I had an excellent chat with Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. He went to Columbia University, aged 15, and graduated in 2021 as valedictorian. He is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute, thinking about long-termism. He has drafted a provocative paper encompassing ideas of long-termisim, existential risk and growth and blogs at forourposterity.
For some of our conversation we were joined by phantom Tyler Cowen imagining what he might think.
We discussed Leopold’s critique of German culture and whether he’d swap German infrastructure for the American entrepreneurial spirit.
Whether being a valedictorian is efficient, if going to University at 15 is underrated and life at Columbia University.
What you can learn from speed solving Rubik’s cubes and if Leopold had to make the choice today if he’d still be vegetarian.
Thinking about existential risk, Leopold considers whether nuclear or biological warfare risk is a bigger threat than climate change and how growth matters and if the rate of growth matters as much depending on how long you think humanity survives.
Considering possible under rated existential risk Leopold sketches out several concerns over the falling global birth rate, how sticky that might be and whether policy would be effective.
We consider what is worth seeing in Germany, how good or not GDP is as a measure and what we should do with our lives.
Leopold has wide ranging thoughts and in thinking and working on fat tail existential ruin risks is working on saving the human world. Fascinating thoughts.
Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the video (above or here on YouTube).
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Contents and lightly edited transcript below.
0:35 How to think about a future career (80000 hours)
3:10 is going to university at 15 years old underrated?
5:22 In favour of college and liberal arts vs Thiel fellowships
8:14 Is being a valedictorian efficient (H/T Tyler Cowen)
12:01 Leopold on externalities and how to sort smart people
14:08 Learnings from Columbia. The importance of work ethic.
18:50 Leopold learning from Adam Tooze and German history
21:16 Leopold critiques German culture on standing out.
22:08 Observations on decline of German universities
24:22 Leopold concerns on the German leadership class
29:25 German infrastructure and if it feels poor
33:13 Critique of too much netflix
34:27 What to learn from speed cubing Rubik’s cubes and weird communities
37:04 Leopold’s story of Emergent Ventures and what he found valuable
39:08 Embracing weirdness and disagreeableness
41:20 Leopold considering whether US entrepreneurial culture worth swapping for German infrastructure
43:44 Leopold on social ills of alcohol
43:59 Examining Leopold’s ideas of existential risk and growth
47:49 Different views depending on time frame:700 years or millions of years
51:18 Leopold’s view on importance of growth and risk of dark ages
56:07 Climate as a real risk but not a top existential risk
1:00:02 Nuclear weapons as an underrated existential risk
1:00:45 View on emergent AI risk
1:02:20 Falling fertility as an underrated risk
1:14:35 Mormon and eternal family
1:16:29 Underrated/overrated with phantom Tyler Cowen
biological warfare
Inflation
GDP as a measure
Berlin
1:30:09 What to see in Berlin
1:32:22 Habits, simplicity and anti-moderation
1:35:10 What EA gets right/wrong, EA as religion?
1:43:56 Advice: Being independent, creative and writing blogs
Finding Meaning in life
Leopold Aschenbrenner in conversation with Ben Yeoh
Ben Yeoh (0:04): I am super excited to talk to Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen Emergent Ventures, and he went to Columbia University at age 15 and graduated this year as valedictorian. He is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute, known for its Effective Altruism philosophy thinkers. He's already drafted a provocative paper and conferencing ideas of long termism existential risk and growth. And he blogs at for our posterity. Leopold, welcome.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (0:34): Hi, great to be here.
Ben Yeoh (0:35): So how do you think you should assess what your future career should be? I went to Cambridge when I was 17. I finished the top of my year at 20. But I didn't really think deeply enough about what I should do but I actually sense that you have. So, how are you thinking about choosing a career, and did you use any Effective [Inaudible 00:54] thinking in terms of what you're thinking about your next steps?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:01): Yeah, I almost think perhaps it's a trap to over intellectualize it, but I definitely have over intellectualized it where you try to think very rigorously about what is it that I want to do, what is it that I want to achieve, what impact do I want to have on the world, what pathway can I best have this impact. And I think it's worth actually trying to think this through. Right. 80,000 hours is the length of your career, so this is really what you're spending a good chunk of your lifetime on. I think this is a valuable Effective Altruism idea. I think the downside of this is that by...you end up always questioning what you're doing because you're trying to do the most effective thing, or have the most impact or whatever, and that way can be almost self-undermined. So, I always think it might be valuable to at some point be like, "Okay this is what I'm doing," and then just have this total commitment to it. I think this is one way which in the Effective Altruism maybe is somewhat a defective religion, or it has these grand ideas of things we hope to achieve, and these are very motivated. But then it always encourages people that question and question and question and then because of the types of people who are attracted to Effective Altruism, they end up undermining their own purpose.
Ben Yeoh (2:29): Yeah, so if you end up thinking about what you're going to do for your 80,000 hours, for all 80,000 hours, you obviously end up doing nothing.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (2:38): If you think about it too much, you end up maybe losing the motivation because you're really into something, working on it really hard, then you think about it some more and you're like, "Maybe this isn't the most effective," and then you lose the motivation. I think that this sort of motivation and drive and just pure commitment is actually very important to a career.
Ben Yeoh (2:57): Have you committed to what you're doing for the next year yet? Or are you still in thinking more about it?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (3:01): Next year I'm working as a research fellow at Forethought, so I want to continue some of this work about thinking about the long term and so on. But in general, I've been pretty confused about my career.
Ben Yeoh (3:10): Sure. So, is going to university at 15 years old overrated, underrated, or just an experience that you would recommend or not?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (3:20): I think underrated, or specific types of people. I think people, or at least people I know for whom it would have been good, they tend to discount it, like skipping grades and so on. People look down upon or they think there are all sorts of social difficulties, and it's really not my experience. I mean it worked out great for me. There were no social difficulties or whatever people always talked about. In fact, I ended up being in a better social environment with older students. And especially if you skipped grades in high school, you save yourself a lot of time in which you're not learning anything you're not making any progress. So, for me it was very invigorating intellectually, socially, it was great. But I also think it's probably only a specific part of the population this is good for. Honestly, I think in an ideal world, I would have started even earlier. I think that I got to the skipping grades thing late, but I could have started at 14.
Ben Yeoh (4:31): I think that's fair. It might not suit everyone but for those who it suits, it's very unsuitable to be in a place where you're not learning anymore.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (4:40): Exactly. I think in the US it is a bit different because you have these incredible high schools.
Ben Yeoh (4:45): Yeah.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (4:46): Some of these private high schools that people go to, or even some public high schools in New York, have these incredible courses, incredible peer groups. But for most people, high school is really a waste of time. And to the extent that especially high schools nowadays they take up all your time. It's not like half the day and then the other half you can do other things. It's just very inadequate. School in general is a very inadequate place to be and I think a lot of people [Inaudible 05:14] dead ends after being stuck in high school or in school for too long. So, I think it's good for people to get out.
Ben Yeoh (5:22): That leads me nicely into, do you think you're in favour of liberal arts education or university in general? because you had a critique about high school and I think if I think about my peers, I would say at least half and not maybe the majority didn't particularly enjoy high school which has to be some sort of critique. And I guess a thinker like Peter Thiel explicitly gives scholarships to people who don't go to university with a strand of thought that universities are too concerned with Credentialism and not learning. But I have the impression you gained a lot from your experience at Columbia and that there is something to liberal arts, particularly if you're going to be a curious generalist thinker, as opposed to, "I definitely know I want to be an architect or a doctor." What's your think about liberal arts and university in general?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (6:08): I am very pro College, especially the US liberal arts college. One I think the actual liberal arts education is extremely valuable, so I very much appreciated this at Columbia. We have the core, maybe a third of the courses, and we read a bunch of classics and political philosophy and all sorts of things. And if I think back in terms of, what did I get the most out of from college, was it some very advanced math course? or was it one of these core courses? It probably was one of these core courses and in terms of properly being able to really think about the world. That's number one. Number two, I think the difference between college and at least most high schools is that you can take advanced courses. So, it's not like you're stuck doing...Whatever your favourite area of expertise is you can actually do the more advanced courses and I think this is a big difference. And I think the peer group effects can be very valuable. You have the selection and sorting of the lots of smart people who go to Columbia, and it's not just a random assortment. I think that is quite valuable. I think there's a big difference between a US elite university, and say, Germany with German universities. This is my alternative, I'm originally from Germany. They're mediocre, there's not great instruction, there's no sorting so they don't sort by [Inaudible:07:37] and it's also not liberal arts so it's one subject and there's very little choice. So that seems like another dynamic for people.
In general, I really like for example, Tyler, his way of thinking. He knows about all sorts of areas, he's read deeply in many different areas, and I think that really helps him synthesize different, new ideas and be a very creative and generative thinker. I think that's what a liberal arts college can be good for.
Ben Yeoh (8:14): Maybe that's a good segue also into a question that Tyler Cowen asked when I put a call out to what questions should we ask you, and he asked, is it efficient, to be a valedictorian?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (8:27): Probably not. I was thinking about this when I got the award in the sense that maybe it just means I spent too much time in school, past the point of optimal diminishing returns. I really, probably should have spent more time and effort doing research, even just like blogging or tweeting or whatever and that would have been more educational. Or just reading on my own would be more educational, more socially useful. And maybe more productive for terms of starting a career later. I think the argument you can make is something that there's an area of utility function that's non concave. Usually going from fourth to third in your class. Very, very little benefit, but going from, say fourth to first is a big benefit because you get this like title valedictorian, maybe they give you some benefits later on and so actually putting in that little bit of extra effort to be valedictorian is worth it. I think there's also the argument you can make that it's not really about the optimization problem but it's about the values or the habits you form. I think I'm a believer in values or habits of excellence. I Am deeply engaging with things and so part of developing these habits and naturally came doing well. I think the other way it's inefficient is perhaps something like the peer group sorting wasn't right. And you usually probably do best in terms of learning, and intellectual exchange when you're not either at the very top or the very bottom of your peer group, you want to be in the middle. And in that way, it would be inefficient.
