Next week for The 80,000 Hours Podcast I'll be interviewing Joe Carlsmith, Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy.
Joe's did a BPhil in philosophy at Oxford University and is a prolific writer on topics both philosophical and practical (until recently his blog was called 'Hands and Cities' but it's all now collected on his personal site.
What should I ask him?
Some things Joe has written which we could talk about include:
- Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?
- Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia
- On infinite ethics —XIV. The death of a utilitarian dream
- Anthropics: Learning from the fact that you exist
- Against neutrality about creating happy lives
- Wholehearted choices and “morality as taxes”
- On clinging
- Can you control the past?
In "Against neutrality...," he notes that he's not arguing for a moral duty to create happy people, and it's just good "others things equal." But, given that the moral question under opportunity costs is what practically matters, what are his thoughts on this view?: "Even if creating happy lives is good in some (say) aesthetic sense, relieving suffering has moral priority when you have to choose between these." E.g., does he have any sympathy for the intuition that, if you could either press a button that treats someone's migraine for a day or one that creates a virtual world with happy people, you should press the first one?
(I could try to shorten this if necessary, but worry about the message being lost from editorializing.)