Episoder
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When (if ever) can suffering be good? Is there an optimal ratio of pleasure to pain? What is motivational pluralism? Can large, positive incentives be coercive? (For example, is it coercive to offer to pay someone enormous amounts of money to do something relatively benign or even painful or immoral?) How can moving from making judgments about a person's actions to making judgments about their character solve certain moral puzzles? Why do we sometimes make seemingly irrational judgments about the relative badness of certain actions? How does the level of controversy around an action factor into how much we publicly disapprove of it? What are the differences between compassion and empathy? Is antisocial personality disorder (AKA psychopathy or sociopathy) defined only by a lack of empathy? How have humans evolved (or not) to detect and mitigate the effects of others who feel no remorse? Is altruism especially vulnerable to remorseless people? What are the differences between narcissists and sociopaths?
Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. Paul Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of six books, including his most recent, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. Find more about him at paulbloom.net, or follow him on Twitter at @paulbloomatyale.
Further reading:
"Friction in Relationships from Misunderstanding the Mind" by Spencer Greenberg -
What is progress? How do we (and should we) measure progress? What are the most important questions to ask in progress studies? What are the factors that lead to progress? Why has large-scale progress taken so long (i.e., why did we not see much progress until the Industrial Revolution)? Why did industrial revolution, scientific revolution, and democratic revolution all seem to start within a relatively short period of time of each other? How can we prevent progress from slowing down, stopping, or even reversing? What factors have contributed to the slowing of progress in the last 50 years? What's the state of progress in nuclear energy? What is the history of attitudes towards progress? And why is it important for people to believe that progress is good?
Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, where he writes and speaks about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. Previously, he spent 18 years as a software engineer, engineering manager, and startup founder. Follow him on Twitter at @jasoncrawford.
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Mangler du episoder?
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What are "forward-chaining" and "backward-chaining", and how do they connect with theory of change? What sorts of mental habits and heuristics prevent you from brainstorming ideas effectively? How can you harness feedback effectively to sharpen your ideas? From whom should you solicit feedback? How can you view your own products with fresh eyes? What are some common struggles people encounter when starting or changing careers, and how can they be overcome? Why are small experiments so under-used? How can we construct a sustainable work life? What are the best ways to rest and recover from overwork and burnout?
Lynette Bye is a productivity coach who works with effective altruists. Before that, she studied the psychology of self-control at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. You can find out more and read her blog at lynettebye.com.
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Researchers in the Effective Altruism movement often view their work through a utilitarian lens, so why haven't they traditionally paid much attention to the psychological research into subjective wellbeing (i.e., people's self-reported levels of happiness, life satisfaction, feelings of purpose and meaning in life, etc.)? Are such subjective measures reliable and accurate? Or rather, which such measures are the most reliable and accurate? What are the pros and cons of using QALYs and DALYs to quantify wellbeing? Why is there sometimes a disconnect between the projected level of subjective wellbeing of a health condition and its actual level (e.g., some people can learn to manage and cope with "major" diseases, but some people with "minor" conditions like depression or anxiety might be in a constant state of agony)? What are some new and promising approaches to quantifying wellbeing? The EA movement typically uses the criteria of scale, neglectedness, and tractability for prioritizing cause areas; is that framework still relevant and useful? How do those criteria apply on a personal level? And how do those criteria taken together differ conceptually from cost-effectiveness? How effective are psychological interventions at improving subjective wellbeing? How well do such interventions work in different cultures? How can subjective wellbeing measures be improved? How can philosophers help us do good better?
Michael Plant is the Founder and Director of the Happier Lives Institute, a non-profit research institute that searches for the most cost-effective ways to increase global well-being. Michael is also a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, Oxford. He has a PhD in Philosophy from Oxford, and his thesis, entitled Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism, was supervised by Peter Singer and Hilary Greaves.
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Should pleasure and pain be measured on logarithmic scales? How might such a scale affect utilitarian calculations? How do harmonic energy waves in the brain correspond to states of (or intensities of) consciousness? What sorts of conclusions can we draw about brain states given the resolutions and sampling rates of tools like fMRI, EEG, and MEG? What is the symmetry theory of homeostatic regulation, and how does it connect to pleasure and pain? Are uncomfortable or confused mental states computationally useful to us? To what extent can the concepts of musical consonance and dissonance map onto energy states in the brain?
Andrés Gomez Emilsson has a Master's Degree in Psychology with an emphasis in computational models from Stanford and a professional background in graph theory, statistics, and affective science. Andrés was also the co-founder of the Stanford Transhumanist Association and first place winner of the Norway Math Olympiad. His work at QRI ranges from algorithm design, to psychedelic theory, to neurotechnology development, to mapping and studying the computational properties of consciousness. Andrés blogs at qualiacomputing.com.
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What is positive psychology? What is the PERMA model? From a creativity standpoint, is there a connection between music and writing? In various artistic fields, how hard is it to be creative without first achieving some level of technical mastery? How can one hone the skill of creativity? How useful is optimism for achieving happiness? What are the different sources from which humans derive pleasure? To what extent is western culture conscious of ageism? What does positive psychology have to say about interpersonal relationships? What is the value and purpose of extended education generally and degrees specifically? What is wisdom?
