Read the full transcript here. What is a criminal label? What implications should criminal labels have (or not) for a person's future? To what extent are the long-term social effects considered as part of the sentence for a crime (e.g., not only considering sending a person to prison for 5 years but also considering how likely they are to be shunned socially or to be prevented from working certain kinds of jobs after their release)? How does the concept of dignity differ from the concept of righ...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Read the full transcript here. What the heck happened with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried? Were there early warning signs that most people failed to notice? What could've been done differently, and by whom? What effects will this have on the EA movement going forward? Timestamps: 00:01:37 — Intro & timeline 00:51:48 — Byrne Hobart 01:39:52 — Vipul Naik 02:18:35 — Maomao Hu 02:41:19 — Marcus Abramovitch 02:49:38 — Ozzie Gooen 03:21:40 — Wrap-up & outro Byrne Hobart writes The Diff , a newslett...
Nov 28, 2022•3 hr 25 min
Read the full transcript here. What is the field of development? What are the differences between rapid and participatory rural appraisal? Under what conditions should qualitative surveys be preferred over quantitative and vice versa? What is participatory mapping? How has the field of development changed over the last few decades? Why do people get taller when sanitation improves? Robert Chambers is a British academic and development practitioner. He spent his academic career at the Institute o...
Nov 23, 2022•55 min
Read the full transcript here. What are the main categories of interpersonal relationship problems? What's really going on when most people say they have a "communication" problem? What are the criteria for being a good listener? What's the "right" amount of conflict to have in a healthy relationship? How can we best express our wants and needs? What sorts of requests are reasonable (or not) to make of our relationship partners? People can get along just fine when they differ on little things, l...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr
Read the full transcript here. How do campaign and election dynamics affect the sorts of people that politicians court and the kinds of platforms they build? How well can we really know non-voters' preferences? What would your life be like if your most treasured belief turned out to be false? What are all the ramifications of voting against your own party? To what extent is "political capital" a real, legit thing? Do politicians actually manage to get anything useful done despite the constant fl...
Nov 09, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Read the full transcript here. Content warning: Please be aware that rape and sexual abuse are discussed in this episode. If you are particularly sensitive to these issues, then please take care when listening. How have identity politics and social media changed sex work? To what extent is sex work work ? Under what conditions is a sex worker a victim of abuse? Why does rape seem so much worse than other kinds of physical abuse? Does an increase in access to sex workers necessarily cause an incr...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 47 min
Read the full transcript here. Can machines actually be intelligent? What sorts of tasks are narrower or broader than we usually believe? GPT-3 was trained to do a "single" task: predicting the next word in a body of text; so why does it seem to understand so many things? What's the connection between prediction and comprehension? What breakthroughs happened in the last few years that made GPT-3 possible? Will academia be able to stay on the cutting edge of AI research? And if not, then what wil...
Oct 26, 2022•1 hr 16 min
Read the full transcript here. How can we change the way we think about expertise (or the trustworthiness of any information source) using forecasting? How do prediction markets work? How can we use prediction markets in our everyday lives? Are prediction markets more trustworthy than large or respectable news outlets? How long does it take to sharpen one's prediction skills? In (e.g.) presidential elections, we know that the winner will be one person from a very small list of people; but how ca...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Read the full transcript here. What is intelligence? What exactly does an IQ test measure? What are the similarities and differences between the structure of GPT-3 and the structure of the human brain (so far as we understand it)? Is suffering — as the Buddhists might say — just a consequence of the stories we tell about ourselves and the world? What's left (if anything) of the human mind if we strip away the "animal" parts of it? We've used our understanding of the human brain to inform the con...
Oct 12, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Read the full transcript here. How does 3D-printed food work? How do hackers and inventors think? What are some ideas that don't matter? Why are humans so driven by stories? What are the current sentiments around nuclear energy? What is an "information DMZ"? Is "cryptocurrency regulation" a contradiction in terms? What are "deep" and "shallow" technologies? How could we handle intellectual property rights more fairly? Pablos is a hacker and inventor that runs Deep Future, a venture capital firm ...
