Austin Chen on Catholicism and EA in Hope in Source podcast

Listen the episode here (transcript included).

Austin Chen, the founder of the prediction market platform Manifold Markets and funding platform Manifund, was interviewed by Henry Zhu about his Catholic faith and EA principles in the Hope in Source podcast. Henry is a prominent figure in the Open Source movement and a Christian who has previously explored spiritual topics in his podcast.

They discuss Austin’s “car wash story, tithing/earning to give, the concept of utilons and fuzzies, creating secular liturgies like Taco Tuesday, the tension between being agentic and the savior complex, on rest and waiting, and seeing the uniqueness of each person amidst the systems we create.”

Below are some interesting quotes from the conversation.

On Catholic upbringing and effectiveness in charity

Austin reflects on how his Catholic upbringing made him very familiar with the idea of giving back and donating.

Later in his life, he started to think about the effectiveness of charity efforts and spending.

While Austin was in middle school, his church was fundraising for a mission trip. The students decided to wash people’s cars for $10 and worked quite hard on it. 

And I think I sat down and at the end of this whole thing I calculated, we made much, much less the minimum wage. We made something like, I don’t know, $5 an hour say, doing all of this, car washing by hand. So a part of me, in middle school, just went like, you know, what I could have done instead is just go and gone to work at McDonald’s and then use that money to quote unquote fundraise for, this mission trip that we had. … That kind of thinking got made me very predisposed to the idea of earning to give much later in, I don’t know, the early 2010 when I heard about the whole effective altruism movement.

When Austin started working after college he was donating 10% to his local Catholic church in the Bay Area

I had some sense in which I wasn’t really sure what happened with the money. It kinda looked to me that the church did have a lot of money. They had this nice cathedral and I’m sure I could have looked in and thought like, oh, they probably served the homeless in America. But there’s always a part of me that is very much trying to optimize. And I guess I’d come across some of the foundational literature on effective altruism. Asking questions around like, does a dollar donated locally, domestically in the US go as far as a dollar overseas? Well, it seems like people in Africa have much lower costs and much lower standards of living and just baseline have many more needs. So you might imagine that like sending like a dollar to somebody there, it just goes kind of farther, helps more people. And I found that to be pretty persuasive.

What keeps Austin Catholic

Henry asks Austin what keeps him in Catholicism. Austin says one part of it is the commitment he made when he went through the sacrament of confirmation. He wants to uphold the person he was while he made the commitment in high school and follow what he believed.

Another reason is that 

in the Catholic faith and more broadly in the Christian teachings, I have found some of the warmest, nicest, most kind people who I think exist on earth, or at least in my little [corner of it] … Seeing the effects of faith on these people, these people represent to me the kind of person that I would like to become. They cite faith as a reason why they do these things. And that makes me think like, oh I want to have this same thing as well.

On humility

Henry: A different thing in faith that we emphasize is prayer. I think a big part of prayer is a vulnerability of letting go, knowing that I cannot fix everything. ... I think it's a powerful act for yourself to be able to let go and be like, I cannot do this, but I would like to at least say that I'm thinking about it or even to change my mindset around that.

Austin: ... I do think inside the EA movement, one of the virtues ... is if they are, quote unquote, agentic. ... And I've almost spent so much time thinking in these terms that the opposite, the ability to recognize when you don't have control and ok with submitting to God or submitting to the things the way they're. I think there's something virtuous about that