Who should we interview for The 80,000 Hours Podcast?

Jeff Sebo on his work launching multiple EA-aligned programs at NYU that advance and legitimize "fridge" causes, including the Wild Animal Welfare Program and the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program. Jeff is also a great presenter, and many students describe him as their favorite professor.

Sampled from my areas of personal interest, and not intended to be at all thorough or comprehensive:

AI researchers (in no particular order):

• Prof. Jacob Steinhardt: author of multiple fascinating pieces on forecasting AI progress and contributor/research lead on numerous AI safety-relevant papers.
• Dan Hendrycks: director of the multi-faceted and hard-to-summarize research and field-building non-profit CAIS.
• Prof. Sam Bowman: has worked on many varieties of AI safety research at Anthropic and NYU
• Ethan Perez: researcher doing fascinating work to display and address misalignments in today’s AIs.
• Toby Shevlane: Model Evaluations for Extreme Risks
• Jess Whittlestone: head of AI policy at Center for Long-Term Resilience, much research here
• Plenty of others: Jade Leung (AI governance and evaluations at OpenAI), Prof. David Krueger (varied AI safety research), Prof. Percy Liang (evaluating models), Prof. Roger Grosse (influence functions for interpretability), many others listed here. 

Economists who have written (esp. but not only deflationary arguments contra Davidson) on AI’s economic impact:

• Chad Jones (see here)
• Ben Jones (see e.g. this, but also all his research)
• Matt Clancy (see this debate, though an episode with him should also address his non-AI work as well!)
• Daron Acemoglu (see Power and Progress)
• Maybe other reviewers here?

Ethicists:

• Iason Gabriel: has worked both on critiques of effective altruism, AI evaluations (extreme risks, representation), and normative questions related to AI alignment. This excellent FLI interview had so many ideas that would be great to explore in more depth.
• David Thorstad: has written critiques of existential risk reduction and longtermism.
• Emma Curran: author of contractualist reply to longtermism

The three I would personally be most excited to listen to: Toby Shevlane, Matt Clancy, Iason Gabriel.

Nate Silver on his takes on EA

Charity Entrepreneurship

Following the episode with Mustafa, it would be great to interview the founders of leading AI labs - perhaps Dario (Anthropic) [again], Sam (OpenAI), or Demis (DeepMind). Or alternatively, the companies that invest / support them - Sundar (Google) or Satya (Microsoft).

It seems valuable to elicit their honest opinions^[1] about "p(doom)", timelines, whether they believe they've been net-positive for the world, etc.

1. ^{^}

   I think one risk here is either:

   a) not challenging them firmly enough - lending them undue credibility / legitimacy in the minds of listeners

   b) challenging them too strongly - reducing willingness to engage, less goodwill, etc

Anna Christina Thorsheim, ED and co-founder of Family Empowerment Media.

Good to interview on charity incubation, reproductive choice, working with local partners as an outsider.

Some of the scholars who've worked on Insects or Decapod and Pain/Sentience (Jonathan Birch, Meghan Barrett, Lars Chittika etc)

Bob Fischer on comparing interspecies welfare

Someone who runs or has built a medium to large location-identified EA community but isn't based in the UK or the Bay Area (e.g. Germany, New York, London, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Poland, Australia, Israel, UAE, Mexico)

Jason Matheny

• Owain Evans on AI alignment (situational awareness in LLM, benchmarking truthfulness)
• Ben Garfinkel on AI policy (best practices in AI governance, open source, the UK's AI efforts)
• Anthony Aguirre on AI governance, forecasting, cosmology
• Beth Barnes on dangerous capability evals (GPT-4's and Claude's eval)

