Nate Silver
speaker
1,377 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 29 Jun
Nate Silver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
In principle, your crypto is supposed to be segregated so you can't then go have a run on the bank. At FTX, it wasn't because Sam thought, oh, I'm very good at making trades and I want to make the world better through effective altruism. So like we have $8 billion in customer deposits in crypto.
Wouldn't it be a shame if I just left that sitting there in some account instead of making these awesome trades with it?
Yeah. He's like, well, I am trying to give my money away to charity and or to become infinitely powerful. He thought he could become president with some probability, literally. He wanted to be like the world's first trillionaire.
I grew out of that.
He even thought he'd become president before he was age 35 by lobbying to get the rules changed.
Alfred Lin was a partner there.
They said they would do it again, right? All that can happen is it goes to zero. So you go from one to zero, eh, who cares, right? You go from one to infinity, even that outweighs a lot of one to zeros. So they were at least honest by saying we'd do this again. Now there is some, I believe, shareholder action.
So this is the rare case where there could be additional liability, but probably not too bad. But the other part of it is if you become successful in any different field, relatively young, you can notice how people change around you. And I'm sure it's true in Hollywood, but it's also true in the nerdier occupations, right?
Yeah.
So effective altruism originally kind of meant what it sounded like, which is how can we find more effective ways to give money to charity?
Save a life for 5,000 bucks instead of the $10 million we put on the average. You know, government agencies actually put a value on human life based on how people behave in the U.S., which is 10 million. So that mindset, though, becomes quite fraught. Even though I think it's right, you're putting a value now on different things. So that already is a little bit fraught.
What is the value of donating to the symphony, for example? Like a little bit harder to quantify. Okay, or we can start to ask some other questions. Well, effective altruists mostly believe in animal welfare, which I see as a good thing. But how much are we trading the welfare of different animals against each other?
One example given in the book is that there was a puppy, a poodle, who got stuck in the New York City subway system a few years ago. And should we stop the entire F train to rescue Dakota? And they decide to stop the F train. But like, you wouldn't do that for a squirrel. You'd run over the fucking squirrel or like a cat probably gets run over.
And a dog, we just assign enough moral value that it gets weird. They're like, OK, well, look at the number of neurons an animal has.
All these solutions to COVID were terrible. It was terrible to have all these people get sick. It was terrible to shut down schools. But you have to make trade-offs.
And people like don't respect the boundaries enough. I'll worry if I'm making a model in baseball or politics or basketball. Oh, this player is 10% underestimated, but the data is very good and we know how the system works. We know the rules of the game, literally. You have little errors and mistakes, but pretty accurate.
Whereas in these big open-ended problems, you're just kind of making shit up on the back of an envelope and sometimes the best you can do. We had to make these decisions again under COVID and maybe if we'd been more thoughtful about them, like what is the cost of shutting down school in Los Angeles for 19 months?
You know, we probably should have done more back of the envelope math there, which I think would have said probably a bad idea even given these uncertain, But people don't know when they go from these closed problems that are amenable to modeling to these open problems where it's just regurgitated assumptions over and over and over again.
So what's happened, though, with EA, the mandate kind of expanded for various reasons from charitable giving to any problem involving utility, meaning how do we make the world better? More questions. Who's deciding what constitutes better and for whom? What if I make myself infinitely happy and the rest of you are my slaves?
You can say, well, Nate has infinite units of utility and you guys have 0.01 because you're not physically dead. Maybe you get to watch TV once a week or something. You get to nap. You're so generous. Yeah, you get to eat at Arby's now and then, right?
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