If you want to improve the world as much as possible, what should you do with your career? Should you become a doctor, an engineer or a politician? Should you try to end global poverty, climate change, or international conflict? These are the questions that the research group, 80,000 Hours tries to answer. They try to figure out how individuals can set themselves up to help as many people as possible in as big a way as possible.

To learn more about their research, Ariel invited Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer of 80,000 Hours to the FLI podcast. In this podcast we discuss "earning to give", building career capital, the most effective ways for individuals to help solve the world's most pressing problems -- including artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and climate change. If you're interested in tackling these problems, or simply want to learn more about them, this podcast is the perfect place to start.

80,000 Hours with Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer

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How are we to make progress on AI alignment given moral uncertainty?  What are the ideal ways of resolving conflicting value systems and views of morality among persons? How ought we to go about AI alignment given that we are unsure about our normative and metaethical theories? How should preferences be aggregated and persons idealized in the context of our uncertainty? 

Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill is the fifth podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, this series will be covering and exploring the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. Broadly, we will be having discussions with technical and non-technical researchers across areas such as machine learning, AI safety, governance, coordination, ethics, philosophy, and psychology as they pertain to the project of creating beneficial AI. If this sounds interesting to you, we hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, or your preferred podcast site/application.

If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.

In this podcast, Lucas spoke with William MacAskill. Will is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and is a co-founder of the Center for Effective Altruism, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours. Will helped to create the effective altruism movement and his writing is mainly focused on issues of normative and decision theoretic uncertainty, as well as general issues in ethics.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Will’s current normative and metaethical credences
-The value of moral information and moral philosophy
-A taxonomy of the AI alignment problem
-How we ought to practice AI alignment given moral uncertainty
-Moral uncertainty in preference aggregation
-Moral uncertainty in deciding where we ought to be going as a society
-Idealizing persons and their preferences
-The most neglected portion of AI alignment

AIAP: Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill

Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society about what people want and how to make it. 

But when it comes to politics and voting - which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals - the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs often turns to skepticism. 

Today's guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won't have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them. Just last year he wrote Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society with Eric Posner, but has already moved on, saying "in the 6 months since the book came out I've made more intellectual progress than in the whole 10 years before that." 

Weyl believes we desperately need more efficient, equitable and decentralised ways to organise society, that take advantage of what each person knows, and his research agenda has already been making breakthroughs. 

<a href="https://80k.link/glen-weyl-episode">Links to learn more, summary and full transcript</a> 

<a href="https://80k.link/glen-weyl-job-board">Our high impact job board</a> 

<a href="https://80k.link/glen-weyl-newsletter" target="_blank">Join our newsletter</a> 

Despite a history in the best economics departments in the world - Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago - he is too worried for the future to sit in his office writing papers. Instead he has left the academy to try to inspire a social movement, <a href="https://80k.link/glen-weyl-radicalxchange">RadicalxChange</a>, with a vision of social reform as expansive as his own. 

<a href="https://80k.link/glen-weyl-radicalxchange">You can sign up for their conference in Detroit in March here</a> 

Economist Alex Tabarrok called his latest proposal, known as 'liberal radicalism', "a quantum leap in public-goods mechanism-design" - we explain how it works in the show. But the proposal, however good in theory, might struggle in the real world because it requires large subsidies, and compensates for people's selfishness so effectively that it might even be an overcorrection. 

An earlier mechanism - 'quadratic voting' (QV) - would allow people to express the relative strength of their preferences in the democratic process. No longer would 51 people who support a proposal, but barely care about the issue, outvote 49 incredibly passionate opponents, predictably making society worse in the process. We explain exactly how in the episode. 

Weyl points to studies showing that people are more likely to vote strongly not only about issues they *care* more about, but issues they *know* more about. He expects that allowing people to specialise and indicate when they know what they're talking about will create a democracy that does more to aggregate careful judgement, rather than just passionate ignorance. 

But these and indeed all of Weyl's ideas have faced criticism. Some say the risk of unintended consequences is too great, or that they solve the wrong problem. Others see these proposals as unproven, impractical, or just another example of an intellectual engaged in grand social planning. I raise these concerns to see how he responds. 

As big a topic as all of that is, this extended conversation also goes into the blockchain, problems with the effective altruism community and how auctions could replace private property. Don't miss it. 

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type '80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app. 

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

#52 - Prof Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society

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#52 - Prof Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society

The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin

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