• Carl Shulman (again), his interviews on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast were incredible, and there seems to be potential for more
• Vaclav Smil, who appears to be very knowledgeable, with a comprehensive model of the entire world. His books are filled with facts.
• Lukas Finnveden about his blogposts on the altruistic implications of Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds
• Some employee of MIRI who is not Yudkowsky. I suggest
  • Tsvi Benson-Tilsen (blog), who has appeared on at least one podcast which I liked. Has looked into human intelligence enhancement and a variety of other problems such as communication. Generally has longer AI timelines.
  • Or Scott Garrabrant, but I don't know how interesting his interview would be for a nontechnical audience.
• Another interview on wild animal welfare, perhaps with someone from Wild Animal Initiative.
  • Perhaps invite Brian Tomasik on the podcast?
• Romeo Stevens (blog) mainly for his approach to his career: Founded a startup to support himself early on, and is now independent. Doesn't tend to write his ideas down, here's an interview which details some of his ideas.

John Nkengasong, US Global AIDS Coordinator, former first Director of the African CDC, and professional virologist.

Good to interview on PEPFAR (which is a Big Deal), efforts to address the global burden of disease by local, bilateral, and multilateral funders and other actors. 

Johannes Haushofer (and / or colleagues), President and CEO at Malengo, and Professor of Economics at Stockholm University.

Good to interview on cash transfers, supporting immigration, experience of moving from academic work to social entrepreneurship. Broadly familiar with effective altruism and may have useful reflections on that too. 

Matt Clancy, Research Fellow in Metascience at Open Philanthropy, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress, and author of New Things Under the Sun, a living literature review of what academia knows (and doesn't know) about innovation

Good to interview on making science better, progress studies, and frontier growth (whilst having an understanding of longtermist concerns with technological safety)

More country-specific content could be really interesting. I'd be interested in broad interviews covering:

• China - economic projections, expert views and disagreement on stability of CCP, tech progress, info on public opinion about US/West, demographic challenges, entrepreneurship, etc. (not sure he'd be the best person to cover all this, but maybe Kaiser Kuo?)
• India - whether high growth rates can be sustained, Sino-Indian relations, complexity of India's diplomatic relationships with Russia and US, challenges and stability of world's largest democracy, intra-country variation in culture and economic structure, Indian human capital and tech talent + plausibility of India becoming an AI power in next few decades
• Same for other emerging powers - maybe Nigeria and Indonesia
• A whole episode on semiconductors and supply chains, including role of countries like South Korea, Japan, and Singapore

It would be cool to have someone with experience in startups who also knows a decent amount about EA because many insights from running a successful startup might apply to people working to ambitiously solve neglected and important problems. Maybe Patrick Collison? 

The 80k podcast has good reach inside and outside the EA Community. It can be used to signal-boost lesser known ideas, co-ordinate on important ones, but I think it's also important to use it to expose EAs to good faith criticisms of our commonly-held positions too.

As such, I'd like to nominate Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor of Complexity at the Sante Fe Institute. Forum users might know her for taking the Con side on the recent Munk Debate on Artifical Intelligence. Melanie is a highly qualified AI scientist, literally writing the textbook on Genetic Algorithms, and is a sceptic of the likelihood of Strong AI emerging soon and thus the case of AI xRisk.

I expect many EAs, and many users of the Forum, to disagree with her. That's absolutely your right! But I think it's important for the AIXR community to listen to its sceptics, identify cruxes with them, and be a willing participant in that dialogue. For example, while I'm more concerned about AIXR than Melanie, I found her recent article summarising the debate on LLM understanding was an absolutely fantastic framing of the issue, well worth reading, and would be a fantastic starting point for a discussion between her sceptical perspective, and Rob (who I believe is much more AIXR concerned).

I know that the episode with Glen Weyl might have limited the desire for this kind of thing, but I still think good-faith dialogue like this critically important for truth-seeking.

Me

Kevin Esvelt

David Milliband, CEO of IRC, for an EA-adjacent view on how to be most effective in global health.

David can speak to why he doesn't just follow EA orthodoxy in running a very large development org with a massive budget. These reasons might prove to be good or bad or just thought-provoking

Oliver Habryka

David Pearce on the seriousness of suffering, paradise engineering, and negative utilitarianism.