This brings me to another thing I've been thinking about which people are talking about the Ivy League, they should make them bigger. There's this argument, "Oh, we should make Harvard bigger so they should admit more people." I think the opposite. I think we should make them smaller. So, if you think about Columbia there's just a very large variation in the individual ability of the students, and in fact you could probably pre-select for that at the time of admission. Columbia has the Scholars Program, which is maybe the top 10% of people upon admission. And those ended up also just being the smartest people throughout the time at Columbia. So maybe we should create a Columbia that's a 10th of the size. There're only the people that are admitted to the Scholars Program, and then there is actually an even better peer group which has all sorts of benefits in terms of these are the people you take classes with and so on.
Ben Yeoh (11:11): I think that there is a kind of argument for that because I think it's slightly the wrong question although it's the question from an economist mind because efficiency is maybe not the only goal in something like being a valedictorian. But where you would sort say, just that very top, 1% or 10% and to a different class. I think if they're going to make transformational ideas or changes that would work, but also part of what you said is that the top 10% can bring up the median or the mean. So, I don’t know whether it might be more important to bring out more mean or medium or say second quarter students or thinkers, so that they can look at the top decile, and improve or aspire. Or whether it's more important to solve that top decile for them to improve on this by the way, I wouldn't have an answer for that.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (12:01): I think it's really all about the externalities of the world. There are very large externalities in terms of empowering smart, talented people to really fully realize their potential. The new ideas they have, the inventions, the artistic creations. I think it's actually quite important to realize this. I think, for example, in Germany. People are very on to this egalitarian thing. You can't have different educational institutions for people with higher abilities and so on because that would be unfair, and that's really denying the whole point, or a big part of the point, which is that you want to support talented people so they create these externalities for everybody else. And it's part of the reason why I think this sorting is valuable, the type that Ivy's already does, is when you put a lot of smart people together. Great things happen. They help each other learn and they accelerate their progress but then they have discussions and new ideas come together and think of all the companies that have come out of Harvard or whatever. So, to some extent it already works out where all the smartest people at Columbia find each other. But I still think there would be benefits to just having an even smaller Colombia with only these people.
Ben Yeoh (13:15): I think this idea that if you look at successful inventions or patents, the originator, whether that's the company or a person maybe gets 5% of the value or 10% of the value, but the world gets 90% of the value. I'm often telling people...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (13:28): Bigger. If you think about social value of research, something like 98% of that is not captured by the inventor.
Ben Yeoh (13:36): It could be even bigger than that, and I still think that aspirin is going to go on for another 100 years creating value and you had a patent on it. Aspirin has a complicated history but for a very relatively short length of time [Inaudible: 13:51] pharmaceuticals. I guess reflecting on your Columbia experience was there anything very unexpected or very much expected from when you entered and left and go, "WOW. That wasn't what I thought it was going to be at all or that was exactly how I thought, American students would be."
Leopold Aschenbrenner (14:08): COVID was the main thing during the four years that was unexpected, but that's not very interesting. I think one of the things I was surprised by was the thing I was saying earlier about just the variation in the students. I think there's incredibly brilliant people who I met. People that are my friends now but there's also actually a surprising amount of people there who are pretty uninterested. They're doing the work because they think they need to get their college degree, elite college degree so they can get a good job or whatever. They're not intellectually, academically interested. They spend a lot of time watching Netflix. I don't know, that's not great. So, in terms of other things that sort of surprised me at the beginning is somewhat opposed to what I just said but I think one sort of culture shock initially coming from Germany was the American work ethic. So, in Germany, university means you're going out, five days a week and maybe you spend one day a week, on actually studying. And in general, despite some of the people who are less academically inclined, the overall work ethic was very high, and people were really putting their heart and soul on things. I think that was quite important for me to see and soak in, at even a young enough age where I could still change my habits or something like that. Working hard is very critical to everything. That was an interesting cultural difference.
Ben Yeoh (15:55): I agree with that conscientiousness part. So, my high school here in London, we had Saturday school for all my high school going through and because I did Sciences at Cambridge, we had to do experiments on the Saturday as well, whereas the guys doing humanities and you only do one thing at a British university. They would have one tutorial or a couple of classes a week and for four days they would really be doing nothing which was surprising. I guess my looking at US university, although maybe this is universities, overall, as I thought they had a very strange and maybe complicated but very strange relationship with alcohol. It wasn’t really healthy at all, and I still really ponder this, and maybe that was 18 or not or drinking and stuff and so it goes undercover but it generally didn’t feel very healthy for a lot of these 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds. I guess it’s not legal to drink in the US until over 21.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (16:52): I think the people who indulge in that are the sort of type...I ended up not being this type of student that was associated with it. I think there are some unhealthy relationships or something but those generally tend to be the people who are less academically interested. They're there because they feel like they have to, they're not there because they really love it.
Ben Yeoh (17:13): So, you put them in the minority or at least...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (17:16): I don't know. They're probably not a minority, but there's like a lot of self-selections that go on over the four years at least if you're doing it right. And you end up associating with a very particular group of people or at least I ended up doing that and that was great for me. But it also doesn't mean I have a great pulse on what the median Columbia student was doing. So, for example the wokeness stuff that people complain about at campuses. I read about it too and all the things’ people say [Cross Talking]. But I didn't interact with it that much, so it was just my experience.
Ben Yeoh (17:53): You have strong ties to Germany, as does Adam too, and I think you took his course.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (17:58): I took his course, it was great.
Ben Yeoh (17:59): What do you think is most misunderstood about Germany and you can extend this to kind of Austria and Europe, if you have bigger thoughts which I think you do. Well, I would agree. I found this kind of German university...Actually, because they've got the technical university route where you can become a master carpenter or the equivalent, which we don't have in some places which I think is quite interesting. Yet at the same point in time, they have this egalitarian thing which means, the professorships can't sort well as you were saying, as a kind of interesting tension. But I don't have a long view of the history of Germany as you probably do or as Tooze does. So, I'd be interested in what you think is misunderstood and also what you learnt coming to America to learn from someone else about your home country.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (18:50): Well, this is funny. I think in some way, I must admit some of my previous ignorance here where I didn't really have a great sense of German history pre the 20th century. I think the main thing that I took away from the Tooze course is just the richness of German history. The rise of pressure from this total dead end, sort of a stand basket of Europe and how they became this Spartan state and then the unification of Germany under Bismarck. There's a real rich history there and it’s a lot of interesting things. I basically hadn't internalized this at all. So, I think you learn the very basic facts but it's surprising after going to German school for a long time. The main thing I learned about was Order 1, Order 2, the 20th century. I think it's funny, but it took me coming to America and to learn from [Tooze] to appreciate the longer view of German history. Suddenly it's also funny because the pre-World War Two Germany seems very different from the Germany that I know. I guess the Germany that I know I get some very negatives on it. How do I summarize, maybe the best way to say it is this? Every time you have an idea, they come to you with all the reasons it won't work and why it's a terrible idea, and why we should just be passive and never do anything, and very, very sclerotic very stagnant in that sense.
Ben Yeoh (20:31): You've commented, "I think that Germans seem to know more US politicians than German politicians themselves." What do you think of that? I don't know German culture enough, but we have this expression of almost tall poppy syndrome, whether that's an idea or anything out. Several commentators, you might have mentioned it, I think Jeff Bezos has mentioned it, "Be a weirdo stand up, be individual think of ideas," and that doesn't do so well in a place which doesn't want to have any tall poppies. What do you think? Is that something to do with the political climate or is it just the culture which is built up post that Second World War?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (21:16): It's worth emphasizing that tall poppy thing. It's really incredible the extent to which this is the case in Germany. They really, really, really hate anyone that deviates from the norm. This is just my constant experience in Germany which is why I had to leave because I did deviate from the norm. And they don't want to acknowledge, for example, that there's differences in talent and that some people are maybe smarter, they need a different form of education and that's completely anathema to their thinking. Or that we want entrepreneurs to create great companies or that we want inventors. This is really contrary to their type of thinking which is very unfortunate.
Ben Yeoh (21:59): But I have the impression that many have an arts counterculture but maybe that's only in bits of Berlin or bits of Hamburg. So, is that not true?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (22:08): For a bit but not really. Not anymore. I think the perspective shift that I had to do this course is that it wasn't always this way. This is sort of a more recent thing and to some extent it's the cataclysms of the 20th century. Though I think it's interesting to think about when it actually shifted. Did it shift with the Second World War? So, if you think about German universities, for example, there were the premier universities at the end of the 19th century. And I think the naive model I used to have is that with the Second World War, this is when German universities started to decline, and American Universities became great. But this doesn't seem to be the case so there’s a bunch of data, and that was recently compiled by an economist at Columbia, Miguel Urquiola, but he recently wrote a book 'Markets, Minds and Money' about the rise of American universities. And the interesting thing in his data is you've looked at the decline of German universities that happened much earlier. Basically, it already happened at the beginning of the 20th, a very early 20th century. So, what the shift there is, it's not quite clear to me yet, but there seems to have been some sort of shift there that was earlier, and I mean I think his story about the rise of American universities that there's competition in American Universities, and the German universities reduced status. to be able to adapt, to rise to the importance of research.
Ben Yeoh (23:43): I see that there's been a similar critique of UK universities because really, it centres around Oxford and Cambridge. And, there’s some evidence that whether intentionally or not, Oxford and Cambridge have essentially suppressed all other university competitions in the UK for arguably selfish reasons but that is why you haven't got greater...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:05): But at least you have Oxford and Cambridge. We don't have an Oxford and Cambridge in Germany. We have nothing! It's a barren landscape, it's disastrous. This is bad because there's also...
Ben Yeoh (24:16): Well maybe that's your life purpose, you've got to go back and find one of these. Not a charter city, but a charter university.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:22): I've been seriously thinking about this, and I think this is one of the bad side effects of this, that there's no competent leadership class. There are no good journalists. All the German journalists are just terrible.
Ben Yeoh (24:34): Although Merkel comes across as competent. Is it notable that she's the only German politician I know?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:40): I would question some of her competence. She really wrecked the Eurozone, for example. There's no good economist. You can criticize the extreme American focus on you're going to elite universities and the elite class that comes out of it. I don't deny that there's a downside. But having no competent, smart people who are leading your country, I think that's also pretty bad. Because it is true that Germany is a leadership role in the European Union and European Union still matters. So, in this total denial of leadership, I worry that this will have bad consequences for example if you think about the whole...
