Spencer Greenberg

speaker

1,056 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Spencer Greenberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

And some of those ways have been very functional, where they've been able to act in the face of incredible adversity.

And other ways, dysfunctional, where the fear actually disabled them from being effective.

First, I want to point out that it's really important to understand your own psychology and not try to force a fake psychology that's not yours.

And so I appreciate that you're saying, well, what is my actual psychology around this?

And I also like to feel special.

I think that's something that's important to me.

I think it's important to a lot of people.

The idea of wanting to feel special can actually be at odds with doing good.

Or, you know, as soon as I think about, like, imagine, you know, there's a child drowning and then, like, three people are fighting to be the one that saves the child, right?

And, like, knocking each other over.

Like, you don't want that, right?

So there's a cost, but there's also a benefit for this.

But you can imagine other people working on these big challenges motivated very differently.

For example, motivated socially by the community and wanting to be a good community member.

Or motivated by the intellectual challenge of like, oh, trying to align AI is like the greatest intellectual challenge.

So there's a lot of different motivational structures that could allow someone to contribute.

But I would suspect that specialness is one for a non-negligible number of people who work on these challenges.

And it gives them the sort of freedom to say, I can try to do something great that really matters.

So I would go back to trying to understand the detailed causal structure.

So I could see why, if you didn't feel special, you might not feel guilty, because you'd say, well, if I'm not special enough to actually make any difference here, then, well, I guess I'm off the hook.

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