David Goldberg. He's the founder of one of the most successful EA organisations, but I've never seen him talk about it in public.

Lars Doucet! He's a winner of an ACX Book Review Contest based on his review of 19th century economist Henry George's works on economic incentives for fair natural resource allocation. A stable society makes every x-risk much more tractable 😉

https://www.gameofrent.com/

I'd love an episode on s-risks (although I'm not sure who would be best to invite on).

Daron Acemoglu (economics legend, recent book Power and Progress on big picture technological progress)

Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at the Atlantic focused on housing and infrastructure development and visiting Fellow at Center for Economy and Society.  

Good to interview on YIMBY movement and American infrastructure.

Tom Chivers, science writer at Semafor and author of The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

Good to interview as someone who is broadly familiar with rationalist / x-risk / EA communities but not an active party. 

A debate format on whether nuclear winter is possible / likely (Robock v Reisner?)

Someone knowledgeable about

• Wild Animal Welfare (Please help me suggest a name)
• Animal Sentience (Rethink Priorities? - please help me suggest a name)
• Intersection between Animal Welfare and AI Alignment/governance (Please help me suggest a name)

David Thorstad (Reflective Altruism/GPI/Vanderbilt) Tyler John (Longview) Rory Stewart (GiveDirectly)

I'd love to hear novelist and YouTuber John Green talk about how he decided to start fundraising for Partners in Health's maternity hospital, his campaign to reduce the cost of TB vaccines and tests, and his thoughts on EA

I would love to see more catastrophic resilience interview after a string of AI safety interviews. Perhaps volcanologists and nuclear security folks:

Mike Cassidy: Associate Professor in Volcanology, authored the best fallout post here.

Follow up with ALLFED and David Denkenberger.

Emad Kiyaei and Kolfinna Tómasdóttir: Setting up an AI risk in Nuclear Weapon civil consortium...

Dominic Roser on Christians in Effective Altruism

Katja Grace on AI is not an arms race, the case for and against pushing for slower AI progress, and the AI impacts survey.
 

Connor Leahy - CEO of Conjecture, an AI Safety startup. You're gonna get a lot of valuable hot takes from him.

Rob Miles - AI Safety YouTuber, although recently he's been busy with other stuff.

Dawn Drescher - CEO of ImpactMarkets, so knowledgeable about funding in the EA/AI Safety space, but also great person to talk to about a lot of stuff.

Oliver Habryka - LW Admin

Perrin Walker - aka SolenoidEntity, the voice behind SSC/ACX podcast and many other projects

Karl von Wendt aka Karl Olsberg - German sci-fi writer, educating the German public about AI X-risks

Kelsey Piper - no intro needed

Geoffrey Hinton ans/or Yoshua Bengio - likewise

Christian Ruhl on nuclear risk and analyzing nuclear risk from an EA perspective (full disclosure: Christian is a colleague of mine).

Christine Korsgaard on Kantian Approaches to animal welfare/ about her recent-ish book 'Fellow Creatures'

An updated interview with Rachel Glennerster! Even though she's obviously a legend in international development, I had a fascinating conversation with her earlier this year about longtermism and how she holds space/concern for both immediate needs and longtermism. 

Richard Fisher could be an interesting one, author of the recent 'The Long View'

Andrew Youn, founder of One Acre Foundation and co-founder of D-Prize. 

Good to interview on social entrepreneurship, working in low-income contexts as an outsider, experience of being a (small) GiveWell grantee, engaging billionaires and other donors with working to support the world's poorest people, and agricultural productivity improvement.

Madhu Pai, MD and epidemiology professor focused on tuberculosis

Good to interview on tuberculosis, why it hasn't been addressed to the same extent as other health conditions, what individuals, funders, and governments could do to reduce the burden; and on what effective altruists or others focused on cost-effectiveness might be missing in their current models of doing good.

