Pigeon Hour

About Pigeon Hour

Recorded conversations; a minimal viable pod www.aaronbergman.net (https://www.aaronbergman.net?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Aaron Bergman

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

8 Jun 2021

Latest episode

9 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

25 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Jul 2026

   #17: Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse knows everything there is to know about AI

   A podcast with Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse, who is on Substack (https://longerramblings.substack.com/), Twitter (@littIeramblings (https://x.com/littIeramblings)) and potentially elsewhere (https://linktr.ee/sarahhw) Topics discussed * Current thing: Fable gets export-controlled * Sarah defends government-enforced staged deployment * Non-misalignment misuse as an existential risk, maybe * Internal deployment (other current thing smart people talk about) * Sarah goes woke thinks that rationalists should not say true but useless and unpalatable things; invisible graveyard of those who’d otherwise have gotten involved as AI safety * Why Sarah left UK AISI after 10 months * Agglomeration effects (London) vs being able to buy things (Sheffield) * Current thing: it’s very hot in the UK and Sarah is coping * Trump on AI: do we want high variance or reasons-responsiveness when they conflict? Transcript [00:01] Aaron: Hello. [00:02] Sarah: Hello. Yeah, well, my laptop no longer has a functioning built-in webcam because I marinated my laptop in Coke Zero, so. [00:09] Aaron: Nice. [00:09] Sarah: Yeah. [00:10] Aaron: I feel like maybe... All right. Whatever. I’ll try to convince you to get a $10,000 computer at some point. [00:15] Sarah: I don’t think I need that. [00:17] Aaron: Sorry. I think I’m projecting. [00:21] Sarah: If you want a $10,000 laptop, you should get one. [00:24] Aaron: Thank you. I probably won’t, but you know. I read 1.5, listened to 1.5 of your recent blog posts. [00:34] Sarah: Thank you. [00:35] Aaron: And not the one that you requested me to listen to. Although, to be fair, I did the listening before I heard from... Yeah, before you responded. [00:47] Sarah: That’s fine. I had no idea of anything specific I wanted to talk about. I just felt like yapping. [00:51] Aaron: Okay. [00:52] Sarah: Did you generate any takes from listening to 1.5 of my blogs? [01:01] Aaron: So, the full one I listened to was the Fable. And honestly, I could’ve done a lot more preparation, so we should talk about the other stuff. But the only thing was like, oh, maybe you’re very slightly sympathetic to the, oh, maybe it’s a coincidence — or sorry, not a coincidence — maybe it’s not the Trump administration just being hopelessly corrupt, and a little bit more sympathetic to that point of view than I am. But I didn’t have any burning hot takes. [01:33] Sarah: Don’t we kind of have evidence that it wasn’t a malicious, petty, anti-Anthropic move because they’re now doing a similar thing with OpenAI? This was the update heard the day after I published that, and I was like, “Oh, no, my point has already been somewhat undermined.” Well, not undermined, because I left it open as to what I thought would happen, but... [01:52] Aaron: So it remains TBD whether they will in fact be export controlled. And so one thing you can imagine, and I think kind of expect this to happen, is just a rapid approval process or a staged rollout over a month for OpenAI’s. It remains to be seen. I could be proven wrong, but staged rollout over a month. First of all, also giving warning beforehand instead of arbitrarily. Actually, let’s set that aside because, fair enough, maybe they just woke up or whatever. But yeah, basically similar from a high-level point of view, type of treatment, but in fact OpenAI’s just gets approved way faster, with fewer restrictions. And they probably didn’t go through all the effort of turning Mythos into Fable, which was — that amount of effort or time, money, et cetera, is probably bigger than what OpenAI will have ever spent, I’m expecting. Or I guess we’ll never know. But I’m guessing that it’ll be bigger than what OpenAI will have sort of spent or implicitly spent, including via the staged rollout. Also, I feel like the wording is such that the staged rollout is like — isn’t that the term that they’re using, or am I wrong? Am I misremembering? [03:14] Sarah: Yeah, something like that. [03:16] Aaron: Because that’s very much a “we’re going to let you do the thing,” just not like, “oh, no, we’re going to ban them,” and then retroactively, or then maybe we’ll have further negotiations. But these are in fact very different things — an indefinite export control versus an informal staged rollout. I don’t know. [03:35] Sarah: Yeah, I can see how they’re different. I’m just saying it appears like there is now a general principle that the government wants some lag time between the model being developed and it being publicly deployed, and maybe this is partially to harden our infrastructure to cybersecurity threats or whatever. And it now appears that that is a genuine intention that they have, as opposed to they are just mad at Anthropic. They might separately be a bit mad at Anthropic, but like— [04:02] Aaron: No, I think it’s both. And I just have a very high prior also on the Trump administration being ridiculously cynical and — is cronyism the right word? Just like if Jensen Huang asks for no export controls, it’s like, okay, no export controls. And Dario’s kind of autistic and woke. [04:26] Aaron: And more importantly, not just totally bending the knee to Trump, and trying to actually be part of civil society in a non-sycophantic way. Now I’m saying sycophantic like it’s a word that you use. [04:41] Sarah: Yeah. But, okay. [04:42] Aaron: Yeah. [04:42] Sarah: I don’t want to defend the Trump administration. That’s not my thing. [04:49] Aaron: No, do it. [04:50] Sarah: But I guess the most charitable possible interpretation of events here is that Anthropic did in fact do a much more — their comms strategy around Mythos and Fable was a lot scarier, right? And presumably policymakers don’t have, or at least not all of them have, the time to actually analyze the benchmarks and observe that Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5 were similarly capable. And so maybe they just got kind of jump scared. They scrambled. They did a clumsy, poorly executed thing. In OpenAI’s case, they have not been similarly alarmed because OpenAI doesn’t do that kind of comms, which in my opinion they probably should. And there’s a version of this story where they’re being kind of incompetent, but they are not in fact just maliciously going after Anthropic specifically— [05:39] Aaron: I mean— [05:39] Sarah: ...for personal reasons, right? [05:42] Aaron: I agree this is in principle possible. I think what actually happened is Trump and one or two top people that he talks to just told the Commerce Department. It’s not like there’s an abstract policymaking blob. There is, but separately, I think this specifically ran through Trump and maybe one other person. [06:01] Sarah: But I feel like that makes it more plausible, right? Because it’s a knee-jerky sort of impulse reaction. [06:07] Aaron: But we already know — we literally know that Trump personally dislikes Anthropic. [06:15] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t know. Honestly, I’m not— [06:19] Aaron: I think— [06:20] Sarah: ...really sure whether it really matters. The thing I’m more confused about is that there are people coming out now, like Zvi Mowshowitz, for example, being like this kind of principle of doing staged rollouts is the maximally bad policy because it widens the gap between the capabilities that the labs— [06:36] Aaron: Oh, right. Yeah. [06:36] Sarah: ...make available to the public. And I’m kind of confused by this take. I think it might be somewhat bad in the sense that now the capabilities are not as publicly auditable, and maybe if you really care about external orgs being able to do safety research with the current frontier, then this is a problem, and it’s bad that we don’t know exactly what’s happening. But it’s clearly not the maximally bad thing. The maximally bad thing is the government is just letting them YOLO and has no insight or visibility into this process at all. At least now there’s some plausible information flow. Just as a consequence of the government having to do the interaction with the labs to agree on the staged rollout, they are now getting more information. [07:12] Aaron: Yes. [07:12] Sarah: And the government getting more information seems like the only plausible path I can think of to anything sensible happening. So I’m kind of confused why people seem to be so upset about it, given that the— [07:21] Aaron: Yeah. But I— [07:22] Sarah: You know what I mean? [07:23] Aaron: Sorry. Yeah. No, go ahead. Yeah. [07:25] Sarah: That was my point. [07:26] Aaron: No, I tend to agree with you. So, internal threat model being: Anthropic, ASI, or some sort of AI system is developed in a lab, and basically takes over lab infrastructure and takes over from there. [07:44] Sarah: Yeah. [07:44] Aaron: Takes over other systems from there. I think that is more — it seems to me like that is more likely, sorry, conditional on that happening. Proper x-risk, existential catastrophe, is more likely conditional on that than conditional on a different situation happening, which is a model is publicly deployed and therefore bad people have access to it and misuse it. [08:17] Sarah: Okay. [08:17] Aaron: Does that make any sense? [08:18] Sarah: Yeah. Is the argument there that it’s better to publicly deploy the models because that means we’re more likely to get a sub-existential catastrophe that is like a warning shot or something? [08:28] Aaron: Well, that’s even more galaxy-brained. I was just thinking about, straightforwardly, if you compare the two, there might be some trade-off where more public deployment means more of just, quote-unquote, “normal” bad things happening along the lines of crippling infrastructure around the world. [08:46] Sarah: More public deployment doesn’t mean that you don’t have the parallel risk of internal deployment causing a catastrophe, right? That doesn’t mean— [08:59] Aaron: So I think I’m imagining a situation where companies can choose to spend resources on developing systems internally or serving models to the world, or some combination of those things. [09:13] Sarah: So the internal development actually gets sped up because now they are using less of their resources to do product and external deployment and whatever, and the government— [09:23] Aaron: Yeah. I mean, this is in my head. This is something that I just sort of... This is not a well-thought-out argument from before this episode started. This is just me on my feet, so I’m not sure this checks out. [09:36] Sarah: I can see that. I just think, I don’t know. The hill I’ll die on is the only way this situation is not completely terrible is if the government is woken up and does something, and they’re way more likely to be woken up and do something if they just have these information channels with the companies. [09:56] Aaron: Yeah. I think that’s right. [09:58] Sarah: That at least makes it the case that this isn’t the worst possible policy that they could have. I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just surprised by the strength of feeling that people seem to have about it. [10:11] Aaron: Is it just Zvi? [10:13] Sarah: Zvi and... I don’t know. I can’t remember now. I was doing a little discourse audit the other day, and I saw several negative reactions. [10:23] Aaron: Okay. [10:24] Sarah: But yeah. I don’t know. I also don’t have a really hot take here. I need to write about it. [10:31] Aaron: Yeah. Nice. Based. Okay. Maybe this seems less crazy to me because the government is standing in the way, and therefore you basically force a dialogue mechanism. And there’s also the “holy shit, it’s in the news that Walmart just lost all their data” or something type of feedback, and it does seem like you get the latter more from just having the frontier be in fact deployed, right? [11:08] Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. This sort of seems like a version of the point I made earlier about warning shots, right? Or just— [11:15] Aaron: Okay. Yeah. [11:16] Sarah: ...put people out in the world and let them fuck stuff up a little bit. [11:18] Aaron: Yeah. Oh. [11:19] Sarah: Yeah. [11:19] Aaron: No, that seems like a bad policy. Okay. [11:22] Sarah: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t want to sound like I’m endorsing people causing sub-existential catastrophes with AI, but this is a common theory of change that people think about, right? [11:35] Aaron: Yeah. Wait, let me think for a second. I guess what you don’t want is just a systematic... I feel like it’s not crazy to think that you don’t want a systematic bias toward protecting only against sub-existential stuff. [11:59] Sarah: Yes. [12:01] Aaron: You could imagine trying really hard to make sure — I mean, at the extreme, try really hard to make sure that nobody ever... there’s no embarrassing things for OpenAI where ChatGPT tells someone to kill themselves or helps them kill themselves or something. And then you don’t care at all about larger-scale or existential-scale stuff. And then it seems like then there’s a systematic discrepancy, and people will be fundamentally misinformed about alignment stuff because you just don’t observe the stuff that would happen in the world where alignment is hard, or at least from a policymaker’s perspective. [12:41] Sarah: Well, this is what I feel like is currently happening, or this is my current concern— [12:45] Aaron: Yeah. [12:45] Sarah: ...with the current regime. It appears from the Fable thing, and then subsequently from the 5.6 thing, it feels like the government is playing jailbreak whack-a-mole, right? They’re like, “Well, what we need to do is patch all the jailbreaks.” And they haven’t internalized this more general principle that you cannot, in fact, patch every jailbreak. Or not even — with the Anthropic one, it wasn’t even a jailbreak. It was just like, yeah, this is a thing that the model can do. You don’t even really— [13:11] Aaron: Oh, right. [13:12] Sarah: ...even need to jailbreak for them to do this. It’s a red herring, right? The broader thing is we actually don’t really know how to control these things. Absent technical breakthroughs, we will not be able to patch every jailbreak for every system that comes out in the future. And it seems like they’re just trying to put plasters on a bunch of gaping wounds, and that’s the thing they’re currently optimizing for, and that seems bad to me. And my theory of change is that, in having this dialogue with the companies, they internalize the broader thing, or it just becomes more salient or obvious to them that actually this whole thing is kind of insane and not just a case of doing a little bit of window dressing to prevent people jailbreaking things. [13:54] Aaron: Yeah. Sorry. [13:56] Sarah: That’s it. [13:57] Aaron: No, no, no. Also, I need to make... Yes, you should speak more than me because you know your shit. [14:06] Sarah: Well, I— [14:06] Aaron: No. Okay, whatever. You don’t get to reject that claim. [14:12] Sarah: I stand by it. [14:13] Aaron: Nice. So I was... Okay, maybe this is a spicy take. I’m not sure. So listening to Shah on 80K recently. Are you familiar with this episode? Or have you listened to it? [14:29] Sarah: No. [14:30] Aaron: Rohin Shah. [14:31] Sarah: Oh, yes, the DeepMind guy on 80K. [14:35] Aaron: Yeah. [14:36] Sarah: Yes, I listened to that. Yeah. [14:37] Aaron: Nice. Wow. Okay. You’re really on top of your shit. So I think maybe this is trivial, and I should’ve come to it myself, but I think he was making the point that jailbreaks were an issue largely through — no, honestly, still through now, but that is because companies haven’t actually worried about the consequences of jailbreaks. So I’m not convinced that if you make that... Maybe Fable is jailbreakable, but it seems to be like maybe — what if it’s just not? I don’t think we’re going to get a technical proof that it’s not, but it doesn’t seem crazy to me that in fact it’s not. [15:14] Sarah: Hmm. Yeah, and then would this in fact be good or bad, I guess? [15:22] Aaron: Oh. [15:22] Sarah: Maybe not bad. It seems like a— [15:29] Aaron: Why is it bad? [15:30] Sarah: Well, maybe the general thing is: sub-ASI systems being well-aligned and hard to jailbreak is plausibly not evidence that we’re any closer to solving the ultimate problem of aligning ASI. So then the better job we do in the current regime where models are not superintelligent, the worse off we are because the greater our false sense of security we have, or something like that. So if you couldn’t jailbreak Mythos, I feel like maybe this would be kind of bad. [15:58] Aaron: I think I disagree with that because I think this is a problem that has to be solved at the limit. At some point, we have to figure out how to... preventing jailbreak is not just a minor thing, whereas true misalignment is the major thing. Maybe directionally, if I had to categorize them or put them in order, that’s true, but it seems like jailbreaking — fixing that — is actually really important for preventing x-risk. Because the misuse isn’t just... You don’t have the classic Yudkowskian story, but I don’t know, it seems very plausible that misuse of a publicly deployed jailbroken model could be on the path to existential catastrophe. [16:54] Sarah: Yeah, I agree. I was just saying maybe we could in fact just solve the misuse problem because we are really good at preventing jailbreaks, and then no one jailbreaks a model to build a bioweapon, and we’ve eradicated that particular threat model. But it doesn’t help with the “will the model ultimately do what we say or care about our values at all” thing. Those things don’t really seem— [17:12] Aaron: Yeah. [17:12] Sarah: ...Yeah. It matters that the model — I guess, jailbreak, I don’t really know if this is true, but jailbreak prevention seems like a kind of after-the-fact layer that gets added on top to prevent the model’s true capabilities from being accessible, but it still has them, right? So it’s like the fact that a person couldn’t get the model to do a thing that the company has said they’re not allowed to do is not evidence that the model couldn’t just do a thing itself that felt like it. [17:43] Aaron: There’s some conceptual stuff there. It’s like what would it mean for — if it is in fact just the case that there is no combination of words that will elicit a response that is undesirable in some specific way, what would it mean for the model to want to be able to... could do it if it wanted to? It sounds like, no, it probably couldn’t. That’s kind of a conceptual thing. [18:07] Sarah: Mm-hmm. [18:09] Aaron: But I feel like that’s me being philosophy-brained or something. So there’s still the problem of Anthropic has an unjailbroken — I don’t know exactly how they’re dealing with this internally, but presumably, and I think just in fact, Anthropic has access to the unjailbroken version, and so then you get into internal security stuff. [18:40] Sarah: Yeah. [18:41] Aaron: And it doesn’t solve the problem at the limit, but I don’t know. I feel like it does help you bumble along a little bit longer or something. If only seven people who are rigorously, very strongly vetted could access the capabilities, and even then it would raise alarms internally. Whereas the entire world, once you have a single jailbreak or a strategy, or people for hire who can do it, or a model that can do it, or anything like that — it’s 10 billion people, 8 billion people is just a lot more than seven. And so I feel like the tail risk — you always want to abstract that away and say, “well, but both probabilities are non-zero.” It really makes a difference what the risk is from misuse of a less solidified version of a model. [19:41] Sarah: Mm. Yeah. [19:42] Aaron: I feel like I didn’t say that well. [19:45] Sarah: Yeah. There’s less risk of catastrophic misuse if seven people have access to a jailbroken model versus 8 billion, I agree. [19:55] Aaron: Yeah. [19:56] Sarah: I don’t know. I still feel spooked by the prospect of, I don’t know, there’s some crazy capable model that’s just deployed inside of an AI company, and there’s a ton of information siloing or whatever. So even only a small fraction of that company even have access to that model or know what’s going on with it. That just seems like a — both from a concentration of power perspective and from a “we now have fewer people with eyes on the problem of making this thing not go crazy” perspective. I don’t know. I don’t feel great about that. I guess that’s one — yeah, this is an argument for the staged deployment thing in fact being bad, which is now all of us have less of an idea precisely what is happening, and maybe terrible things are currently happening or will be happening in the near future, and we just won’t know. [20:40] Aaron: Yeah. You could imagine a mandate. This is just popping into my head. I have no idea if this is a good idea, but you can imagine a mandate that — maybe you don’t need full Fable-level safeguards internally, but you need... there’s some threshold. I think you probably do need this at some point, which is just restrictions on internal deployment, which basically don’t exist now, right, as far as I know? There’s no legal stuff. [21:13] Sarah: Not to my knowledge. [21:15] Aaron: Okay. Yeah. [21:16] Sarah: Yeah. [21:17] Aaron: And then this is a weaker version. You could also just tie it to what’s publicly available. You could say you have to do X, Y, and Z to launch something publicly, and then that is also the model that you’re allowed to use internally. I don’t know if this is viable at all. It just popped into my head. Maybe it’s probably not smart, but it’s something that could be done in principle. [21:39] Sarah: People definitely have done... I now no longer know what I’m talking about. I think there’s an Apollo paper which is about this. So it’s about the risks of internal deployment and some mitigations that you could do. Because it does seem like, yeah. This is another thing with my red herring point, that I think no one in the government is thinking — or almost certainly hardly anyone in the government is thinking about the risks of internal deployment, right? They are conceiving of AIs as things that are dangerous when the public or foreign actors get hold of them, and not as things that could be dangerous when they’re just inside a company. [22:11] Aaron: Yeah. No, I agree. Is there probably someone in some — like ASI-pilled in some department somewhere? It’s like, yes, but no. I agree, and it’s just like, “Oh, that sucks.” [22:25] Sarah: Yeah. It’s pretty bad. Anyway, maybe we should— [22:31] Aaron: No, go ahead. [22:31] Sarah: ...move off this thread. [22:33] Aaron: Yeah, no. I had no commitment to only talking about the most serious stuff. Okay, cool. I feel like you have lots of takes. How do I elicit latent Sarah takes? [22:45] Sarah: I don’t even know how my takes should be elicited. When I try to do an audit of my own takes in my brain, I can’t think of them, and they have to be triggered by someone else. [22:54] Aaron: Yeah. That’s why I should’ve actually listened to your four hours of blog posts. [22:59] Sarah: No, I wouldn’t subject you to that. Don’t worry. [23:03] Aaron: Okay. Rat discourse. So you had a blog post that was extremely well-written and also not incredibly convincing, according to me. [23:11] Sarah: Okay. Want to push back? [23:14] Aaron: Well, my pushback is you’re critiquing a blog post and essentially it was like, “Look, this is such a good microcosm of the entire rat ecosystem.” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I’m not convinced of it.” [23:26] Sarah: I didn’t say the entire rat ecosystem. I said— [23:29] Aaron: Okay. Sorry. [23:29] Sarah: ...one documented instance of a phenomenon that I have observed on multiple occasions. I’m not making any claim about the percentage of rats that have this particular brain worm. Maybe it’s actually quite low. I just— [23:41] Aaron: Yeah. [23:42] Sarah: ...it happens too often for a community that is ostensibly so concerned with, I don’t know, value maximizing and being smart. You know what I mean? [23:50] Aaron: Wait. Can you actually spell out what the “it” is here? [23:55] Sarah: Yeah. So I was trying to think about... I frequently have this experience, right, where I’m on Twitter, and I’m experiencing this whiplash of going between — usually it’s AI safety discourse which concerns itself with “will AI literally destroy the world in two to five years?” — and then some other stupid culture war topic, which just feels like a massive sinkhole of value and time. And the specific one that I was providing commentary on in that blog post is a blog about how women should get sexier, and the advice mostly amounts to don’t eat and have big boobs or whatever. And this just happens a lot, right? There’ll be some cultural thing — I don’t know, should we be allowed to flirt at EAG, or like— [24:40] Aaron: I would never discuss this, ever. [24:44] Sarah: Would never participate in that discourse. Or some eugenics-y adjacent... I think it’s because the rats have a tendency to — they like commenting on unpalatable things, and they’re somewhat optimizing for the goal of saying true but unpalatable things, even if there is zero value to saying those things, and if there is in fact negative value to saying those things. This disagreeable — let’s say the “true thing that no one wants to say” heuristic, I just think is manifesting in this way that is just so distasteful to me, and that actively kind of makes me feel repelled from the discourse. And if I was not already so bought into AI safety, and if I didn’t know that most people in this community are actually lovely, I think it might just turn me off altogether. And that makes me think there are many other people who are in fact turned off by this. [25:33] Aaron: Yeah. [25:34] Sarah: There are hit pieces in The Guardian that get written about us, right? Because someone at Manifest decides that they’re just going to do some race science. And it’s obviously hugely discrediting to the entire movement, which I think is unfortunate because I think the movement is generally correct about many things, including extremely consequential things. I don’t know. It just bugs me a little bit. [25:55] Aaron: Yeah. We should fight about this. Okay. So I agree that there is a suboptimal dynamic. I’m not sure that it’s a realistic better option than... I mean, just hold on, hear me out for a second. Because I feel like the ask is not just a change of norms, it’s like “if everyone would just do better according to this one perspective” — and it’s just individuals are just going to... So I feel like the stronger case here is people who are really bought into AI x-risk shouldn’t throw away points on stuff like this. But it’s a harder case to make that there’s even a lever of change over individuals who are broadly rat-adjacent but don’t necessarily prioritize — just aren’t super altruistic, for one thing. Don’t prioritize AI, or maybe are vaguely bought in but just in fact don’t care that much or something. And it’s like, I don’t know, policing individuals, it’s just a hard thing to do. [27:10] Sarah: Oh, I mean, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should police people’s speech, and I’m also not making the ask that people stop doing this, per se. I’m not saying... I think I even said in that post, I was like, “I’m not trying to litigate what people can and can’t say.” My point was only that I think it reveals about people that they haven’t internalized the values that they say they have, right? [27:31] Aaron: Ah. [27:31] Sarah: The value being — I think the broad thing that connects all of these communities, because it’s actually a bunch of adjacent communities, right? It’s the rationalists and the EAs and the pro-progress people and other factions. [27:42] Aaron: Yeah. [27:43] Sarah: They’re united by this thing, which is: we are willing to entertain ideas about the future or about reality that are outside of the Overton window of the average person, right? We have the imagination to consider dystopias or utopias, or the possibility that, I don’t know, bugs are having a really bad time, or maybe Claude is having a really bad time or whatever. And they just appreciate this vastness of reality and how things could be way worse or way better. And I think if you really had internalized that and you really thought that reality was that huge and radical and weird and big, you just simply would not concern yourself with whether or not women should look like pin-up dolls to get a husband. Obviously, I think this is obviously going to be the case, right? Because it’s extremely hard to internalize those kinds of values— [28:28] Aaron: Yeah. [28:28] Sarah: ...and people concern themselves with all sorts of pedestrian things all the time, so it’s not surprising that this happens. But that it happens in such an egregious way and in a way that is like, I don’t know, it makes the community feel hostile for me. I don’t want to be sitting there on Twitter reading about how I’m too fat to be attractive, or... We have high-profile members of this community, like Roko, for example, who has said on Twitter that— [28:52] Aaron: Oh, he’s been a persona non grata for ages. [28:56] Sarah: No, but I agree with you, right? That is true, and that is a credit to us. But what is it about this culture that is producing people like this in the first place? I don’t know what it is, but it’s something. [29:10] Aaron: I feel like Roko — I want to push back on Roko specifically. That’s just a perfect example of doing the kind of, I mean, policing — but quote-unquote policing, not necessarily in a bad way. I think some community policing is genuinely warranted. And this is a great example of the rat sphere doing the good thing of excommunicating this guy who seems pretty bad and has terrible takes. [29:35] Sarah: Mm. Yeah. [29:36] Aaron: So it’s like— [29:37] Sarah: And I’m not even making the case for exiling more people. I just think it’s interesting. He’s not the only one. There are a bunch of these anime accounts that are anonymous, have very similar takes to him, and they at least have some level of visibility and are engaged with by people whose takes I would otherwise respect, even if those people aren’t agreeing with these people, but they’re giving them the time of day. [30:02] Aaron: Ah. [30:02] Sarah: They’re in the water. I will see this stuff even though I don’t care about fertility rates or how to get sexier or IQ and race or whatever. But this stuff is in my algorithm. It’s in my feed because I care about AI safety. And the fact that there’s some link between those two things seems like a problem to me. [30:25] Aaron: Okay. Nice. I like it. I see what you’re saying. I think maybe you should consider just using the Following feed that’s on Twitter. [30:33] Sarah: Well, no, because I do genuinely — often the algorithm will bring things to my attention that I do want to see, right? [30:40] Aaron: Okay. Yeah, fair. [30:43] Sarah: I don’t know. I just— [30:45] Aaron: Yeah. [30:45] Sarah: ...I worry about the graveyard of people who might otherwise have become part of this community or contributed in a positive way that have just been totally turned off by this stuff. Like— [30:57] Aaron: Yeah. No, I see that. It’s just hard for me to imagine a different situation, so maybe it’s just not tractable, and it’s just like, “Oh, this sucks,” which is something we can agree on. I guess insofar as it’s laden with some sort of normative ask or