My top 10 picks from 200 episodes of the 80k podcast

By JWS 🔸 @ 2024-09-09T19:27 (+128)

Intro

I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast is a great show. Despite the world of podcasts overflowing with content to choose from, it's reliably been a high-quality production that's been a regular part of my listening habits ever since I discovered it. It was also probably one of the first routes I become more aware of the EA community, which I suspect I might not be alone by.^[1]

So, as the podcast numbers ticked up, the vague idea to write up a post shouting out some of my favourite episodes took root. I didn't get far with it from there, and now the unreasonable effectiveness of the 80k podcast production team has forced my hand! So in the post I'm going to link to my 10 favourite episodes, along with some final thoughts at the end.

I hope to share with you some of my favourite episodes, but I want to be clear that this is my list and not any sort of official ranking. If there's a really good episode that your surprised isn't on there, it may well because I haven't listened to that one yet! So, without any further ado, here's the Top 10 List:

My Top 10

10-4

10: #144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe

While the podcast's title is nominally about cancer, I think the ideas in the podcast actually hint towards Autopoiesis, something I think connects a bunch of different causes I care about. I wasn't really aware of many of the things that Athena and Rob discuss in the episode so I found the discussing incredibly interesting, especially about how the concepts of growth, maintenance, and co-operation appear at many different levels in the universe.

9: #175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

LEEP is probably one of the key EA success stories in recent years but hearing it through Lucia's own words and her own story, from CE incubation to actually bringing the results of lead concentration to the Malawi Ministry of Health, was really inspiring to hear. There's also some good discussion about the 10% Pledge and the age-old Randomista v Growth debate in the episode too.

8: #139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

This was another excellent episode where Rob and an incredbily smart, engaging guest got to do a deep dive into an idea and see where it went. I think Professor Hájek did a fantastic job sharing his knowledge in an enlightening way, and he really showcased a number of limits of expect value calculations (not least the realisation the probability(0) events can and do happen all the time) which left my mind blown in a good way.

7: #153 – Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent work

GiveWell looms large in the world of EA, so to get the CEO to come on the podcast and talk in this detail was great to see. I found Elie both an engaging guest and a persuasive interlocutor when he and Rob get into debates, and this definitely didn't seem like a softball interview to me. The Randomista v Growth section (at 02:20:00) is really good on this, and I wish Rob had actually put himself on the line a bit more since he clearly has a lot of sympathy with the 'Growth' side of the debate.

6: #129 – Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

This podcast comes in at over 3 hours, but still I found it flying by as a listener.  The topics range from the specific work of Maleria Consortium, the overall landscape of the battle against Malaria, as well as James' own story, including fighting off the disease himself. There's some much rich discussion that it feels like any of these could have been an episode on its own, so to get all 3-in-1 firmly puts this as one of the best episodes I can remember. 

5: #185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals

Over recent years the issue of Animal Welfare, and especially the potential ongoing moral catastrophe of factory farming, has mattered more and more to me. So listening to this episode when it came out had a strong impact on me. I actually had to stop what I was doing while listening to just take in what Lewis was saying, about the scale and callousness with which we treat farmed animals, and why it's so important to gain knowledge of how to mitigate and hopefully one day eliminate it. (The episode would also make an extra rough double-bill with Episode #182 on Moral Weights).

4: #67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

As soon as I thought of the idea for this post, this episode popped into my head. The older I've got the more Chalmers-sympathetic I've got on the topic of consciousness, and he does skewer Rob particular on the Vulcan thought experiment in this episode, but throughout it he shows clarity of ideas. It's nearly five hours and throughout it all Chalmers is super smart and on-the-ball.  It's just a fantastic, idea-dense episode. Plus, a few days after I first listened to the podcast, I had an experience of anattā, so maybe it'll do the same for you.

Top 3

3: #43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, & how they could be dismantled

I think this is one of the earliest episodes I remember listening to (though I have relistened to it at least once), and it's always stuck with me. I think Nuclear War is one of the first ways many people grapple with the ideas of catastrophic and even existential risk. Ellsberg's testimony here is equal parts gripping, enlightening, and terrifying, and to my mind also argues for why Improving Institutional Decision-making should be a key piece of all x-risk efforts.  

2: #145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

The discussion of the importance of ideas when societies were malleable, and the risks of 'lock-in', was one of my favourite parts of WWOTF. This episode tackles a historical case study, that of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Brown is simply terrific as a guest, and provides a clear and cogent that the ideas and moral debate on this issue actually mattered, and it wasn't just due to inevitable march of history. In the end, the strongest signal that I think this episode is great is that I've recommended it to friends and family who know nothing about 80k or EA at all, just because I think it's so high quality.

