Nate Silver on his theory of SBF and top criticisms of effective altruism
Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
The book 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.
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. While EA has arguable weaknesses, could Nate actually do any better in practice? We ask him to get concrete in how EA could do better.
Learn more and see the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episod...
Chapters:
• The danger of 'winner's tilt' (00:00:00)
• Intro (00:01:05)
• Nate's bio (00:02:58)
• During SBF was EA the 'world's biggest trust bubble' (00:03:59)
• Should 'expected value' fall in status because of SBF (00:19:03)
• How much Sam Altman and SBF are the same (00:24:40)
• Nate's top criticisms of EA and how to do better (00:31:53)
• Nate dislikes act utilitarianism but ~endorses rule utilitarianism (00:44:44)
• How EA is vulnerable to game theory (00:48:58)
• Culture clashes between EAs and Rationalists (00:53:05)
• How Nate would give away $10 billion (00:57:25)
• We had to 'raise-or-fold' on COVID (01:07:24)
• Is slowing down AI research rich-person selfishness? (01:10:38)
• The democratic illegitimacy of making dangerous AI breakthroughs (01:19:20)
• Bullshit election modelling: 'The 13 Keys to the White House' (01:23:33)
• Whether we have enough n to empirically tell which election models are best (01:30:59)
• Reasons prediction markets are now overrated (01:42:20)
• Ways venture capitalists only pretend to take risk while actually screwing their entrepreneurs (01:50:13)
• Rob's outro (01:58:13)
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