#292 — How Much Does the Future Matter?
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.7K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2022
⏱️ 120 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about his new book, What We Owe the Future. They discuss the philosophy of effective altruism (EA), longtermism, existential risk, criticism of EA, problems with expected-value reasoning, doing good vs feeling good, why it's hard to care about future people, how the future gives meaning to the present, why this moment in history is unusual, the pace of economic and technological growth, bad political incentives, value lock-in, the well-being of conscious creatures as the foundation of ethics, the risk of unaligned AI, how bad we are at predicting technological change, and other topics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. |
| 0:24.1 | This is Sam Harris. |
| 0:26.2 | Well, it's been a big week for news. |
| 0:30.1 | I think I'm going to wait for a few more shoes to drop before touching any of it. |
| 0:37.6 | Earlier in the week, Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago, is that really his home? |
| 0:45.2 | That golf club that looks like a dictator's palace and what he might call a shit hole country. |
| 0:52.5 | It was rated by, quote, rated by the FBI in search of misappropriated documents that |
| 1:01.5 | may or may not contain secrets about nuclear weapons or nuclear policy or something nuclear. |
| 1:09.8 | Again, I think I'll wait for more information to surface before I comment on this, but |
| 1:16.6 | it would not surprise me if Trump had done something terrifyingly inept and self-serving |
| 1:25.2 | and even nefarious. |
| 1:27.8 | So let's just wait and see what happens there. |
| 1:31.6 | I share many people's concern that the execution of this search warrant was inflammatory enough |
| 1:37.9 | that if the facts in the end don't seem to merit it, it will be yet another thing |
| 1:44.6 | that bolsters Trump's political stature in the personality cult that has subsumed the |
| 1:51.9 | Republican Party. |
| 1:54.0 | And that would be a bad thing. |
| 1:56.0 | Once again, this is an asymmetrical war of ideas and any misstep that seems to suggest |
| 2:04.1 | that our institutions have become politicized, in this case, the FBI run. |
| 2:11.3 | We should note by a Trump appointee, Christopher Ray, not the fittest object for allegations |
| 2:18.6 | of anti-Trump partisanship, really. |
| 2:22.0 | But any apparent bias here makes any further discussion of facts more or less impossible. |
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