Oct 05, 2022•1 hr 27 min
Read the full transcript here. What should we do (or not do) to make a good first impression on others? Is "humble-bragging" better or worse than straightforward bragging? Or is completely hiding our successes an even better strategy than humble-bragging or straightforward bragging? When do our attempts to signal something about ourselves actually end up signalling something else that we don't intend? What are some long-term strategies for gaining others' respect? Övül Sezer is a behavioral scie...
Sep 28, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Read the full transcript here. Are ambition and altruism compatible? How ambitious should we be if we want to do as much good in the world as possible? How should we handle expected values when the probabilities become very small and/or the values of the outcomes become very large? What's a reasonable probability of success for most entrepreneurs to aim for? Are there non-consequentialist justifications for longtermism? Habiba Islam is an advisor at 80,000 Hours where she talks to people one-on-...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Read the full transcript here. How much should we actually trust science? Are registered reports more trustworthy than meta-analyses? How does "inspired" science differ from "open" science? Open science practices may make research more defensible, but do they make it more likely to find truth? Do thresholds (like p < 0.05) represent a kind of black-and-white thinking, since they often come to represent a binary like "yes, this effect is significant" or "no, this effect is not significant"? Wh...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 21 min
Read the full transcript here. What is longtermism? Is the long-term future of humanity (or life more generally) the most important thing, or just one among many important things? How should we estimate the chance that some particular thing will happen given that our brains are so computationally limited? What is "the optimizer's curse"? How top-down should EA be? How should an individual reason about expected values in cases where success would be immensely valuable but the likelihood of that p...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Read the full transcript here. What is the genetic fallacy? How do the analytic and continental philosophical traditions differ? What is the role and value of intuition in analytic philosophy? Is continental philosophy too poetic for its own good? Alexander Prescott-Couch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is currently writing a book on genealogy that is under contract with Oxford University Press. His academic work has appeared in journals such as Noûs and J...
Aug 31, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Read the full transcript here. Does the US have one of the worst implementations of democracy in the world? Why do people sometimes seem to vote against their own interests? Is it rational for them to do so? How robust are various voting systems to strategic voting? What sorts of changes would we notice in the US if we suddenly switched to other voting systems? How hard would it be to migrate from our current voting systems to something more robust and fair, and what would be required to make th...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Read the full transcript here. What is Effective Altruism? Which parts of the Effective Altruism movement are good and not so good? Who outside of the EA movement are doing lots of good in the world? What are the psychological effects of thinking constantly about the trade-offs of spending resources on ourselves versus on others? To what degree is the EA movement centralized intellectually, financially, etc.? Does the EA movement's tendency to quantify everything, to make everything legible to i...
Aug 19, 2022•1 hr 38 min
Read the full transcript here. How can we form good habits more effectively? What roles do reward and punishment play in the habit formation process? And what roles should they play? How should we structure our daily schedules around new habits to maximize the likelihood that they'll stick? If our goal is to do 100 push-ups a day, it's often easier to start with 10 and increase the difficulty over time; but at what level of difficulty should we start, and how quickly should we approach the targe...
Aug 10, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Read the full transcript here. How is outcome bias especially relevant to science publishing? What are some possible solutions for overcoming outcome bias? In what ways are the publishing and peer review processes flawed? Why do many (or maybe most) scientists perform peer reviews for free? What value do publishers add to the scientific process, especially given that the internet democratizes distribution? How do (and should) scientific journals differ from newspapers? What kinds of changes must...
