Tag: will macaskill

Notes from Sam Harris’s interview of Will MacAskill

Here’s the episode, it’s fantastic and dense and requires a more attentive listen than your average podcast:

I wanted to share a few particularly powerful comments:

  • Obligation versus Opportunity paradox: an obligation is when you have the moral imperative to help a person or cause because your life is better, which doesn’t seem to convince either Sam or Will. An opportunity is when you help because you’ll feel better and improve your reputation as a result, and this is more convincing to both. Will’s Effective Altruism movement is based on this
  • 90/10 problem: 90% of r&d funds are spent on 10% of humanity’s problems. For example, Will mentions male pattern baldness as an example of a problem that attracts a lot of research dollars but it mostly affects a small, well-off minority, while new antiobiotics aren’t being invented because the profit motive isn’t there
  • Will describes patents as “two wrongs trying to make a right”. Very interesting. The first wrong is that companies can’t capture the full market value of their r&d, and the second wrong is to grant a legitimate monopoly in the form of patents and hope the two failures cancel each other out

If you take 5 minutes to pick a restaurant, then you should spend 2 years to plan your career!

tim-ferriss-showI enjoyed Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Will MacAskill who, at 28-years old, is possibly the youngest tenured philosophy professor on the planet, and at Oxford no less.

Will believes people spend FAR too little time planning their careers. To wit:

1. We take five minutes to choose a restaurant for a 2-hour dinner (some of us much more!)

2. That means we spend 5% of our time planning the meal, and 95% eating

3. A normal person will work 80,000 hours in their life (roughly 40 working years, at 40 hours per week; both assumptions are conservative)

4. The same 5%, therefore, would equal 4,000 hours or 2 whole years!

I assume Will would recommend those 4,000 hours be spent throughout your career, and not entirely in a two-year binge (which would drive even the most fanatic planner insane…)

Even with the caveat, we should all spend more time doing things like:

  • researching career paths
  • finding better jobs
  • deciding what skills to develop and why
  • building good systems and habits

By the way, this also means you have PLENTY of time to switch careers…more than once!

Plans are nothing, but planning is indispensable – Eisenhower

Thanks for reading! Here are my ten favorite podcasts.