiming that the count has been fortunate. and the delay to announcing the president raises big questions about the.