Life Experiments and Philosophical Thinking (with Arden Koehler)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Arden Kaler, a researcher at 80,000 Hours, about career planning for impact, running life experiments, the nature of placebo effects, and the philosophical mindset of seeking truth versus making arguments.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
Introduction to 80,000 Hours and its Mission
Effective Altruism Approach to Career Decisions
Balancing Career Impact with Personal Happiness
Entrepreneurship: Personality Fit and Benefits
Importance of Career Planning and Exploration
Running Cheap Experiments in Life and Career
Spencer's Experiments with Herbs and Supplements
Distinguishing True Placebo from Other Effects
Capabilities and Limitations of the Placebo Effect
Meditation and the Mind's Influence on Sensation
Transitioning from Philosophy to Impact-Focused Work
Philosophy's Focus on Argument vs. Truth
Philosophical Thinking: Strengths and Missing Tools
4 Key Concepts
Effective Altruism
An approach to doing good that involves rigorously thinking about what actually does the most good, rather than being attached to a particular cause or method, making it an intellectual project to maximize positive impact.
True Placebo Effect
An actual improvement in a person's condition that is caused solely by their expectation of feeling better due to a treatment, distinct from other factors like regression to the mean or reporting bias.
MVP Style Working
An approach to work, often from the startup world, that involves creating a minimal, somewhat imperfect version of something to learn from it quickly, get feedback, and then iterate, rather than trying to perfect it from the outset.
Zeno's Paradox
A philosophical problem illustrating the difficulty of motion, where to travel a distance, one must first travel half the distance, then half of the remaining distance, and so on, implying an infinite number of steps. This paradox is resolved by understanding that an infinite series of decreasing time intervals can sum to a finite amount of time.
10 Questions Answered
It's a nonprofit that helps people use their careers to do as much good as possible, offering online advice, articles, and one-on-one advising focused on high-impact global issues and career paths.
It focuses specifically on careers, not volunteering or donating, and takes an effective altruist approach, emphasizing rigorous thought about what actions truly maximize good.
While 80,000 Hours focuses on impact, personal happiness often aligns with impactful work through fulfillment, purpose, and excelling in a chosen field; it's also important to consider what makes an individual happy and effective.
Entrepreneurship is best for individuals who can thrive amidst extremely high stress, long hours, high probability of failure, enormous ambiguity, and constant challenges, as it offers potential for huge impact, financial gain, and autonomy.
Instead of only considering obvious options, people should actively seek out 'hidden doors,' conduct cheap experiments like talking to people in desired roles about their daily tasks, and try out aspects of a career for a few hours a week.
A true placebo effect is an actual improvement caused by the expectation of feeling better, whereas other perceived improvements can be due to regression to the mean, reporting bias, or exaggeration, which are not direct effects of belief.
A true placebo can reduce anxiety, decrease feelings of hopelessness, and make pain less unpleasant by changing interpretation, but it cannot kill viruses, bacteria, cancer, or cure mental physical disorders.
Meditation can allow a person to experience raw physical sensations, like cold or pain, without the associated suffering or unpleasantness, by detaching from the brain's interpretive thoughts and emotional reactions.
Philosophy trains the mind to interrogate everything, identify flaws in arguments, and develop pattern recognition for logical leaps or bad thinking, which is valuable for critical analysis.
Philosophy often lacks focus on practical heuristics, shortcuts, and flexible models for acting in the world, and it doesn't typically emphasize explicit hypothesis testing and rapid belief updating based on empirical feedback.
35 Actionable Insights
1. Focus Career on Doing Good
Arden Kaler, a researcher at 80,000 Hours, advises focusing your career on doing as much good as possible. This approach helps you make the most difference in the world by addressing global issues.
2. Combine Personal Fit with Impact
When choosing a career, integrate your personal interests, skills, and what you’re good at with high-impact opportunities. This ensures both success and significant positive contribution.
3. Invest More Time in Career Planning
Dedicate a greater proportion of your time to the “deciding phase” of your career, considering both personal preferences and global impact. This initial investment can make the subsequent “doing” phase much easier and more fulfilling.
4. Actively Seek Career Opportunities
Instead of only considering visible job openings, proactively search for and create new opportunities. This involves looking beyond official channels and exploring “hidden doors” that might not be immediately apparent.