1: #100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome

I'd guess that many of you might have suspected this episode would end up as the #1, but it's simply deserved. Howie's honesty and openness throughout the episode, but especially on recounting some dark times, hit pretty close to me as someone who has gone through related times (though never to the extent that Howie experienced), and I think such experiences are sadly not uncommon in the EA community. I think this episode's grace, honestly, bravery, and ability to make the listener reflect on important personal choices and directions makes it stand out even amongst 199 other episodes to choose from.

Final Thoughts

Honourable Mentions

There are way more than 10 good episodes on the show, but I had to draw a line somewhere. Even so, I wanted to highlight 3 episodes which very nearly made the Top 10, but didn't quite in the end.

#52 – Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better, and how to get them

Ok, so, I'm not putting this on the honourable mentions not because it's actually because it's one of the best episodes, or my favourites, but because it contains perhaps the major thing I think episodes of the 80k podcast lack the most - an honest-to-goodness disagreement between the host (Rob in this case) and the guest, and a proper back-and-forth about it (specifically, the "Critiques of effective altruism" section). Sure, it didn't really resolve this time, but I don't think that having more discussions like this where strong disagreements are brought out in the open and not lightly touched on/brushed over.

#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all

This one very nearly made the Top 10 list. The whole discussion of global catastrophes is thorough, covers the issue from many interesting angles, and also provides great examples to boot (such as the ingenuity of Bosnians finding ways to generate electricty while being under siege). And even after all of that, you get a 2-for-the-price-of-1 as there's a whole separate discussion about Luisa's own journey to impact and how that led her to find her biological father, which I found very moving.

#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

In a really funny turn of events, I actually read Professor Schwitzgebel's paper barely a week or so before I listened to this, so it was a pleasant surprise to see the topic pop up on the feed! I think Eric & Luisa have a great répartie in this episode as guest and host, Luisa is admirably open about which of Eric's thought experiments challenged her own intuitions, and 2 hours simply flew by as listener.

But JWS, where are the AI episodes?

Ok so, having got here and seen 13 out of 200 episodes highlighted, there's an obvious question to ask. Where are all the AI episodes? Surely some of them should have made the list. The honest answer here is personal preference and perspective. I work in ML and AI, so the conversations on these topics are perhaps in areas I am more familiar with, and less likely to be 'mind blowing'. Even more than that though, over the last couple of years I have generally found myself swimming against the tide in EA regarding AI risk.^[2]

So when I listen to these episodes, I often feel like the guest and the host (be it Rob or Luisa) implicitly agree on most of the cruxes of AI already, and don't really interrogate them. An example that's always struck with me is the episode with Tom Davidson, where at the very beginning he says "I think like 1,000x improvement in the AIs’ capabilities in a year is a natural, kind of conservative default." When I heard this, I immediately thought "excuse me wtf? this wildly implausible claim makes me doubt everything about your thesis please justify it" and I kept waiting for the whole episode for the pushback from Luisa on this point, but it never came.^[3]

So recently I've found myself not finishing, or even skipping, some of the AI episodes. I see the guests, think I can guess the general perspectives they and Rob/Luisa will take on AI, and don't think it'll add too much to my knowledge of the topic. If there are particular episodes that you think this is particularly incorrect about, then please let me know! But I'd really like to see Rob interview someone like Melanie Mitchell or Jeremy Howard who have serious disagreements with the in-house 80k view on AI timelines, risks, and responses, and have proper hammer-and-tongs disagreement about it, Weyl-style. I think some directional examples of this sort of thing would be Francois Chollet on the Dwarkesh Podcast, or Ryan Greenblatt on Machine Learning Street Talk.

Epilogue

Despite my personal disinclination to the recent AI-themed episodes, the 80k podcast still remains one of the most thought-provoking podcasts I listen to. There are many more excellent discussions beyond the 13 listed here that made earlier versions of this post, and it's a credit to the team that they've kept up an engaging, long-form interview format for over 200 episodes and still find new and interesting topics to discuss on the show.

On reflection, it seems that the episodes which have stuck with me the most are those that combine a discussion of important ideas that are often novel to me, but also include a personal connection from the host as well. However, that may not be the same for you, so if you disagree, or want to shout out other episodes, please add them below. 

So I'll sign off with a final thank you to the 80,000 Hours podcast team: Here's to another 200 episodes of unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems, and what you can do to solve them.

1. ^{^}

   I remember listening to some of the early episodes with Phil Tetlock in 2018 when I was really into his work. I think I came back to the podcast in 2021 though, and hard rotation began around episode #96.

2. ^{^}

   I won't go into it in this post, though I do want to write it up someday. The best places I can point to for my perspective at the moment is this quick take, and this post.

3. ^{^}

   This is the most clear example in my mind, but not the only one. I remember listening to the episode about AI deception with Ajeya Cotra and coming away unconvinced about the assumption that default methods would lead to this form of deception.