something, like, “Guys, come on,” then it’s very hard for me to imagine a world where you don’t have random anime accounts who are vaguely vibe-adjacent to rationalism but also don’t talk about unpalatable issues. [31:31] Sarah: Also, I don’t think that I’m going to put out a call with my blog post, and I’m like, “Everybody, please stop doing this,” and they’re like, “Sorry, I was being unreasonable. I’ll stop.” I don’t know. It’s more of an observation. I don’t know. I feel like if someone— [31:45] Aaron: That’s a reasonable thing to potentially ask. It’s not like everyone’s going to take it as the word of God, fair, but this is the kind of thing that you could totally reasonably do if you wanted to. [31:55] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t know. I just want people to introspect a little more, be like, “Okay, what are my values? What do I believe?” And do those really cash out in a specific concern about hip-to-waist ratios for single women? It would be surprising. Whose value set is that? Anyway, maybe we can move on from this. [32:17] Aaron: Okay. I’ll see what I want to cut and see how hard I want to get canceled today. So tell me everything you know about the British government. [32:27] Sarah: Oh. [32:29] Aaron: Just kidding. Wait. Okay. Tell me what you were doing at AISI. Wait, not American. [32:39] Sarah: I mean, basically, I worked on our comms team for 10 months, and the team was very small. When I joined, it was literally just one person. Then I was the second person. And so there’s maybe 10 different research teams at AISI. Everyone’s trying to push out research all the time. If you’re on the comms team, you get a cool bird’s-eye view of all of this. So it was like, do we want to have a splashy comms moment around this paper? Usually, I was either writing or editing the blog posts that went out. I was also somehow the only person, or one of the only people, that had access to the back end of the website, and one time I broke the entire thing for a weekend by trying to write my own custom code. [33:21] Aaron: That’s extremely funny. [33:23] Sarah: Yeah. Well, not write it myself. I tried to insert it in a way that was wrong, and then the entire— [33:28] Aaron: I remember this. I remember this. [33:33] Sarah: Yeah. Anyway. I don’t know. I loved it there. It was a great time. [33:40] Aaron: Oh, cool. [33:40] Sarah: I was sad to leave. The only reason I left is because I felt like I just wanted to yap freely, and so that’s what I’m doing now. [33:48] Aaron: Yeah, yeah. [33:49] Sarah: It’s pretty hard to yap freely in the civil service, famously. [33:53] Aaron: Yeah. Wait, so do you know what would actually happen if you just yapped freely? Okay, not freely about anything you’ve explicitly signed an NDA about, but everything else. [34:06] Sarah: Are you saying what would’ve happened if I just said whatever I wanted while I was there? [34:11] Aaron: So I guess I don’t know what — about things you didn’t promise anyone or the government that you wouldn’t talk about. [34:20] Sarah: I mean, the rule was more that you don’t — this is a government-wide rule for the whole of the UK Civil Service, which is that you don’t publicly comment on the thing that you work on. [34:31] Aaron: Okay. No, that’s actually— [34:33] Sarah: That strict. Our technical researchers would be like, “This is a cool paper,” or whatever, but it’s more expressing opinions, especially opinions that involve policy positions or whatever. [34:45] Aaron: Yeah. [34:45] Sarah: That’s not an AISI-specific thing. It’s just like you can’t do that. [34:48] Aaron: Yeah. [34:48] Sarah: And especially if you’re a person, it’s more so assumed that your opinions affect— [34:53] Aaron: Yeah. [34:53] Sarah: ...your employer, even if you say that they don’t, which is probably fair enough. [34:57] Aaron: I think you made the right choice to yap freely. [35:02] Sarah: Yeah. But I don’t regret it, and I’m pro-AISI. AISI is cool, and people should go work there, even if temporarily. I think it was a good decision. [35:10] Aaron: Nice. Yeah, but you did publish all of the blog posts, right? By AISI? [35:17] Sarah: Yeah. I would say — no. I mean, maybe 50% of the ones that were published while I was there, I wrote the first draft of, and the other 50%, the research team drafted them, and then we synchronously edited them. [35:32] Aaron: Okay. So it sounds like you wrote both, or you were heavily involved in— [35:36] Sarah: Yeah. [35:36] Aaron: Okay, nice. That’s actually just impressive. Wait, doesn’t it not say your name? [35:41] Sarah: No, yeah. There are no bylines. It’s— [35:43] Aaron: Oh, yeah. That’s nuts. Wait, are you allowed to claim retroactively that you wrote stuff? [35:49] Sarah: I mean, I can say which ones I wrote. Yeah, I think it wouldn’t be the norm for this kind of output that you would put author names on. [36:02] Aaron: Okay. I feel like you should probably do that unless there’s a really good reason not to. Because I’m just curious which ones you wrote versus edited. I guess basically all of these now are. Yeah. There’s a lot here. You can go to aisi.gov.uk/blog and see all of Sarah’s beautiful writing. [36:22] Sarah: I mean, they’re not all mine, like I said. It’s a combination — I won’t just go through and say all the ones that I wrote on here because that feels weird. [36:31] Aaron: Okay. Maybe I’ll convince you, then we’ll add it to the episode description. [36:35] Sarah: Sure. [36:36] Aaron: Yeah. Wait. Do we have anything that’s not just a normal... Hmm. What would we talk about if we weren’t on a podcast, but that also isn’t very extremely personal or something? I feel like that’s always the best podcast content. [36:50] Sarah: I can talk somewhat about personal things — not personal in that they’re extremely revealing. [37:03] Aaron: No, they’re not. [37:04] Sarah: But they’re not super important. [37:05] Aaron: Yeah. Okay, cool. How’s your personal life? [37:10] Sarah: It’s pretty good. I’m moving back to London in two weeks. So if anyone lives in London, is an AI safety person, and wants to be my friend, they should just DM me on Twitter. [37:23] Aaron: Am I allowed to do that even if I don’t live in London? [37:28] Sarah: You— [37:28] Aaron: If you come to — go ahead. [37:29] Sarah: Yeah. You can DM me on Twitter whenever you want. [37:32] Aaron: Okay. Thank you. Cool. Okay. Yeah, honestly, I’m sorry, but I’ve kind of lost track of your various living and working situations a little bit. [37:43] Sarah: No, that’s chill. I honestly don’t even totally know what you’re doing right now either, so we’re even. [37:48] Aaron: Yeah. Okay, cool. Nice. Okay. Wait. Remind me. I think you just said this, but why are you moving to London again? [37:58] Sarah: I— [37:58] Aaron: Or is it not for a specific thing? It’s just a vibe. [38:02] Sarah: No, it’s basically AI safety reasons. I’m moving— [38:05] Aaron: Nice. [38:05] Sarah: ...very close to the LISA offices. And I just realized that living in Sheffield... I do love Sheffield. It is one of my favorite places, but it does not... Actually, it does have an EA presence that I only recently discovered. And a bunch of them, the northern EAs, are dying on the hill of “it’s so stupid that all of the EAs move to London and spend all this money on rent that they could donate.” And so there’s a big campaign to get people to move up north, but I defected and was like, “Sorry, I’m part of the coordination problem. I’m going down south.” But I don’t know. [38:39] Aaron: Nice. [38:39] Sarah: I unfortunately just don’t want to make the sacrifice of trying to be the flag bearer for moving to Sheffield and doing EA stuff. [38:47] Aaron: No, I have totally switched my opinion. So I was on about Tulsa at one point, and how everybody should move to Tulsa. And I have actually just come around to — okay, straightforwardly, maybe not straightforwardly, I don’t know if it’s the right word, but the agglomeration effects are just so strong, but they’re strong for a reason. And yeah, from an EA perspective — well, I don’t know if this is true in all worlds, but in the current world, you can imagine something where there’s basically zero funding or something, and there’s a very small community. But setting that aside, in the actual world, I think people should just not do the Sheffield thing, and it’s just straightforwardly worth it to donate less and live elsewhere. [39:31] Sarah: It is a lot less, to be fair, though. [39:35] Aaron: No. Yeah. [39:38] Sarah: People just don’t realize how cheap Sheffield is. [39:44] Aaron: Yeah. It just seems like really strong evidence, the fact that so many people just do, in fact... So setting aside EA world, just the fact that there is so much demand commercially, societally and socially and economically — I guess I meant that instead of commercially — for people to concentrate in one city just seems like really, really strong evidence that there’s really high returns to almost any sort of... No matter what you care about, it seems likely that probably you’re going to accomplish that best in a large city. [40:18] Sarah: Yeah. But it’s very chicken and egg, though, I guess. Everyone believes this, and so they— [40:25] Aaron: Yeah. But — philosophically, yeah, but I think in fact, I don’t really imagine... I think it’s sufficiently stable at this point. Maybe in 1591 or whatever — so I did not mean 1491, I meant a random year, so 1595 or whatever, when people were starting to go to New York — it’s like, “Oh, should we go to the other side of the river?” Maybe at that point, but at this point, I don’t think it’s really a coordination problem that’s possible to solve because there are really strong institutions in specific places. [40:58] Sarah: Yeah. But everyone’s — I don’t know. I maybe buy that it would be good if more people moved to cheaper places and donated money, and that those people could probably do... Given that so much work is remote now anyway, I would buy a lot of them can just do as good of a job from those other places. I mostly want the social aspect, and I feel like if I go into a co-working space, I absorb a bunch of ideas via osmosis. But that’s kind of— [41:24] Aaron: No, that’s important. [41:25] Sarah: I don’t think I literally couldn’t do what I’m currently doing if I— [41:30] Aaron: No, but the osmosis thing is really, really important. [41:33] Sarah: Well, I do think it is. I do think it is somewhat... Yeah. [41:37] Aaron: This is one influence about why I’m... I’m going to be working remote, at least to start, and I’m still going to Berkeley. Maybe this is evil of me and I should move to Tulsa. I’m not sure. [41:48] Sarah: No, I definitely don’t think that. Are you going to try and get into Constellation? I don’t know if that’s hard. [41:54] Aaron: I haven’t actually thought about this at all. It would be cool if somebody invited me or I could go, but it’s not like, oh, my professional plan is to work from there specifically. [42:05] Sarah: Yeah. [42:08] Aaron: Although that would be, I guess, depending... Although maybe I’d have to tell somebody. Yeah, maybe it depends what I’m doing, probably. I just have to figure that out, and how to communicate it. But I need to liberate my mind. Do you have any burning — or not burning — any interesting things at all? [42:31] Sarah: It is like getting blood from a stone, isn’t it? I know. [42:36] Aaron: That’s so British. [42:40] Sarah: Is that not a thing that you guys say? [42:41] Aaron: Blood from a stone? No, I don’t think... Honestly, maybe this is a Dostoevsky moment, and that is a thing people say, but it’s not a thing I say. [42:51] Sarah: It’s hard to get something out of something. [42:54] Aaron: Oh, yeah. Sure. [42:54] Sarah: Like interesting takes out of me. [42:56] Aaron: No, not interesting takes. It’s hard to get goss, but that’s a different story. [43:00] Sarah: No, that’s true. Maybe I would give you gossip if you just prompt me more specifically. [43:05] Aaron: I should jail— [43:05] Sarah: Don’t prompt me. [43:05] Aaron: ...Okay. Wait. How do I jailbreak Sarah? When are you moving to London? [43:12] Sarah: Two weeks in theory, but there’s going to be another heat wave right when I intended to do this, so I may in fact— [43:19] Aaron: Oh, yeah. [43:21] Sarah: ...not do it when I said I was going to do it. [43:25] Aaron: People should yell at Sarah to get air conditioning. It’s high impact. [43:28] Sarah: They do. To be fair, I’m coming around to... The other night when it was 32 degrees during the day or something here, I just had too many fans, just one on either side of my bed, just blowing air at me. [43:44] Aaron: Was that pleasant or was that still too hot? [43:48] Sarah: Well, it was pleasant. But only the top half of my body was cooled. It was not— [43:52] Aaron: Okay. Sounds not pleasant, actually. [43:56] Sarah: The whole thing was unpleasant. Honestly, it’s so funny how ill-equipped we are to deal with the heat, to the point where it’s all anyone talks about. I’m still talking about it, and the heat wave has ended. Watching the news during that week, it was alternating between the fact that our prime minister quit and then just people on the news being like, “It’s really hot right now. Here’s some various shots of places in London where it’s hot. This is Tower Bridge. It’s really hot there right now. There aren’t many people about because it’s so hot. Here’s a woman splashing herself with water because it’s so hot. God, when is it going to get less hot?” [44:26] Aaron: Yeah. [44:26] Sarah: Just that on the news for days. [44:28] Aaron: If only we had the technology. [44:31] Sarah: If only there was something that we could do about this. [44:34] Aaron: Yeah. [44:34] Sarah: You know? [44:35] Aaron: Are you going to get AC at your new living situation, whatever that is? [44:38] Sarah: Maybe I’ll get a little one of those units that are a few hundred pounds that you just put in your room or whatever. [44:44] Aaron: Yeah. Should I — wait, I’ll show. [44:47] Sarah: Okay. [44:47] Aaron: Well, I guess my background is blurred, but this little guy— [44:51] Sarah: Oh, okay. [44:51] Aaron: ...this window unit. I think it was 100 — well, I think it’s gone up, but it’s under 200 bucks, and this is saved. [44:57] Sarah: Oh, okay. [44:58] Aaron: This is the reason why. So it’s going to be — wait, let me check again. It’s going to be... Oh, it went down. Yesterday, it was projected to be 103 on Friday. Now it’s only projected to be 102. So that’s actually pretty bad for DC. [45:10] Sarah: Yeah. [45:10] Aaron: That’s pretty uncommon. [45:12] Sarah: I was in DC in the summer of July 2024, and I had the flu, I think. [45:18] Aaron: Oof. [45:18] Sarah: It was one of the worst experiences of my whole entire life. [45:22] Aaron: That’s why you never come. [45:23] Sarah: Wait, I come to DC so much. [45:26] Aaron: Okay. Yeah. Okay, fair. Wait, 103 to Celsius. I could do this, but I’m not going to be able to do it in my head while I’m looking at someone. [45:35] Aaron: Okay, that’s 39. 39— [45:37] Sarah: Whoa. That’s a lot. Okay. [45:40] Aaron: 39.444. It’s easy to say. [45:43] Sarah: That might be hotter than any temperature I’ve ever experienced. I think when I was in DC, it was 37. [45:49] Aaron: Okay. No, this is very uncommon. [45:52] Sarah: Sorry. This is not an interesting topic, probably. There was one day in 2022 where it got to 40 degrees in the UK, and I remember this because me and my housemates tried to calm down — cool down, even. We didn’t have air con, so we just— [46:06] Aaron: Oh, God. [46:06] Sarah: ...slept on ice cubes, and we watched the movie Frozen because we thought that— [46:11] Sarah: ...we thought if we just thought about ice, it would just feel immersive, and we would cool down. It kind of worked. But that’s a low intervention— [46:20] Aaron: I’m going to re— [46:20] Sarah: ...is just watch ice-themed content. [46:22] Aaron: I’m sure that will work if I turn off all the AC in my— [46:29] Sarah: Yeah. [46:30] Aaron: ...house or whatever on Friday. How do we convince the world — not the world, the UK — to adopt air conditioning? [46:38] Sarah: I think we just will eventually because if the summers are like this every year, it will be totally impractical not to, right? [46:49] Aaron: Yeah. I guess you could — yes, but I guess much like AI stuff, there’s a question of how do you accelerate or decelerate. Something might be inevitable, but there’s a question of how to control the timelines within some bounds of plausibility, so I don’t know. [47:07] Sarah: Yeah. I think there is just a contingent of people here that are just on principle opposed to— [47:14] Aaron: Is it American? Is that a vibe — people think it’s American-coded? [47:19] Sarah: But yeah, people just want to suffer. [47:22] Aaron: Not me. [47:23] Sarah: I don’t, either. I don’t want to suffer. [47:26] Aaron: Yeah. Okay, cool. Should we wrap up with one last topic of your choice— [47:34] Sarah: Yes. [47:34] Aaron: ...so I don’t have to choose? [47:36] Sarah: Oh, man. Maybe I should ask you a question. How has your level of optimism/pessimism about AI safety changed in the last, let’s say, year? [47:52] Aaron: Oh, that’s actually a good question. Wow, nice. I feel like we should probably have done more of this where I make you ask the question — not so I can answer it, but because that’s a good question, and then we can both discuss it. So a year. Okay, so what was happening in June/July of 2025? I feel like it hasn’t changed that much. It’s definitely changed since Trump, too. I’ve gotten more pessimistic broadly in Trump’s second term. But I think that was all pretty built in, and honestly, I don’t have as much of an explicit model with a change log, like people like Zvi do. So wait, hold on. Wait, what important developments have happened in the last few years? [48:42] Sarah: Well, I keep a blog on this, so let’s see. [48:44] Aaron: Oh, wait. Yeah. Right. Okay, totally. I wish I knew of a resource, and it’s nice. [48:49] Sarah: So in the last year, around about a year ago — GPT-5 came out. [48:57] Aaron: That’s crazy. That was four centuries ago. [48:59] Sarah: That was August. What happened in June? [49:04] Aaron: Wait, what is it? Wait, what’s this— [49:10] Sarah: In June, there was— [49:10] Aaron: Sorry. [49:10] Sarah: ...CAISI, the US AISI, but something CAISI. I don’t know why I spent so many words talking about this in the blog. It’s actually not that interesting of a development. And then we had the federal preemption thing ended up dying in July last year. [49:24] Aaron: Oh, right. Wait. So I just pulled up your blog post. Oh, wow. It’s like a whole list. I just— [49:29] Sarah: Yeah. There’s a list. [49:34] Aaron: Yeah. So I guess looking at this, broadly, slightly pessimistic because of — I guess the main thing is the administration seeming to be actively picking sides in a way that I think it wasn’t obvious, at least to me. Picking sides between labs, sorry, to be clear, in a way that wasn’t obvious to me a year ago. [49:58] Sarah: I mean — oh, between labs as in they’re picking OpenAI over Anthropic. [50:03] Aaron: Yes, and to be clear, this is literally importantly informed by my priors, but also I think it’s been a substantial update. I think Trump respects wealth enough to make it — oh, which is not a good reason to think that he would be on a level playing field, but evidently he’s not afraid to antagonize even people who are billionaires, which usually he’s pretty friendly to billionaires, but not in all cases. I don’t know. [50:41] Sarah: Yeah. [50:42] Aaron: That’s not a good theory of why a president should be neutral, or at least neutral as a starting place, with respect to various companies. But it was maybe a vibe that I was sort of hoping for. [50:56] Sarah: That’s not an axis I’ve been tracking, of “is the government displaying favoritism towards one particular company?” I haven’t really thought about that. [51:06] Aaron: Oh, okay. [51:06] Sarah: I was thinking of it in this maybe overly simple paradigm of “is the government situationally aware or not?” I have this— [51:17] Aaron: Can you say that— [51:17] Sarah: ...I have this assumption that if we achieve true government situational awareness, by which I mean the government is AGI-pilled and thinks about AI in vaguely the same way as me and a bunch of my friends, they will in fact just converge on vaguely sensible things, and nothing that came before will actually matter that much because it will be such a substantial update to them. But if they were previously embroiled in a bunch of petty drama where they are mean to Anthropic and they like OpenAI or whatever, they’ll just have an epiphany or a moment of clarity where it will all become clear. And they’ll be like, “We know what we have to do.” And that’s not to say that necessarily they would do the correct thing, but I’m more saying I think that would be a watershed moment where everything that happened before doesn’t necessarily really matter. And so when I was writing this blog post, I was really primarily tracking this situational awareness thing and the extent to which it seemed more or less plausible. Not that it’s a total discrete moment or whatever. [52:11] Aaron: Totally. I think this is a better model for the national security state specifically. It’s like when you look at the revealed preference of the American Republic, it’s like what actually people care about, or what the powerful people care about. It’s the Fed and the military. [52:29] Sarah: Mm-hmm. [52:29] Aaron: And the national security state broadly. So that said, there’s just no getting around the individual who is Donald Trump as president for the next couple of years. He is just — what the president personally wants to do just does matter tremendously for a lot of things. And like— [52:51] Sarah: Okay. I don’t like Donald Trump for all the normal reasons. I’m a broadly liberal person, et cetera. I would not have voted for him if I was an American, whatever, but for AI safety specifically, he’s just so high variance. I just can’t comment on whether he is in fact better or worse than, say, Harris would’ve been for AI safety because I literally feel like he could just roll out of bed one morning and be like, “I don’t like AI anymore.” [53:18] Aaron: Z— [53:19] Sarah: That’s a possibility that feels like it’s on the table, which it wouldn’t have been for any other president who’s just a little more sane and more predictable. He’s unpredictable, but in a way that could just be massively in our favor. I don’t know. [53:32] Aaron: No, I see where you’re coming from. I guess I would just say that if that happens, it’s not going to be because he agrees with you about reasons to be concerned. [53:43] Sarah: It could. He could get personally— [53:47] Aaron: Yeah. It could. Yes, it is not literally physically — there’s one Everettian branch out of 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the trillion that is this happening. [53:58] Sarah: I don’t think it’s that unlikely. I remember there was a video clip that went around ages ago. I feel like the AI safety community tends to grasp at any little thing that looks like it’s directionally good or whatever, but there was this one clip where he’s on a plane and he’s being interviewed by some random journalist, and they ask him about superintelligence, and he refers to it as the rabbit that we can’t let get away, or... Do you remember this? I’m pretty sure that was the phrasing he used. And this was one thing out of a million random things he said that day or whatever. But it’s not impossible to me that he could just be like, “Whoa, there is this thing these companies are making that seems really powerful and scary, and is a threat.” At least in my head, it’s a threat to his power, but the actions you might take to prevent loss of control of AI as the president could still be broadly good, even if they are motivated by a desire to not— [54:43] Aaron: Yeah. [54:43] Sarah: ...play the crazy AI. I don’t know. There’s something there. It doesn’t seem like one in 10 million. It seems like— [54:50] Aaron: No, yeah. Sorry. [54:51] Sarah: Oh, really? [54:52] Aaron: No, the really unlikely thing that I was claiming, just to be clear, is where he — or even if we didn’t even talk about the administration broadly — but I don’t know, actually, let’s just talk about Trump specifically. He comes around to a worldview that is based on reasons. That is the thing. And that then leads to sort of rational action. I agree that he could, for whatever reason — maybe Sam Altman or Jensen Huang, they come around for other reasons or something, and then they have... sorry, that’s actually not relevant or load-bearing, so forget about that. I agree that the chaos is a thing and that could potentially be good. I just disagree that it’s going to be downstream of him having reasonable takes. [55:37] Sarah: I think if it’s downstream of him just being scared, then that seems like it could be fine. He doesn’t have to read LessWrong and understand the arguments for AI risk. He could just be like, “Wow, my panel of scientific advisors are telling me real scary things, and I don’t like that Dario guy, or that Sam guy or whatever. I’ve got to do something about this.” That seems like it could lead to some not— [56:01] Aaron: Yeah. [56:02] Sarah: ...maximally bad outcomes. [56:04] Aaron: No, I guess I would rather live in the world where the president — and I think this has been the case for — I think he is more or less, probably... Listen, I’m not a historian of presidents. I don’t know who was the president in 1840 or whatever, but at least in recent history, I think he has been the least reasons-responsive in an important sense, such that other administrations you could model as sort of rational actors, at least broadly, in a way that I don’t think you can with Trump, and I think that’s actually negative, not positive. [56:41] Sarah: Yeah. I think it’s probably going to be negative, but with the variance thing, there’s some small chance it’s extremely positive. Maybe this doesn’t cash out to be any better than a different president. I don’t know. [56:54] Aaron: That’s also true with — you can imagine a whatever. In my mind, I’m thinking of Obama, but even Biden, even anybody but Trump in recent history. You could also imagine them doing some sort of very high pro-safety action, but that would be not because of random variance. So it’s not clear how it checks out. If your worldview is like, “Oh, something radical needs to happen,” then it’s not clear whether you’d prefer reasons-responsiveness or high variance. I think that’s the actually coherent way of saying it. [57:35] Sarah: Yeah. I guess with, say, the Biden admin, it seemed like they were vaguely, or they were at least concerned about AI ethics issues or like— [57:44] Aaron: No. Yeah. [57:45] Sarah: But I wasn’t expecting... It was cool that they had that executive order with the reporting requirements or whatever, but it kind of always seemed to me like they were just going to keep doing these fairly pedestrian things. Whereas with Trump, it seems like they are, at least in posture or aesthetically, extremely accelerationist. But because of this high variance thing, and because actually if you look at the content of some of the stuff they put out, it’s not as accelerationist as you’d think — I think that that pro-innovation thing is kind of not a very good signal of what could actually happen in the future. Some people are like, “Oh, the Trump admin is so bad because they’re just so hawkish and they want to beat China, and they just talk about innovation all the time.” And it’s like, that’s true, but I think you have to kind of look beyond that to, A, the high variance thing, and B, the fact that the actual substance of, say, the AI action plan or other things that they’ve put out is... And it’s also borne out in this recent staged deployment thing. They are not in fact totally foot on the gas pedal. They just act like that because it looks cool. [58:49] Aaron: One thing I will say, I think it’s very important — the actual chronology of the Biden versus Trump thing is very important. What we’re not observing is Biden in the current 2020-something world. [59:03] Sarah: Yeah. That’s true. Yeah. [59:06] Aaron: And likewise, fair, we did not observe — I don’t think Trump would be near... I think he would probably look directionally more or less ASI-pillable in the era of Biden just because of chronology stuff. [59:25] Sarah: I don’t think— [59:25] Aaron: Not ASI-pillable. Sorry. The whole world is sort of moving in the direction of— [59:30] Sarah: Yeah. I think that the— [59:32] Aaron: ...consequentialism. [59:33] Sarah: ...I would guess the political right wing are way more ASI-pillable than the left. [59:39] Aaron: No, I agree, and I actually think deferring to woke or whatever is a real problem. I also — yeah, you still have the reasons-responsiveness thing. I do think the president is pretty... I guess in terms of actively doing things that undermine national security, I feel like Trump is uniquely capable of doing things that actively undermine national security. I also think you’re giving a little bit too much credit to actual ideology here. I think it’s pretty clear that Trump doesn’t actually care in any important sense about the sort of natural extension, or the very close, basically almost identical extension of where his rhetoric points. Because if he did, he would not be deferring to Jensen Huang on export controls. It’s very difficult, and I’m trying not to say this as a partisan. I’m trying to say this insofar as I can, just my overall actual impression, but it’s hard to give him too little credit, I think. [1:00:44] Sarah: I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to give him credit. I’m just trying to think about how to model him or predict him. [1:00:49] Aaron: No. I get that. I guess I just think even the ideology model isn’t that good. [1:00:57] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t know. I just think there’s something to this argument that the left is uniquely un-AGI-pillable, even though I would broadly agree with them on most things. They just have this baked-in skepticism of everything and — [1:01:11] Aaron: Yeah. [1:01:12] Sarah: ...and there’s all this— [1:01:13] Aaron: There’s the online — sorry, I cut you off. Sorry. [1:01:17] Sarah: Yeah. I don’t know. For some reason, this polarization has emerged between the ethics-y people and the safety people, and maybe that’s just kind of a weird contingent fact of history, and it didn’t have to happen that way, but it has happened that way. And so just — there’s at least something to that, that maybe this means that if a singularity happens under a Republican admin, this is slightly more likely to... Yeah. [1:01:42] Aaron: Yeah. No, I think this is true, but Trump’s flaws just point in the other direction, however. [1:01:49] Sarah: Yeah. It probably is outweighed by him being crazy, but I feel uncertain. [1:01:57] Aaron: Yeah. [1:01:58] Sarah: Yeah. [1:01:58] Aaron: Okay. We should probably wrap up soon. [1:02:00] Sarah: Cool. Seems like a good place to end. [1:02:02] Aaron: Do you have any final — do you have any last words? [1:02:05] Sarah: Do I have any last words? People should not be too overconfident about their AI takes. It might just all be totally chill. [1:02:16] Aaron: I don’t know if I... Well, we can’t get into that because it’s 3:26. [1:02:19] Sarah: Yeah. [1:02:19] Aaron: Okay. Sarah, it’s been lovely talking. We will redact parts as appropriate. [1:02:24] Sarah: Yeah. [1:02:24] Aaron: Maybe we’ll keep in this part that says we’re redacting parts as appropriate. [1:02:28] Sarah: Yeah. That’s appropriate. [1:02:28] Aaron: And go enjoy whatever you have to go to. [1:02:32] Sarah: Cool. Take care. Thank you for having me. Bye-bye. Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe (https://www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   24 May 2026