5. Proactively Create Job Opportunities
Reach out directly to companies or individuals, even if no official positions are advertised, to explore potential roles. This involves initiating conversations and demonstrating your skills to potentially create a new position.
6. Start Doing Desired Work First
If you aspire to a specific career, begin performing aspects of that work before seeking formal employment or payment. This allows you to gain experience and test your fit for the role.
7. Conduct Cheap Career Experiments
Before committing to a career path, perform low-cost experiments, such as spending a few hours a week trying out the work. This provides a more realistic understanding of the daily tasks and challenges.
8. Focus on Daily Details of Careers
When researching career paths, inquire about the typical day-to-day activities and time allocation of people in those roles. This helps avoid being misled by abstract concepts and understand the practical realities.
9. Run Life Experiments Regularly
Continuously conduct small experiments in your life to test assumptions and discover new insights about yourself and the world. This fosters a mindset of continuous learning and adaptation.
10. Formulate and Test Explicit Hypotheses
Make explicit predictions about outcomes and then actively seek to confirm or disconfirm them through experience. This practice helps in learning and updating your understanding of the world.
11. Prioritize Doing Right Over Perfection
Shift focus from obsessing over the quality of an argument or project to ensuring it aligns with doing the right thing and creating value. This encourages pragmatic action over endless refinement.
12. Adopt an MVP/Iterative Work Style
Develop a minimal viable product (MVP) or initial version of a project, even if imperfect, to gather feedback and learn quickly. This approach allows for rapid iteration and improvement rather than striving for perfection upfront.
13. Differentiate Argument Games from Truth
Recognize the distinction between winning an argument or being persuasive and genuinely seeking the truth about reality. This helps in focusing efforts on what truly matters.
14. Interrogate All Arguments
Develop the skill to critically question every premise and conclusion in an argument. This helps in identifying potential flaws and assessing the true strength of a claim.
15. Develop Pattern Recognition for Flaws
Learn to intuitively spot common logical fallacies and cognitive biases in arguments. This allows for quicker identification of potentially unsound reasoning.
16. Study Logical Fallacies and Biases
Actively learn about various logical fallacies and cognitive biases to recognize their patterns in real-world arguments and information. This enhances critical thinking and helps avoid manipulation.
17. Practice Argument Critique with Others
Engage in conversations where you and others actively challenge and poke holes in each other’s arguments. This hands-on practice helps in internalizing critical thinking skills.
18. Deconstruct Own Persuasive Arguments
Regularly review and critically analyze your own strongly held beliefs and the arguments you use to support them. This practice, like tearing apart an old essay, helps identify personal biases and fallacies.
19. Treat Persuasive Arguments as Mysteries
If an argument is highly persuasive but leads to a surprising or seemingly impossible conclusion, view it as an indicator of an underlying mystery to be solved. This encourages deeper investigation rather than immediate acceptance or rejection.
20. Update Beliefs Cautiously
When encountering a persuasive argument for a surprising conclusion, update your beliefs incrementally rather than immediately committing. This acknowledges the human tendency for reasoning errors.
21. Compare Conclusion Strength to Argument
Evaluate the strength of your belief in an argument’s validity against the strength of your belief that its conclusion is wrong. This helps in deciding how much to update your views.
22. Resist Immediate Persuasion
Be wary of immediately accepting arguments from highly persuasive individuals, especially if your intuition signals something is amiss. This protects against manipulation and allows for independent verification.
23. Embrace Heuristics and Shortcuts
Recognize the value of practical shortcuts and rules of thumb for navigating complex situations in life. These “fast and loose” methods are often more useful than striving for perfect logical validity.
24. Value Empirical Examples as Evidence
Accept that in many real-world scenarios, a collection of examples demonstrating a pattern can serve as valuable evidence, even if not a logically valid proof. This helps in understanding messy, difficult-to-think-about problems.
25. Use Flexible, Useful Mental Models
Develop and apply simple, flexible models of how things work, understanding that while they are technically “wrong,” they can be incredibly useful for navigating life. This approach prioritizes utility over formal correctness.
26. Research and Consult Doctor Before Supplements
Before trying any new herbs or supplements, thoroughly research potential side effects, best brands, and interactions with existing medications, and always discuss plans with your doctor. This ensures safety and informed decision-making.
27. Experiment with Supplements Cautiously
Approach trying new herbs or supplements with an experimental mindset, observing effects on your body, but always with caution and prior research. This allows for personal discovery while minimizing risks.