Ben Yeoh (25:34): And it's bad for the world right not just them.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (25:36): That's the thing. Think about the rivalry with China right now. If this ends up heating up more, I think it might end up being true that Europe plays a key role. If Europe ends up uniting with the United States that immediately doubles the economic output, the size of the economic bloc that's trying to get from China or something like that. But my impression of European leadership is that all they want to do is sharp back and not deal with it and go on living their comfortable lives. So, it doesn't sound great to me.
Ben Yeoh (26:10): Would your critique of Germany then extend to Austria, also other parts of Europe because I think at least in nominal GDP terms Germany is still richer than say the UK and France and even the Netherlands is richer than the UK. Although the UK has these interesting pockets where if you look at the -- Actually Oxford, Cambridge, London sort of hub triangle, it really bounces up the whole average of the UK...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (26:36): Germany still does quite well but this is another thing. Germany feels a lot poorer than the United States. I think it's also because I was in New York City and New York City is richer. But it's crazy. I think even Germany, which supposedly has the highest GDP per capita in Europe, feels a lot poorer than the US.
Ben Yeoh (27:00): Do you extend your critique to a lot of the Eurozone?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:05): Probably, I just don't know that much about them. Germany's the one in which I would know very well.
Ben Yeoh (27:13): Staying in Europe for one touch longer. It would just be hopping over to Switzerland, which does seem a little bit different. Is there something that they got right?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:22): [] Yes, Switzerland seems different in culture in some ways. They seem less anti elite. Much more conservative politically but also in a general outlook on things.
Ben Yeoh (27:44): So, it's not a system of the kind of federated central government, tension or not it's more of a cultural issue on tall poppy...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:55): I think it's massively cultural. It extends across the political spectrum and extends across different spheres of politics or journalism or universities. I think it's very much cultural.
Ben Yeoh (28:09): You seem quite interested in geopolitics, geoeconomics. Do you have a view of Japan then?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (28:18): Not really, No. I don't know enough about Japan.
Ben Yeoh (28:19): Alright, we'll skip that one then. Maybe if you'd go back, if you had more time, you could have done a core course in Japan to add to your body of knowledge. I'm not that familiar with it as well, but I think it's very interesting that I think Patrick Collison had one of these as one of his ongoing questions. Why I mentioned it is that he views that built infrastructure/culture/a lot of institutions in both Switzerland and Japan are so much better countrywide than in so many other countries. And so, I would say this interestingly if you want to do this travel trip. I would agree if you travelled and train across Germany as I've done, you will look at the weather or you said that there's some bits which strike, maybe it's rural but actually quite cool, like not that rich. Whereas do you don't get that same sense in Switzerland, or Japan? There are some poor parts of Japan but you go around and a lot of it seems really rather well done. And he comments that he doesn't quite know why this is the case, and their cultures are quite different, so there might be something. It was an unanswered question, that's why I threw it out there in case you might have some radical insight.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (29:25): I think you could say the same thing about Germany. People do idealize it like the trains are nice in Germany, like the ICEs. You ride them and there's no wobble or anything at 200 miles an hour. And a lot of the infrastructure is good. The towns are pretty, the whole medieval style towns. In some way I think this can be delusive though because it's just another symptom of this decadence or however you want to call it where you want to make this life as comfortable and as nice as you can without actually having grander ambitions about creating something. In some ways, you know, the United States is not as pretty. You drive around the northeast quarter and it's pretty ugly, crumbling infrastructure but it's harsher. In some ways this harshness is part of what it's about. And if we made things too nice. If it was all just fun and games, then you would lose some of that energetic spirit. And this thing I mentioned about Germany being poor. Yes, some towns and so on are poor, but you don't have the same high incomes that you do in the United States. So, if you're a professional in the US, you'll earn pretty high incomes here, this is just not very unfamiliar in Germany. Like the starting salaries, a lot of people out of Colombia are much higher than anyone I ever knew in Germany.
Ben Yeoh (30:55): Well, I think you've got a lot of family's monies. Some of it is connected to family companies [Inaudible: 31:02].
Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:03): If you look at German billionaires, they all have inherited wealth, where the US billionaires which they... [Inaudible:31:09].
Ben Yeoh (31:10): Maybe that's partly VC software and things but it's not only. Some of them are more the industry, or the knowledge industry.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:16): A lot of them are. This is a big difference. It's actually a good stat, where did billionaires get their money.
Ben Yeoh (31:24): Yeah. Did they inherit? So, I do wonder whether that is a German problem. And then it’s actually interesting that you are so interested in egalitarianism. But wouldn't want to do an inheritance tax where you give all of that money away to something else to start again, or something like that. I don't view them as that [Inaudible: 31:40]. So, you mentioned that we watch too much Netflix. Is this just a US Columbia student problem? A median student problem? Or is this a broader phenomenon that you think?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:55): It's probably a broader phenomenon. It's probably like loss of meaning in the modern world, not just some people but for a lot of people. You have food on the table, and you have a house over your head and things rumble along, and they should have no existential threat to you and so what is it that you have no more religion? You say there's no god you're worship so what is it about. But I think that's the reason I focused on this Columbia type or elite type populations because you're getting externality. This sort of people ends up just watching Netflix then when you could have been using this time to be doing great things.
Ben Yeoh (32:46): Yeah, opportunity costs. Do you think the counter argument would be that of a Luddite fallacy? We said the same about newspapers, we said the same about printing them with the internet. But I think your point would be that there's an addictive quality that is, you might have autonomy when you make the choice to do it, but a little bit like smoking, once you're addicted you've actually lost your autonomy. So, in that way it's more insidious, is that your further argument or is now...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (33:13): I think in general, I’m pretty negative on most of the classic vices, like alcohol or drugs, smoking, or maybe Netflix. And I think most of the time you get some self-regulation where it is looked down upon and then people look down upon taking hard drugs, and socially it ends up working out where people don't do it. Or playing too many video games is looked down upon. But it's kept in check whereas I feel like Netflix has been in a weird way normalized, where it's okay, to spend all your time watching Netflix.
Ben Yeoh (33:49): Is it a problem of Netflix programs being too good? If they're a little bit brass...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (33:53): I think it's very addictive. I think people are very bad at dealing with addictions. Whether that be Netflix. whether that be drugs, whether that be gambling, like now with Bitcoin and Robin Hood or whatever. I think there's actually a quite negative development, for example with marijuana and so on, people are embracing that 'anything goes' philosophy where it's cynical about human nature. No, people can't handle this.
Ben Yeoh (34:23): The downside of libertarianism
Leopold Aschenbrenner (34:25): And so, you [Inaudible: 34:25] constrain them or something.
Ben Yeoh (34:27): Have you watched the documentary, Speed Cubers? What do you think I could learn from cubing?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (34:35): I used to be very into Rubik's Cubes, this is how I met my best friend. He solved the Rubik's Cube World Record back when I was quite a bit younger. I used to be into Rubik's cubes. I had a YouTube channel, and it wasn't that fast but it's pretty good. It was maybe the 60th in Germany. I never got into competitions. I don't know what you get out of it.
Ben Yeoh (35:08): So, you memorize all these algorithms of pattern recognition so that you can insert it.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (35:12): There's basically three layers. The third layer you do with algorithms, the first two you do by thinking about it. It was a fun spatial exercise. like one course I really liked at Columbia was topology, which is very abstractly thinking about space and geometry. In some ways that applied very similar skills like spatially visualizing how you're turning things. I think the other thing about cubing was at the time, there was a good community of people that I didn't have otherwise. It was one of the first things that turned me on to weird Internet communities.
Ben Yeoh (35:53): And it's a weird elite sport, right?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (35:55): Exactly and I think weird Internet communities can be very valuable. Now I'm in another weird internet community, which is The Extended [Inaudible:36:02] Universe on Twitter. I've met a lot of people through that or through emergent ventures. I think that can be very valid but first, inculcating a certain sense of weirdness and difference in you and giving you a broad space of opportunities. I think that's great.
Ben Yeoh (36:25): Sure, well maybe as you mentioned emergent ventures. I get the impression that it was meaningful for you to be able to go at 15 to Columbia and then without it would have been a little bit tricky, and I run a small micro grant thing as well. I'm not as famous as Tyler, but I think it is really interesting that we don't support more individual people, particularly those who might have quirky brilliance, or maybe they're just quirky because you're young and uncertain. Who knows quite how brilliant people will be? So, I wonder whether you'd reflect on funding individual people or the idea of emergent ventures and what you got out of it.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:04): Can I tell the story of how the emergent ventures grants happened?
Ben Yeoh (37:08): Sure, please do it.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:10): This is great. It also speaks to the unbureaucratic nature of it. A year and a half ago almost 2 years ago. I had written this paper of existential risk and growth and Tyler came upon it and he really liked it and he posted it on his website. So, he said "If you know Leopold, tell him to drop me a line. So, I wrote to him. We were emailing and this is maybe Wednesday or Tuesday, he goes, “Can you come down to Washington DC today we have a conference." So completely out of the blue.
Ben Yeoh (37:45): And you were in Germany at the time?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:47): No, I was in New York.
Ben Yeoh (37:48): You weren't, okay.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:49): Then I came down there. I arrived and he goes "Yeah, so this is the conference for all the emergent ventures granters. To make it fair. We must give you an Emergent Ventures grant too. Think about what you can use this [ ] It was great because it's just out of the blue, very quick and I think almost the most valuable thing I got out of emergent Ventures is meeting all the people at the conference, but then also, most of all, the past year or two, getting to know the community of people online. And because it's a lot of brilliant driven but also perhaps most importantly very quirky people who are trying to create things, but not on the standard career path. I think otherwise you're at Columbia and people are doing a very narrow set of career paths. And I think it's easy to get stuck into one of those dead ends. I'm in the Bay now so I'm actually meeting...this is part of the grant so I can come to the Bay. Now I'm here and I'm actually able to meet a lot of these people in person. And that's been really fantastic. It's a great community.
Ben Yeoh (38:58): I'd say this, your social capital is building up so maybe it was very efficient, to be valedictorian, so you could do that, and you've got all of this building up on the side.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (39:08): Social capital, inspiration, the combustion of ideas. There's a lot of ideas that I think are floating around in space and that can’t read a book about them, but people talk about them. By osmosis it really shifts your worldview. I think this is here, where it comes in, that it's quite good that I was at Columbia and was doing this quite early because there's still a lot of plasticity and I'm not quite set in my ways yet. And so, for example, coming from Germany, one thing I learned was the work ethic, the discipline. The other thing was really embracing the weirdness and the disagreeableness. Where in Germany it was always about no you should be like everybody else.
