Do You Want to Become a Vampire? — with L.A. Paul

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4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do we decide whether to undergo a transformative experience when we don’t know how that experience will change us? This is the central question explored by Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist L.A. Paul. Paul uses the prospect of becoming a vampire to illustrate the conundrum: let's say Dracula offers you the chance to become a vampire. You might be confident you'll love it, but you also know you'll become a different person with different preferences. Whose preferences do you prioritize: yours now, or yours after becoming a vampire? Similarly, whose preferences do we prioritize when deciding how to engage with technology and social media: ours now, or ours after becoming users — to the point of potentially becoming attention-seeking vampires? In this episode with L.A. Paul, we're raising the stakes of the social media conversation — from technology that steers our time and attention, to technology that fundamentally transforms who we are and what we want. Tune in as Paul, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin explore the complexity of transformative experiences, and how to approach their ethical design.

Transcript

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0:00.8	Two quick things before we dive in. First, the Center for Humane Technology is hiring.
0:05.9	And second, the guest featured in this episode will be joining us for a podcast club on Friday,
0:10.3	August 20th. Details of all that are at the end of the episode.
0:15.1	And with that, here we go.
0:20.6	Imagine that you're touring some castle in Romania and you go down into the dungeon and you're
0:26.8	exploring it and all of a sudden, then Dracula comes to you and offers you the chance to become
0:33.2	one of his own. He says, you'll get amazing new sensory powers. There are some negatives.
0:42.3	You become undead and you have to drink blood and sunlight will burn your skin in this horrible
0:49.2	way. But all things considered, I think it's worth it. You've got 12 hours to decide. You'll never
0:55.4	have another opportunity to do this. That's philosopher and cognitive scientist L.A. Paul.
1:03.2	She studies transformative experience and to illustrate the nature of what makes a transformative
1:08.8	experience, Paul uses the metaphor of becoming a vampire. By definition, you can't know what it's
1:15.4	going to be like to become a vampire. This is an irreversible life changing decision.
1:20.5	And so the question is, how do you even evaluate these options and know how to assign them value in
1:25.6	ways that it's going to be meaningful, like becoming a vampire versus living your life as a human
1:30.1	and kind of passing up this chance? How do you evaluate those possibilities and determine your preferences?
1:39.6	How do we determine our preferences about a transformative experience when that transformative
1:45.1	experience will change our preferences? Whose preferences should we prioritize, the person before
1:52.2	being transformed or the person after? The only way persuasion can be ethical is when the goals
2:00.7	of the persuader align with the goals of the persuady. But the plot thickens when the persuader
2:06.4	is transforming us into someone who ends up wanting the thing that we were persuaded into.
2:12.0	What if the persuader is a vampire, turning us into someone who enjoys feeding on human blood?
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