First: Thank you so much for sharing your curated list. As someone who has curated and shared my favourite essays by Holden Karnofsky, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, and Joseph Heath, I find it to be something incredibly underappreciated, and it’s been wonderful to see my own list drive significantly more attention to some of my favourite articles and ideas — I hope your list does the same.
Second: this is serendipitous timing for me as I recently unsubscribed from the 80,000 Hours podcast and was reflecting on how both the podcast and the broader intellectual environment have evolved over time. (For the record, I didn’t unsubscribe because I think the podcast has declined in quality — I simply don’t have enough time to keep up with more than four active podcast subscriptions.)
When the podcast first launched, the ideas it introduced and the discussions around each episode felt so fresh and exciting. I specifically remember Spencer Greenberg’s 2017 and 2018 episodes leaving me feeling energized, and there being so many people in my online circle eager to talk about them (even though neither episode was really about Effective Altruism). Spencer’s 2024 episode isn’t worse, but the context is entirely different. We’ve now been exposed to ideas like this for a long time and there are now way more venues for people to explore and discuss these kinds of ideas. The podcast was a trailblazer that helped shape this broader discourse, and if people now turn to something like the Dwarkesh podcast to find new ideas, that’s a testament to the path the 80,000 Hours podcast helped pave.
I still remember back in 2018 when Bryan Caplan wrote a post titled “Hear Rob Wiblin” (https://staging.econlib.net/archives/2018/05/hear_rob_wiblin.html), urging his readers to listen to the 80,000 Hours podcast. His recommendation wasn’t because his audience was particularly drawn to EA, but because the ideas being discussed were so engaging and the interview quality so high. To give you a sense of how remarkable that was, Bryan has, to my knowledge, only written similarly glowing praise for Scott Alexander. Rob Wiblin and the 80,000 Hours podcast, and Scott Alexander — that’s it!
First: Thank you so much for sharing your curated list. As someone who has curated and shared my favourite essays by Holden Karnofsky, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, and Joseph Heath, I find it to be something incredibly underappreciated, and it’s been wonderful to see my own list drive significantly more attention to some of my favourite articles and ideas — I hope your list does the same.
Second: this is serendipitous timing for me as I recently unsubscribed from the 80,000 Hours podcast and was reflecting on how both the podcast and the broader intellectual environment have evolved over time. (For the record, I didn’t unsubscribe because I think the podcast has declined in quality — I simply don’t have enough time to keep up with more than four active podcast subscriptions.)
When the podcast first launched, the ideas it introduced and the discussions around each episode felt so fresh and exciting. I specifically remember Spencer Greenberg’s 2017 and 2018 episodes leaving me feeling energized, and there being so many people in my online circle eager to talk about them (even though neither episode was really about Effective Altruism). Spencer’s 2024 episode isn’t worse, but the context is entirely different. We’ve now been exposed to ideas like this for a long time and there are now way more venues for people to explore and discuss these kinds of ideas. The podcast was a trailblazer that helped shape this broader discourse, and if people now turn to something like the Dwarkesh podcast to find new ideas, that’s a testament to the path the 80,000 Hours podcast helped pave.
I still remember back in 2018 when Bryan Caplan wrote a post titled “Hear Rob Wiblin” (https://staging.econlib.net/archives/2018/05/hear_rob_wiblin.html), urging his readers to listen to the 80,000 Hours podcast. His recommendation wasn’t because his audience was particularly drawn to EA, but because the ideas being discussed were so engaging and the interview quality so high. To give you a sense of how remarkable that was, Bryan has, to my knowledge, only written similarly glowing praise for Scott Alexander. Rob Wiblin and the 80,000 Hours podcast, and Scott Alexander — that’s it!
Hi there, would you be willing to share a link to these collections? I’d be interested in checking them out. :)
With pleasure :)
I highly recommend the Heath essays, as the ideas are less likely to have permeated into this zeitgeist.
https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-joseph-heath-articles-canadas-most-important-canadian-thinker/
https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-tyler-cowen-posts-and-ideas/
https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-holden-karnofsky-essays-pre-cold-takes/
https://danfrank.ca/the-wisdom-of-scott-sumner-my-favourite-non-econ-scott-sumner-blog-posts/