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

That sucks.

Almost everyone has the value of not causing people emotional pain as well.

So what do you do?

And the answer will differ for different people depending on the relative strengths of those two values.

And so there's not going to be a single answer to this question.

So how do you even think about this?

How do you get traction on this?

And what I like to do is little mini thought experiments here.

You could be like, OK, suppose you knew your friend was going to be so depressed by what you said that they were going to go into a tailspin and not be able to function for a month.

To me, then, it's an easy choice.

Yes, I really care about truth, but that's just not worth it.

That's too much emotional suffering to cause them to preserve the truth.

OK, well, what if you had to like give like a five minute lie where you're just going to like make up all kinds of details that are not true about your thought process, blah, blah, blah.

Well, that would just be like beyond the pale and like a truth level.

Right.

Like as you can kind of begin to do this experience to kind of converge to where you sit, because some of these will be like, oh, that's obvious which one wins here.

And then as you get to sort of closer and closer to the real situation, you're going to be like, OK, yeah, I think on this one I'm leaning here.

But that's the best way I know of in these practical situations to try to get to it, is you start tweaking the parameters to see how your values react to that.

We're constantly facing values trade-offs, because even at the very basic level, spending time on one thing to get one value

means we spend less time on other values.

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