#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch

#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch

Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the 'Yang Gang' — is kind of a big deal, but is particularly popular among listeners to The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Maybe that's because he's willing to embrace topics most politicians stay away from, like universal basic income, term limits for members of Congress, or what might happen when AI replaces whole industries.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

But even those topics are pretty vanilla compared to our usual fare on The 80,000 Hours Podcast. So we thought it’d be fun to throw Andrew some stranger or more niche questions we hadn't heard him comment on before, including:

1. What would your ideal utopia in 500 years look like?
2. Do we need more public optimism today?
3. Is positively influencing the long-term future a key moral priority of our time?
4. Should we invest far more to prevent low-probability risks?
5. Should we think of future generations as an interest group that's disenfranchised by their inability to vote?
6. The folks who worry that advanced AI is going to go off the rails and destroy us all... are they crazy, or a valuable insurance policy?
7. Will people struggle to live fulfilling lives once AI systems remove the economic need to 'work'?
8. Andrew is a huge proponent of ranked-choice voting. But what about 'approval voting' — where basically you just get to say “yea” or “nay” to every candidate that's running — which some experts prefer?
9. What would Andrew do with a billion dollars to keep the US a democracy?
10. What does Andrew think about the effective altruism community?
11. What's one thing we should do to reduce the risk of nuclear war?
12. Will Andrew's new political party get Trump elected by splitting the vote, the same way Nader got Bush elected back in 2000?

As it turns out, Rob and Andrew agree on a lot, so the episode is less a debate than a chat about ideas that aren’t mainstream yet... but might be one day. They also talk about:

• Andrew’s views on alternative meat
• Whether seniors have too much power in American society
• Andrew’s DC lobbying firm on behalf of humanity
• How the rest of the world could support the US
• The merits of 18-year term limits
• What technologies Andrew is most excited about
• How much the US should spend on foreign aid
• Persistence and prevalence of inflation in the US economy
• And plenty more

Chapters:

  • Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
  • The interview begins (00:01:38)
  • Andrew’s hopes for the year 2500 (00:03:10)
  • Tech over the next century (00:07:03)
  • Utopia for realists (00:10:41)
  • Most likely way humanity fails (00:12:43)
  • What Andrew would do with a billion dollars (00:14:44)
  • Approval voting vs. ranked-choice voting (00:19:51)
  • The worry that third party candidates could cause harm (00:21:12)
  • Investment in existential risk reduction (00:25:18)
  • Future generations as a disenfranchised interest group (00:30:37)
  • Humanity Forward (00:32:05)
  • Best way the rest of the world could support the US (00:37:17)
  • Recent advances in AI (00:39:56)
  • Artificial general intelligence (00:46:38)
  • The Windfall Clause (00:49:39)
  • The alignment problem (00:53:02)
  • 18-year term limits (00:56:21)
  • Effective altruism and longtermism (01:00:44)
  • Persistence and prevalence of inflation in the US economy (01:01:25)
  • Downsides of policies Andrew advocates for (01:02:08)
  • What Andrew would have done differently with COVID (01:04:54)
  • Fighting for attention in the media (01:09:25)
  • Right ballpark level of foreign aid for the US (01:11:15)
  • Government science funding (01:11:58)
  • Nuclear weapons policy (01:15:06)
  • US-China relationship (01:16:20)
  • Human challenge trials (01:18:59)
  • Forecasting accuracy (01:20:17)
  • Upgrading public schools (01:21:41)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Episoder(333)

#12 - Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.

#12 - Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.

“When you're in the middle of a crisis and you have to ask for money, you're already too late.” That’s Dr Beth Cameron, who leads Global Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative...

25 Okt 20171h 45min

#11 - Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

#11 - Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

Do most meat eaters think it’s wrong to hurt animals? Do Americans think climate change is likely to cause human extinction? What is the best, state-of-the-art therapy for depression? How can we make ...

17 Okt 20171h 29min

#10 - Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

#10 - Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

What if you were in a position to give away billions of dollars to improve the world? What would you do with it? This is the problem facing Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project - people l...

11 Okt 20171h 51min

#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it

#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it

Take a trip to Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, when going to space sounded like a good way to get around environmental limits, people started cryogenically freezing themselves, and nanotechnology l...

4 Okt 20171h 45min

#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes

#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes

Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before being killed for human consumption. Over the last two years Lewis Bollard – Project Officer for Farm An...

27 Sep 20173h 16min

#7 - Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

#7 - Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

The scientific revolution in the 16th century was one of the biggest societal shifts in human history, driven by the discovery of new and better methods of figuring out who was right and who was wrong...

13 Sep 20171h 14min

#6 - Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

#6 - Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world th...

6 Sep 20172h 8min

#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading

#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading

Quantitative financial trading is one of the highest paying parts of the world’s highest paying industry. 25 to 30 year olds with outstanding maths skills can earn millions a year in an obscure set of...

28 Aug 20171h 45min

Populært innen Fakta

fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
foreldreradet
mikkels-paskenotter
treningspodden
rss-bisarr-historie
jakt-og-fiskepodden
rss-sunn-okonomi
sinnsyn
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
rss-kunsten-a-leve
hagespiren-podcast
rss-bak-luftfarten
ukast
fryktlos
hverdagspsyken
rss-mind-body-podden
gravid-uke-for-uke