Ben Yeoh (39:57): Great I can see that. So maybe picking up on a couple of other things that I've seen that you've done. Do you think subway funding needs to be radically changed? And now that you've been in California a little bit, what do you think you should do about California transport? Is it tunnels under the earth or could a radical different way of funding public transport just change it and they just need to be more radical in their thinking?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (40:24): I think what you're referring to is a thing I did in my freshman year of college. I wrote a proposal for changing the funding system. I think in hindsight, this was a very bad proposal now that I think about it. So, I don't actually have any good ideas for fixing subways, I'm sorry about that. But it's actually funny. I only really encountered economics at the end of my freshman year in college. And this is probably from taking Intro Ecom. It was one of the most world changing courses. Just this way of thinking. And I really encountered it quite late, but it also very much shifted my opinions on other things. It's a very powerful framework to think about, like, what are the incentives? Supply and Demand, and those kinds of things.
Ben Yeoh (41:10): So sadly, no ideas for fixing US infrastructure. Because I do think they could unlock a lot if they somehow pursued that
Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:16): I think it's overrated. I don't think it matters that much.
Ben Yeoh (41:18): Right, it's the people more than the infrastructure.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:20): The benefits of better infrastructure like proper roads are small. I think they matter a lot for quality of life maybe. There's this thing I mentioned about " German towns are pretty or you have great subway systems." I think it irks a lot of people aesthetically. In the grand scheme of things.
Ben Yeoh (41:50): If you put American culture, with German infrastructure you don't actually get that much better thing out of it?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:55): Suppose you had perfect German infrastructure in the United States, then you have infrastructure. It improves the quality of life, but this is not what it's about.
Ben Yeoh (41:56): It doesn't help to generate transformation.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:57): No, the whole point is the things that are advanced or that are important in the long term. And in fact, again, I think there's some value to having things be even harsher because if you make the quality of life too good, you make things too hedonistic then people will spend their 20s going out and hanging out.
Ben Yeoh (42:15): Watching too much Netflix.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (42:16): Watching too much Netflix. The Berlin version of this is going clubbing every day. I want people to be generative and have ideas and work hard and build a great civilization.
Ben Yeoh (42:31): I was taken back a little bit about the Berlin night club culture. I went to Germany, Berlin, when I was about 14. Reading my age, this is almost 30 years ago, and they let you into nightclubs at 14 there and this is a whole thing. I remember everyone was screaming, drinking these things which are translated as green forest. So, there were these people, and I was going, "Is this really what teenage German kids do?" I don't know but it did seem to be definitely a thing.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (43:03): This is also the other thing. Americans have a lot of weird preconceptions about Europe. Very glorified where my responses were always "You only think it's great if you're earning an American income and then you're traveling to Europe." One of the things that's glorified is the drinking culture. Americans like to binge drink less than Europeans, they start later. My experience in Germany was that people start drinking very early. They drink a lot and it's not that great.
Ben Yeoh (43:28): There's also an interesting study that is done by drinks companies that show there are these moments of drink. A lot of people drink sorrow, which is not a healthy way of drinking as opposed to, say, for joy, or something like that.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (43:44): In general, alcohol is one of the great underrated social ills of our society. A lot of people die from it. It ruins a lot of lives. Tyler is a big thing on this, but I think he's right about it.
Ben Yeoh (43:59): So, we mentioned long termism so we should talk about your paper which goes to lead to emergent ventures and everything. If I get in a non-technical sense of what you're suggesting is that, while there are some existential risks people talk about such as emergent AI, there are pandemics, there's climate change. Nuclear weapons would be the big one. And for a time because we're innovating and we're creating these new things, new technologies. That existential risk of us deleting human life might go up, but then at some point it might steadily fall because these new technologies, let's extend nuclear, that we had some clean energy, cheap energy source. Would then mean that our existential risk goes down, and therefore our imperative should be on growth, and certainly not degrowth and certainly not all these other things and that would be a follow up on to your thing that quality of life is okay and let's have German infrastructure in America. But if we're not innovating our way away from this existential risk curve, then we're going to fail as a human species. Do I have that thesis right? Would you like to add anything to that? and [Cross talking: 45:09], which I don't quite fully get but how are you evolving your thinking here.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (45:17): The idea of this curve is that you're developing new technologies and new technologies can be risky, think of nuclear weapons or maybe we're bioengineering and that's maybe going to cause a pandemic. Very relevant nowadays. And so, some of these technologies might even be so bad or the risk might be so bad that it could wipe out all of humanity. The question is, how does growth affect that? So, you can imagine a world in which growth, McGregor makes it worse because he developed these technologies, and the underlying mechanism of what's happening in the paper, is that as people grow richer, they care more about safety because they care more about life. You grow richer, you have your basic material needs satisfied and things like preserving health, avoiding risks, this becomes more important. People invest in safety technology, so you might invest in mRNA vaccine and pandemic preparedness and that means you can counter pandemics. So hopefully that will be enough so we can bend the risk curve, and ultimately risk and follow zero exponentially.
Now this is a moderate parameter world. There are also two other worlds. There's one world in which the world is really robust. It's not very fragile at all, in which case we would never expect the risks to rise because we always get this downward directory. It doesn't really look to be the world we're in because we are inventing new dangerous technologies that do look like risk is growing. Then there's another world which is worlds away, sickly in which existential risk is inevitable. There's no way to prevent that even if we put all our society's efforts into it. The danger of nuclear war is so high, or the craziest person who gets access to nuclear weapons and maybe nuclear weapons are eventually $10,000 because we're improving technology, and then there's no way to prevent it. And so, we're going to go extinct anyway. That would be sad and it's actually quite possible we live in that world, but then you have to do the expected value calculations where on a world in which we go extinct anyway, there's not a long future and there's not that much potential human value. Whereas in a world in which we don't and there's a possibility of us not going extinct. That's a world in which we have a very long run potential future, a lot of potential. That's where most of the expected value of the future comes from. I think functionally it makes sense to act as if we're in that medium world.
Ben Yeoh (47:49): Does it make a difference, your timeframe? Let's use Tyler because he's said, maybe we've got a few 100 years to a few thousand years? Like 700 to 3000 years before we faced this existential threat. Whereas if you've got a million, not quite stretching out to infinity. Even if we're still only growing up to 2 or 3%, or even if it goes down to 1. 1% compounded by a million is a really, really large number, with some of these things on growth. So, is there a time set difference?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (48:24): A bunch of thoughts on this. First, Tyler's 700-year timeframe. It's quite funny in a way, this actually bothers me a bit. I'm not quite sure what's funny about this. Tyler is basically arguing that we live in a very fragile world in which existential risks aren't habitable. So, this argument is something nuclear weapons are going to get cheap because of better technology and so eventually they're going to be close to $10,000. There's going to be something like a crazy terrorist attack, or something crazy enough that they're going to destroy the world with this. You think this is basically [Inaudible: 48:59]. This is a plausible world in my paper. this sort of fragile world. But in that world, it's not actually clear if growth is good because in that world the reason that growth is inevitable is because of this better technology that is riskier. Therefore, the better nuclear weapons. That world might want a slow growth so that we can reduce risk and so have longer timeframes. Instead of 700 years, we have 1500 years. I don't actually think Tyler's growth argument is necessarily true in the short time horizon.
Now I don't think it also makes sense to focus on the short time horizon because I think it is plausible enough that we can contain the threat of WMBs and in general the risk with safety technology. Maybe it means having radiation monitors on every street corner and then we can counter the $10,000 nukes. If you think the moderately fragile world is possible in which existential risk is not inevitable, a very long-time span is possible. Most of the potential value of the future is in that world. And you mentioned growth compounding. If you think about long timescales, this is potentially the idea of long termism. Humanities existed for modern humans for a million years. But really if you think about that, we could have millions and millions of years ahead of us, maybe a billion years of human civilization. Most potential people to ever exist or in the future. And so, one argument is that the most important thing if we care about the future [Inaudible: 50:39], is that we must avoid extinction. That's an existential risk. If we go extinct now, we foreclose this whole potential future. Another argument you can make, this can be a Tyler counter argument you can make based on the zero-source discount rate, is that we should be growing as quickly as we can because of its compounding value of growth. But then the key question becomes how these interact, and that is the goal of what I'm trying to think about in the paper.
Ben Yeoh (51:12): And where do you currently sit between those views as it's evolving?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (51:18): On the growth, I think I'm not as persuaded that the exact rate of growth is the most important thing we should be focusing on. Say we grow for 100 years and grow at 2% instead of 1%. That means a delay. That means colonizing the universe is delayed by some amount of time because we grew slower. The lost value of that delay is dwarfed by the lost value of if we went extinct. We didn't only lose 100 years of delay but also all the millions of years of potential future in human civilization. I'm less concerned about it. I think on the margin, should growth be a little bit faster? Should growth be a little bit slower? The effect on risk really matters. And I'll get back to the effect of risk in a bit. The one thing I am concerned about is what if we don't just slow growth, but we go all the way to zero, similar to a Dark Ages scenario. I've been thinking about this a lot quite recently and I think this is actually quite a realistic worry.
There is a realistic worry where the Dark Ages shows that something like this is possible. I think that especially, now that people are very rich already. They have pretty high levels of material comfort so there's less incentive to escape. Then there's a few specific mechanisms that I think point to this potentially happening. I think the most important one is declining fertility rates and I'll get to that in a second. In terms of what's the effect on the rest. There's my paper which argues that faster growth is better because we're growing richer earlier, which means we can care more about risk earlier, which means you invest more in safety earlier, which means we should bend this risk curve earlier. I think there's a few good counter arguments to that. One of the counter arguments is, what matters is transition risk. So rather than a certain level of technological development corresponding to a certain level of risk. A relevant risk is something like AI. We live in a world pre-AI and then suddenly AI determines the future of human civilization. There should be a one-time transition and we want to make this transition go well. I think if you believe something like that, we probably want slower growth so we can make this transition go better. It might happen a bit later when we're a bit wiser.
