Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:10)
Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Fin Moorhouse, who is a research scholar at the Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, and he's also an assistant to Toby Ord, and also the host of the Hear This Idea podcast.
Fin, I know you've got a ton of other projects under belt. So do you want to talk about all the different things you're working on, and how you got into EA and this kind of research?

**Fin Moorhouse** (0:34)
I think you nailed the broad strokes there. I think, yeah, I've kind of failed to specialize in a particular thing. And so I found myself just dabbling in projects that seem interesting to me, trying to help get some projects off the ground and just doing research on, you know, things that seem maybe underrated. I probably won't bore you with the list of things. And then, yeah, how did I get into EA? Actually, also a fairly boring story, unfortunately.
I really loved philosophy. I really loved kind of pestering people by asking them all these questions. You know, why are you not, why are you still eating meat? Read kind of Peter Singer and Will MacAskill. And I realized I just wasn't actually living these things out myself. I think there's some just like force of consistency that pushed me into really getting involved. I think the second piece was just the people. I was lucky enough to have this student group where I went to university.
And I think there's some dynamic of realizing that this isn't just a kind of free floating set of ideas, but there's also just like a community of people I really get on with and have all these like incredibly interesting kind of personalities and interests. So those two things, I think.
Yeah.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:39)
And then so what was the process like? I know a lot of people who are vaguely interested in EA, but not a lot of them then very quickly transitioned to, you know, working on research with top EA researchers. So yeah, just walk me through how you ended up where you are.

**Fin Moorhouse** (1:52)
Yeah, I think I got lucky with the timing of the pandemic, which is not something I suppose many people can say. I did my degree, I was quite unsure about what I wanted to do. There was some option of taking some kind of close to default path of maybe something like, you know, consulting or whatever. And then I was kind of, I guess, forced into this natural break where I had time to step back. And I, you know, I guess I was lucky enough that I could afford to kind of spend a few months just like figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.
And that space was enough to like, maybe start like reading more about these ideas, also to try kind of teaching myself skills I hadn't really tried yet. So try to, you know, learn to code for a lot of this time and so on.
And then I just thought, well, I might as well wing it. There are some things I could apply to. I don't really rate my chances, but the cost to applying to these things is so low. It seems worth it. And then, yeah, I guess I got very lucky and here I am.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:45)
Awesome. OK, so let's talk about one of these things you're working on, which is that you're you've set up and are going to be helping judging these prizes about EA writing. One is you're giving out five prizes for $100,000 each for blogs that discuss Effective Altruist related ideas. Another is five prizes of $20,000 each to criticize EA ideas.
So talk more about these prizes. Why is it now an important time to be talking about criticizing EA?

**Fin Moorhouse** (3:15)
That is a good question. I want to say I'm reluctant to frame this as like me personally, like I certainly have helped set up these initiatives.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:24)
I heard on the inside that actually you've been pulling a lot of the weight on these projects.

**Fin Moorhouse** (3:30)
Certainly, yeah. I find myself with the time to get these things over the line, which I'm pretty happy with. So yeah, the criticism thing, let's start with that.
I want to say something like in general, being receptive to criticism is just obviously really important.
If as a movement you want to succeed, where succeed means not just achieve things in the world, but also end up having just close to correct beliefs as you can get, then having this property of being anti-fragile with respect to being wrong, really celebrating and endorsing, changing your mind in a loud and public way, that seems really important.