   #16: Tommy Crow is extraordinarily based and correct about everything

   Episode main page: https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/tommy-crow (https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/tommy-crow)A podcast with Tommy Crow, who is on Substack (https://tommyjoancrow.substack.com/), Twitter (@tommyjoancrow (https://x.com/tommyjoancrow)), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@tommyjoancrow), and elsewhere (https://linktr.ee/tommyjoancrow), recorded irl after a recent EAGx conference in DC! Topics discussed - Tommy’s awake top surgery: how it happened, why almost every doctor said it was impossible - “Fighting the tube,” post-op torture, and the liability incentives that quietly make pain a tolerated feature of US surgical care - The role of amnestic drugs like midazolam - preventing memory of suffering rather than the suffering itself - and why that’s epistemically and morally suspect - Historical precedent for getting this catastrophically wrong as evidence the current consensus deserves scrutiny - Practical self-advocacy: drafting a healthcare power of attorney with anesthesia/intubation restrictions, and why the state-default POA is worse than anything you’d write - How to find heterodox doctors - Hormones as a tightly-coupled system: Aaron’s cis TRT experience, Tommy’s trans TRT experience, and tradeoffs that get glossed over - Healthcare abundance as a policy and career direction - Shenanigans by Tommy’s insurance provider - Gay male culture as Tommy’s “classically liberal” second home Transcript [00:00] Aaron: Hi, this is Aaron, and in this episode of Pigeon Hour, Tommy Crow and I talk about surgery, medicine, and more. Tommy is a super cool guy who I met in person for the first time at EAGxDC a couple weeks ago. We recorded the next day after the conference in person, and we’re finally getting this out now. One thing to note is that during the recording, I committed to running the transcript through Claude in case anything is misleading or deserving of correction. There are a few things what I consider to be pretty minor, but those are in the Substack post attached to this episode, with a bit of back and forth between Claude and then Tommy or I depending on who said the thing in question. So, without further ado, me and Tommy. [00:48] Aaron: Okay, we are now recording. [00:50] Tommy: Okay. [00:51] Aaron: Actually, so we’re recording on one device just in case. And because now I have a 48-gig Mac, I can do Otter as well. Okay. Tommy, I hope that’s okay — that was the name of the Google Calendar event. [01:13] Tommy: Tommy coming. Love that. Yeah, I had a similar incident that also made me a little paranoid about losing recordings. [01:22] Aaron: Oh wow, what happened? [01:23] Tommy: I mean, it wasn’t like a huge deal, but I similarly tried to rig up a way to record a phone call and failed to record one side of it — I only recorded my side. And it was with this kind of gray-market surgeon I was talking to. He — I almost did my surgery with him. I actually had plane tickets to Italy booked. [01:49] Aaron: Oh, dang. [01:51] Tommy: And he was actually a legitimate researcher at the University of Naples, and then we just found out that he was also doing black-market plastic surgeries out of a hotel on the side. [02:01] Aaron: That’s kind of cool. I’m — [02:03] Tommy: Yes. Like, and I totally — [02:05] Aaron: — not sure if I endorse it, but it’s kind of cool anyway. [02:08] Tommy: Well, we had a whole debate. I was thinking about doing it with him because at the time I couldn’t find anyone else in the world who was willing to try it. So I thought he might be my only hope. [02:18] Aaron: Do you want to give — wait, so for the people, do you want to give context? [02:23] Tommy: So, okay, so as far as we know, I’m the only documented case of someone getting modern female-to-male top surgery fully awake. And before I did this, most doctors would tell you that it was medically impossible. And this was just very obviously not true. Anyone who understands this particular method of local anesthesia that was used would know that it can be done this way. It’s not hard technology to understand, but it’s very underappreciated. So a lot of doctors will just sort of dismiss it out of hand. [02:59] Aaron: And yesterday — so we met at EA Global. Well, we met online, but then we were talking at EA Global in person, Washington, DC. By the way, this is an in-person Pigeon Hour, a special event. Yeah, welcome to the beautiful recording studio, which is a couch. [03:10] Tommy: Happy to be here. [03:11] Aaron: So wait, why did you even want to do the not-asleep version? [03:23] Tommy: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? So I think general anesthesia opens you up to a lot more risk of pain at multiple points throughout the procedure. And I think this happens a lot more than people are typically aware of. And it actually happens oftentimes as part of the procedure. So just one example of something that commonly happens in American hospitals is this phenomenon that they call “fighting the tube” — that’s actually the phrase that doctors and anesthesiologists use. They call it fighting the tube. And that’s basically exactly what it sounds like. It’s where they wake you up after surgery in post-op while you’re still intubated, and they wait for you to basically struggle and thrash and try to scream and gurgle against the tube because you feel like you’re getting waterboarded. And they just kind of tie you down or hold you down and let that happen for a while. And they do this because there’s a complicated mix of liabilities here. Basically they will slightly, slightly, slightly reduce your chance of dying in exchange for an almost certain chance of causing you extreme suffering and anguish, because that reduces liability for them — they face much more liability for your preventable death than they do for your preventable suffering. [04:47] Aaron: Yeah, okay. So to not be coy about it — yes, we’re going to be talking about how you’re secretly being tortured in surgery and why this is bad. I’m always doing this — I’m always saying “um” and “uh” when I start recording. It’s terrible. I do it even off recording, to be fair. But anyway. So this is not just a top surgery thing. This is a general surgery thing. I’m not trying to cancel trans voices or anything, I promise. I’m trying to make it like — there’s a general problem here, right? Or a general phenomenon here. And then we’ll let the people of Pigeon Hour decide if it’s a problem. I think it’s a problem. [05:32] Tommy: Well, and I will say it in my very trans voice — this is not the issue that I encountered, it just happened to be applicable in a trans surgery for me. But this is applicable in many, many, many surgeries across the entire United States, and presumably elsewhere as well, although I’m not informed about that particularly. And there are two things that I’ll say that are very general concerns or topics that I’m interested in. Number one, there is a pain management crisis in the United States that has been going on ever since the opioid epidemic, where basically there’s a whole bunch of incentives that discourage doctors from managing pain effectively and also normalize the use of anterograde amnesia–inducing drugs as a substitute for pain relief. So that’s number one. And number two, there are just better ways to do fat-based surgeries specifically. Any surgery that’s being done with fat can be done better oftentimes than it is, because this technology called tumescent local anesthesia is very underused. [06:44] Aaron: Yeah, so wait — the amnesia thing is kind of obviously also — wait, to back up, a meta point is like, it’s a very kind of horrifying topic that I don’t especially like discussing. Do you think it’s important? [06:55] Tommy: Yeah. [06:55] Aaron: But we’ll try. I mean, we’ll try to strike a balance of being like — not withholding important information, but also not scaring people away from actually listening. I mean, I think it’s a genuinely hard problem. There’s some sort of curve where you maximize the impact, but if no one’s listening, you don’t maximize the impact. So you’ve got to hit the top of the curve. So the amnesia thing basically means that you don’t remember, and so that is effectively what’s going on — that you are being made to not form memories of being tortured, rather than just not being tortured in the first place. And you know way more about this than I do. This is like a big part of your researching this — it’s evidently a big part of your life. And the way it’s sort of been like the horrors of the background universe to me or something. But I do know as some context that there’s precedent in the sense of — we used to not use any anesthesia at all when operating on infants. [07:59] Tommy: Yes. [07:59] Aaron: And this is in Jonathan Birch’s book Edge of Sentience — sorry, we’ll cut out my pausing. And yes, that’s the proper, both philosophical and just accurate, as far as I can tell, description of what happened. And basically, it was totally standard practice to just simply cut open human babies without doing anything about — without any sort of prevention of pain or suffering. And one normie response is like, “that’s obviously bad,” and I think it probably is. But the other thing is that there’s a gigantic asymmetry. It’s like, why are you so sure? You know, if there’s only a — I mean, definitely at a 30% chance I think you can go pretty low while the moral calculus checks out as to whether you should take at least any steps, and certainly probably pretty intensive steps, to prevent suffering. Like, what are the chances that we’re wrong about infants not feeling pain, right? And I will go to bat for: knowing the subjective experience of another being is extraordinarily difficult. So like — yeah, I don’t think there’s any sort of trick going on to say that even if you think in some situations that maybe in fact there’s no suffering, like, ground truth under the surface — it’s worth considering the probability that you’re wrong, or how certain you are or whatever. That’s my pitch or ramble about — I don’t know, any takes? [09:30] Tommy: Yeah. When people talk about the pain-related risks of general anesthesia, oftentimes what people are imagining is kind of the classic horror story where someone is aware during surgery, like while the doctor is cutting them open. And I actually think that there is a risk there. I mean, this has happened to people — people have woken up during surgery. I do think that’s a real risk. I will say that’s not my primary concern. My primary concern is mostly during post-op, where there are actual, you know, lots and lots of witnesses seeing this happen and whistleblowing and talking about how it’s actually part of the procedure to just expect pain. But also there is a concern about what’s happening during surgery. I don’t think general anesthesia is well understood. And I think it’s also somewhat simplistically logical to say, well, I can have a higher certainty that no pain is happening if I block that pain at the source, at the actual nerve, the nerve pathway, rather than try to do it systemically at the brain level. [10:49] Aaron: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if that’s — maybe that’s true. It’s not intuitive for me at all. I feel like I’m much more confident if I just nuke myself with fentanyl instead of — [10:56] Tommy: Oh, I’m not. [10:56] Aaron: Okay. I mean, there’s reasons not to do that, right? But also I don’t know what I’m talking about. But just at an intuitive level, blocking it at the source sounds kind of like — okay, well, why? Like, maybe. Also, I have a sense that people, at least philosophically, often talk about pain as though it is entirely localized to where some sort of injury actually happens — and that is often true that if you get a paper cut, you feel it on your finger. But the visceral sense of suffering is, at almost a philosophical level, it needn’t at least conceptually exist or needn’t be tracked consciously as located wherever. Your brain can just decide to do whatever it wants or something. I feel like this is probably not the most important point, but — [11:51] Tommy: Well, think about it. I mean, I guess if we’re going to get into this point — think about: okay, so I was in surgery and I was just as alert and clear as I am speaking to you right now. And in fact I was narrating the entire surgery to the camera and I was watching it happen. And I was watching him — sorry, this is going to be graphic. [12:16] Aaron: No, tell it. You can — well, we can figure out what to cut later. If anything, we don’t have to. [12:20] Tommy: So I was watching him literally skin me alive, because he skins them first, you know, and then cuts them off. And I was just watching and talking, like just like I’m talking to you now, and I was just watching him do this and I couldn’t feel anything. And for me, when I look at that scenario, there is no big philosophical question to ask, because I was exactly the same person that I am now and I know for a fact that I was not experiencing pain or suffering. But if I was in some sort of weird anesthesia state — I’m not going to call it sleep because it’s actually very different from sleep — there are actually real philosophical questions and uncertainties about what’s going on in the brain while I’m in that sort of weird sleep state. Whereas if I’m awake and I’m just talking like I’m talking to you now, I know that there’s no pain. [13:09] Aaron: Or at the very least, I mean, somebody could be pedantic, but I think I agree that it is overwhelmingly likely that you’re correct about your own experience. We don’t have to get into it. [13:16] Tommy: In whatever sense I can be confident that I’m not going through torture right now, I was confident at that time. [13:22] Aaron: Yeah. And to poke at the — oh wait, hold on, I had a thought on the people waking up during surgery, which is that — okay, I take your point that this might be the secondary issue. I think it’s important as at least evidence, or like very, very high-evidence case studies or something, because you don’t need to speculate about the ground truth of subjective experience, like, absent report or things like that. Like, these are just existence proofs — or not approximately, but very, very close to existence proofs of terrible suffering during surgery. A pet peeve to get out there is that — I’ve read about this back in, I was honestly reading about this more than a couple years ago, I think 2023. And yeah, there are these horrifying case reports — people genuinely being tortured during surgery, and then they talk about it in terms of like, “oh wow, they’re traumatized.” It’s like, that sucks, I agree it sucks that they’re traumatized, but also it sucks they’re being tortured. I think that’s actually the primary thing. [14:30] Tommy: Completely agree with that. Completely agree with that. And oftentimes I talk about the reliance on these amnesia-inducing drugs and people say, “wow, that sounds so horrible because the body keeps the score, these people must be traumatized afterwards.” And I’m like, I don’t really give a shit if they’re traumatized afterwards. If you have seen torture — like, I’ve seen some shit in hospitals, and that is way worse. I’m sorry, to me that’s way worse than any sort of psychological trauma I’ve ever experienced. [15:00] Aaron: You also don’t have to take a strong stand of “I don’t give a shit.” It could just be that both things are bad. But I agree, the fundamental primary issue here, probably the main one, is the experience itself. [15:08] Tommy: Yes. To me the trauma is rough, and I’m sorry if that exists, but it’s so secondary to the actual torture. [15:17] Aaron: I mean, there’s a general thing — I guess we’re sort of preaching to a choir while having this conversation. But like, I don’t know, sometimes the choir is just correct, right? I mean, this is like many such cases in society — we have factory farming. There’s also the neonatal anesthesia thing. There’s the fact that — I don’t know, I’m pausing the fact that they use — what is the term again, prevention of memory formation — [15:52] Tommy: Anterograde amnesia. [15:54] Aaron: Yes, anterograde amnesia, like amnestic drugs or whatever. That is very, very sus, right? It’s like, wait, hold on a second, why are you causing me to not form memories specifically? And wait — sometimes it comes along for the ride, right? So it’s not necessarily nefarious, but I think we should — I don’t know, it’s a big — like, literally, not literally, but figuratively a red flag. [16:17] Tommy: Yeah. And a few things I will say on that: number one, just to give a few disclaimers, I am not claiming that doctors have nefarious motives to torture you and they’re like, “oh yeah, I love this.” That’s not the motive. And oftentimes I think there is a level of pseudo-benevolent paternalism where they just honestly don’t want you to be traumatized by something that has to happen anyway. However, I think especially after the opioid epidemic, there has been an increasing callousness about pain, and it really has seeped into the culture of anesthesiology. You hear oftentimes a very common phrase that I’ll hear anesthesiologists say, or emergency room nurses say, is “pain is not an emergency.” And I just completely disagree with this philosophy. I think that is an evil philosophy. I think pain is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you besides death, and somehow it’s worse — [17:17] Aaron: I mean, plausibly, quite plausibly worse than death. [17:18] Tommy: Exactly, yeah. And similarly, midazolam is relied upon for the explicit purpose of memory prevention. I want to emphasize this very strongly. It is not relied upon for pain management. It is not a good pain management drug. It is for memory prevention. And you can Google this and look at what anesthesiologists are saying about it — they will explicitly say this is for the prevention of, quote, “unpleasant memories.” That is explicitly what it’s for. [17:53] Aaron: Also, just as a tiny bit of added credibility, I commit to running the transcript through Claude and saying, with your consent, I guess — actually, non-consensual Claude transcript analysis, just kidding — to figure out, presumably something we say is going to be slightly off. It’s very hard to talk for an hour and never say anything wrong. But we will report that. [18:15] Tommy: Yes, yes. [18:17] Aaron: Yeah, seems bad. I mean, so at one level I 100% buy this, and at another, for some reason I am less mad than I feel like I should be about the fact that this has probably happened to me. And I don’t know, memory is highly integrated into the human psychology, neurology, whatever. I have gotten surgery before and I struggle — it’s very similar to like a factory farming thing — I just struggle to viscerally care enough or in proportion, or not even in proportion, but sort of to a maximally appropriate all-things-considered degree or whatever about pigs and chickens being confined their whole lives, et cetera. And I do think the amnesia thing is just doing a ton of work here. And I guess also, I do actually kind of bite the bullet — if we could causally isolate everything, that amnesia is good because of the trauma thing. Like, I’m glad that I’m not traumatized. [19:23] Tommy: Oh yeah. [19:23] Aaron: But it’s very hard to have people act in their self-interest when you’re preventing the mechanism by which they know to protest or something. [19:34] Tommy: Right. And for a surgery that you have to have — if you know that you’re going to get it anyway and it has to be painful for some reason, then it does seem like a very useful tool to just prevent memory formation of that. [19:48] Aaron: Yeah, I guess also — one dynamic is that often the condition of surgery is not that you’re in a position to be making much of a decision. I actually think this is maybe the most actionable thing — for a highly anticipated voluntary surgery. Often you’re not in a position to be making much of a decision. Maybe this sounds unagentic or something — I think in a literal sense it is, but, you know, some shit happens, you’re in a bad car accident, or I’m just imagining I’m in a bad car accident, in the hospital, vaguely know about these concerns. Realistically, I feel like I’m probably signing the consent papers anyway because, oh no, okay. Well — [20:28] Tommy: Go for it, and remind yourself. [20:29] Aaron: Well look, I’m not sure that I would at this moment, and second of all, I’m very — especially I think maybe I should think through, what are my actual asks? I should have a note in my phone in case this happens. What are my actual asks here? Because I probably don’t want to die because I refused surgery, all things considered. At the same time, I guess the one saving grace here — sorry, I’m rambling — is that if you explicitly refuse consent for something in the US, my sense is that in general they don’t secretly do it. [21:02] Tommy: I think that’s mostly true. [21:04] Aaron: Mostly. Oh, great. Wonderful. [21:07] Tommy: Yeah. There are many, many exceptions to that. [21:09] Aaron: I mean, there’s also a lot of gray area in the sense of — if you’re handed a 50-page document for the benevolent doctor to make you not die, generally you say yes without doing a whole analysis. I mean, maybe LLMs are something to be used here. [21:25] Tommy: Yeah. [21:26] Aaron: Yeah. [21:26] Tommy: I do carry around my healthcare power of attorney. [21:30] Aaron: Oh wait — I mean, like, if you’re comfortable showing it. So this is embarrassing, but I don’t actually know what physical item you’re going to produce. [21:42] Tommy: It’s a piece of paper. [21:43] Aaron: Okay. I mean, I feel like maybe you should have it on Google Drive also. I’m guessing you do. [21:48] Tommy: Well, yeah, doctors can be weird about that, though. [21:50] Aaron: Yeah, no, I know. Doctors hate Google Drive. They actually give you more — they give you, like, pain-causing medication during surgery if you try to send them a Google Drive link. [22:01] Tommy: They give you a pain-causing medication, just like inject you with water. [22:08] Aaron: Cool. Oh, this is based. Okay, I should do this. How do I do this? Seriously. [22:12] Tommy: It’s really, really easy. So it depends on your state — it’s on the state level. I recommend every single person does this. This is one of my big tips that I tell to everyone. [22:19] Aaron: Should we take a picture? Is it okay if we take — I mean, we can decide whether to add it, like take a picture and then maybe add it or link it or something. [22:25] Tommy: This is just the Wisconsin — [22:27] Aaron: Just so people have an idea of the kind of thing they’re looking for. [22:29] Tommy: Yeah, so basically — it’s on the state level. Just Google your state name and then “healthcare power of attorney” and read through it. And then oftentimes you’ll have to take it to a notary and have it signed by like two people. But then the important part is that you can usually, depending on the state, attach an addendum to it. [22:49] Aaron: Oh, that’s cool. [22:50] Tommy: So mine just says — I only have like three items on it. It says, quote, “general anesthesia,” and quote, “deep sedation,” and similar states of medically induced unconsciousness should not be used unless absolutely necessary to preserve life. That’s number one. I have those two things, general anesthesia and deep sedation, in quotation marks because those are kind of like umbrella terms. [23:13] Aaron: Do you want to take a picture of it? [23:14] Tommy: You can take a picture and then we’ll discuss after. Let me think about it. [23:19] Aaron: Okay, because I’m interested in the specific wording. But like, yeah, tell me to delete it later, obviously I will. [23:25] Tommy: And then basically, no intubation unless it’s to save my life. And then a statement about who I want to make decisions for me. [23:34] Aaron: Oh, that’s a good one. I’m not sure if I trust the people that I actually trust with most things to make good decisions on this front. [23:40] Tommy: Yeah, so an important thing to keep in mind is that you already have a healthcare power of attorney. It’s given to you automatically by the state. So if you haven’t made one, you’re basically just outsourcing that to the state. And presumably the state is only going to make equal or worse decisions about your healthcare than you. [24:01] Aaron: Wait, hold on, I feel like — what does power of attorney even mean? [24:05] Tommy: Your healthcare power of attorney is a person