Something else you could argue is, what matters is political coordination. Political coordination happens at a different timescale than economic time. If you make economic changes go faster then political coordination can't keep up and we won't be able to do the relevant regulations. I think on the margin, I'm probably a bit more convinced by the case of my paper which shows the story of why you want to develop safety technologies. If you think about the pandemic, the way we ultimately conquered it is the mRNA vaccines for better technology rather than like political intervention social distancing. But I think it's still a very, very open question, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went either way.
Ben Yeoh (54:38): Great. Maybe I might ask you that and then the context of climate change. So, I guess two or three points of observation. Someone like Nassim Taleb would comment on climate change being a potential ruin risk. So that's why he's worried because it's an existential threat, multiplicative as well. Again, because there's so many parts of our current economy, which are hard to abate, we're going to need a lot of innovation, probably to combat some of what's happening with climate change. You've also got the problem with whatever it is, there's about a billion people in the world today who are living on less than $2 a day. So, we need growth obviously to bring those up. Then you have all the degrowth arguments about if there are issues on transition or planetary boundaries, or either disorderly transition from late policy change or late technological change or transition risk because something happens to an ice shelf.
But we don't really have a good understanding of complex systems which could have an upside so it might not be as risky as we are today, but it could have real downsides because we're not able to cope with that. Is this a way where you can think of resolving some of the degrowth arguments with the growth arguments that we need? And does this argue for a certain amount of growth, whether we should be doing more, or at a steady pace, or how? I guess this intersects with both the political, the economic and the technology. I'm sure you've thought about it, I'd be interested in your view.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (56:07): I just don't think climate changes are anywhere close to the most important risks. I agree with...you mentioned you attributed this to Tom but [Inaudible: 56:17] there's a bunch of work on this, and I think perhaps the most important worry about climate change are the tail scenarios, maybe there's feedback loops that are unexplained. I think one thing that worries me here is that we still don't seem to have reduced the uncertainty on this much like the last few decades. There's a lot of uncertainty over the climate sensitivity like sensitivity of temperature to increase the carbon concentration. There's potentially a fat tail there and that can go really wrong. The median scenario of climate change is not that bad, or it's bad if it's a few percentage points of GDP. It's a lot of disruption but it's similar to say pandemics or something like that.
Ben Yeoh (56:58): We can adapt.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (57:02): We can adapt because it's a big deal but it's not existential. I think the real existential threat comes from tail scenarios. I think based on what people have looked at when they thought about the probabilities, it seems like the tail on climate change probabilities where the risks that this is an existential risk that wipes out the human race is much smaller than the rest that say, the bioengineering pandemic or a nuclear war. People are not thinking about nuclear enough, but a nuclear war can still happen very, very easily. Things like AI can lead to wiping out humanity. Climate change is still an important thing, but I think it's roughly on the order of national pandemics, bioengineering pandemics. Just as we should be doing a lot more pandemic preparedness, I think we should be doing a lot more climate change. So really this is likely to be on the margins. I think the other thing I'll say is that climate change maybe it's too far to say it's solved, but it seems to be solved like other people are on it. right the reason I'm not personally inclined to work on it is that everyone else is thinking already.
Ben Yeoh (58:10): It's not an unknown risk or a little-known risk.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (58:15): Elon Musk is solving it. He's developing his technologies and then you will have everyone in your office or whatever and all the young people in the US are very politically engaged about it. Is there a chance that things like this happen in sub optimally that were too slow? Yes. Do I think we're going to solve it also? Yes. And I think also that a pretty good insurance mechanism with climate change is carbon capture. So, if things get bad. we can technically do carbon capture.
Ben Yeoh (58:45): It would cost us a lot...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (58:48): It would cost us a lot but there's an insurance mechanism there. Whereas, if you had a nuclear war. There's not a similar insurance mechanism.
Ben Yeoh (58:59): I get that. So, it's a top 10 risk or top 5 risk maybe even, but it's probably not a top 3 risk, or to your point, it's just not undiscovered or not... The risk of going to the dark ages from it quite de minimis as you were talking.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (59:16): I think it's still a real risk. I think it's worth worrying about. I just don't think it's the most tractable for a young person. They're starting their career and there's enough other people working on it. So, let's figure out something that maybe, I would even say the same thing about pandemics. I think two years ago pandemics was a big thing. I was worried about the people who were working at institutes. If you ask me, should you work on pandemic preparedness now, I don't know. This seems like other people are going to cover this now after COVID.
Ben Yeoh (59:46): So, what are your top three? I guess it's nuclear. Is it emergent AI or bio-engineered pandemics? Are those your three which would worry you? Or the whole system, like you say that the system is not set up for either innovation or growth or policy thinking around this.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:02): I think nuclear is very underrated. There's actually a great book by Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers guy. He was the nuclear war planner, and he recently released a book about Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I think nuclear is underrated. I think partially the reason I'm very attuned to this is I feel proof from family history, I'm still very rooted in the Cold War or something like that. I think nuclear is underrated. I also think what is underrated is...
Ben Yeoh (1:00:27): Even in Pakistan. I don't quite know the ideal improbabilities in markets all the time. It seems to me nonzero and probably above 1% of a chance of having it. Which seems ridiculously large for an existential risk. That's probably not quite an existential risk but...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:43): It's potentially really bad.
Ben Yeoh (1:00:45): But it puts quite a significant...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:45): There's a lot of uncertainty over what nuclear winter would look like. I think emergent AI is underrated by society at large but is probably overrated by the types of people I talked to.
Ben Yeoh (1:00:58): Overrated by Silicon Valley
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:59): I don’t know, even Silicon Valley but the EA people who are concerned about AI. I think my view on AI analysis is by short timelines like a GPT-3 style language model that's human level. I think that's plausible to come in 5-10 years. I just don't think that will be the sci fi AI that people are very stuck on. I think the more realistic scenario is this is a human level language model. Computers have always been able to deal with numbers well. Now they can deal with language as well and assist with drafting reports or...
Ben Yeoh (1:01:44): Customer service.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:01:47): I think it'll be very transformative. Maybe on the scale of the internet. The internet changed everything, and this is going to change everything. But I don't think it will be a fundamentally discontinuous shift in human civilization, where economic growth is suddenly 20% a year. People have these crazy ideas. That said, I'm very uncertain about this. I believe that AI could go lots of different ways. And so given this uncertainty, I think it's still a top thing to worry about.
Ben Yeoh (1:02:13): [Inaudible: 01:02:13] not raising the existential risk probably, did it? Internet. So, you could say, AI probably would not, although maybe [Inaudible: 1:02:19]
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:02:20): I think the issue is the uncertainty over what it looks like. I think the median scenario is something like the human level language models. It's not even just the existential risks, it's just much less transformative than people think. It'll just be through the next set of tools that people have. But again, I want to emphasize the uncertainty, I think the uncertainty here is very long and developing very rapidly. It is possible we just have human level intelligence and the superhuman level of intelligence. The other thing that I think is very underrated, and I sort of hinted at this earlier, but I'd like to talk about it, is the shift in birth rates. So, all around the world birth rates are plummeting. They've been below 2, which is the replacement level, 2 per woman. In Western Europe for a long time and now they're in America. They've been below 2 in the Pacific. Essentially, the only place in the world where they're almost at two is in India, I think they're around 2, in South America, Latin America. The only place in the world where they're still substantially above two is Africa. But I think as Africa develops, as they get urbanized, they get educated, they're very likely to follow the pace that all the other countries in the world have done which is why the fertility rates are plummeting. They are plummeting, and they'll eventually fall below 2. So, I think within a few decades, maybe sooner, and we already are already facing this within the developed world. We have a situation where having less than two children per woman will lead to having a population decline. This is a dramatic shift from any time in the past, where we've had an exponentially growing population.
I think this is a really underrated shift in the sense that once you have the shift, I think it gets locked in, in some way. If you think about people who were an only child, most of them also only want to have one child, maybe two children, but they're not thinking about having four children. Whereas people who come from families with four children, five children. They themselves also want to have a lot of kids. So, in some way these fertility preferences are very dependent on the size of family you came from. So, we have this shift where we end up shifting to lower fertility rates. I think it's a puzzle that we stay at those fertility rates. So, why is this bad that we have a population of climb or a steadying population. I think the most worrying thing here and there's great paper by Chad Jones about this, is the relationship to economic growth. So, in the Semi Endogenous Growth Models, which I think are the best growth models we have in economics, as you economically develop such as developing technology, ideas become harder to find and your ideas are exponential improvement. So, you pluck the low hanging fruit, you've invented the wheel, the next invention becomes a bit harder. And so, the way to compensate is that you must throw more and more people at it. This is a Nick Bloom paper; ideas are getting harder to find. It's the same idea as the original Chad Jones paper that was worked on from the 1990s. If you see this from the macro level, US economic growth has been steady, but we now have multiple times more people working on R&D. If you see this at the micro level, think about Moore's Law, chips are improving at a steady rate, but we must throw more and more people at it, 10x or more the amount of research at it to sustain because ideas are getting harder to find.
The flipside is if you stop growing the number of researchers, eventually we would have economic stagnation because ideas are getting harder to find. And so, the only way to sustain exponential growth is to keep growing the population. That's what we've had in the past. But once we get below 2 replacement fertility levels, you don't get a growing population anymore and then the result is what Chad Jones calls 'Empty Planet'. You have a dwindling population due to the negative fertility and you have economic stagnation. And so that seems like a really depressing future. The future I want is what Chad Jones calls an 'Expanding Cosmos’. We have a growing population, growing economic output then we colonize the universe. I'm pretty worried about what it means to shift to this population declining world.
Ben Yeoh (1:06:39): Sure. So, I guess most countries so far when they tried policies to increase the birth-rate, I don't think any single one of them has worked from what I can tell.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:06:50): I wouldn't say they haven't worked, it's just that the effects are pretty small.
Ben Yeoh (1:06:54): Okay, small effects. But I would say they haven't worked because they haven't been enough to get it above back over 2.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:06:59): Sure.
