Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship

... the scope for, like, what we could achieve is, like, really extraordinarily large (laughs) . Like, maybe kind of larger than most people kind of typically entertain. And having this kind of property of being, like, anti-fragile with respect to being wrong, like, really celebrating and endorsing changing your mind in a kind of loud and public way. But you can also do a thing which is try to make a lot of money and just, you know, make a useful product and then use the success of that first thing to then just think squarely, like, "How do I just do the most good?" So you have, like, $10 million in the bank and you make another $10 million, does your life get twice as good? (laughs) Obviously not, right? If, on the other hand, you just care about, like, making the world go well, (laughs) then the world's an extremely big place and so you basically don't run into these diminishing returns, like, at all. There's this question of, like, if the many worlds view is true, what, if anything, could that mean with respect to questions about, like, what should we do or what's important?

(instrumental music) Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Finn Moorhouse, who is a research scholar at the Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute and he's also an assistant to Toby Ord and also the host of the Hear This Idea podcast. Um, Finn, I know you've got a ton of other projects under your belt, so do, do you wanna talk about all the different things you're working on and how you got into EA and this kind of research?

I think you nailed the broad strokes there. I think, yeah, I've kind of failed to specialize in any particular thing and so I found myself just dabbling in projects that seem interesting to me, trying to help get some projects off the ground and just doing research on, you know, things which seem maybe underrated. I probably won't bore you with the, the list of things. And then, yeah, how'd I get into EA? Actually also a fairly boring story, unfortunately. I really loved philosophy. I really loved kind of pestering people by asking them all these questions, you know, "Why are you not... Why are you still eating meat?" Read kind of Peter Singer and Will MacAskill and I realized I just wasn't actually living these things a- these things out myself. I think there's some just, like, force of consistency (laughs) that pushed me into really getting involved. And I think the second piece was just the people. Um, I was lucky enough to have this student group where I went to university and I think there's some dynamic of realizing that this isn't just a kind of free floating set of ideas, but there's also just, like, a community of people I re- really get on with and have all these, like, incredibly interesting kind of personalities and interests, so, um, th- those two things, I think.