who makes decisions for you. [24:10] Aaron: Right, okay, that makes sense. Wait, so I feel like — isn’t it usually like next of kin or something? I guess it’s for inheritance stuff. But usually they ask your parents or something. They don’t just call up a bureaucrat. [24:25] Tommy: Right, right, right. And that’s why my third amendment says “not my parents.” [24:29] Aaron: Oh, interesting. Okay, wow. My parents are not going to like this — luckily they don’t listen to this. [24:36] Tommy: Yeah, I mean, and if your parents are your choice, then that’s great. But — [24:40] Aaron: No, I love my parents. I actually have them excluded from my will because I don’t think they donate the money well. I have somebody who I trust to donate. I don’t have a gigantic amount of money — oh, sorry, to be clear, they are comfortable. It’s not like they’re — yes, the expected direction of money flow goes the other way. I’m very confident they’re not going to need my dinky little savings. [25:04] Tommy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [25:06] Aaron: Dang. Wow. [25:08] Tommy: But basically anything you can bring up quickly should be equal to or better than whatever the state automatically gives you. [25:14] Aaron: Yeah, maybe I’ll try to put — this is like a post-podcast-recording project — but what I would want is a checklist of things to follow or something. Obviously some things are approximately irreducibly your decision. But I don’t want to spend 100 hours of research figuring out what to do. I want somebody who’s done the research and has an appropriate and accurate understanding of the stakes here to make reasonable recommendations that I then approve or decide on. So maybe I’ll try to put together a website where this exists. One thing I can do is vibe-code websites. [25:55] Tommy: We could work on that together. [25:58] Aaron: Yo. Wow. Wild. [26:02] Tommy: Can I give my other pitch while we’re here? [26:03] Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [26:05] Tommy: There’s two things that I tell people to do. One is to have the healthcare power of attorney, and the other one is, if you have a stash of leftover pain medication — opiates or whatever — keep one of those in your wallet all the time. [26:22] Aaron: Okay, yeah. No, I think Pigeon Hour is based and therefore not going to cut this for legal reasons. Cool. Although I have — so maybe I might cut this part — I don’t currently have any opioids in this house, for example. I think if it was up to me, sort of without any legal risk, I would. So it just — maybe out of sort of — it’s never been a priority of mine because I never think that I’m — luckily I’m not in chronic bad suffering, which is a great privilege to be in, you know, to not be in. So there’s a question of, like, should I in fact just seriously take seriously, and probably I think I’ll be able to acquire opioids, and if so, literally which ones? I mean, presumably pharma, not like — yeah. [27:12] Tommy: Yeah, you know, that’s actually a great question, and I have no idea. I feel like they all work way better than ibuprofen or Tylenol, so whatever you can get your hands on, I think. I’m not actually informed about whether you should go for oxy versus hydromorphone. [27:27] Aaron: Yeah, I’m guessing it’s mostly a question — if you have enough of any of them, it kind of works. That’s my very vague sense. [27:36] Tommy: Yeah. The difference between zero and one is way, way bigger than the difference between one and two. [27:42] Aaron: I’m just going to make a note on my phone. [27:48] Tommy: Yeah, it’s a good question — literally which one — because there must be, I’m sure there are differences, I’m just totally — [27:55] Aaron: I mean, frankly, it’s like — man, it would be really — I feel like no one’s going to buy it if I say like, “yes, officer, I’m importing X, Y, and Z, but listen to my podcast episode, bro.” Although — [28:10] Tommy: “Tommy got me into it.” Go take Tommy to jail. [28:14] Aaron: Yeah, no. I think — yeah, and this is actually something I have — I perpetually have a to-do list. This should probably go at least on the secondary to-do list rather than not even existing on the to-do list. It’s like, figure out at least whether this is something I want to do — like, acquire. And the system for, I mean, not literally but approximately, what did people refer to by “the system” — will tell you, oh, discard any unused medication. Like, no, bonk. [28:43] Tommy: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. [28:47] Aaron: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, one thing is — this is just not the most fun conversation to have, so — [28:58] Tommy: I’m a party killer, yeah. [28:59] Aaron: No, but that’s an actual issue, right? It’s like — AI risk even is a little sexier. Yeah, lots of — not to mention global poverty. Nobody’s uncomfortable talking about, like, preventing malaria. Maybe they are, but — [29:21] Tommy: Maybe I’m a freak, but I find surgery and — I mean, pain relief is a very hard topic to talk about, but I also find surgery and pain management so interesting. [29:33] Aaron: Okay, interesting. [29:34] Tommy: Which is probably why people hate me at parties — they’re like, “God, here comes Tommy, we’re going to talk about torture again.” [29:40] Aaron: I actually — no, no, that does genuinely suck. Am I glad? I’m glad this is someone’s special interest, right? [29:50] Tommy: Well, we can talk about the more fun parts of something, like — [29:54] Aaron: I mean, well, I guess we should — I do want to make sure we don’t miss anything important. Are there any fun parts? [30:00] Tommy: The surgery itself was literally the most fun I’ve ever had. [30:04] Aaron: Oh wild, that’s weird. But — [30:06] Tommy: It was so fucking fun. Not — [30:07] Aaron: Not because you were high? [30:09] Tommy: Not because I was high. I was not really high. I basically felt the way I’m talking to you now. But I just love surgery. It was — [30:16] Aaron: That is — you’re so weird. [30:19] Tommy: My sister said that to me once. [30:20] Aaron: You’re the only person in the world. I think my sister can relate. [30:23] Tommy: She said, “You just keep getting weirder.” [30:26] Aaron: Yeah, this is not — I had an MRI not too long ago and it wasn’t that bad, but I don’t know, I feel like it’s approximately the ideal version of surgery — you’re aware, you’re just lying there, and it was mildly unpleasant. At least I wasn’t like, “wow, this is amazing.” [30:44] Tommy: We were laughing because I was videotaping the whole surgery, and I kept looking at the camera and going, “wow, this is amazing,” and being like, “wow, this is so cool,” because — it’s just the most beautiful thing, actually. I mean, when you think about it, you are literally watching the triumph of man and technology over nature. And I was disabled, you know — I had fucking triple-D tits and I couldn’t run. And if you’ve ever met me, I’m like constantly running around, climbing stuff, fighting. I’m an extremely high-energy, high-motivation person. I want to work like 10 or more hours a day. And I could not sit up, be upright, for more than six or seven hours at a time without shooting nerve pain down my shoulders, and my bra straps would cut into my skin or into my rib cage. I was disabled from them. [31:40] Aaron: So you mean you were — you had gender dysphoria as well? This is distinct? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want, but — [31:48] Tommy: Well, like, I’m definitely — [31:49] Aaron: Like also this pain that’s like not — [31:51] Tommy: I’m definitely a man on the inside. That honestly almost feels like a coincidence, in this bizarre way. [31:59] Aaron: Yeah, no, that’s totally plausible. You can have breast pain, whatever it’s called — sorry, I’m not well informed — and also anything else. [32:07] Tommy: Yeah, I actually decided to get top surgery before I identified as a man. [32:11] Aaron: Well, you can also get breast reductions, right? This is me learning a thing, whatever — I’m sure most women learn this at, like, 11. I intuitively missed this information. I’m a 26-year-old man. [32:23] Tommy: You’re forgiven. [32:23] Aaron: God. But it would also — there was a thing, not to do just the viral discourse, but there was like a thing on Twitter — this is like a culture-war thing — like, “oh, you should definitely get breast enlargements.” I think that’s probably a bad set of advice to give people, and quite possibly you should consider the opposite if it’s causing you distress. [32:48] Tommy: Oh, yeah. There was, like, a Cremieux tweet, I think, or a quote that I’m not going to get exactly right, so maybe his fans are going to come flame me for this — but he said something like, “if your value is to be as hot as possible, never, ever, ever, ever —” [33:06] Aaron: I don’t think it was Cremieux who originally said that. I — [33:08] Tommy: Oh, really? Who was it? Maybe he retweeted — [33:09] Aaron: I might be wrong, actually. There was a woman who wrote an article. [33:13] Tommy: Yeah, I think I saw it because he retweeted it. You’re right. She was like, “you know, if your value is to be as hot as possible, never, ever, ever get a breast reduction no matter how much they pay” — [33:24] Aaron: Which is also just a little bit of a silly thing to say. It’s like — [33:27] Tommy: Well, it’s tautological in a way. Like, yes, if your value is absolutely maximizing this one thing, then yes. But also, I think someone who is good would usually not be encouraging having that value to such an extreme that it actually derails the rest of your life. I am like a philosopher — in principle I understand the concept of holding the value constant and then saying what actions would result in optimizing for that value, but it is sus. [33:55] Aaron: Yeah, and it’s not super specific, I guess. I could read the wording — I just dissect the words because it’s not that important, I guess. This is reminding me that maybe I should use steroids — just, not wait, yeah. What else? Do you have any other “people should definitely consider not doing X or seriously consider doing X” hot takes, in the broad medicine/physiology, or anything actually, sphere — I guess anything, honestly. [34:33] Tommy: Well, in all seriousness, I do actually think you need to be careful with testosterone. I’m not actually very well educated on this for natal males, but I do — I’m probably not educated enough to speak on this, but I do think there’s probably some evidence that taking it for a natal male can decrease your natural production, which you might not want to have happen. [34:54] Aaron: Oh, totally. It’s actually — no, decent — I was on TRT, I’m not anymore. But that’s — I mean, maybe I’m not sure if I’ll keep it in — that’s how I got through puberty. I’ve been fucked up from that. [35:04] Tommy: Wait, is that why you’re so short? No offense, sorry. [35:05] Aaron: No, no, no — I was much shorter. I started college at 5’2”, not 5’7”. [35:12] Tommy: That’s what I am, 5’2”, short kings. [35:14] Aaron: Yeah, I mean now I’m like a standard deviation, but this is only one, right? You see 5’7” people walking around, it’s not like, oh — but, oh, 100% — my understanding is that this is just very clearly and demonstrably true, but also might be worth it. [35:31] Tommy: Okay, yes. [35:31] Aaron: Although I’m not sure at very low doses — I’m sure there’s like, it’s a question of like, okay, one molecule, does that sit in your entire pituitary? I don’t know the answer. I mean, so it’s a matter of degree to some extent. But yeah, I will say that I think more people should get checked, or it should be the kind of thing you check, like, once a year or whatever, because why not. It’s a bit of a bitch to deal with — and not even logistically. It’s true that it takes a few minutes, it’s slightly painful to inject yourself, but it’s not that bad. Managing the dosing and trying to emulate a sort of endogenous control cycle is just a difficult project, especially if you don’t have rapid testing — we don’t have rapid testing. So you have to maybe get tested occasionally and guess based on what’s going on. I wound up on a very specific regimen, which is 11 milligrams every other day. It was very small at this point, so that’s why it was relatively low — but if I had taken a standard dose of 150, I would have just been perpetually extremely — so I mean, at one point — this is just an aside, whatever — I started out with a much larger dose, I think a single 100-milligram injection, and I puffed up. I mean, presumably the mechanism is estradiol, but I felt like total shit and I was extremely puffy, with what I assume was water — I don’t think I was gel of some sort. Long story short, it’s a bit of a — it’s not a “oh whatever” kind of thing. Factor in the fact it’s a bit of a hassle, it’s also quite plausibly worth it for many people. [37:13] Tommy: That’s fascinating. So I haven’t experienced any of those downsides, which is probably because I have never done that high of a dose. Because I think for natal females, there’s also quite a lot of risks to it. For one thing, it probably just shortens your lifespan. And one of the privileges I have as a natal female is that I get a couple extra years on you guys. I don’t really want to throw those away. And then also it drastically increases your risk of needing to get a hysterectomy eventually, and obviously I don’t want to have that, because I’m going to have to do that whole thing awake and it’s going to be a whole other project to find a guy to do that awake. So I keep it pretty low, and I’ve never experienced any of those bad side effects. I basically always just feel insanely good whenever I take it. [37:59] Aaron: Wow, I’m so jealous. [38:00] Tommy: Yeah, but I really half-ass it these days. I used to be pretty careful with it and I would keep track of my levels and make sure it was at, you know, somewhat less than a natal male would have. Nowadays I totally wing it — I just wait until I’m feeling kind of depressed and then I give myself like a random shot. [38:19] Aaron: No, I mean, that’s — I feel like it’s okay, hopefully you don’t have to be depressed for that long, but that is almost the ideal thing. It’s like you eat when you’re hungry or whatever, and that’s a system working well. [38:27] Tommy: Exactly. Yeah, I basically just eat when I’m hungry. [38:30] Aaron: Nice. I’m jealous, but I’m glad for you. Oh wait, so here’s a whole other thing — so I am, again, I’ll probably just keep this in because I don’t care at this point. So I am, I think, going to be trying — unless something good happens, like some sort of positive surprise — I’m probably going to be trying to find a surgeon to do an exploratory laparoscopic surgery on me, or partially diagnostic with the potential, if they see anything, to fix it. How the fuck did you find a surgeon? [39:03] Tommy: How did I? [39:04] Aaron: No, it’s a totally different specialty or situation, but, like, how do you go about finding a heterodox surgeon? [39:10] Tommy: That’s a great question. So I don’t know much about laparoscopic — [39:16] Aaron: Oh no, no, yeah, I was being in general, like, as a general process, but not necessarily specific to anything. [39:22] Tommy: Yeah, so literally basically my strategy was to go on Google Scholar, or Sci-Hub, and find people who clearly are passionate about doing actual research related to whatever weird niche thing it is that you want. [39:41] Aaron: Find an autistic surgeon, okay. [39:43] Tommy: Yeah, yeah. And then literally just email them or reach out. [39:46] Aaron: No, interesting. I was thinking about just making a Google Doc that’s like, “does anybody know a surgeon?” That was massive. No, but yeah, I should — this is also on my to-do list. I wish I was your 10-hour-working kind of guy. I mean, I think that’s sort of endogenous to my health issues — it’s like a vicious cycle of not being able to work on my health issues because — or not being able to do things like write up Google Docs. Not that I can’t or whatever, but it scarcifies your productive time. Sorry, not like a “woe was me” situation. It’s all good. [40:19] Tommy: I will say, I think this is one of my unwoke takes — but it sounds unwoke but actually is woke — I do think testosterone is just a general-purpose performance-enhancing drug. Obviously physically, but also mentally — just my stamina is way improved. And I think it’s important to recognize this, that females are at general disadvantages just because biology is unfair. [40:49] Aaron: Wait, I have always wondered, I’m not sure I entirely buy this — so if you compare a cis male with very low testosterone to a woman with the same blood level of testosterone, you don’t see the same — I expect the guys to be much more depressed, fat, unmotivated, and I don’t expect the same of the woman. This is based on my general observations of looking around society. But sorry, backing up, I don’t think you can just say women are basically operating at a disadvantage corresponding to the level that they have but if they were a cis man. [41:31] Tommy: Yes, I do not think women are the same thing as a strangely low-testosterone man. [41:40] Aaron: Okay. That is a plausible interpretation you might have. [41:45] Tommy: Right, and I definitely do not think that. And obviously I think there’s a lot of confounders if you try to compare a bizarrely low-T man to a woman — obviously it’s probably just worse in a million ways, and with the causal arrow going in both directions, to be a weirdly low-T man it’s probably not comparably as bad to be a woman, maybe. [42:07] Aaron: Yeah. Although, maybe there’s something that’s similar — I’m not sure. I mean, hormones in general are just very powerful and very hard to get right. One thing that jumps to mind is — it’s a totally different hormone, but if you have hypothyroidism — I also have hypothyroidism, so that’s another thing wrong with me. But that is also like — somebody, a loved one, basically had Hashimoto’s, and was just living, I think eventually luckily living poorly enough that they went to the doctor and just got diagnosed. And basically, if you have Hashimoto’s and you take levothyroxine, you’re just normal again once you get the right dose. But yeah, they’re very depressed, very, very low energy. I feel like Huberman or something — I don’t listen to him, but I feel like I see clips and he talks like this — so I don’t know if there’s anything I was getting at with that. Just, yeah, like, try not to have bad hormones somehow. [43:03] Tommy: Yeah. I mean, another one of the many practical reasons why I try to keep my T very low is because hormones are just a very — they’re not well understood, I think. And they’re one of these systems that’s kind of like an economy, you know, where you try to tweak one little thing and then you fuck up the whole shebang. And people are always really surprised that I did this crazy ridiculous experimental surgery, but now on the other hand I’m claiming that testosterone is dangerous, and they’re like, “what are you talking about? Every trans guy does testosterone — but you’re doing these weird surgeries.” But I actually think testosterone is a lot riskier than the type of surgery I had done. [43:46] Aaron: Yeah, that sounds totally reasonable and probably just correct. Although, so I do want to, in the name of being good Bayesians or something, share my experience with this, which is that I did not find a monotonic relationship or anything close to that between testosterone and subjective well-being when I was injecting. I mean, I’m guessing this is true for everyone at some point, right — if you inject a literal gallon you just die — so at some point that obviously happens. But I was really hoping — I feel like I read all the stuff on Reddit about how, like, “yeah man, keep it at 900 nanograms per deciliter to feel good,” and whenever that happened to me I just in fact felt overall worse. I felt best at a moderate — so in general, like 500 to 700, which is middle of the range. I’m going to get canceled because — I don’t know, it’s almost like, I kind of wish it was the case that you could actually just testosterone-max and be superhuman, and I think some people in fact for whatever reason can, but I think I consider myself an existence proof of this not being a universal experience. [44:46] Tommy: That totally makes sense. Totally. [44:49] Aaron: Cool. Oh wait, do you want to — I don’t know how much time you have. [44:54] Tommy: I have all day. [44:55] Aaron: I don’t have anything actually to do, but I do have limited energy, but I’m good for now. So it hasn’t even been an hour, honestly. I think these podcasts where people talk for three hours — that’s insane. I could do that once, but it would be difficult or whatever. Wait, so presumably you do other things in life besides having surgery takes. Is this true? [45:21] Tommy: Oh boy. [45:22] Aaron: No, you don’t have to answer this — I’m just, do you want to talk about anything? We can also cut whatever. Obviously we’ll cut whatever you want. [45:30] Tommy: I do do other stuff in life besides having surgery takes. [45:33] Aaron: Not that that would be a bad thing, to be clear. [45:35] Tommy: Like, to only do surgery. [45:36] Aaron: I mean, presumably you want to, I don’t know — do other stuff, get laid. [45:40] Tommy: Yeah, well, that is mostly the other thing. I am actually somewhat — I would say not — well, I really, really like gay male culture, like, anthropologically. [45:54] Aaron: I did not expect this. I wasn’t going to fill in my sentence with what you just said. But keep going, sorry, sorry, keep going. [46:01] Tommy: Someone asked me last night, “what do you do for fun?” And I started, once again, talking about all of the takes that I have that are related to what I want to do for a career. And they were like, “no, no, no, I said what do you do for fun?” And I was like, “well, you know, I like to go to the club.” [46:22] Aaron: Wait, what the fuck is — okay, I always hear about “the club.” Florida saying “I’m at the club.” Where do I go? I need a Google Maps link, okay? [46:33] Tommy: Have you ever been to the one club? [46:34] Aaron: I don’t think I’ve been to any. I’m not even talking about — I don’t have any particular interest in going to a gay club, sorry, but where — what does one do to find oneself in a club? [46:46] Tommy: Well, the one that I go to is Jackhammer in Chicago, happiest place in the world. That’s kind of like my leisure space. [46:57] Aaron: Okay, cool. Wow. [46:58] Tommy: I have my work stuff and then my fun stuff. [47:02] Aaron: Do you want to tell me what your work stuff is? [47:04] Tommy: Well, right now I’m in a career transition period. I’m trying to do healthcare abundance as a career. [47:09] Aaron: Oh, based. [47:10] Tommy: Used to be in finance. [47:11] Aaron: Good luck. I think I have a tweet about that, which basically makes us — yeah, we’ve been throwing it around. I’m sure I know about as much about it as you, because I had a funny take once. Um, that was a dumb thing to say. Yeah, sorry, gay male culture. [47:28] Tommy: Yeah, well, you asked me what I do for fun, and I guess when I’m doing takes and they’re kind of my for-fun takes rather than for-social-improvement takes, I oftentimes talk about gay male culture. That’s kind of like my little side anthropology project. [47:52] Aaron: Oh, interesting. Okay, wild. [47:55] Tommy: Because I really fell in love with that as my secondary home, my primary home being rationalism/EA. Because I’ve never experienced a culture that is so truly classically liberal as that one. [48:13] Aaron: As which of the two? [48:14] Tommy: As gay male culture. [48:14] Aaron: Okay. I was going to say, I would have suspected that, you know, rat would be, but isn’t it? [48:20] Tommy: It is, mostly. [48:21] Aaron: Yeah, but isn’t gay culture kind of woke? Or no? Is that just a myth? [48:25] Tommy: So it can be — like, this is definitely a complaint that I have about it, just because — [48:30] Aaron: I mean, because — I’m not saying that should be a reason why you don’t do something, but for the particular claim that it’s, like, radically liberal, that, I think, is surprising to me. [48:40] Tommy: It is, yeah. So there’s a big difference between the culture in gay men’s spaces versus queer/trans spaces. [48:48] Aaron: Okay, wild. There’s a civil war — I’m sorry, that was offensive probably. [48:52] Tommy: Oh yeah. Well, no, it’s kind of true, actually. [48:55] Aaron: I just actually did not fully realize that. I mean, obviously they’re different — they’re just conceptually distinct, right? People don’t have to be part of the