Ben Yeoh (1:07:01): But I wonder if this becomes a more pronounced effect whether we will do more. So, I think you had an idea, whether you blogged about it or wrote a short paper about using child benefits as an upfront payment. I think if you were to give some populations $20,000, 30, 40, $50,000 to set them up at the start, you might get some sort of...We haven't had the margin thought about it as much yet. So, I do agree that it's an increasing problem, but I do wonder, not necessarily that we have an insurance mechanism, but we do have more, not even that much more extreme policies that we haven't really thrown at it yet because Policymakers haven't quite got their head around it. But you're right, it's definitely underappreciated...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:07:48): I have a few thoughts on this. It's a good point. So, first, I agree that I think we need to get much more ambitious and in our thinking about this. Right now, we're still in this weird liminal space where for example, Biden passes child tax credit, and some people have these explicitly perinatal rationales for it. But generally, it has a kind of hidden purpose that people don't want to talk about whereas I'm like "No, you need to talk about." Hand families a big check like the ones that they have on prize shows when they walk out the delivery room. "Here's $50,000, Thank you for having a child." And you can justify this in very sober economics terms, which is that children have an externality, and in these economic growth models, an additional person is an additional person with ideas. The ideas they generate drive economic growth. So, you could think about this with the sober term 'externality’, but I think that you want to be more ambitious about it.
Will that work, I don't know, I think really the big thing that is happening is the value shift, which is that becoming secular, educated and urbanized, so children are taught to do things because God wants you to, or you do it because it's economically important. You do it for your own hedonistic enjoyment, and the fact of the matter is people don't know that maybe they want to have one kid for their own hedonistic enjoyment. Once you think your kids are hedonistic enjoyment, you're not going to have a lot of kids. So, the thing I worry about is, I agree if we really went big now, maybe we can solve it. And I think this is one reason to really work on it now when you think about this. The reason I’m worried is if we don't do it now, we end up getting locked in. This is the thing I mentioned earlier, I think there's a lot of fertility preferences that surpass 'dependent', depending on what your parents had, what you're used to, what your culture is surrounded by. Once we have this culture where everyone is only having 1.3 children on average, then that becomes pretty embedded, and I think it becomes much harder to shift upwards again. [Inaudible: 1:09:53] This is on the Chad Jones paper, and I don't know if I'll be able to explain it in a way that makes sense, but there's a funny lock-in mechanism which is, if you have enough population decline, even like a social planner. If you delay implementing your fertility policies long enough, then optimal policy becomes not doing fertility subsidies and letting the population decline. The reason is once you have a dwindling population the per person effort to do research for the next increment of economic growth is high because you have less people. And so eventually the effort of additional growth becomes too high and becomes not worth anymore. This is...sorry I'm bad at explaining this, but the general idea is if you wait too long, you could become locked in. I think the more colloquial version of this is the [Inaudible: 1:10:52]. You have a really aging population, if it becomes too old and you only have a few children for too long, you end up in this very stagnant equilibrium.
Ben Yeoh (1:11:03): Yeah, one way path dependent like a one-way street, or one of those one-way locks that you can get through and then you suddenly can't come back, I think that's right. I have a semi radical, it's not that radical at all policy thinking about this which solves two of the things that I'm thinking about that you've talked about is, I think you should do a carbon tax, and you should simply give all of that tax money back to people who have children. So, you're almost revenue neutral, but you just do redistribution. But the carbon tax is really a pricing signal because I don't actually think the tax amount is as important as knowing what externality is, and then actually you give it back. Then you have a slightly progressive thing because, typically, I think you might correct me if I'm wrong because I don't know as well. Socio-economically, you tend to have more children, or maybe if you are slightly poorer you can have this child benefit and it will affect you more. So, you just use that as your carbon dividend and have it as an almost universal benefit. It could be universal, and everyone can grow. That could be potentially a relatively popular policy because typically with the tax you don't see it but you're saying [Inaudible: 1:12:14], we'll give it to everyone, just have a child now.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:12:17): That sounds like a neat idea. I don't know what the sort of political manoeuvrings are. It seems, especially in the US, there’s always complicated deals that need to be worked out depending on what the different constituencies are.
Ben Yeoh (1:12:31): But why I think this could work is the whole increasing child thing appeals to quite a lot on the Right and certain Christian values and things like that. The carbon tax appeals to people and things on the left. And, both should appeal to economists of either colour who lose interest when you lean right or left. I think carbon tax is the way to do it.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:12:48): The funny thing though is that the Left is the one who's rejecting a carbon tax.
[Cross talking 1:12:55]
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:13:00): Probably all economists in favour of carbon tax. In some ways I don't know if child subsidies are ultimately going to get us there because I think this underlying values shift is too large. I think the reluctance of people to have children is too large, and I don't know if people will ever be able to be that motivated by this idea of, "Oh, we should have another child for the economy," Which is essentially what you're saying.
Ben Yeoh (1:13:31): Yeah.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:13:32): You're saying we give them money because they need another child for the economy. And maybe the political resistance to that is too large. So, I wonder if the real solution to this is religion's resurgence. Maybe we all need to become Mormons.
Ben Yeoh (1:13:47): I guess this is the cultural point. So, speaking to Anton Howes, an innovation historian, he's got this thing about, we need to celebrate innovators. But this is the same thing as a cultural shift you need to show that, because you can do it the other way around. The emancipation, slavery became illegal because of the flipping around we celebrated freedom, or rather we thought that's what we should do morally. The same with women's vote or minority rights, and all these other things, there was a cultural shift. Humans decided that, as opposed to an economic shift, and people argue in the literature about the economic value of slaves so I can't quite figure out, but it really wasn't an economic argument either way. It was a moral cultural argument. So maybe you're right, the same would have to be made on the fertility take.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:14:35): Well, the Mormons do this very well. They really celebrate the family; the family is part of God's plan. They also have these interesting ideas. They have this idea of eternal family, so it's not just you're with your family while you're on earth but you're with your family in heaven and you're together forever. So, for example the wedding vows aren't till death do us part, which is the classic thing you hear, but it's for time and all eternity. So, this is part of the reason why there's a whole doctrinal or the logical reason why families are so essential, which relates to this eternal family.
Ben Yeoh (1:15:08): Great.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:15:09): In general, the Mormon cultures seem to have very salvatory families. So maybe if we can't have everyone become Mormon, we can adopt some of these cultural ideas to celebrate families, like we want to celebrate inventors.
Ben Yeoh (1:15:25): And if we made our living conditions and our technological condition so much easier to have these families than it comes in place for...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:15:35): I think part of it might be technology, maybe you have technology to make it easier. But ultimately, I think that's probably the wrong way to think about it. In the sense that with having children there's always going to be a certain huge sacrifice associated with it. For a woman it's physically like childbirth, it's insane. Or the way your life shifts once you have this child, all the time and your priorities and money and so on. So, I really don't know if you're ever going to be able to convince people to have children if the framing is just "Oh we're doing this for your own enjoyment," "Oh this is we're going to make it easy for you.". Clearly hedonistic terms. I think there needs to be a higher calling for it or re-emphasize the cultural values of the importance of family.
Ben Yeoh (1:16:29): Cool. In honour of Tyler, we should do a little bit of "underrated/overrated", but I was going to do maybe a little twist, because this is something that you tweeted about, in reference to marginal revolution, which is what does shadow Tyler think? So, we can try that and...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:16:48): Phantom Tyler, yeah.
Ben Yeoh (1:16:49): Phantom Tyler, what do we think? We'll riff on some of those ideas. So biological warfare, underrated risk or overrated?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:04): Underrated. I think Tyler would think it's underrated too.
Ben Yeoh (1:17:06): I agree. My fans and Tyler also agree. Inflation, thinking about inflation. So, what should we say, whether we should be worried about inflation? Overrated or underrated?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:25): Underrated by the Twitter mob. Probably overrated by certain people and overrated by the Bitcoin people who think that we're going to have hyperinflation.
Ben Yeoh (1:17:37): Okay, so where does that leave you or are you neutral?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:42): Compared to most people on Twitter, or most economists on Twitter, underrated.
Ben Yeoh (1:17:48): What does Phantom Tyler think? I think Phantom Tyler's may be less concerned about inflation per se but around all the policies which are aimed at it, that's my view about what Phantom Tyler thinks.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:18:05): I think Tyler, and he said this explicitly, he doesn't think inflation will get out of control, he just thinks it'll just be higher for a while. I think the most worrying thing is the underlying dynamic of debate which has led people to disregard these risks. A few months ago, when they were working on the new American rescue plan, the new stimulus package. The general homogeneity of the Twitter debate and not being representative of what actual economists are saying, people being afraid to voice their views. But the Twitter debate ended up driving the policy. It seemed like an unhealthy state of affairs.
Ben Yeoh (1:18:43): GDP as a measure. overrated/underrated.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:18:47): Underrated. People like to dunk on it and yes it has a ton of flaws. It's a terrible measure but it's giving you a better measure.
Ben Yeoh (1:18:54): It strangely correlates with a lot of supposedly better measures. [Inaudible: 1:18:58] all these other things. So, I quite like the human development index which has life expectancy and education, but high correlation with GDP, as you might expect.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:19:08): In general, this is the thing that Tyler arguments for growth, which promotes moral value so if you're wealthier, you can do a lot more. Maybe it means better hedonistic welfare, maybe it means better Arts and Sciences, whatever you think is important. You can do more with more wealth and so GDP is maybe correlating with better health, GDP promotes that. I think there's some valuable critique to this which [Inaudible: 1:19:39] recently wrote about this. This is a blog. It's not actually true that growth is correlated with or that growth promotes everything that we might think is good. For example, think about religiosity. As we've grown richer, we've become a lot more secular. And so, if you think religion is true and you should all be believing in God, then growth is bad because it's made us all unbelievers.
Ben Yeoh (1:20:05): And growth seems to have reduced the fertility rate.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:06): Exactly. So, maybe it's also because we're at this moment of unparalleled wealth, where people are really rich and people start caring about other things like luxury goods and those luxury goods, for example, enjoying your life and not having children.
Ben Yeoh (1:20:29): I was thinking about it. I don't know much about curves, but I was thinking about the up and down curve, and I think that might be true to air pollution. There's a certain stage that has gone up and now it's coming down because we've got technology.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:38): There's this idea called an Environmental Kuznets Curve, so it has [Inaudible: 1:20:40] for a bunch of different pollutants.