Stefan Dercon, author of Gambling on Development, IMV the best book on development economics published this year, former DFID Chief Economist and FCDO Policy Advisor, currently at Blavatnik School in Oxford. 

Good to interview on why some countries grow and some don't, and what both insiders and outsiders might be able to do about it

 

Joel McGuire from HLI (gave two great talks at EAGxBoston and EAGxNYC)

Someone on atomically precise manufacturing: A "big if true" thing that is floating around EA but never really tackled head on. I don't know how good Eric Drexler is on podcasts, but he'd be an obvious candidate.

Or whatever person wrote this report.

Someone both with deep knowledge of colonial history and a good understdaning of EA. 

Especially in EA work on global health and poverty, I think it would be interesting to see if there are lessons from history we might want to look more into. Some, or perhaps  many narratives during colonial times sounded a bit like current sentiments about modernization and free markets. I think an interview with such a person would broaden EA discussions and perspectives as I do not think many EAs are aware of differences and similarities between our work and development work dating back to colonial times.

I find Jaron Lanier's thoughts on the impacts of tech development interesting and probably controversial in EA circles. 

Daron Acemoglu is a known growth economist, and he has recently published a new book and had an interesting episode with Rhys Lindmark. 

I also remember following Vinay Gupta a while back, and that he had interesting opinions on civilizational resilience (say, here). He was also involved with Ethereum, and is doing blockchain stuff, not sure what.

Generally, I'm interested in more discussion with people in communities  or ideas that could be EA-adjacent but there isn't a lot of (visible) overlap at the moment. Say, leftist economists, blockchain, metascience, or virtue-ethicists.

Some weak (not necessarily endorsed) suggestions:

• Jonathan Baron about rational thinking and decision making
• James Gleick about the history of information and information theory
• Victoria Krakovna about AI alignment
• Melanie Mitchell about complex systems and AI
• Harold James about economic crises
• Gregory Allen about US export controls
• David Reich about population genetics
• Kathryn Paige Harden about behaviour genetics
• Larry Temkin about global aid and EA skepticism
• Johan Norberg about global capitalism and liberalism
• Elizabeth Barnes about critical disability theory and the use of DALYs
• Chris Miller about semiconductors
• Nate Silver about forecasting and media
• Julia Wise about early EA and community health

Lawrence Newport to discuss his shockingly successful campaign to get the Bully XL dog banned in the UK.

Tetlock. Yes, again.

Wei Dai on meta questions about metaphilosophy, the intellectual journey that led him there, and implications for AI safety.

Sebastian Schwiecker of Effektiv Spenden on entrepreneurial EA meta work.

Tyler Cowen again

Adrian Hill, Director of the Jenner Institute and Professor of Vaccinology in Oxford, co-leader of the group that created the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, leader of the group who developed the R21 malaria vaccine.

Good to interview on Covid-19, on getting vaccines into the world (cf. R21 vs RTS,S in terms of country approval processes), vaccines in general, global health R&D.

Heidi Williams, Director of Science Policy at Institute for Progress and professor of Economics at Dartmouth.

Good to interview on economics of science and progress, the economics of pharma and health R&D, and innovation

Michael Huemer, who blogs at Fake Noûs (see top posts), and has been on Dwarkesh Podcast.

Cory Doctorow- Author fiction and non and activist on competitive compatibility, fixing the internet, resisting monopoly, influencing through fiction and non https://pluralistic.net/

Daniel Suarez hard sci fi author on ai risk on space risk (Kessler Syndrome) and a counter point on why and how we should colonize space asap vs Will MacAskill concern we should maybe wait for better values first. https://www.daniel-suarez.com/

James Starvidis retired Admiral and author of 2034 on great power war risk and fiction for warning about it. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3813314838

Annalee Newitz author of scatter adapt remember how humans will survive a mass extinction on surviving various x risk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15798335

Scott Santens on UBI! https://www.scottsantens.com/

Rob Thelen entrepreneur founder of rownd.io ; former IBMer, Googler, USAF combat veteran, on career exploration and pivots and the case for relentless optimism (biased- he’s a good friend of mine and hugely positive influence) https://rownd.io/about-rownd

I just finished Unrivaled by Michael Beckley (h/t Stefan Schubert) who has a lot of interesting views on China https://www.michaelbeckley.org/articles

His main points are that China does not and will not come close to the US in terms of power, and that the US should be pretty hawkish to contain Chinese power. I found it a pretty well balanced book that's well supported afaict, and doesn't glorify the US. I haven't read his 2023 book yet, which is about "the coming conflict with China".