LGBT community. But okay, say more. [49:10] Tommy: The spaces are truly very distinct. There is a very distinct culture that I fell in love with the first time that I went to Jackhammer, which in practice still is basically a gay male space. They will accept anyone, but in practice it is male, male-dominated, male culture. And in that culture, it is very, very direct, and it’s really a free market when it comes to sex. So you can just make trade offers, and people will accept mutually beneficial trades, and the trade offer itself is never seen as a threat or as a coercion. [49:51] Aaron: Wow, this is so not relatable. Keep going. [49:54] Tommy: Very low transaction costs. And like, for me as someone who — this is going to be graphic — you can cut this out. [50:00] Aaron: No, I mean — I’m just hoping nobody in my room — my roommates aren’t around, but I think it’s okay. It’s fine. Go for it. [50:06] Tommy: I have always wanted to be the dominant and be kind of rough, and it’s very rare that I feel like I can just directly ask for that stuff and directly initiate that stuff and trust that no one will be threatened by the trade offer itself. Just very low transaction costs. And I really fundamentally love free markets, both for money and for every other good and service imaginable. So I really fell in love with that culture, and that is exactly the opposite of queer spaces. [50:42] Aaron: Okay, interesting. I am so not informed on this. [50:48] Tommy: So that’s kind of my for-fun stuff. [50:49] Aaron: No, no, interesting. I am — there’s a very crude sense in which I could be jealous, which is just around the sex itself, but I am more jealous around the directness allowed. You know what I mean? [51:12] Tommy: Yeah. It’s hard. And some of it makes sense, right? Because it obviously makes sense that women are more threat-sensitive than men. That is not irrational. [51:20] Aaron: Yeah, I’m not making any sort of enormous, like — I’m saying like, it’s an inconvenient reality for some people, not like I’m saying it’s anyone doing anything bad. [51:29] Tommy: Right. Yeah, like to go back to the previous topic, nature is unfair. And it’s particularly unfair to females, I think. This is just a reality of the world that we live in. [51:39] Aaron: Yeah. Return with a vengeance to asexual reproduction. [51:44] Tommy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [51:47] Aaron: Wait, so actually I’m curious — do you mind — do you want more, have more gay culture? It’s healthcare abundance — we’ve talked about stuff. Is there a — do you want to give your pitch for, or actually not even pitch, what else besides the things we’ve talked about is in your vision of healthcare abundance? [52:09] Tommy: Yeah, great question. Where to even start? [52:17] Aaron: Or you can say what’s not. Is there anything that’s like — or is the answer just yes, access to anything, anything you want? Like drugs, certain diagnostics, whatever. I think that’s actually a very intuitive, plausible thing. [52:37] Tommy: Yeah. I mean, I do have very libertarian instincts when it comes to just being able to access stuff. I do think natal males should be able to access testosterone — it’s definitely not right that I’m able to access testosterone and most of my man friends can’t. [52:52] Aaron: Yes, or at least not easily, or it’s expensive — it’s a whole thing. [52:56] Tommy: Yeah. One of the things I’m really concerned about lately in the healthcare abundance realm — the Niskanen Center talks about this kind of a lot — is that freestanding doctor’s offices, more and more over the years, we’re just bleeding those off because they’re getting acquired by hospitals. And this happens because of the way we’ve set up our Medicare system, where basically they reimburse doctors at much higher rates if they perform the exact same procedure in a hospital rather than in a freestanding clinic. And so what happens is that a doctor operating a freestanding clinic is very highly motivated to sell his clinic to a hospital, and he doesn’t even have to move locations — they just change the paperwork, and then he starts making like double money. But now all of a sudden he has all this hospital overhead, he’s bound by all these liability concerns, and something like my surgery, that was extremely safe and better than the standard of care, could not have happened outside of a freestanding office. It happened because my doctor cared about doing innovation, and he owned his practice so he could do innovation and take on that risk himself. And it was worth it to me to take on the risk myself. So we’re losing the spaces where innovation can happen. [54:20] Aaron: Yeah, that sucks. I mean, I actually now recognize when you say it — correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking, that’s why random doctor’s offices everywhere in this area are somehow associated with George Washington University for no obvious reason. Is that a plausible — or the same phenomenon, you think, or just something different? [54:42] Tommy: Maybe. I’m not informed around here, but — [54:43] Aaron: But I guess it could be, you know, the local university wherever, or Georgetown. But yeah. [54:50] Tommy: Very possibly. I have no idea what’s going on in this city. [54:52] Aaron: Okay. I’ll ask Claude — that’s right. Oh yeah, I actually — so I was talking earlier, I mentioned, if you explicitly do not say “I do not consent to something,” they generally abide by that. I think if you have an MD, there’s a fair amount of latitude in what you can do, right? So a lot of healthcare is ridiculously controlled, and so a ton of shit revolves around having a person with an MD, or I guess a DO in many cases, down to do the thing. I don’t know if I have any — there’s something, I don’t know if there’s more to say about that, but like, this is where the freedom lives — it’s like, within the discretion of individual doctors. And I think — I haven’t given my whole health history, which is obviously not interesting, but I think the main challenge for me is not — I’m guessing here, right, it could be that my case is intractable in terms of physical or physiological level, but my overall take is that in fact the problem is finding doctors willing to do even quite safe and not extremely expensive, not even operating — so I was talking about surgery, but a lot of this is like diagnostics. Like, please just do the diagnostic, I promise, you know. But often they just don’t, they don’t want to. [56:31] Tommy: Yeah. [56:32] Aaron: And actually, I mean, this is the kind — I think money buys you quite a lot. I got a concierge doctor but at the very, very low end of what that means. And I think this has been a bit helpful, but my overall sense is that if you’re very wealthy, then there are doctors who are willing, you know, for $400,000 a year, to help you get whatever tests you want. But most people can’t afford to spend $400,000 a year or whatever. [56:59] Tommy: Yeah, yeah. There is a lot of medical tourism stuff that seems very promising that I’m not super well-informed about, but maybe worth — just flying outside the country. I don’t really know much. [57:13] Aaron: I actually am considering this for something. It’s underdeveloped, so I probably don’t want to go into too much detail. That means maybe a future Pigeon Hour. But yeah, I know Mexico and Turkey — so it’s not just hair. And, especially if you care about being in the US, Puerto Rico is often a bit more expensive than Mexico but also a potential option for lots of things. I think there are many cases in which, if you need the best thing in the world, it’s in the United States; if you don’t, then the 90th percentile for 1% as much is in Mexico. [57:52] Tommy: Yeah, so I was looking at Mexico when I was getting desperate. I thought that I might never be able to get this surgery. [58:00] Aaron: That sucks. [58:01] Tommy: It was just awful. So many people told me I would never be able to get this surgery. [58:06] Aaron: I mean, I think I would have guessed that. [58:09] Tommy: Yeah, that I would never have gotten it. [58:11] Aaron: That you would never have gotten it awake, like you did. [58:13] Tommy: Really? [58:14] Aaron: Oh totally. I’m surprised that in fact you got that somebody — I mean, you know, it’s a testament in part to the state of the world, in part to your persistence, right? But it’s some function of those that determines whether in fact you get the thing. [58:32] Tommy: Okay, I feel like — if I was sitting here before and I still had boobs and I told you that I was going to get it awake, I feel like you would have laughed. [58:39] Aaron: No, I wouldn’t have laughed, because I wouldn’t have known. But given what I know now about this not being standard or being very uncommon, then in sort of a weird hindsight sense, I would have been surprised. [58:49] Tommy: Okay, but I feel like — the thing is, the technology is so relatively speaking simple. [58:55] Aaron: Yeah, that’s an update. [58:59] Tommy: It’s like, every single doctor would say that it was impossible, but it’s actually very easy to understand. [59:05] Aaron: I’m guessing what they mean is, it’s not standard. [59:08] Tommy: They don’t want to do it, yeah. [59:09] Aaron: And to be fair — I mean, I’m not that sympathetic to that concern, honestly, but I would be a little — there’s one thing that is, if someone is asking you to do something weird, that’s a Bayesian update that they’re a little weird in some way. I feel like this is true in many cases. It’s like, okay, is this person going to try to sue me with the footage somehow? Are they just going to be harassing me? Are they going to be crazy? Are they not going to pay? It does increase the likelihood that something weird happens, in a way that it’s worth recognizing, even though it’s not true in your case and I’m pretty sure it’s not true in mine either. [59:46] Tommy: Yeah, totally, totally. I think basically the reason it worked was because, after I got super desperate, I was looking at gray-market body-mod surgeons in Mexico — you know, like the people who put reptile spines on people’s backs. [1:00:02] Aaron: Oh god. [1:00:03] Tommy: I was getting so desperate, and I finally just tracked down the inventor. [1:00:09] Aaron: Oh, that’s — okay, nice. This is so smart. [1:00:11] Tommy: Yeah, literally just the guy who invented the method of anesthesia that I knew would work. And because I thought that he would maybe care, you know, because no one else would fucking listen to me. And he’s retired, you know, so I just — [1:00:25] Aaron: Oh wow, I did not know that. New bit just dropped. [1:00:28] Tommy: So that’s why I didn’t think to call him previously, but I was just desperate, you know, so I just called him and I was like, “you’ve got to help me.” And he connected me to a co-inventor of his who did it. [1:00:39] Aaron: Wait, can I ask how much this cost? [1:00:41] Tommy: $8,000. [1:00:42] Aaron: Oh, wow. Okay, I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d said ten times that. He’d have a lot of leverage over you. I’m finding someone — I’m not sure what your willingness to pay was, but I’m guessing it would have been at least $9,000. [1:00:54] Tommy: Oh yeah, way more. I would have put myself in debt for the rest of my life. [1:00:56] Aaron: I mean, I was just curious. [1:01:00] Tommy: I would have signed a contract to pay him $10 million over the course of the rest of my life. [1:01:04] Aaron: I mean, I think I wouldn’t, because I’m a little bit — sure. No, I get it, I get it. Wow. Wait, that was out of pocket, I’m guessing? Like, you didn’t involve any sort of intermediary like insurance? [1:01:18] Tommy: Correct. So I literally just read him my credit card number over the phone. He put it on a credit card. I did get it pre-approved by my insurance company after the fact — like, after I had paid, but before I got the surgery. I got it pre-approved by my insurance. The insurance approved it. Totally approved it. I gave them all the paperwork, all the codes. [1:01:43] Aaron: “We don’t want to deal with this, guys, too.” [1:01:44] Tommy: All the codes — they approved everything. Then I got the surgery. I asked them to reimburse me, as they had already promised to do, and then they told me that this surgery was impossible and they were not going to reimburse me because they didn’t believe that it actually happened. [1:01:55] Aaron: Oh, sounds like a lawsuit. [1:01:57] Tommy: Yeah, I need to sue them. It’s on my wishlist. [1:01:58] Aaron: I mean, honestly, it’s actually a good use of your time for $8,000. In some just universe — I actually don’t think it’s crazy to not — I will honestly really want to — not in a bad way — I do want to experience seeing somebody — I’m honestly 60% joking. This is not in fact — I think in fact it would be more stressful, more expensive, more frustrating than I anticipate. But maybe I would want to observe someone like you going through it, especially for something that’s like — I imagine this is a very central case of a good reason to be able to sue someone. They tell you, they sign legal documents saying they’ll do X, they don’t do X. That is like the Assyrian 3000 BC type of situation. [1:02:42] Tommy: Absolutely. Yes. Yes. [1:02:47] Aaron: Probably it’s also a cool Substack article — “I sued [insert your healthcare provider].” They probably — they’re not going to go to court for $8,000. [1:02:56] Tommy: Presumably. Yeah, although the amount of money — like, I have spent more than $8,000 worth of my time already fighting them. [1:03:05] Aaron: Oh, oh. Okay, no, I feel like you should contact a lawyer to say, “here’s the situation.” [1:03:11] Tommy: I should, yeah. [1:03:12] Aaron: I mean, you know, I’m not actually sure about this, but it’s something to consider, especially because — I don’t know, I feel like they would love this case. Are you kidding me? [1:03:20] Tommy: Yeah, yeah. [1:03:22] Aaron: I mean, I have no idea. [1:03:23] Tommy: It’s on my to-do list. I have a hundred things. [1:03:25] Aaron: You should Substack your to-do list. It’s gonna — I feel like it’s gonna be very obviously redacted if you want. It’s gonna be very disparate — it’s like, “sue the healthcare provider, solve pain in America...” [1:03:41] Tommy: My long-term goals. Go to the club. [1:03:44] Aaron: Yeah, exactly. What Claude flagged for review and why Tommy stands by his claims Context (from above) [00:17:06] Aaron: Also, just as a tiny bit of added credibility, I commit to running the transcript through Claude and saying, with your consent, I guess — actually, non-consensual Claude transcript analysis, just kidding — to figure out, presumably something we say is going to be slightly off. It’s very hard to talk for an hour and never say anything wrong. But we will report that. 1. “Fighting the tube” as a deliberate liability-driven practice. Claude (Opus 4.7) The phenomenon and terminology are real — patients can emerge during/after extubation and react to the ETT, and anesthesiologists do talk about “bucking the tube” / “fighting the tube.” But Tommy’s framing — that they “wake you up...while you’re still intubated, and they wait for you to basically struggle and thrash...and they do this because” of a liability calculation that trades suffering for slightly lower death risk — is one strongly editorialized interpretation, not a description of standard practice. The actual goal during extubation, per the standard literature, is to have the patient “awake enough to breathe without assistance, but sedated enough not to fight the endotracheal tube.” Sometimes that goal isn’t achieved, and the patient does fight the tube, and that’s genuinely awful — but presenting it as the intended design of the procedure is going to read as conspiratorial to anyone with anesthesia training and will be the easiest thing for a critic to dismiss the whole episode on. Worth adding a caveat or rephrasing as “this happens routinely as a failure mode of how we do extubation, and the system seems remarkably tolerant of it.” Tommy: On the “fighting the tube” topic - I think you can see some examples of both corroboration and denialism in this random reddit thread (https://archive.ph/uddYB). It is so frustrating that I have talked to tons of nurses who are trying to whistleblow about the fact that many hospitals have terrible “vent weaning”/”fighting the tube”/”awake extubation” PROCEDURES and then tons of other people - and AIs, lol - show up to be like “That is totally not part of the procedure” 2. “I’m the only documented case of someone getting modern female-to-male top surgery fully awake.” Claude: Maybe true for the specific procedure (double-incision mastectomy with chest contouring on a non-elderly, low-ASA patient, framed as gender-affirming), but mastectomy under tumescent local anesthesia has been in the literature since at least Worland 1996, and the Sassari, Italy group (Trignano et al.) has published a body of work doing breast surgery — including subcutaneous mastectomy, gynecomastia correction, and trans-related breast augmentation — under TLA, with cohorts in the dozens. So “most doctors would tell you it was medically impossible” overstates the consensus. More defensible phrasing: “no documented case of this specific procedure being done awake on someone like me” or “essentially absent from the US gender-affirming literature.” Tommy: Like yes. There is “no documented case of this specific procedure being done awake on someone like me.” That’s why I said “I’m the only documented case of someone getting modern female-to-male top surgery fully awake,” lol. And yes, the reason I knew this was possible, the reason I stuck to my guns for years while people treated me like a conspiracy theorist, is because of breast cancer patients undergoing mastectomies! That definitely proves it’s possible – that was my whole argument! I was going around making the case that mastectomies were not relevantly different from FTM top surgeries from the perspective of the anesthesiologist (despite significant differences from the perspective of the cosmetic surgeon), because that was obviously true. And then, you know, I was being told that this was my untested theoretical argument, and that it was extremely dangerous and naïve to try to get a surgery that hadn’t been done before, on the basis of my theoretical arguments. Obviously though, my arguments were right, and I was right to make decisions based off them. And I’ve now written about that publicly. But before I wrote about it publicly, doctors AND AIs were saying that an FTM top surgery done this way was either medically impossible or very risky / unlikely to work. I almost feel like Claude might be using the existence of MY work to say that my work wasn’t novel, lol. What Claude is doing is just sorta building the same argument that I had to build, but framing it as a correction, which is weird and misleading. Like: “A research group in Sassari, Italy has published multiple papers on breast surgeries performed this way in dozens of patients.” Part of the research that I relied upon heavily to make my case was a collection of diverse breast surgeries done under TLA that came out of Naples, Italy. Unfortunately for me, there were no FTM top surgeries included in that group (or any that I’ve ever been able to find documented in modern times), which was a huge problem. That’s why I kept getting rejected from every doctor – because I did not have a single documented case of it to point to, and no one wants the potential lawsuit of doing something without precedent, even if it’s clearly safe. So for two years I was going around making the case that the differences were irrelevant and that this was really super safe, and then getting told a bunch of bullshit about how unknown unknowns would come to bite me and how I couldn’t possibly know that it was safe, since I was “just theorizing” and “there’s no actual evidence” (aka no published report of this particular thing actually happening). But, you know. I eventually succeeded. (It’s also perhaps notable that breast augmentations, which Claude mentions as a piece of evidence, ARE very relevantly different from mastectomies, and much easier. No real doctor would have ever listened to me if I tried to bring in augmentations as a main piece of my argument – they just aren’t great evidence. I think Claude just doesn’t have a deep understanding of the field here.) 3 and 4. Testosterone “just shortens your lifespan” (for natal females) and “drastically increases your risk of needing a hysterectomy” Claude: This is stronger than the evidence supports. The Amsterdam cohort study (de Blok et al., Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol 2021) — the biggest dataset we have — found trans men on testosterone had ~1.8x the mortality of cis women, but the excess was driven by non-natural causes (suicide etc.), not directly attributable to testosterone. Multiple cohort studies of trans men on T for 10+ years have found no increase in MI, stroke, or DVT. There are real cardiovascular risk-factor markers that worsen (hematocrit up, HDL down, LDL up), but the leap from “biomarkers move in a bad direction” to “shortens lifespan” isn’t established. Worth softening to “the long-term effects aren’t well-characterized, and the risk markers move in concerning directions. and Also overstated. Older WPATH guidance recommended hysterectomy after ~5 years of T, partly on theoretical endometrial-cancer grounds, but that’s been walked back. The actual data is mixed: ~60-65% of trans men on T for 5+ years have atrophic endometrium, ~20-40% have proliferative endometrium, and large-scale evidence of increased hysterectomy necessity (vs. elective gender-affirming hysterectomy) isn’t there. Endometrial cancer cases in this population are rare. “Increases the risk somewhat, and the long-term picture is uncertain” would be more defensible. Tommy: Way less confident on this one; I don’t know much about testosterone/hysto compared to how much I know about surgery. But I will just flag that I’m a little suspicious that Claude is overupdating on like, lack of a singular published study to back up these claims, while NOT actually modeling how these chemicals work and making reasonable extrapolations. He basically can’t do that still, as far as I’ve been able to tell. Newer models are obviously wayyyy better, but as of last year, before I started writing publicly about having done top surgeries awake, the big models were still essentially claiming that it was impossible or highly unlikely to work. They would do this even after I begged them to think about MECHANISMS for the action of tumescent local anesthesia, and apply that reasoning to the proposed surgery. They were unable to form their own independent model of how an anesthesia style works, and then apply it to a hypothetical. Instead they were only able to tell me, like “This probably won’t work because there is no evidence [i.e. a published study] saying that it will work.” The conflation of “no evidence” with “no published paper” is one I’m always on alert for. But again, not confident on this one. 5. The insurance lawsuit framing. Claude: [Aaron’s] “honestly, it’s actually a good use of your time for $8,000... probably it’s also a cool Substack article” framing may oversell how winnable this is. Insurance retroactive denials after pre-approval are notoriously hard to litigate — there are ERISA preemption issues for employer-sponsored plans, mandatory arbitration clauses, and the fact that “pre-approval” often isn’t a binding payment guarantee in the fine print. Tommy might have a case, especially if he has the written pre-approval in hand, but the casual confidence (”they’re not going to go to court for $8,000”) is probably wrong — insurers very routinely fight small claims hard precisely to discourage future ones. Worth either softening or noting the legal complexity. Aaron: Ok fine increase the uncertainty on my claims. I will note that the fact that Tommy has hours and hours of high quality footage of the surgery would seem to be an unusual factor in his favor insofar as the claim really was “this didn’t happen.” Video gen models are a thing but we’re talking about hours and hours of real footage - not easy to generate synthetically without a ton of time and money.Also the “insurers routinely fight small claims” thing doesn’t necessarily push in the direction of “Tommy won’t get his money.” If true it indicates that they’d take it to at least arbitration, which I think Tommy would win. Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe (https://www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   25 Jan 2026