Ben Yeoh (1:20:43): I'm not sure what my Phantom Tyler thinks about GDP actually. I don't know, I know he mentioned it in Stubborn Attachments as an imperfect measure, but I don't know whether he still thinks is underrated or overrated.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:55): I think he would say give me a better measure. I think this would be great to figure out a better measure of something that correlates and is better comparable. One problem with GDP is that...So I think GDP is useful to compare like
Ben Yeoh (1:21:09): Countries.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:21:10): Going from 2015 to 2014, maybe it's even decently useful across countries or something like that. I think it's very hard to compare across long time horizons. If you think 1900 versus 2000. The problem is that there's differences in quantity, and there's differences in kind. And so, GDP tries to put this all-in-one dimension so you can have differences in quantity, maybe you're producing double the amount of stuff which will double the GDP. But most of the economic changes since 1900 or at least these are the most important economic changes are the differences in kind. We have all these new inventions that we can do different things and someone in 1900, even with infinite wealth, they couldn't have gotten antibiotics and the child would die of an infection. Think of how much they would have been willing to sacrifice to get the antibiotics to save the child. And so, this is one question where it would be nice to have a measure that is better able to quantitatively compare these differences in kind across time.
Ben Yeoh (1:22:10): That'd be a huge general-purpose invention, we could think about it, I always think about this in terms of healthcare, in terms of pain. We now have and had for some time, the ability to live the last say four weeks of our life, if we need to, essentially pain free. And if you look at it economically, we don’t value that very much at all such as the price of morphine or price aspirin. If you don't think about it...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:22:39): But we do spend a lot on healthcare.
Ben Yeoh (1:22:41): We do spend a lot on healthcare but I'm thinking specifically about the value of being pain-free. Whereas if you ask someone, or their family in their last four weeks of life, how much would you pay to die pain-free. You'd probably give up quite a lot of your wealth, at that point in time to do it and the value of pain doesn't really appear in GDP. I agree it appears in healthcare, but I think that one thing, which in the moment, you would value extremely highly, and probably would put a price on it, would generally not appear in any kind of economic climate statistics because of the way we measure the anchors. Translating pain into a dollar figure is hard.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:23:21): In general, prices in the economy represent, ideally, items like marginal costs or how hard is it...Water is very cheap. If you didn't have water, you'd be really screwed but they don't represent the consumer surplus or something similar. This is a critique sometimes [Inaudible: 1:23:35] lobbied against, how we measure the [Inaudible: 1:23:38] technology. Google is free to us and so there's a lot of value to get out of it. Maybe even the ad revenues are accounted in the GDP, but we get so much value out of Google, and it barely shows up. Now, again, though I think those critiques can be overstated, which is that if you think about the long run economic history. Most of the time, when you think about the inventions of the first half of the 20th century, for example women had to spend all their days carrying water and then we had running water, which alleviated dozens of hours a week of work. And so, running water only carries a very small amount of GDP. That wasn't captured either even though that was a huge quality of life improvement. So, we've always had these mismeasurement challenges. It's not clear to me that these mismeasurement challenges are unique thing now, and they can somehow explain the measured growth [Inaudible: 1:24:33]
Ben Yeoh (1:24:35): I get that they've always been about it. I do wonder about, not mismeasurement. I still can't get rid of having some general-purpose invention. One classic one for me is the double-blind trial phenomena. First, we could have invented it a lot earlier. In fact, there were signs 2000 years ago. They did think about it a little bit, but it didn't stick. That knowledge stayed in the past. And then, ships which had scurvy carried lemons or limes or oranges to prevent scurvy, and they double blind trial found it out. That didn't stick the first two or three times. That knowledge was lost. They knew a cure for scurvy which they lost and then they had to rediscover that. Then it did stick, and they realized that we could trial this and then it spread from healthcare medicine into even economics trials. Therefore, we've made discoveries, you wouldn't have been able to discover otherwise. So where do double blind trials fit into that and obviously you've got it in some way, it gets captured broadly in how we are thinking but I still think somehow, we missed some of that. And then why don't some of these things stick? I have no idea why that is because it's quite an obvious idea. A logical thinker, any of these philosophers, should have been able to think about this 2000 years ago, and make it stick as an experimental technique, but it didn't.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:00): A lot of the best ideas are like this. I think they are very different domains, but the best economic theory is stuff that you wouldn't have thought about. If you hadn't used the machinery of economic theory, you wouldn't have come up with this idea, but once you write down your models after you come up with this thing that is intuitive and makes a lot of sense. I also think a lot of the best ideas have this property that they seem obvious in retrospect, but maybe weren't too obvious at the beginning.
Ben Yeoh (1:26:26): No, exactly. Although [Cross talking 1:26:27].
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:28): You see it's easy to launch into this discussion of how GDP is measured. And so, this is what people always do. I think in general...
Ben Yeoh (1:26:35): So, you think it's underrated.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:38): Yeah, I think it's underrated because the conclusion people draw to these conclusions of why GDP is flawed is like GDP is worthless, but actually super valuable and actually quite indicative.
Ben Yeoh (1:26:48): Great, maybe the last couple then. Berlin, is this underrated or overrated?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:53): Overrated, very overrated. These people go there on vacation...
Ben Yeoh (1:26:57): You seem to view this as Germany overall, that's probably a better version...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:27:01): If you're an ambitious young person, you actually want to be productive, you want to create something completely, this is not the place to be. There are a few tech companies, but there's nothing there. You don't have that many smart, ambitious, hardworking young people. But then I would say this about all of Germany. No, Berlin has an interesting history, I will say that. So, going there and soaking in some of the history I think is nice. One thing I very much cherish about having grown up in Germany, is being connected to some of the history. It feels much more visceral. My parents grew up on opposite sides of the wall. My mother grew up in East Germany, my dad grew up in West Germany.
They met shortly after the fall of the wall. The whole fall of the wall, enter the Cold War, it feels very visceral to me that the Cold War and the very real possibility that this could have exploded, like the Berlin crisis could explode very early.
My great grandmother who's still alive, she was alive during World War Two. She was just outside of Dresden when Dresden was firebombed. And so, these are the stories that shall tell. I think it's quite valuable to have a sense of just how bad things can get. I think it was partially explained by some of my proclivity of interest in existential risk, and I think that's partially why I think that people very much underrate the risk of really bad conflict with China. I think it's quite plausible that we see a World War three style event in the next few decades. So, while people don't feel that people don't viscerally internalize that, I think it's quite important to viscerally internalize that.
Ben Yeoh (1:28:37): No, I think that makes a lot of sense. The guy who ended up inventing fertilizer by understanding the nitrogen cycle. Essentially, he invented it because he was starving from famine in one of the Great famines and he said I never want to see anyone go through that again so I'm going to dedicate my life to figuring this out, and he did, but it came from a very visceral sense of this could happen. Phantom Tyler thinks travel is quite important. I don't know about Berlin...maybe this could be my next question...
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:13): He might say underrated because people overall still underrate travelling.
Ben Yeoh (1:29:16): Travel but maybe not living in Berlin specifically. If I were to go to Germany or even Berlin or wherever. What do you think I should travel and do?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:26): Tyler spent a year in Germany already or maybe more than a year in his 20s, and I think he said that was hugely impactful for him.
Ben Yeoh (1:29:34): So maybe just living anywhere different.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:37): Yeah, like setting on his path that he's been doing now. So maybe he would say underrated.
Ben Yeoh (1:29:42): Maybe we'll have to ask him or maybe he'll comment. Say if I go to Germany, what should I experience? I guess I'm most interested in anything. Should I experience it culturally or maybe even food wise? But what should I do? I've got two weeks in Germany, or even longer, maybe we're going to live there longer, I don't know. What should I try? What's the best of Germany, we sort of critique, some of the bits that could be better but if I want to see the best of what Germany has to offer.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:30:09): I would travel to the former East; I don't think people do this enough. I think it's just very interesting and you also have a lot of weird things that are happening at the same time. For example, you have all these very nice infrastructures that they built right after the reunification, but then you also have these very ageing towns because all the young people left, and if possible, talking to the people is just interesting to get their experience. I think Berlin is worthwhile, the history is worthwhile.
Ben Yeoh (1:30:43): Okay. All right, so maybe....
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:30:45): I don't know if the food is that great. I wouldn't focus on the food.
Ben Yeoh (1:30:48): You wouldn't focus on the food. So, you're not a fan of sauerkraut? The two things I remember about German cuisine, maybe it's not a very good choice, is white Asparagus.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:01): White Asparagus is great.
Ben Yeoh (1:31:02): White Asparagus and, I can't even remember the German name of it, but basically stew glutinous knuckle. Pork knuckle.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:13): Okay.
Ben Yeoh (1:31:15): Obviously, that's not your thing.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:17): I'm vegetarian, I don't know. Maybe this is my problem.
Ben Yeoh (1:31:22): No, no I'll come to that. Maybe that's because Asian cuisines, Chinese cuisines are glutinous, gloopy and gelatinous. So that leads me greatly to my next question because I think probably my greatest moral failing is that I still eat animals. I know a lot of people in the Effective Altruists’ movement have ended up vegetarian and vegan from an ethical point of view, and I think, in my mind, that I agree. Cultural and other reasons I haven't got there yet but every year I cut out another thing. I think last year, I can't eat octopus anymore, because they seem too clever and too close to what maybe something might be, even if that's that. But is that how you come to it? Do you think that maybe how we view animals is something that we don't think about enough and I think this is maybe one of the things that EA has, well at least brought to my attention? It was always simmering there in the background but might be something that they’ve added to their canon.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:32:22): I'm a big fan of two things. I'm a big fan of habits and I'm a big fan of if you're going to cut something out basically cut it out completely, instead of trying to sort of just reduce it. I think people are bad at moderation, so this goes for other things for example, Netflix. People tell themselves, "Oh I'm going to watch less Netflix." Never happens. And if they have a habit of Netflix, they're going to keep doing it. Whereas if you want to change a habit...
Ben Yeoh (1:32:42): [Inaudible: 01:32:42].
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:32:46): Exactly. If you can change a habit, it's very hard initially but once it becomes a habit, it becomes very automatic, and you don't have to think about it. With alcohol I think sometimes people tell themselves they'll drink less alcohol, but every time they go to a party they start drinking and they'll drink a lot. The same thing applies to vegetarianism or that's how I got started. I basically don't think about it, it's just a habit. I've had it for about seven-ish years, something like that, along time. I don't think about it.