Aug 07, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Read the full transcript here. Are all animals equally intelligent but in different ways? Do some animals perceive the passage of time differently from humans? Are our definitions of intelligence biased towards our own human strengths and therefore not fairly applicable to other animals? Is a baby human's pre-linguistic communication (like crying) analogous to the ways other animals communicate? Is civil litigation the best strategy for defending animal rights? Human lawyers represent their clie...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Read the full transcript here. How straightforwardly should we communicate our preferences to others? How many times does a person need to say "yes" relative to the number of times they say "no" so that a relationship can be maintained? Most people probably use a mix of asking and guessing; but under what conditions should each strategy be employed? What are the costs and benefits for the askers, guessers, and the people of whom the explicit or implicit request is being made? Since even the act ...
Jul 20, 2022•1 hr 19 min
Read the full transcript here. Is our adoption of beliefs primarily motivated by wanting to be the heroes of our own stories? Why do we have such a hard time understanding the stories other people are telling about themselves and the world? How can we reduce political polarization? How plausible are the various theories (conspiracy or otherwise) around the origins of COVID? Why don't the EA, Rationalist, and related communities focus more on transforming political landscapes? Free speech is incr...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Read the full transcript here. How does the current information revolution compare to previous information revolutions? What kind of event or set of events counts as an information revolution? Why do new information technologies usually amplify the most extreme voices first? Why are intentions not very useful as a metric for determining whether a particular kind of censorship is good or bad? When, if ever, is censorship appropriate or morally acceptable? Why were officials of the Inquisition muc...
Jul 06, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Read the full transcript here. What are some surprising discoveries in the science of sex? What should we do when animals break human laws (e.g., when they commit manslaughter, steal, or even jaywalk)? Is a capacity for suffering the primary characteristic — or perhaps even the sole characteristic — that imbues an animal with moral status? How do science writers ensure faithful and accurate accounts of fields in which they may not be experts? Is there any evidence that humans could have psychic ...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Read the full transcript here. What is willpower, really? What are the differences among willpower, self-control, self-discipline, and other related concepts? What are the best ways to become more self-disciplined? What are the differences between enthusiasm and motivation? What are the most effective motivators? What are fixed, performance, and growth mindsets? It's possible to work too hard and thus degrade our productivity; but is it possible to be too productive ? What does it really mean to...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Read the full transcript here. Why is most communication advice so fluffy? How can we actually communicate better? Why do we sometimes fail to say what we mean or what needs to be said? What counts as "nonviolent" communication? To what extent is avoidance of conflict and confrontation a result of agreeableness versus cowardice? What aspects of divorce aren't talked about enough? Misha Glouberman helps people communicate and connect better. He teaches a course called How to Talk to People About ...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Read the full transcript here. How hard is it to arrive at true beliefs about the world? How can you find enjoyment in being wrong? When presenting claims that will be scrutinized by others, is it better to hedge and pad the claims in lots of caveats and uncertainty, or to strive for a tone that matches (or perhaps even exaggerates) the intensity with which you hold your beliefs? Why should you maybe focus on drilling small skills when learning a new skill set? What counts as a "simple" question...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 16 min
Read the full transcript here. To what extent does thinking about ethics actually cause a person to behave more ethically? Do ethicists behave more ethically than the average person, or are they just better at justifying their unethical behavior? Why do we sometimes have strong negative reactions to people who seem "too" moral — even if they're genuinely altruistic and not just acting as though they're better than everyone else? Is morality inherently motivating? More specifically, are some kind...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr 15 min
Read the full transcript here. How do meanings get words? What is ethnomethodology? Some attempts at defining words are successful; but why do some words seem to become more slippery the more we try to pin down their meanings? What sorts of problems uniquely plague the social sciences? What subtle aspects of the placebo effect are not noticed or easily forgotten by researchers? How can social science researchers clarify and strengthen the meanings of words in their questionnaires? More broadly, ...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Read the full transcript here. What does it mean to be "groupstruck"? How does groupstruck-ness differ from the bystander effect, normalcy bias, and other related cognitive biases? How do we break people out of being groupstruck? What does it mean to be a "bounded" person? How can we build up better decision-making heuristics? What sorts of decisions do people usually not quantify but should (and vice versa)? How can we make rational relationship decisions without coming across as "calculating" ...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 7 min