Unrivaled also discussed the details of a possible Taiwan invasion and why it would likely fail.

(Not sure if this is within the scope of what you're looking for. )
I'd be excited about having something like a roundtable with people who have been through 80'000h advising – talking about how their thinking about their career has changed, advice for people in a similar situation, etc. I'd imagine this could be a good fit for 80k After Hours?

Amrita Ahuja, senior philanthropic staffer (Douglas B Marshall Foundation, CRI Foundation), co-founder and current Board Chair of Evidence Action.

Good to interview as someone with great experience in philanthropy,  leadership in social entrepreneurship, and familiarity-but-not-identity with effective altruism.

Nick Bostrom on his new book Deep Utopia, and/or his extensive other work.

John Halstead on his report on climate change and longtermism, and maybe some other posts on his blog.

Jennifer Pahalka who recently wrote a book "Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better". Loved her interview on Ezra Klein show (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-book-i-wish-every-policymaker-would-read/id1548604447?i=1000615839464)! And, given government/policy work has been expanded upon in the recent career guide, I think this would be a great 80,000 hours interview!

I'd love to see Johann Frick (Philosophy, UC Berkeley) on the podcast. Johann is a nonconsequentialist who defends the procreation Asymmetry and thinks longtermism is deeply misguided. Imo, his recent paper on the Asymmetry is one of the best; he'll be able to steel-person many philosophical views that challenge common EA commitments; and he's an engaging speaker. 

Ken Caldeira on climate

Eliot Higgins, investigative journalist and founder of bellingcat. He also wrote this (which I haven't read), and who featured, maybe hosted this podcast series which I thought was interesting.

I would like to hear a conversation with some prominent EA critics - specifically people who've engaged with but ultimately rejected the EA movement. I think Jess Whittlestone is in that category (though maybe it's not something she wants to talk about); also Carla Zoe Kremer, Luke Kemp and similar.

Toby Jolly on Impactful Government Careers

Some great suggestions here already.

I'd add in Owen Barder. Former DFID chief economist, Centre for Global Development... and was involved with setting up advance market commitment for pneumococcal vaccine. 

Currently CEO of precision agriculture development, could comment on process of givewell assessment of his charity also.

Would be great to have someone who is exceptional at convincing high net worth individuals to donate for specific causes. I’m sure some people in the AI Safety community would find that valuable given the large funding gap despite the exceptional amount of attention the field is receiving. I’m sure other cause areas would also find it valuable.

EDIT: I’ve gotten a few disagree-votes, which is totally fine! Though, I’m curious why some people disagree. If it‘s because they wouldn’t find this interesting, they don’t think it would be appropriate for the podcast, or…?

Richard Chappell on consequentialism, theories of well-being, and reactive vs goal-directed ethics.

Ege Erdil on AI forecasting, economics, and quantitative history.

Chad Jones on AI, risk tolerance, and growth.

Phil Trammell on growth economics (the part of his work more directly focused on philanthropy was covered in his previous appearance). 

Steven Pinker (there are a lot of things that he has written that are relevant to one aspect or another of EA). 

Amanda Askell on AI fine-tuning, AI moral status, and AIs expressing moral and philosophical views (she talks some about this in a video Anthropic put out).

Pablo Stafforini on the history of EA and translations of EA content. 

Finally, I think it would be good to have an episode with a historian of the world wars, similar to the episode with Christopher Brown. Anthony Beevor or Stephen Kotkin, maybe.