Ben Yeoh (1:33:18): Before you moved to the US?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:33:21): Yeah, a long time. In general, I think it's valuable to think about things once, decide and not have that been the habit. Now would I do it again? Nowadays, I don't know. I think that I've become almost to an extent too total utilitarian and this idea is something like if we didn't eat animals, none of these farmed animals would exist because the counterfactuals are not that farmed animals live a happy life. They just don't exist at all. And so, to the extent that you think some of these farmed animals probably live not great lives but lives that are still above zero utility, lives that are somewhat worth living. It's not actually clear if not eating meat and not existing is good. For example, cows get to go out on the grass. It seems like a decent life. So, I think it might be sort of not negative to be vegetarian. At this point, it’s a habit so I won't think about it.
Ben Yeoh (1:34:26): I think that's interesting. I think we mentioned right at the beginning that maybe some of the critiques of where EA thinkers get to. One of the ones I hear is that sometimes their thinking is too far away from what people might say is common sense, morality, this idea that effective giving and we can do it more effectively for saving the child's life in Africa. I could see that at the margin, but most people would say well I want to give to my own community or something first because it's closest to me, and I see that. I think that makes a lot of sense to people. I was wondering what you thought about that and whether there were any other aspects of EA that you think are misunderstood or maybe taken too far.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:35:10): EA in its current form is not suited as, if everyone started believing in EA right now it would not be suitable. For example, the local community support. I think it's good to have people be involved in their local communities, give to charity, etc... That sort of basic social ordering system. But if you're the small group of EA, on the margin is it the best thing to give to your local community back? No. So, you want to think about what's most effective on the margin. There I think EA is completely right and what some people call common sense morality, other EAs might call it not actually trying to think things through. I think it's valuable. You see this with the FDA during the pandemic, where they're trying to follow their standard ways of doing things by maybe not approving AstraZeneca, or by not approving first doses first, or by not approving tests. But these are just completely unsuited for the pandemic. They're just not making the expected value calculation and you have to make the expected value calculation.
Ben Yeoh (1:36:19): They don't do that, although to be fair or showing that it's maybe not in their mandate, but they certainly don't seem to be doing that.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:36:29):
You mean the FDA? Of course, it's their mandate. Their mandate is to do the best regulations for the welfare of the people,
Ben Yeoh (1:36:35): I'm not sure if it's in their actual mandate. Well, this is a problem [Inaudible: 1:36:38].
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:36:39): Well, this is their responsibility. It's a pandemic, it's a public health emergency. They're key people and they're making it all worse. So, their mandate is not to have insane bureaucratic procedures that they follow no matter what, this is not their mandate. Their mandate is to do what's best for the people. And so, for that you need [1:37:00 inaudible]
Ben Yeoh (1:37:01): That's definitely what their theoretical mandate would be. I'm not a defender of the FDA but I think that is maybe what they would think.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:37:09): It is interesting to consider what we would make an EA look like that could spread it as a religion to everybody. I mentioned this at the very beginning, in some ways EA defuncts religion for example with the career advice, but people keep questioning it in some ways that undermines the motivation. EA seems surprisingly anti-natal, a lot of people don't want to have kids, or they have a weird reasoning about how I can have a better impact if I work instead of having children. I don't even know if that's a correct argument, but definitely if we wanted to spread EA as a religion, then it needs to be much more pro-natal to encourage people to have kids. It's a very important value. In general, if you think about which groups are going to win out in the future, there's a whole interesting argument that it's going to be fundamentalist religious groups because they have the highest fertility rates. They're also pretty heritable because they're fundamentalists, so people stay in the religion. You think Israel, Orthodox Jews used to be a very small percentage of the population and now they're 30% of elementary school aged kids because they've had much higher fertility rates and then the rest of the population.
Ben Yeoh (1:38:23): And they can defend themselves, whereas 2000 years ago, Romans would wipe you out if you were a cult and you weren't going to assimilate. But today we don't wipe you out more or less so actually you grow.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:38:33): Thank God. I don't know if this will actually continue. For example, Mormon fertility rates have been falling, and they're still somewhat above two but they're not that far above two anymore. So, the Mormons used to have this big fertility advantage and grow quickly and it's not clear if that's the case anymore. So, I will be somewhat sceptical of some of these long-term predictions that like "Oh, like the Amish or religious people are going to take over the world." But I do think it's actually an underrated component of who would...If you're thinking about the trajectory long term trajectory of human civilization, who determines the future? What are the values that are going to survive? What the different groups' fatality rates are, is quite important and liberalism fatality rate is low and falling.
Ben Yeoh (1:39:21): Existential risk to liberalism-particular humans in general.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:39:25): No but seriously, right?
Ben Yeoh (1:39:27): Yeah, I could see that. Thinking on the EA thing on donations, I think at the margin that decision framework to think about how you're going to donate, and not enough people do, do that. Although, therefore I came around to micro grants because slightly, my theory is we're going to have some of these ideas generated by individuals or individuals with projects and there's not enough funding going into that, which is essentially some of the Emergent Venture type of stuff. But I think if we're not going to think about it and default to giving well or whatever, because if you just want to spend 30 seconds thinking about it, then don't because someone else has thought about it for you and this would be effective.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:40:06): I think EA has a bit of a problem about not being weird enough. They are very weird in certain ways, but they're sort of weird in homogenous ways in their community. So initially the big thing was to give well and effective donations. The problem with that was probably too oriented things that you could quantify, and then people realize now the big thing is long termism, and we should care about existential risk. These are very worthy causes, but I think there's almost too many people marching in lockstep and I think you want to diversify a bit more or you want to fund your things which is exactly why you're doing it, we're trying to do what Tyler Cowen is doing. And I think that's [Inaudible: 1:40:43].
Ben Yeoh (1:40:44): Although homogeneity could probably be quite good if we want it to be a religion. So maybe that's the way.
[Cross talking: 1:40:49].
Ben Yeoh (1:40:52): Slightly in jest but yes.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:41:00): I think maybe you need to have enough epistemic humility to recognize that. Even EA has already shifted a lot of priorities so to some extent we should be encouraging diverse and weird things. I think to some extent EA is doing that. I think something like Emergent Ventures or micro grants is a good idea.
Ben Yeoh (1:41:19): I was thinking of one of the critiques I've read, although I have to admit I didn't fully understand from Amia Srinivasan who's a philosopher and now at All Souls College. One of the critiques did seem to centre around the fact that it did seem quite homogenous to her as a group of thinking, although she also had other things which she talked about on it.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:41:40): Maybe homogenous is the wrong word, in some way weirdly unambitious. EA has these non-profit research institutes about existential risk, and these are great, but it seems sometimes for some EAs, this is the end all be all. It's like, "We want to fund non-profits." And sometimes EA says something like "We're not funding [Inaudible: 1:41:58] anymore. We have enough money, we're not [Inaudible:1:42:02]." I say, yes you have enough money to fund your little non-profit...
Ben Yeoh (1:42:07): But you're not saving the world.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:42:08): Yeah, you're not saving the world yet and it's you're being unambitious. So, I think EA in a weird way is a bit European. It's founded by the Brits, also Australians maybe, some are in the middle. And they have this scepticism or pessimism about technology being embedded and the lack of ambitiousness.
Ben Yeoh (1:42:41): Great. I could go on for a long time but I'm going to try and do these last three questions for you on that. We can do another part two someday. I'm just going to ask, what does a productive Leopold day look like? Are there any things about personal productivity or maybe productivity you, see? I was quite taken by the fact that you thought, coming to the US, there was this work ethic conscientious thing. I also see this were Chinese students, so anyone who's really studied in China, and they come to Europe, and they meet Europeans, they can't believe how little Europeans worked from the age of four to 21. I was probably a little bit in the middle but even I look at that Chinese work ethic and go, oh my god you were studying from 7 to 7 in the day, six days a week right, from the age of 4 to 21. That's a lot more studying than the average Western. But anyway, what does a productive Leopold day look like?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:43:43): To be clear, I don't want to glorify rogue studying. This goes back to being valedictorian efficient, that's not actually the best thing to do.
Ben Yeoh (1:43:53): Would it be better if you could be more independent led and not have to take all these courses?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:43:56): Being independent and creative. You don't want to just be studying for the Gaokao. You want to be creating a start-up. I think the general thing of the US is people are driven, they're ambitious, and instead of this being cut down, people are encouraged to do it. They dedicate their lives to really creating something and I think that's admirable. In terms of productivity, I don't think I have great tips. I would encourage people to read a lot. A key part of continuing to be productive is taking out a lot of time to read, even if during the time you're reading you're not reading a lot. Then, I think one thing I struggle with, but a lot of people struggle with, is minimizing digital distractions. But I don't have any good answers.
Ben Yeoh (1:44:36): Great. And do you have any advice for young people, people your age or maybe a little older starting university or just getting into university, about what they should think about doing with their lives? I'm guessing be weird, follow research questions which aren’t as researched. I don't know if you have anything else you want to add.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:44:58): Maybe write a blog, or good Twitter but ideally a blog. I think you'll end up meeting a lot of interesting people on the internet this way. It forces you to develop your thoughts. Somewhat ironic I'm saying this since I've been somewhat delinquent on my blog because I've been spending too much [time] on the end of semester, but I realized this too late. I think this can be quite valuable and I think you need to just apply yourself. Figure out something to do and apply yourself and figure out something to do that isn't just studying for your classes.
Ben Yeoh (1:45:34): Great. I'm going to end with a couple of...I guess these are philosophical questions. Plato Socrates asks, how should you live? Have you had any thoughts on that, partly because of your long termism and everything else? Would you have an answer for how we should live? While you dwell on that, I think it's a little bit intertwined, for instance, to what it is to be a human being. What could you hope for, what should you do? It ties back to the original one, deciding a career. What should we do?
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:18): Find something that gives you meaning, whether that's making this long-term imagination come true, whether it's family and children, whether it's being engaged in your community through church. I think the biggest downfall of modern civilization is that people lose all sense of meaning.
Ben Yeoh (1:46:42): Meaning and connections.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:43): And it's like a hedonistic treadmill.
Ben Yeoh (1:46:46): Great. Well, I think that's a really great place to end so Leopold, thank you very much.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:56): Thank you so much. This was great.