2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year)

"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depending on how you want to look at it." — Rob Wiblin

It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode, including:

• How to use the microphone on someone’s mobile phone to figure out what password they’re typing into their laptop
• Why mercilessly driving the New World screwworm to extinction could be the most compassionate thing humanity has ever done
• Why evolutionary psychology doesn’t support a cynical view of human nature but actually explains why so many of us are intensely sensitive to the harms we cause to others
• How superforecasters and domain experts seem to disagree so much about AI risk, but when you zoom in it’s mostly a disagreement about timing
• Why the sceptics are wrong and you will want to use robot nannies to take care of your kids — and also why despite having big worries about the development of AGI, Carl Shulman is strongly against efforts to pause AI research today
• How much of the gender pay gap is due to direct pay discrimination vs other factors
• How cleaner wrasse fish blow the mirror test out of the water
• Why effective altruism may be too big a tent to work well
• How we could best motivate pharma companies to test existing drugs to see if they help cure other diseases — something they currently have no reason to bother with

…as well as 27 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.

Check out the full transcript and episode links on the 80,000 Hours website.

Remember that all of these clips come from the 20-minute highlight reels we make for every episode, which are released on our sister feed, 80k After Hours. So if you’re struggling to keep up with our regularly scheduled entertainment, you can still get the best parts of our conversations there.

It has been a hell of a year, and we can only imagine next year is going to be even weirder — but Luisa and Rob will be here to keep you company as Earth hurtles through the galaxy to a fate as yet unknown.

Enjoy, and look forward to speaking with you in 2025!

Chapters:

• Rob's intro (00:00:00)
• Randy Nesse on the origins of morality and the problem of simplistic selfish-gene thinking (00:02:11)
• Hugo Mercier on the evolutionary argument against humans being gullible (00:07:17)
• Meghan Barrett on the likelihood of insect sentience (00:11:26)
• Sébastien Moro on the mirror test triumph of cleaner wrasses (00:14:47)
• Sella Nevo on side-channel attacks (00:19:32)
• Zvi Mowshowitz on AI sleeper agents (00:22:59)
• Zach Weinersmith on why space settlement (probably) won't make us rich (00:29:11)
• Rachel Glennerster on pull mechanisms to incentivise repurposing of generic drugs (00:35:23)
• Emily Oster on the impact of kids on women's careers (00:40:29)
• Carl Shulman on robot nannies (00:45:19)
• Nathan Labenz on kids and artificial friends (00:50:12)
• Nathan Calvin on why it's not too early for AI policies (00:54:13)
• Rose Chan Loui on how control of OpenAI is independently incredibly valuable and requires compensation (00:58:08)
• Nick Joseph on why he’s a big fan of the responsible scaling policy approach (01:03:11)
• Sihao Huang on how the US and UK might coordinate with China (01:06:09)
• Nathan Labenz on better transparency about predicted capabilities (01:10:18)
• Ezra Karger on what explains forecasters’ disagreements about AI risks (01:15:22)
• Carl Shulman on why he doesn't support enforced pauses on AI research (01:18:58)
• Matt Clancy on the omnipresent frictions that might prevent explosive economic growth (01:25:24)
• Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration (01:29:43)
• Annie Jacobsen on the war games that suggest escalation is inevitable (01:34:59)
• Nate Silver on whether effective altruism is too big to succeed (01:38:42)
• Kevin Esvelt on why killing every screwworm would be the best thing humanity ever did (01:42:27)
• Lewis Bollard on how factory farming is philosophically indefensible (01:46:28)
• Bob Fischer on how to think about moral weights if you're not a hedonist (01:49:27)
• Elizabeth Cox on the empirical evidence of the impact of storytelling (01:57:43)
• Anil Seth on how our brain interprets reality (02:01:03)
• Eric Schwitzgebel on whether consciousness can be nested (02:04:53)
• Jonathan Birch on our overconfidence around disorders of consciousness (02:10:23)
• Peter Godfrey-Smith on uploads of ourselves (02:14:34)
• Laura Deming on surprising things that make mice live longer (02:21:17)
• Venki Ramakrishnan on freezing cells, organs, and bodies (02:24:46)
• Ken Goldberg on why low fault tolerance makes some skills extra hard to automate in robots (02:29:12)
• Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on the ups and downs of founding an organisation (02:34:04)
• Dean Spears on the cost effectiveness of kangaroo mother care (02:38:26)
• Cameron Meyer Shorb on vaccines for wild animals (02:42:53)
• Spencer Greenberg on personal principles (02:46:08)

Producing and editing: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Video editing: Simon Monsour
Transcriptions: Katy Moore