Some functionary involved in malaria vaccine distribution to tell us how they could expand and accelerate.

Someone to explain to us how that Danish pharmaceutical firm's governance structure works, and whether it's better for continuous investment in innovation than the one where "founder mode" ends and lawyers take the reins of firms crucial to human progress.

I liked your interview with a professor who talked about defense methods against pandemics and potential gene drive efficacy against malaria, new world screw worm, lyme disease, and maybe one other nasty enemy. Works in Progress also had an article about gene drives' promise against diseases like these in its most recent edition. I would also like to know about Jamaica and Uruguay's attempts to open new fronts against the New World Screw Worm.

I liked an interview that I believe to have been on 80k hours about efforts to reduce air pollution in India. I would like to know what effect could be expected from allowing export of natural gas from countries like Turkmenistan, Iran, and Venezuela to India.

I am interested in learning about the importance of fertilizer prices and natural gas prices to global nutrition. I think there is a woman at the Breakthrough Institute who studies this topic. I suppose oil prices may be an important input, too.

I would like to know more about how USD interest rates and oil prices impact global poverty, so as to better evaluate the importance of factors like home rental inflation and economic sanctions in determining poverty rates.

Dr Jessica Eccles, post-doc at Brighton Medical School, has an amazing research pipeline looking at the overlaps and interdependencies between hypermobility, neurodiversity, and psychological symptoms. She is systematically exploring the interface between mind and body, not least interoception. This has recently also overlapped with long Covid. I am confident that her work will revolutionalize our attitudes to many 'medically unexplained symptoms', including in relation to PoTS, ME/CFS and chronic pain syndromes such as fibromyalgia. An oustanding example of shattering the McNamara fallacy, i.e. making the important measurable, rather than the measurable, important!

Prof. Lorna Harries, Exeter University. An expert on cellular ageing, passionate about her work, and a great communicator. She is also a great advocate for using alternatives to animals to research human disease, having established the second Animal-Free Research Centre of Excellence in the UK. She has several YouTube videos.
Details at: https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/people/profile/index.php?web_id=Lorna_Harries

Leif Wenar

I've been an avid listener to the 80k Podcast for much of the past decade. I've heard Rob's, Luisa's, and Kieran's voices more than my annoying uncle who just doesn't ever stop talking. I wanted to suggest you invite Michael Simm on to make the case for the charity he founded. I think there's been a shortage of young innovators working in GHD. And his counter-intuitive focus on the US poverty challenges the black-and-white dichotomy between poor and rich countries. 

Phaedra Boinodiris - AI for the Rest of us (book about AI Ethics)
https://phaedra.ai/ 

She is currently the business transformation leader for IBM’s Responsible AI consulting group and serves on the leadership team of IBM’s Academy of Technology. Boinodiris is the author of the book 'AI for the Rest of Us, and is a co-founder of the Future World Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to curating K-12 education in AI ethics. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in AI and Ethics at University College Dublin’s Smart Lab.

Christopher Mason (author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds) on how bioengineering can help us explore and inhabit other planets to mitigate extinction. Familiar with effective altruism but brings different views to the table on longtermist priorities.

Luke Kemp on:

• Climate Change and Existential Risk
• The role of Horizon Scans in Existential Risk Studies
• His views on what EA gets wrong about XRisk
• Deep Systems Thinking and XRisk.

Alternatively for another Climate Change and XRisk that would be narrower and less controversial/critical of EA than Luke is, Constantin Arnsschedit would be good

Ajay Agrawal. He researches the potential economic impact of AI and is one of the authors of Power and Prediction, which offers a unique and surprisingly simple perspective on this subject.

If you enjoyed the Micheal Webb episode, then I think you would enjoy this interview too.

Kelly Wanser,  ED of SilverLiving, an NGO focused on advocating for safe research into solar radiation management to address near term climate risks.

Good to interview on climate change and safe technological research and development.

I thought her Volts interview was well conducted.