#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more

80,000 Hours Podcast

"When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying to give them a really specific answer, like, 'I solved your problem.' What I’m trying to do often is give them other ways of thinking about what they’re doing, or giving different framings. A classic example of this would be someone who’s been working on a project for a long time and they feel really trapped by it. And someone says, 'Let’s suppose you currently weren’t working on the project, but you could join it. And if you joined, it would be exactly the state it is now. Would you join?' And they’d be like, 'Hell no!' It’s a reframe. It doesn’t mean you definitely shouldn’t join, but it’s a reframe that gives you a new way of looking at it." —Spencer Greenberg

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks for a fourth time with listener favourite Spencer Greenberg — serial entrepreneur and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast — about a grab-bag of topics that Spencer has explored since his last appearance on the show a year ago.

Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.

They cover:

• How much money makes you happy — and the tricky methodological issues that come up trying to answer that question.
• The importance of hype in making valuable things happen.
• How to recognise warning signs that someone is untrustworthy or likely to hurt you.
• Whether Registered Reports are successfully solving reproducibility issues in science.
• The personal principles Spencer lives by, and whether or not we should all establish our own list of life principles.
• The biggest and most harmful systemic mistakes we commit when making decisions, both individually and as groups.
• The potential harms of lightgassing, which is the opposite of gaslighting.
• How Spencer’s team used non-statistical methods to test whether astrology works.
• Whether there’s any social value in retaliation.
• And much more.

Chapters:

• Does money make you happy? (00:05:54)
• Hype vs value (00:31:27)
• Warning signs that someone is bad news (00:41:25)
• Integrity and reproducibility in social science research (00:57:54)
• Personal principles (01:16:22)
• Decision-making errors (01:25:56)
• Lightgassing (01:49:23)
• Astrology (02:02:26)
• Game theory, tit for tat, and retaliation (02:20:51)
• Parenting (02:30:00)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Transcriptions: Katy Moore