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

I think it's actually really important to have an opinion, but to recognize it simultaneously that you should be willing to quickly update on new evidence, especially because lots of really smart people

think you're wrong, even ones who have studied this as much as you have.

I think it's important to go to the motivation.

Often when people disagree about us with a topic that's so important to us, where we might think that they're even causing harm, it's easy to impute a sort of a bad motivation, like, oh, you must not take this seriously, and you're just being reckless, or you're just doing this because it benefits yourself, or whatever.

And I think jumping to that is often inaccurate and can really damage your relationship.

So if you can go to the motivation, you could try to understand their motivation.

without making it about, again, the answers to these questions, but why are you doing this?

What's motivating you?

And recognizing that if they have positive motivations, there's a good chance they do if they work on these topics, recognizing that really what's happening is they just disagree about the facts.

They're trying to help, probably, and they disagree about the facts.

And also,

Making it hostile is not the way to win them over to your side.

If you want to win someone over to your side, the way you do that is by getting them to see your point of view, which also involves being genuinely open to hearing their point of view.

Very rarely are people willing to be convinced unless they could see the possibility that they could convince you too.

If I come in and be like, here's why you're wrong, you're not going to listen to me.

But if I'm like, let me hear you out.

I want to hear your perspective.

Can I also tell you my perspective?

Then now we can actually have a real dialogue.

Julia Galef in her book Scout Mindset has some really helpful viewpoints here.

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