   #15: Robi Rahman and Aaron tackle donation diversification, decision procedures under moral uncertainty, and other spicy topics

   Summary In this episode, Aaron and Robi reunite to dissect the nuances of effective charitable giving. The central debate revolves around a common intuition: should a donor diversify their contributions across multiple organizations, or go “all in” on the single best option? Robi breaks down standard economic arguments against splitting donations for individual donors, while Aaron sorta kinda defends the “normie intuition” of diversification. The conversation spirals into deep philosophical territory, exploring the “Moral Parliament” simulator by Rethink Priorities and various decision procedures for handling moral uncertainty—including the controversial “Moral Marketplace” and “Maximize Minimum” rules. They also debate the validity of Evidential Decision Theory as applied to voting and donating, discuss moral realism, and grapple with “Unique Entity Ethics” via a thought experiment involving pigeons, apples, and 3D-printed silicon brains. Topics Discussed * The Diversification Debate: Why economists and Effective Altruists generally advise against splitting donations for small donors versus the intuitive appeal of a diversified portfolio. * The Moral Parliament: Using a parliamentary metaphor to resolve internal conflicts between different moral frameworks (e.g., Utilitarianism vs. Deontology). * Decision Rules: An analysis of different voting methods for one’s internal moral parliament, including the “Moral Marketplace,” “Random Dictator,” and the “Maximize Minimum” rule. * Pascal’s Mugging & “Shrimpology”: Robi’s counter-argument to the “Maximize Minimum” rule using an absurd hypothetical deity. * Moral vs. Empirical Uncertainty: Distinguishing between not knowing which charity is effective (empirical) and not knowing which moral theory is true (moral), and how that changes donation strategies. * Voting Theory & EDT: Comparing donation logic to voting logic, specifically regarding Causal Decision Theory vs. Evidential Decision Theory (EDT). * Donation Timing: Why the ability to coordinate and see neglectedness over time makes donation markets different from simultaneous elections. * Moral Realism: A debate on whether subjective suffering translates to objective moral facts. * The Repugnant Conclusion: Briefly touching on population ethics and “Pigeon Hours.” * Unique Entity Ethics: A thought experiment regarding computational functionalism: Does a silicon chip simulation of a brain double its moral value if you make the chip twice as thick? Transcript AI generated, likely imperfect AARON Cool. So we are reporting live from Washington DC and New York. You’re New York, right? ROBI Mm-hmm. AARON Yes. Uh, I have strep throat, so I’m not actually feeling 100%, but we’re still gonna make a banger podcast episode. ROBI Um, I might also, yeah. AARON Oh, that’s very exciting. So this is— hope you’re doing okay. It was— I hope you’re— if you, if you, like, it was surprisingly easy to get, to get, uh, tested and prescribed antibiotics. So that might be a thing to consider if you have, uh, you think you might have something. Um, mm-hmm. So we, like, a while ago— should we just jump in? I mean, you know, we can cut. ROBI Stuff or whatever, but— Yeah, um, you can explain, uh, so I talked to Max, uh, like 13 months ago. AARON It’s been a little while. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And so this is, um, I just had takes. So actually, this is for, for the, uh, you guys talked for the as an incentive for the 2024, uh, holiday season EA Twitter/online giving fundraiser. Um, and I listened to the— it was a good— it was a surprisingly good conversation, uh, like totally podcast-worthy. Um, I actually don’t re— wait, did I ever put that on? I’m actually not sure if I ever put that on, um, the Pigeon Hour podcast feed, but I think I will with— I think I got you guys’ permission, but obviously I’ll check again. And then if so, then I, I will. Um, and I just had takes because some of your takes are good, some of your takes are bad. And so that’s what we have to—. ROBI Oh, um, I think your takes about my takes being bad are themselves bad takes. Uh, at least the first 4 in a weird doc that I went through. Um, yeah, I saw you published it somewhere on YouTube, I think. I don’t know if it also went on Pigeon Hour, but it’s up somewhere. AARON Yes, yes. So that we will— I will link that. Uh, people can watch it. There’s a chance I’ll even just like edit these together or something. I’m not really sure. Figure that out later. Um, yeah. Yes. So it’s, yeah, definitely on you. Um, so let me pull up the— no, I, I think at least two of— so I only glanced at what you said. Um, so two of the four points I just agree with. I just like concede because at least one of them. So I just like dumped a ramble into, into some LLM. ROBI Yeah. AARON Like, These aren’t necessarily like the faithful, um, uh, things of what I believe, but like the first one was just, um, so like I have this normie intuition, and I don’t have that many normie intuitions, so like it’s, it’s like a little suspicious that like maybe there’s a, a reason that we should actually diversify donations instead of just maximizing by giving to the one. Mm-hmm. Like just like, yeah, every dollar you just like give to the best place. And that like quite popular smaller donors say people giving less than like $100,000 or quite possibly much more than that, up to like, say, a million or more than that. Um, that just works out as, as donating to like a single organization or project. ROBI Yeah. Okay. Um, I, I think we should explain, uh, what was previously said on this. So there’s some argument over— okay. So like, um, normal people donate some amount of money to charity and they just give like, I don’t know, $50 here and there to every charity that like pitches them and sounds cute or sympathetic or whatever. Um, And then EAs want to, um, first of all, they, I don’t know, strive to give at least 10% or, I don’t know, at least some amount that’s significant to them and, uh, give it to charities that are highly effective, uh, and they try to optimize the impact of those dollars that they donate. Whatever amount you donate, they want to, like, do the most good with it. Um, so the, like, standard economist take on this is, um, So every charity has, uh, or every intervention has diminishing marginal returns, right, to the— or every cause area or every charity, um, possibly every intervention, um, or like at the level of an individual intervention, maybe it’s like flat and then goes to zero if you can’t do any more. Anyway, um, so cause areas or charities have diminishing marginal returns. If you like donate so much money to them, they’re no longer, um, they’ve like done the most high priority thing they can do with that money. And then they move on to other lower priority things. Um, so generally the more money a charity gets, the less, um, the less effective it is per dollar. This is all else equal, so this is not like— like, actually, if you know you’re going to get billions of dollars, you can like do some planning and then like use economies of scale. Uh, so it’s like not strictly decreasing in that way with like higher-order effects, but for like Time held constant, if you’re just like donating dollars now, there’s diminishing marginal returns. Okay, so, uh, it is— the economist’s take is like, it is almost always the case that the level of an individual donor who donates something like, let’s say, 10% of $100K, like, the, the world’s best charity is not going to become like no longer the world’s best charity after you donate $10,000. And most people donate like much less than that. So the, uh, like standard advice here is, um, if you are an individual donor, not a like, um, institutional donor or grantmaker or someone directing a ton of funds, um, you should just like take your best guess at the best charity and then donate to that. And then there are ways to optimize this for like bigger amounts. So you’ve probably heard of donor lotteries, which is like 100 or 1,000 people who want to save time all pool their money and then, then someone is picked at random and then they do research and maybe they split those donations 3 ways. Or like it all goes to something, or like— [Speaker:HOWIE] Yeah. AARON [Speaker:Kevin] Hmm. ROBI $10,000 times, uh, 100 or 1,000 is like a million or $10 million. At that level, it’s plausible that you should donate to multiple things. Um, so in that case, maybe it makes sense. AARON Um, so I don’t, I don’t— oh, sorry, go ahead. ROBI Uh, so that’s the standard argument. Um, and, um, I, I’m happy to, um, explain why this still holds, uh, to anyone who is like engaged at least this far. Um, most people haven’t even heard of it and they’re like, um, well, but what if I’m not sure about which of these two things, then I should like donate 50/50 to them. AARON Um, uh. ROBI I’ll let you go on, but I just want to say this is a really lucky time to record this podcast because Yesterday someone replied to me on the EA forum linking to some, um, uh, have you heard of, uh, Rethink Priorities, um, Moral of Parliament simulator? AARON [Speaker:Howie] Yes. ROBI [Speaker:Keiran] Okay, so it has some, um, pretty wacky and out-there decision rules, and, um, so I was— I was arguing with someone on the EA forum about this, like, um, saying Uh, it doesn’t make sense to, um, to, to split your donations, uh, at the level of an individual donor, um, even moral uncertain— and they said, but what about moral uncertainty? What if I’m not sure, like, if animals even matter? Um, uh, and I said, well, even then you should take your, like, probability estimate that animals matter and then get your, like, EV of a dollar to each and then give all of your dollars to whichever is better. Um, and they said, well, but I, I, I plugged this into the Rethink Priorities moral parliament simulator and there’s a bunch of these like different worldviews and different decision procedures here. And then these two decision procedures say you should like split your donations. Um, it was like, um, wait, that can’t be right. And I went and looked at it and actually, um, That is a correct outcome, which I can tell you about later. But, um, yeah, uh, you were gonna. AARON Say— wait, wait, hold on, we have to— I feel like I just got cut off at the best part. So there are coherent worldviews where you. ROBI Think you said— um, not, not worldviews. I think the, the worldviews decide what you value, but then there are, there are decision rules. So the two that this person gave me on the forum as examples are, um, Okay, so the— maybe the, the standard one, uh, under which I was arguing is like— or like a simple one is, um, uh, I guess I’ll explain what a moral parliament is. So if you have moral uncertainty, you’re like, let’s say you’re not sure whether deontology is true or consequentialism is true or virtue ethics is true, um, instead of So if you are sure, it— like, let’s say you’re just a consequentialist, then you simply decide according to consequentialist rules, uh, like what you want to do. Um, maybe you just like max the— or like you try to— you pick the action that will maximize your expected value based on your, uh, best guess as the consequences. Um, or if you’re a deontologist, you just like follow the rules that tell you what is right. Uh, in a moral— so if you have moral uncertainty, the moral parliament is one way to, um, decide what to do when you’re not sure which of these views is right. And in the metaphor, so if you’re, uh, you give them seats in the parliament proportional to, um, how likely you think it is that that view is correct, or you’re proportional to your credence in each view. So if you’re completely uncertain, uh, like consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, you’re like equally sure those are— or like you find those equally plausible, um, and you, you’ve ruled out everything else, then you would give them each like 33 seats in the parliament or 33% of the votes, um, and then they would vote on what to do. AARON Um. ROBI So one simple decision rule Although maybe non-consequentialists will argue this favors consequentialism or so. I don’t know, it’s unclear. It’s like, do the decision that maxes the total value according to all of the representatives. So under each view, there’s like different values of the different possible outcomes. And then you add up the possible value over all the representatives or like take the integral with respect to the probability, um, uh, sum over all the probabilities. The, the weighted sum of value and probability. Anyway, um, uh, so that’s one way. Um, but there’s like some criticism of this, which is like, um, well, maybe this is, uh, this is bad because Uh, it gives extra weight to views that believe in, like, that more value is possible or something. Um, which I’m not sure is like really a flaw, but I mean, I guess that’s true. Um, okay, so the, the two rules which are somewhat exotic and unintuitive, uh, the, the first one I had heard of, the first one Rethink Priorities calls it moral marketplace. And this is, um, uh, this is maybe the least fancy decision procedure. This is just, um, your total allocation— your overall allocation is, um, each of the factions in the parliament gets a fraction of the funds proportional to their credence or proportional to their representation, and then they all independently decide Um, what they want to do with their money, and then your overall action is you just do, uh, you just add all those together. So if the consequentialists want to do option A with their 33%, and the. AARON Um. ROBI Deontologists want to do option B with their 33%, and the virtue ethicists want to do, uh, option C with their 33%, you, you give like 33% of your donations each to option A, B, and C. Okay, uh, I think this is— this is pretty straightforward, and it’s very plausible as a strategy for. AARON Um. ROBI What you do if you’re, um, allocating a large portfolio. Uh, so like, if you rethink priorities and your staff, uh, collectively are uncertain or can’t agree on what is the right worldview and you have a large amount of funding, then this would make sense to me. Um, I’m not sure this is reasonable to— like, I’m not sure if it would be reasonable to let this guide your actions as an individual, but I just heard of this yesterday, so— or like, I, I’ve heard of this before, but I hadn’t heard of it used in this context until yesterday. So I haven’t fully thought through whether this makes sense for individuals. I will— let me just tell you the last, the other example they gave. So the other example they gave was, it was, uh, this is— I think this is completely ridiculous. This is maximize minimum. And so the strategy is, uh, it completely disregards um, like, share of the parliament, and it’s just, uh, you do the option of all your possible actions that, um, that maximizes the satisfaction of the most unhappy party. So this is like minimax over all of the different possible actions and all the different, uh, people with any seats at the table. Um, and this is complete and utter nonsense. So, um, First of all, this gives equal weight to, uh, a view that you’re like 99% sure of, a weight that you’re— a view that you’re 80% sure of, a view that you’re 30% sure of, and a view that you’re 0.000000 like 10 to the minus 20% sure of. Um, those are all like weighted equally, and then the 10 to the minus 20 view is like infinitely more, uh, has infinitely more consideration than the 0% view. Um, you can— so this is, this is just like completely unworkable. I don’t know. I, I, okay, I just heard of this yesterday. AARON I’m not gonna— I agree with you, by the way. ROBI Yeah, so, okay, look, uh, I just heard of this yesterday, so I don’t know if anyone has like published a philosophy paper refuting this yet, but if they haven’t, I will. Um, you can mug anyone who believes in this nonsense by just proposing— okay, so the example I gave was, um, Uh, if someone believes this or like follows this rule, you can mug them into doing literally anything at any time. You just, uh, say, hey, I heard of this, uh, I I saw a preacher on the street corner and he was preaching to me the, uh, religion of shrimpology. Um, it turns out the universe is created by an omnipotent shrimp deity, uh, who will torture, uh, 10 tetraded to the 20 sentient beings for, uh, 3 octillion years unless you donate all of your money to shrimp welfare. Um, and they can be like— you can be like 1 to a googolplex, uh, confident this isn’t true. But— or like, it— maybe the probability of this is 1 in a googolplex because it’s so ridiculous. Um, you’re more sure this is not true than anything you’ve heard in your life, but you can’t be 100% sure, like, that’s not a, uh, a real credence you can assign. And so just by me saying this, you would be forced to donate all of your— like, you could make up any view that wants anything and is the most unhappy, like, view you’ve ever heard of, and then your action just has to follow that. Um, okay, so, uh, I think I’ve ruled that one out. Um, so Um, the upshot is I’m much less certain than I was 2 days ago that, uh, you should not diversify your donations, uh, at the level of an individual. I still think you shouldn’t, or like, I don’t see a real-life case where you would— where it would make sense to do this. Um, but I retract my, uh, previous perhaps possibly overconfident assertion that it’s like completely 100% always illogical. Uh, like maybe there is some way where it makes sense to do this. AARON Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I, um, so the one thing I like want to say the words two envelopes problem, because isn’t that like where some of this comes from in a, like, if you try to just be ruthlessly, maybe that’s not a good word, just like, um, what, like full-mindedly, uh, and full-heartedly. Utilitarian and consequentialist, like you run into the problem of one worldview that, um, takes a position of like ants and one that takes a position of elephants. And I, I feel like I’m just not smart enough to always have this. I would, you know, like think through it a little bit to like load it into my brain. I’m just not smart enough to like immediately have it booted up. But like, that is like one thing I like wanna— wanna say. Although I, I almost just like wanna investigate Like, I’m inclined to disagree with you because, like, like, at an intellectual. ROBI Level, um. AARON Although, yeah, we should talk— we can talk about that. I guess the plausibility of the moral parliament view. I’m, I am just like almost— I’m. ROBI Actually very on board with moral parliament. Um, I have moral uncertainty. I’m not like 100% consequentialist or anything like that. Um, I think it makes sense if you’re like deciding among things. Um, and again, I think it makes a lot of sense for like Rethink or Open Philanthropy to diversify because they have large donations. Um, I do not think it makes sense for me to apply moral parliament with like moral marketplace decision rule to my own donations as a small donor. Um, and then there are, I think, better decision rules that— so for example, I think Was it Toby Ord who proposed the, the, um, what’s the one you, um, I think his rule makes more sense. You, um, select a dictator with probability proportional to, um, to—. AARON [Speaker:David] Wait, that’s crazy. Why would you do that? ROBI [Speaker:Elana] Oh, ‘cause it, uh, this is optimal in various ways. Uh, um, let me, let me propose, Let me mention a couple of the, like, improvements I’ve heard of. Um, so there’s more of a parliament, but instead of everyone just gets a— instead of everyone votes on something. So that, that has the problem, there’s like unstable coalitions. Um, you know, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, and like, um, two factions prefer option A over B, but then two of three factions prefer B over C, and then two of three factions prefer C over A. There’s like a lot of, a lot of voting problems. Um, uh, one is, um, the groups are allowed to bargain with each other. So, um, they’re allowed to say, uh, like, hey, uh, I’ll— the utilitarians can say, hey, I’ll, um, vote to, like, protect the sanctity of the rainforest if you’ll allocate just, like, 1% of the light cone to, um, hedonium if you’re— if you, you end up in charge, and like they will offer different things based on like how much voting power they have, um, and who the other— the players are and what everyone values. Um, I think this is an improvement. Um, there’s— so, uh, one of the rules proposed in one of the moral parliament papers is, um, instead of “take a vote”— so, so one of the problems with just “take a vote” is, um, If you have 51% credence in one view and 49% in the other, the 51% will just like completely override the 49%. Bargaining helps this a little bit, but actually no, bargaining doesn’t help in that case. So the, the 51% might just like override the desires of the 49% and do something that they like slightly more than what the smaller group wanted, but is like completely and utterly horrible to the smaller group. Um, uh, one thing you can do is— so one proposal is, um, everyone votes as if it’s like a straight-up majority vote, but instead of simply taking the results of the vote, you pick a voter, uh, with probability proportional to their representation, and then you enact that voter’s, uh— this has beneficial properties for the same reason, um, This would be good in like a regular democratic election, uh, which I won’t get into because. AARON I was just going to say— [Speaker:KEVIN] No, I just want to say, um, this sounds crazy to me because, um, I think it— maybe it makes sense. I like believe you, um, if you like sort of expand the analogy of like an in— like, um, or expand the situation of an individual person’s moral uncertainty to like a society where you’re having multiple people vote. But like, you can actually just do way better than that insofar as you’re a single person because you can credibly and you can just decide to be honest and say, like, so what— one problem with eliciting, uh, preferences in democracy is it’s really hard to elicit, uh, like, strength of various preferences, um, from various people. I can just, like, assert, oh, I am, like, a quadrillion times more certain than you are that, you know, Donald Trump is bad, and maybe I actually am or whatever. But if you’re just a person, um, yeah, you could just, like, in fact, uh, care about the 49% in, like, uh, in, in, like, proportion to, like, how