28. Acknowledge Biological Individuality
Recognize that people’s bodies can react very differently to medications, supplements, and nutritional changes. This explains why universal advice may not apply and why personal experimentation is valuable.
29. Distinguish True Effects from Placebo
When evaluating the effect of a substance, consider how unlikely the observed effect is to occur naturally. A highly unusual and reliable effect is stronger evidence against it being merely a placebo.
30. Understand True Placebo Effect
Recognize that a true placebo effect is caused by the expectation of feeling better, distinct from other factors like regression to the mean or reporting bias. This clarifies its actual power.
31. Leverage Placebo for Mental States
Understand that the placebo effect can genuinely reduce anxiety, decrease hopelessness, make pain less unpleasant, and change attitudes or interpretations of sensations. This highlights its utility for mental well-being.
32. Recognize Placebo Limitations
Be aware that placebos are unlikely to cure physical ailments like viruses, bacteria, or cancer, or to directly treat mental or physical disorders. This sets realistic expectations for their power.
33. Practice Cold Meditation for Pain Reinterpretation
Engage in practices like “cold meditation” to experience raw sensations without immediately labeling them as unpleasant or bad. This trains the mind to reinterpret pain and reduce suffering.
34. Explore Mind-Body Connection Through Self-Experimentation
Experiment with your own mind’s ability to influence bodily sensations and perceptions. This can lead to a deeper understanding of the mind-body connection and introduce you to practices like meditation.
35. Practice Multi-Sensory Mental Imagery
Go beyond visual imagination and practice mentally simulating other sensory experiences, such as sounds, heat, smells, or even an itch. This expands your mental capabilities and awareness.
6 Key Quotes
All models are wrong, some models are useful.
Spencer Greenberg (quoting George Box)
If you're doing something that you love, you're just likely to excel a lot more. And so that's one way that if you're doing something that's, you know, going to make a positive difference. Excelling is good and like good for the world. And so that's one way in which your personal happiness and your altruistic goals can sort of align.
Arden Koehler
I think a lot of people, most people are not really suited for entrepreneurship. They would not be happy and they would not necessarily be good at it.
Spencer Greenberg
If you ever give up at any point, you lose.
Spencer Greenberg
I think people vastly underestimate the amount of differences that people have biologically that cause different effects.
Spencer Greenberg
If you're immediately persuaded, like maybe that causes you to be just kind of manipulated by the most persuasive person that, you know, rather than like necessarily being pushed towards the truth.
Arden Koehler
5 Protocols
Career Exploration and Experimentation
Arden Koehler & Spencer Greenberg- Look beyond obvious career paths by actively seeking 'hidden doors' rather than just choosing from visible options.
- Conduct 'cheap experiments' by trying out aspects of a potential career for a few hours or weeks.
- Interview people in desired careers, asking them to detail a typical day and break down their hours and tasks.
- Start doing something you're interested in, even without pay, to gain experience and see if it can become a paid role later.
Cold Meditation for Sensory Experience
Spencer Greenberg- Place yourself in a very cold environment without a jacket.
- Focus on experiencing the raw physical sensation of coldness.
- As soon as negative interpretive thoughts (e.g., 'this is bad,' 'I don't like this') arise, consciously let them go.
- Aim to experience the cold sensation with indifference, without suffering.
Developing Pattern Recognition for Argument Flaws
Spencer Greenberg- Study logical fallacies and cognitive biases in detail.
- Actively practice identifying these patterns in various real-world contexts, such as news or blog posts.
- Cultivate an intuitive 'red alert' system that signals when reasoning seems questionable.
Developing Pattern Recognition for Argument Flaws Through Interaction
Arden Koehler- Actively engage in conversations where you present arguments and others critique them.
- Practice critiquing the arguments of others.
- Allow the emotional impact of realizing flaws in arguments (yours or others') to help imprint these patterns for future recognition.
Teaching Critical Thinking Through Essay Deconstruction
Spencer Greenberg (describing a teacher's method)- On the first day of class, students write a persuasive essay on a topic they strongly believe in.
- Throughout the semester, teach students about various logical fallacies and cognitive biases, having them identify these in external content.
- On the last day of class, students are tasked with deconstructing their own original persuasive essay using the critical thinking tools they've learned.