much, like, um, how strong that preference actually is and like not, not pretend that this is unelicitable information. And so that’s why, like, it’s the dictator— like, I mean, I also just have the strong intuition that like, wait, hold on. Uh, there’s no way, there’s no way leaving it up to chance at the end of the day is like the best thing to do. But this is like sort of— oh, wait, wait. Okay. ROBI Actually, I think you reminded me of something. So, so, uh, another, another proposed improvement. Gives— so you, you tell all the representatives in the parliament your decision procedure is you will, you will, you will pick someone randomly and then they vote as if they’re, as if they believe some— the dictator is being picked randomly. But then you actually, in fact, go with the majority vote. AARON [Speaker:Howie] Um, wait, okay. Like me, like, why would you do that? ROBI I don’t know. This has some kind of elegant, like, properties where it, like, I don’t know. Yeah, actually, I must be misremembering it. That, that doesn’t make sense because, like, if there’s not a majority, uh, or if it’s more than two options, you. AARON Could just take the plurality, like, in principle. I don’t know. ROBI Uh, if there’s more than— if there’s more than two parties voting on more than two options, um, I think it gets complicated. But yeah, it’s something like that. AARON I feel like we’re over— I feel like— so there’s like, not this is like intrinsically like too, too complex or anything, but like the thing that I want to investigate is like, so I in fact donated a little bit of money this year, um, and I donated like part— I donated to 3 different, um, organizations, uh, pretty sure, and like also maybe some small, like some one-off, like small things for like various reasons, but like basically Uh, Late Cone, um, the EA Animal Welfare Fund, and Alex Borris. And like, I don’t do this because, like, at a conscious level, it just seems like the right thing to do. Um, it’s not necessarily a great— I. ROBI Think this is— so, uh, leaving aside Alex Borris, which I think has some special, um, uh, actually, no, maybe that’s not right. AARON Yeah, it’s like, it’s like you might not— if you’re only limited to like $7,000 and you have $8,000, you might donate the $7,000. I didn’t donate $7,000 to him. ROBI Oh, okay. Well then I think you’re— okay. I think you’ve definitely done something unreasonable. Although I think you have built— yeah. AARON No, for like, for that one, for political stuff, there is like some benefit to just saying, oh, like, um, I have like X number of donors. So it’s like not totally exactly the same, but we can even just do the EA Animal Welfare Fund or like pretend it was just Animal Welfare Fund and, and Light Cone. I like, so like at a con— like at one level, like I have this, I just like have a strong intuition that like doesn’t, and I don’t normally have strong normal intuitions. Not that strong. It’s not like as strong as like, oh, like the feeling that I have qualia, but it’s like, it’s like somewhat strong that like, um, there’s like something going wrong if I, uh, um, yeah, I don’t— and the problem is that I can’t actually articulate it, right? I like, I like in fact basically just endorse what you, what you in fact think, and I like don’t know what you mean. ROBI So I think your intuition is wrong. I believe that, uh, By your own lights, you have done less good by splitting your donations among Lightcone and EAIF, uh, than you would have if you— or sorry, uh, you said Animal Welfare Fund? AARON Yeah, AWF. ROBI Yeah, AWF. Okay, uh, you split your donations between Lightcone and AWF. Um, I am pretty sure that, uh, you would have done better, or like the world would be better according to your own views, uh, and values if you had given all of the money to one or the other. Um, I think we both agree there are like, uh, there are some like small exceptions to this. Like political donations are limited to like X dollars per person. Uh, so I maxed out. I, I donated $7K to Alex Horace. Um, and, uh, yeah, and I do, I do do like really small donations. So like if it’s someone’s birthday and they have like, I don’t know, they ask for donations for their birthday, I’ll donate like $50 to some charity on GiveWell’s like top 10 that I think they would like— yeah, might get them interested or something. Um, or it’s like valuable to be able to say you’ve donated to that in case it comes up in a conversation with normies, and then you might be able to get them to like do more charity research or something. Um, apart from that, if you’re just— if you’re just— if you’re just looking at the direct first-order, uh, help to the recipients of the charity, of the dollars you’re donating, of your donation budget, um, I think you have to be. AARON Uh. ROBI At least a bigger individual donor than we are, uh, before— [Speaker:KEVIN] Yeah. AARON I mean, the problem is that I don’t actually, I don’t actually know which of animal welfare funded, like, what is the better use of my— [Speaker:ASH] Oh. ROBI Well, in that case, uh, in that case, that’s easy. Then, um, just like spend 5 minutes doing a BowTech and then just give all the money to the top one. AARON Or— [Speaker:KEVIN] I’m still gonna, so I’m gonna wind up with, I’m not exactly 50/50. So I actually did, actually, or like, I need to check back on what I did, but I actually gave, I think, more to— I think I gave more, more to like John, um, sort of in proportional, but like, I think what I was implicitly doing was something like that. Oh, everybody gets to see that the moral parliament, but almost like not everyone because only the, only like the views that are actually compelling to me or something, which is like sort of like a hybrid 5E decision procedure. ROBI Um, yeah, you did. Okay. You did like boundedly rational moral marketplace. Like you’re not, you’re going to round off any, like, you’re going to round off any views with like less than 5% like credibility. And then the, the top 2 or 3 views get to spend money according to their, um, yeah. AARON Although, although, like, I, I, it’s, my brain doesn’t clearly, at least like my conscious mind doesn’t clearly distinguish between like moral uncertainty and empirical uncertainty. Like in this case, it sort of all just mashed together. I don’t know if that matters. ROBI Yeah. Okay. So I am 100% sure empirical uncertainty is not a valid reason to split your donations. Moral uncertainty might be. AARON So wait, but now, so like, I know you commented on this thing about— so my like first hypothesis is like, maybe there’s an ED thing going on, and I’m actually not entirely sure. So like your point is, so basically the, the, the thing, the idea is like, okay, um, like is the con— so does the world look better from the position where everybody behaves [Speaker:HOWIE] Um, yes, yes, yes. ROBI So if everyone would stop, uh, if everyone would stop splitting their donations and just donate to whatever they think is best, at least if most people are well-informed, uh, then this would improve. Maybe that— maybe this doesn’t improve the world for like, because normies are donating like $10 to 100 different charities and 99% of charities are like approximately worthless compared to effective charities. Um, then actually it’s probably good for them. It’s probably good that they split coincidentally, just because if they took my advice and gave all the money to their favorite charity, then 100% of the money would go to like church or like homeless shelter for cute kittens. And then, but like, maybe they’re better. AARON Than, maybe, maybe they’re, maybe they’re better at than, than, than chance at guessing which is the best, right? Isn’t it? I actually don’t think that your argument falls down. In the normie case, it’s like, oh, maybe there’s like a 2% chance that they donate to the one out of 100 that is like the best. ROBI [Speaker:Howie] Uh, that’s actually, uh, that, that’s plausible to me. Um, I won’t get into that, but okay. So, um, you— so this argument often comes up for like, okay, so there’s this argument people sometimes give, uh, that it’s not worth your time to vote because there’s already 150 million other people voting in For example, the US presidential election, there’s like 140 million voters already voting. Um, and the, uh, margin in almost every state is going to be— it’s not even going to be close. Uh, even if you live in a swing state, it’s pretty unlikely that it comes down to one vote. So like the election outcome is going to be the same, uh, whether or not you vote. So therefore it’s, uh, it’s not worth your time to vote. You should just, like, stay home and do something else. Okay, here’s a really bad counterargument to that. People often say, like, I think the most common argument I’ve heard is. AARON Um. ROBI No, but that, that can’t be right. If everyone did that, then no one would vote. And then by me voting, I’ll be the only voter and I’ll decide the election. So I have to vote. Okay, so, um, my, uh, the straightforward response to that is, well, okay, yeah, if everyone followed this bizarre logic and, uh, if everyone— if everyone acted in this way and no one voted and you didn’t, then you would be the— then you would be the only voter and you would decide the election. However, we know for a fact That is not the case. Like, 80 million people have already voted. You are not going to do anything. Okay. Um, there’s a rationalist— yeah, yeah. So, uh, okay. So there’s a better rationalist version of this, which is, uh, instead of— so the— here’s a rationalist argument, um, in favor of voting. So they concede the causal decision theory outcome, like, like if you subscribe to causal decision theory, then What I’ve said so far is correct. So 80 million people have already voted. Your marginal vote will do nothing. So therefore you should not vote. It’s not worth the time. However, if you subscribe to evidential decision theory, then you’re not just casting one vote. You’re in some sense, maybe, um, uh, your vote is like correlated influenced by, maybe not causally, but somehow correlated with the decisions of everyone else who thinks like you. And there are enough people who are smart and thinking this way that you should vote as if you’re, like, kind of directing all of their votes. And so you should vote, uh, because, like, you’re better informed than the average person, and across the multiverse, you, like, improve a lot of election outcomes. Yeah, um, so I basically endorse this, I think. Sure, yeah, okay. So, um, uh, let me not— let me leave that aside for elections. And so you, you took this argument, which I think is better than the usual argument for voting, uh, for elections, and then you applied this to donations. So, um, you said, so does it make sense to split your donations because EDT— uh, for— on EDT grounds, um, should you diversify because then everyone will diversify and then you’re— this is correlated with like not just one person’s donations but many people’s donations will go to like both of these good charities. Um, and, uh, I think I have like, uh, refuted this with the observation that, um, this might make sense for an election where everyone votes simultaneously. However, this is not what the scenario is for donations. So everyone donates at like a different time throughout the year. You can, uh, you can talk to each other, like the donors can talk to each other. Um, you can look up what all the previous donations were and you can see what is the most neglected charity at the time of your donation. And then you can leave instructions or like talk to people donating later. And then based on whatever is most neglected after you and more people donate, they can change their donation. AARON So this is not obviously a, like a Like, I think this is a plausibly good point, not like a clear refutation. So like, the first thing that comes to mind is just, um, that you don’t— it’s not— so in an election, you can have a system where everybody commits to voting once in a given time period, and then, like, you know, for example, every— the 365 people, everybody in, in the year, and everybody has an assigned date to vote, whereas donations, like, there’s uncertainty around, like, how much people are going to vote, how much you’re even going to vote. You might not, like, have decided that yet. ROBI Um, uh. AARON When that— yeah, and like when that happens, and like to some extent this is solvable with communication, but it’s just communication that empirically doesn’t actually happen. Um, and like maybe it makes sense to happen. ROBI That’s not true. Wait, that’s not true at all. When— whenever I donate to a fundraiser, there’s like— there’s like that thermometer that is like, we have raised $5,000 of our $30,000 goal. AARON Yeah, but like you, you don’t— you don’t have complete information. My point is that you don’t have complete information about every other— sure, you. ROBI You don’t need complete information. The scenario, the argument breaks down as long as there’s any information, like, um, you can look up like approximately— you don’t have to know the exact amounts donated to every charity for you to, um, for it to, uh, not make sense to split. You just have to know the approximate, like, neglectedness of different options. And then it only makes sense to donate to the most neglect— to the, to your best guess of the most neglected option at that time. And then that will change over time. Like, maybe it doesn’t— maybe they don’t, like, do their financial reporting right away. Maybe there’s some lag on when the charity donates— how much— uh, updates how much money they’ve raised in donations. But later donors can find out about that and then donate differently, donate to different things, even if they are following the exact same decision procedure as you, and even if they have the exact same values as you. Um, your, your values might be, like, donate to AMF if that’s the most neglected, and donate to, um, Uh, uh, what— lead, uh, LEAP if that’s the most neglected. And then you donating first when AMF is most neglected will donate all of your money to AMF, and then this person donating later in the year who has the exact same values and wants the same thing will instead donate to, um, to, uh, LEAP because that’s the most neglected later in the year. But, uh, and so you’ve collectively split your donations even though you, uh, want the same thing, and it wouldn’t have made sense for you to split your donations initially. Um, what was good changed throughout the course of the year with the intervening events as more funding came in. Um, yeah, but so actually, this is. AARON A good point but might already be accounted for. So it’s like, there’s a reason why, like, part of my moral parliament doesn’t say, like, give to, like, Will McCaskill so he can, like, seed effective altruism as a movement. It’s like, that’s already totally funded. I already— it’s already, like, accounted for or something. Like, I still— like, I still don’t know which is the more neglected one, like, between EA Animal Welfare Fund and Light Code. And so at some point, like, I still have this genuine uncertainty, you know what I mean? Like. ROBI Um, I think— well, this all comes down to worldviews. I think one or the other is the more neglected one based on how much you value animals and how and what your discount rate is for the, the far future. I think once you decide those parameters, one or the other is the one you should donate to. AARON Well, you might— maybe, but what if you have— are you— is that still true if you have, um, you know, uh, probability distributions over those parameters? ROBI Oh yes, yes. Then, then at the scale of an individual donor, you just like integrate over those and then one or the other is the one you should donate to. AARON I want to think about that. ROBI That’s for empirical uncertainty. Um, someone raised the point that moral uncertainty is like maybe more ambiguous for this than I realized. So I have retracted my claim that you should not diversify even if there’s moral uncertainty and you are following like some— Yeah. Strange procedure. AARON I’m kind of in the position of the normie that you talked about with the— like you said you didn’t want to get into it. Maybe I’m going to pressure you to. You still don’t have to. About like the normie who has like, oh, donate $10 to 100 charities. I feel like in some respects I am just in that position where like, I, um, like maybe I can do better than chance, but like my intuition is something like, um, like I am trying to— like we, like we, we maybe like share the same intuition or like, like in, in some respect, which is like, oh, I have like, and, you know, and charities and one of them is going, going to be the hit and I just don’t know which the hit is. Um, but like, maybe this isn’t necessarily contradict anything you’ve already said, but, but. ROBI That doesn’t— then, then you should just like donate to whichever one you have the highest probability of is going to be the hit. AARON Yeah. Um, yeah, I think you’re probably right. That, to be clear, that’s my like takeaway. ROBI Yeah. AARON And yet, yeah, go ahead. ROBI Oh, uh, we can talk about the, the normie 100 charities thing if you want. I, I don’t have a strong opinion on that. I just It wasn’t quite relevant to what I was saying before. AARON No, I, I think, I think it just, it just like, in fact, the same, that’s like, in fact, just like structurally the same position that, like the actual position that I’m in, maybe like less extreme. And like maybe I have— you’re, you’re smarter. You can do. ROBI Calculus. AARON No, no. So I’ve, I’ve a Pareto, I have a Pareto improvement over them by like having more information, maybe being smarter, but like I still, um, I’m still in the position of like sort of having 100 options and like, even though the worst one is like plausibly, at least in expected terms, like plausibly better than like, um, like even potentially the best that they’ve identified, it’s still like by my own lights, like probably like a, like a, something like a power law distribution, um, like ex post. And so like the question is like, how do I, how do you give when like most of the impact comes from basically guessing, comes from the money that you give to the like best single choice or something. ROBI Yeah, I, I agree with that. Um, in this case, I would either, like, satisfy— or, like, bandedly rational— like, decide what amount of time it makes sense to spend, and then, like, spend that amount of time and see if I’ve made progress. And then, like, maybe just donate all my money to whatever is my best guess at the end of that time. Or, um, maybe it doesn’t make sense for me to spend time thinking about this, uh, join a donor lottery, or, like, ask a friend you trust to like allocate your money for you, or, um, or yeah, donate to something like EA Animal Welfare Fund or Light Cone or EA Infrastructure Fund where they do more research and like allocate to different projects. AARON No, I was actually having a conversation with this, uh, uh, with somebody on, uh, wait, who was it? Um, I think Caleb. Yeah, I think Caleb on, on Twitter, Caleb Parikh, uh, and about how the thing that I actually want is like a, like a like a fund, like analogous to, like, animal welfare, a long-term future fund that just, like, in fact has my, like, values exactly. But, like, this just doesn’t exist. ROBI Right. AARON Yeah. So it’s like, and, and in fact, like, if any, like, I’m actually quite open to just anybody wants to make the case, I should just give them money and they’re like, they’re better at making decisions than me, but like we have relevantly, like, very similar values. I’m actually like pretty open to that. I just like, I, I like, I know a lot of friends and we all have like important, like, disagreements, even though it’s like sort of like nihilism of small, uh, narcissism, small differences. It’s like, yeah, these are like actually like quite important disagreements about like what the world is like or something. ROBI Yeah, I, I agree with you on all that. I liked your approach of, um, um, you made that manifold market according to Aaron’s views, what should Aaron donate to? AARON Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. ROBI And that there were like 20 different options. See, I— so I think you should make that market and then at the end you should just give all your money to whatever is the highest probability. AARON Yeah, no, I think that that’s probably the act, in fact, the right thing to do. Or like, at the end of the day, like, taking that into account as a source of evidence or something. Like, yeah, sure. I, I think I probably— right. ROBI Or you could even— maybe this makes sense. I don’t think it does. You could even moral marketplace and do your donations in proportional to the percentages on the, the market. Um, but I think— actually, no, I’m sure that is just worse than donating all to the top one. AARON Yeah, yeah, I think I’d probably agree. And yeah, so maybe— okay, should we move on? ROBI Yeah, um, uh, I, uh, don’t have good new thoughts on the repugnant conclusions things, but, uh, I would be happy to talk about the rest of the doc. AARON Uh, okay, wait, so— well, one thing I just want to, like, clear the record. So you’re totally wrong. Wait, I’m just like— to be clear, I, like, say this with love or whatever. But like, you talk about this like purple yellow card thing in the first— Yeah. Um, interview around 40 minutes for, for, I guess starting at 39:30 for people who are like, want to reference that. Yeah. Um, and like, I actually think in some like extremely autistic, um, interpretation of utilitarianism, like you’re right, but like nobody actually means that. So nobody, nobody actually thinks that like you should be like considered blameworthy or like suboptimal if you try, if like you absolutely try your best and like the ex ante. The best guess. ROBI I’m not claiming that. I, I, I’m not claiming that. I’m, I, I still think you should do your ex ante best guess. I’m just saying it’s very arbitrary based on this, like, fact of what happened to be in someone’s mind, like, that determines whether you were wrong, whether, whether you were good or bad. AARON No, but like, ex ante isn’t the whole point that you can’t— wait, so like, the, the thing that you don’t know is like whether like you’re this like potential, uh, like, uh, moral patient. Prefers, like, X or Y, and you don’t know that, but like, that doesn’t affect what the best choice is, ex ante. ROBI I agree. Yes. AARON And so like— Yes. ROBI Yes. AARON Yeah. ROBI So you, you’re saying the morality of doing your choice is, um, is based on your ex ante. Um, and I’m saying the, like, ex post, uh, morality is, like, decided by this, like, unknowable bit or something. AARON Yeah. ROBI Um, and this just makes it really, like, Like, really, universe? This is— this is the moral truth? AARON [Speaker:Kevin] I don’t know, it seems like it’s like probably just like, yes, like I’m not surprised at all that this is the case. ROBI [Speaker:David] Okay, uh, well, anyway, if you ever come across any evidence for moral realism, let me know. I still haven’t seen any. AARON [Speaker:Kevin] Um, okay, I— like, my evidence is like, eat a— eat a like California Reaper pepper and then get back to me. Oh, that’s really nice. ROBI I love that. AARON Oh, okay. That is— I’m assuming it was from like a— like I, I think somebody like asked me like a similar— I forget if it was exactly this question, but like something similar. And like, actually, like at the end of the day, like you actually like experience sort of is the argument. Wait, I actually sort of stand by—. ROBI No, that, that’s not evident. That’s just like, it’s just unpleasant. It’s subjectively unpleasant. That’s not objectively bad. Um. AARON You’Re part— I mean, I feel like I’ve, I feel like I’ve had this conversation many times. I don’t want to like beat too much of a dead horse, but like you are part of the universe, right? Like, you can imagine, would it still be that if, like, every molecule had the same— it was like panpsychism is true, and also every— like, every molecule— just pretend that this is coherent or, like, possible— like, had the same experience. Like, at some point, would you concede that, like, the, the, like, the subjective, like, is just part of the objective? And in, like, when you have, like, sentient beings who are just, like, an aspect of the world. ROBI Um. Good question. I’m not sure. AARON Um, you’re like, I don’t think there’s anything like weird, like sort of like spooky written into the stars. It’s just like sentient beings are part of the— are part of the world. And we talk about like bad for one person, um, like versus bad in general. What do you mean? What would we mean by bad in general is like bad for the world and like they’re just part of that. Yeah, sure. ROBI Um, Maybe you have a good point. I think you’re moving the goalposts to, like, something less than what, uh, I understand moral realism to be. AARON Okay. I mean, maybe I just have a different conception of moral— Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. It’s, it’s, um, like, I guess maybe I want to, like, say that, okay, like, I actually, um, there is some additional step, which is like, uh, what is, like, genuinely good or bad. Is just, is like, is like identical. And this is like a substantive claim. It’s like identical to what is good or bad for the world or something. ROBI Okay, great. AARON And what’s your evidence? My evidence is just like—. ROBI Yeah, that’s right. You don’t have any. No, because it’s like, it’s like— Source, I made it up. AARON I made it up, but it’s, I made it up because it’s true. ROBI Okay, well, I can’t argue with that. AARON No, but, um, uh, okay, maybe there’s some like logical, I feel like this is gonna get into like a highly semantic, like a highly, um, yeah, like semantic, uh, discussion about like what we mean by words. ROBI Um, yeah, uh, maybe, maybe we’re, uh, maybe we’re not gonna convince each other. Uh, I’m happy to talk about it more if you want, but maybe not productive. AARON Yeah, maybe, maybe we’ll— I feel like we’ve already had this discussion, so yeah. Um, oh yeah, so there’s the, there’s the total happiness point. Oh, and then you said— so I actually totally would think that interpersonal utility comparisons are, are legit. Um, that doesn’t— so ignore that part. ROBI Um, uh, you like ordinal but not cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. AARON So, um, me, so No, cardinality still exists, just not necessarily, um, it’s not necessarily well, well modeled by, by addition over the real numbers. And this is like, did you see my— are you familiar with my EA forum post where I like, I spent way too long on this, but it’s like, uh, like effective altruism should accept that some suffering cannot be offset. Um, and then this actually— I, I. ROBI I decided it was all wrong, and I, I didn’t read that carefully, but yeah, you’re okay. AARON Okay, I think this is like— okay, I will— okay, I feel like I. ROBI Will— I will, I will engage further if you want, but I, I don’t— I think I’m gonna, uh, actually, I think I just read the first half and found lots of problems with it. AARON Okay, sure. I like don’t believe you, or like, I don’t believe that your problems The problems you identified are legit. Um, or like, I think, I think—. ROBI I don’t think they would convince you. AARON Oh, okay. Maybe you, if you want to, like, uh, if you like, yeah, maybe we can have another discussion, like, or which do you, do you have them like top of mind enough where like you could pull up the link and then go through them? ROBI No. Um, I remember this post. I think I read the first one-third or half and decided it wasn’t worth the time to comment. AARON Oh, wild. That’s funny, because I’m like, I’m like 99% sure in the first— the part 1 is true, and like less sure about part 2. Okay, 1 part is like, it’s like the logical thing, which is like, uh, it could be the case, it’s like not illogical, uh, that under utilitarianism, um, some off suffer— some suffering cannot be offset. And this part 2 is like, in fact, some suffering cannot be offset. ROBI Uh, okay, uh, I might have— it might have been I agreed with that, and then Scroll past it to the second part. It was like the second half. AARON Okay, that, that makes, that makes more sense. Like, I, I am, I’ve actually updated against, uh, the, like, not below 50%, but like from like, I don’t know, like 80 to 65% or something after. ROBI Yeah, fair enough. AARON It’s a, it’s literally on my to-do list to like go back over the comments. And there’s like some good points that are like, I, that are just actually like really conceptually hard for me to think through. Um, that I like, it’s, this is literally on my Google Tasks and I needed to do it. ROBI Um, what’s your day job these days? AARON Oh, so as of now, arb— I— arb research. Arb something. Yeah, this is like, as of like a week ago. Thank you. ROBI Okay, yeah, um, I am not sure, uh, how much time that takes up and whether you should— I don’t know. Yeah, um, if you get to it, um, Yeah, if I’m, um, maybe next time I’m on the subway or something, I will, um, try to go back to your post and get through it. Uh. AARON If you want, I don’t want to, like, pressure you. Um, plausibly, yeah, plausibly the— like, wait, maybe, maybe I’ll— maybe after this, I won’t try to find it now, but, like, there’s a— there’s, like, a single comment there that is, like, a bunch of— that is, like, cruxy or something, and, like, maybe I’ll try to link that so I can, like, make clear, like, what my current uncertainties or something. ROBI Amazing. Yes, you can send me a link to the comment. AARON Okay, I will— let me try to do that. Okay, cool. Uh, what else should we talk about, if anything? ROBI Uh, is there anything else on the doc before the repugnant conclusion stuff? AARON Those stipulated happiness— I forget this one. Paper— Uh, that’s like not— no, so I think, I think the main additional one is, um, the very repugnant conclusion that you just bite the bullet. I say no, don’t bite the bullet. ROBI Um, I think I still endorse Bite the Bullet. I would have to read through it. AARON Yes, so like this one, um, let me just remind myself of what I said when I was originally listening. Oh yeah, so no, this is, this is honestly just my— this is just like the paper again, or the EA forum post again. Um, okay, not, not just, but like very similar, like very closely related. Um, and like, I think the main point is like, or like a main point is, um, that it’s not unlike the repugnant conclusion where you could just— wait, no, no, even the repugnant— oh, so sorry, this actually relates to number 4. So even though we’re probably in conclusion, I’ve come to believe, even if, even though I like tentatively am willing to bite the bullet on that, it doesn’t actually follow from the premises of utilitarianism. It’s not like a logical thing. Like, you can’t just— like, it’s conceptually possible that there’s like happiness so great that it, that it like isn’t consi— like moral— it’s like morally, uh, more important to create like one amount of that than any amount or any like, you know, a number of like time being units of some like more normal happiness. This is like a possibility to consider. ROBI Um, uh, is this like a finitist objection? Like, there could be that much if the universe were like bigger, but the universe is not big enough to have this much utility. AARON We don’t in fact know, like, there’s, um, we’re so like the— in part because of like the radical, I guess mostly because of like our radical like uncertainty about like the nature of like qualia and experience. It’s just like not— so like the mapping between like qualia and like moral value or Um, what am I trying to say? Um, it’s just like, it’s like not written anywhere that like the moral value of an arbitrary qualitative state like has. ROBI To be— [Speaker:KEVIN] Can go higher? Can— like there might be a ceiling somewhere? You’re saying? AARON [Speaker:Howie] Um, conceptually there’s like probably not a ceal— wait, I’m just like trying to remember that like the right words to say this. So like conceptually there’s like probably not a ceiling, but it’s just like nothing breaks if you imagine that like one pigeon, like Like the state of a pigeon eating an apple, like, just doesn’t— like, like, there’s just, um, morally, like, no, like, uh, any, any, like, real number, uh, number of, like, hours of pigeon apple hours, like, don’t morally, um, or, like, morally, like, less important than creating, like, one, like, hour of, like, I don’t know, like, jhanas or something. And, like, it could— like, on the, on the merits, like, you can debate this. Like, is this, like, like, okay, like, is it— are in fact, like, 100,000 pigeon hours or, like, way more than that? Like, morally equivalent, but like nothing under, like in the utilitarian core, as I call it, like breaks. If you, if you like, um, if in fact the answer is no, like for any, for any number you pick of pigeon apple hours, like, like the moral value of the, of like the jhanas, like situ— uh, experience, like still— Yeah, sure, sure. ROBI I agree with that. Um, uh, is this where the name pigeon hour came from? AARON No pigeon. That was, uh, no, I just like pigeons. ROBI Yeah, okay, um, yeah, uh, have I told you about, um, what’s it called, unique entity ethics before? Have we talked about this? AARON I don’t think so, I don’t think so. Go, go for it. ROBI Um, okay, there, uh, this is a— have you read Unsung by Scott Alexander? AARON No, sorry. ROBI Oh, okay. Um, so in Unsung there’s this, um, uh, do you know what theodicy is? Like attempts to resolve, like how Uh, there can be suffering in the world even if God is omnipotent. Yeah. Um, so there’s this, uh, there’s this theodicy theory, uh, proposed by like some Christian philosopher, uh, which also happens to show up in, um, uh, Scott Alexander’s fiction novel. So, um, the question is, uh, how can there be suffering in the, the universe if God is omnipotent and benevolent and omniscient? Surely he would like not let us suffer. He— because he’s able to stop it. And he doesn’t want us to suffer. Um, uh, so, um, in the book, some character talks to God and finds out God created— like, uh, Job is like cursed with boils and plague, and he asks God, like, why didn’t you make me happy? Um, and God says, I did make a universe where you’re happy. Then I made a universe almost exactly like that perfect universe where everyone is happy. Then it made a universe almost exactly like that one, and then like so on and so on. Uh, I made every universe with net positive utility. Uh, and then yours is like the farthest one from the perfect universe, uh, where, where the universe is still good. So your life is filled with suffering, but it will ultimately be worth it. Um, uh, so Now you could imagine God just creates like an infinite, infinite, like uncountably infinite copies of the, um, the, the perfect universe where everyone is having the same experience over and over. Um, but maybe duplicates don’t count, or like the value, the moral value doesn’t increase linearly. AARON Um, so like, I mean, maybe I don’t know. ROBI I think— yeah, this is debated. So let me, let me give you an argument for why it, it doesn’t scale linearly. Um, although I think this might depend on more, um, physicalism than you’re willing to endorse. Okay, suppose I take— suppose I take your, um, your, uh, your brain and I scan it and I imprint it, imprint it onto like a silicon wafer. I’ve got like a one-atom-thick silicon wafer, and then I add some circuits on it so that when I plug in this chip, uh, it runs neural pro— like some electrical processes. So it’s like perfectly simulating your brain. Um, uh, can we assume, or like, bear with me for a sec. Um, can we agree if like the, the mind that is experiencing the things because these like electrons are flowing, has the exact same experiences as you do, it has like the same moral value as you, or like— [Speaker:HOWIE] Yeah, conditional. AARON On having the same experience, then it has the same moral value. ROBI [Speaker:David] Sure, yes, uh, or, or let’s just say it has some unit of moral, moral value, um, but like it has some experiences, it has some moral value. Okay, it’s like one atom thick and there are like circuits etched into it. Okay, now, um, uh, now let’s say I take an anatomically precise 3D printer and I just like stack another atom on top, uh, to double the thickness. So it’s a 2-atom-thick, uh, chip. Um, like everywhere there was a silicon atom, there’s now another silicon atom on top of it. And everywhere there was a copper atom, there’s another copper atom. And now it’s, it’s a chip exactly as before, except twice as thick. It still runs the same processes, still has the same experiences. Okay. Um, is this still the same moral value as before? AARON I have no idea. Like, maybe. It’s like, it’s like, it’s a quasi-empirical question. Like, are there two— are there two beings now, or are there one? Like, streams of experience or one? And like, I, I just don’t know the answer. ROBI That’s a good point. Almost everyone says yes, this is the same as the, the, the previous, like, before I doubled the thickness. Um, okay, now the gotcha is supposed to be here. So like, I take this two-atom-thick thing that’s having the same experiences as before, and then I separate it by like one angstrom. So now there’s two copies. I’ve done nothing except like split it apart. Is this now suddenly twice as valuable. AARON As— [Speaker:HOWIE] I mean, the answer is like, the answer is like, maybe it’s like, it’s not inconceivable that like, that you have like some version of computational functionalism, just like [UNCLEAR] is just like, it’s like a brute fact of the universe. Like you have to separate functional, you have to separate like instantiations of an algorithm by like some amount of like air. ROBI [Speaker:Howie] Okay, great. So, so just to This didn’t work on you, but a lot— uh, many people find this like a knockdown argument against, like, linear scaling of identical experiences of, like, moral value. So, um, uh, many people would say, “Okay, this argument conclusively demonstrates, yeah, 2 pigeons eating 2 apples for 2 hours is not twice as valuable as, um, 1 pigeon eating an apple Uh, yeah, it’s somewhere between 1x and 2x. Like, there’s some kind of discount. AARON Like, the discounting thing is like pretty— seems pretty implausible. Like, the closer thing to like plausible in this, in this like space is like, um, it’s like you, you want to be able to say— it’s like, uh, this gets into like weird multiverse stuff, but like you want like a genuine— like you want, um like two copies of the quote unquote, like the exact same thing. And there’s like sort of metaphysical question, which is like, can you have two copies of the same thing? Like if, if there are just like two copies of, of like, uh, of like a set. So like, I think at the sort of low level physics, ‘cause like my understanding is like, it’s just properties all the way down. And like, can you even have two different, like I quote unquote, like identical pigeons? Or something, because like they’re not identical with respect to like how their fields are interacting with like, uh, you know, like various, uh, like other gravitational— [Speaker:HOWIE]. ROBI Yes, wait, okay, um, suppose I just take, uh, I say there’s this pigeon eating this apple for 1 hour, uh, let’s suppose I make an atom-for-atom copy, uh, it’s so far away they’re like outside of each other’s visible universe. AARON [Speaker:Howie] But like, like, so, so like, like, um, I think that I haven’t thought about this very much because I don’t think it holds, but like, um, I think the idea is like, oh, like physical position, like, is just a property that matters here. And so like, you can’t— basically, like, the idea of the argument is like, you, you can’t actually— you can’t actually get to like two pigeons, like two identical things. Like, in some intuitive sense you can, but it’s in like genuine metaphysical sense you can’t, because like, okay, yes, exactly the exact same properties, it’s just like one item. ROBI [Speaker] Right. So I was going to say, like, yeah, suppose they’re so far apart, they’re like, they can’t causally interact with each other. But then you say, okay, like, yeah, but I don’t know, bird’s eye view of the universe, there’s one bird over here and one bird over here. And like the location in the universe relative to the other bird is like a property that is different between them. Okay. What if I have an infinite grid of birds and like, 80 billion light years apart from each other so that for any individual bird, there’s an equal number of birds in every direction. And so they are in fact, like, identical in that. AARON [Speaker:Howie] Oh, uh, I love it. Um, you know, I, I, I, some, like, the answer is like, yes, like maybe that makes the difference. And like in this, in this situation, there’s in fact only— so I, I think the fundamental thing that I believe is like, um, there is like, it’s like a fact of the matter about like the number of streams of experience. — or like, there’s something about, like, how much quality is going on, or like what quality exists in the world. Um, and like, physics can, like, pretend to, like, have an answer to this, but like, there’s either— either there’s one stream or there’s many. And like, maybe it’s a brute fact of the universe that if you have, like, structurally— like, the structural perfect, like, lattice of pigeons, there’s only one stream. But this seems, like, very unlikely to. ROBI Me. [Speaker:ELANA GORDON] Uh, okay, yeah. Um, I don’t know if we can, um— I don’t know that there’s any way to empirically resolve this. No, I don’t think it comes down to— I think it comes down to, like, people believe different things about this, uh, because of arguments like that, like, one-atom-thick etched silicon circuit. AARON Thing. ROBI Yeah. And people have different intuitions, uh, and maybe you just can’t test. AARON This. Yeah. No, I mean, the, um, I, I, it’s like a little bit— it’s like interesting to me that people— and I think objectionable, I guess, also not just interesting— that, like, people will go from —uh, the direction of like, oh, that there’s this like wafer argument to— and therefore there’s like less than 2 streams of experience as opposed to the— or sorry, less than 2 times like the amount of moral value as opposed to the, the like other logical direction, which is like, which is like clear, like there can be 2 identical twins, therefore this, this thought experiment is nonsense. Um, like, or like there, there can be 2 identical twins who are like clearly like have their own —like conditional on them, on us not being radically wrong about what the world is like, there are just like two— there are in fact two persons there, like two streams of experience, two sets of qualia. Like they can— and so like this demonstrates that the thought experiment like doesn’t— is like, is like tricking me somehow. Like I think that’s the correct. ROBI Inference. Yeah, some people, some people see this and they’re like, okay, that seems fine. Yeah. So now there’s just two— it’s just, it’s, it’s— that’s right. It’s twice as valuable when you separate them by one Planck length. Um, you’ve made it twice as. AARON Valuable. No, that’s the other option. Yeah. Um, cool. I’ll FYI, so I’m actually happy to keep talking, but I’m like at 6:30, I’m probably gonna hop. ROBI Off. Or, uh, yeah, I should get going. Um, I can send you some, uh, I’ll send you two links. I’ll send you one, uh, I don’t know if you know Richard Bruns. Um, he works at JHU. He wrote a blog post on unique entity ethics. I’ll send you that. I’ll send you an EA forum comment thread about the Moral Parliament tool and point out where in the Moral Parliament tool this— these decision rules are. Oh, and maybe something about voting mechanics. Send me the transcript. I’ll listen to it and then figure out what would be the best—. AARON Okay. Okay, cool. And I will try to send you— I just wanna identify like a single comment thread that is like good to identify about from my, from my forum. ROBI Post. Great. Uh, and then I will see you again in 13. AARON Months. Yes. Maybe even sooner. Maybe we’ll run into each other in real life. You never. ROBI Know. Uh, likely. Um, are you going to. AARON EAG? No. If you’re ever in DC, you can look. ROBI Uh, likely in. AARON March. Yeah. Okay. Well, you hit me up. Okay, cool. See. ROBI Ya. Awesome. See you. AARON Later. Take care. See. Get full access to Aaron's Blog at www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe (https://www.aaronbergman.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.8 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

4.8 / 5

4 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 48 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

68

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

68

Contact Pigeon Hour

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.