Georgia Shreve is a composer, fiction writer, playwright, and poet. She holds degrees from Stanford, Brown, Columbia, and PENN. Her poetry and fiction have been published in magazines such as the New Yorker, New Republic, and New Criterion, and her short story, "The Countess of M-", won the Stanford Magazine Fiction award.
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What is machine learning? What are neural networks? How can humans interpret the meaning or functionality of the various layers of a neural network? What is a transformer, and how does it build on the idea of a neural network? Does a transformer have a conceptual advantage over neural nets, or is a transformer basically the equivalent of neural nets plus a lot of compute power? Why have we started hearing so much about neural nets in just the last few years even though they've existed conceptually for many decades? What kind of ML model is GPT-3? What learning sub-tasks are encapsulated in the process of learning how to autocomplete text? What is "few-shot" learning? What is the difference between GPT-2 and GPT-3? How big of a deal is GPT-3? Right now, GPT-3's responses are not guaranteed to contain true statements; is there a way to train future GPT or similar models to say only true things (or to indicate levels of confidence in the truthfulness of its statements)? Should people whose jobs revolve around writing or summarizing text be worried about being replaced by GPT-3? What are the relevant copyright issues related to text generation models? A website's "robots.txt" file or a "noindex" HTML attribute in its pages' meta tags tells web crawlers which content they can and cannot access; could a similar solution exist for writers, programmers, and others who want to limit or prevent their text from being used as training data for models like GPT-3? What are some of the scarier features of text generation models? What does the creation of models like GPT-3 tell us (if anything) about how and when we might create artificial general intelligence?
Learn more about GPT-3 here. And learn more about Jeremy Nixon and listen to his episode here.
Further reading:
"Kanye West, Donald Trump And Jim Brown: The Full Transcript"lsusr's website"The Humans Are Dead" by Flight of the Conchords -
How can we apply the theory of measurement accuracy to human judgments? How can cognitive biases affect both the bias term and the noise term in measurement error? How much noise should we expect in judgments of various kinds? Is there reason to think that machines will eventually make better decisions than humans in all domains? How does machine decision-making differ (if at all) from human decision-making? In what domains should we work to reduce variance in decision-making? If machines learn use human decisions as training data, then to what extent will human biases become "baked into" machine decisions? And can such biases be compensated for? Are there any domains where human judgment will always be preferable to machine judgment? What does the "fragile families" study tell us about the limits of predicting life outcomes? What does good decision "hygiene" look like? Why do people focus more on bias than noise when trying to reduce error? To what extent can people improve their decision-making abilities? How can we recognize good ideas when we have them? Humans aren't fully rational, but are they irrational?
Daniel Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Kahneman has held the position of professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1970-1978), the University of British Columbia (1978-1986), and the University of California, Berkeley (1986-1994). He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2002), the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013). He holds honorary degrees from numerous universities. Find out more about him here.
Here's the link to the Thought Saver deck that accompanies this episode: https://app.thoughtsaver.com/embed/JGXcbe19e1?start=1&end=17
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What is 80,000 Hours, and why is it so important? Does doing the most good in the world require being completely selfless and altruistic? What are the career factors that contribute to impactfulness? How should people choose among the various problem areas on which they could work? What sorts of long-term AI outcomes are possible (besides merely apocalyptic scenarios), and why is it so important to get AI right? How much should we value future generations? How much should we be worried about catastrophic and/or existential risks? Has the 80,000 Hours organizing shifted its emphasis over time to longer-term causes? How many resources should we devote to meta-research into discovering and rating the relative importance of various problems? How important is personal fit in considering a career?
Ben Todd is the CEO and cofounder of 80,000 Hours, a non-profit that has reached millions of people and helped 1000+ people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. He helped to start the effective altruism movement in Oxford in 2011. He's the author of the 80,000 Hours Career Guide and Key Ideas series. Find out more about Ben at benjamintodd.org.
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How can we make psychotherapy more effective? How much confidence should psychotherapists have in the efficacy of their methods? How does deliberate practice differ from mere repetition? How can we overcome confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and other blind spots in our own fields of expertise? What are the most significant predictors of positive outcome achievement for clients in psychotherapy? When a patient has a physical ailment, doctors gather data, diagnose the ailment, and prescribe a particular treatment; but to what extent is psychotherapy similar to that model? To what extent do psychological models reflect the culture in which they're created? Has psychotherapy improved its efficacy over the course of its existence? When the therapeutic relationship seems less than optimal or even difficult, how long should clients stick with a therapist before switching to a different one? What are some meta-analyzers getting wrong when they compare treatment methods?
Scott D. Miller, Ph.D. is the founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence, an international consortium of clinicians, researchers, and educators dedicated to promoting excellence in behavioral health services. Dr. Miller conducts workshops and training in the United States and abroad, helping hundreds of agencies and organizations, both public and private, to achieve superior results. He is one of a handful of invited faculty whose work, thinking, and research is featured at the prestigious Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference. Email him at [email protected] or learn more at scottdmiller.com.
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What makes studying humans harder than studying other parts of the universe? Is social science currently improving its rigor, relevance, and self-reflection? Is it improving its predictive power over time? Why have sample sizes historically been so small in social science studies? Is social science actually able to accumulate knowledge? Have social scientists been able to move the "needle" on real-world problems like vaccine adoption? Is social science becoming more diverse? Specifically, does social science have a political bias? Are universities in crisis? Do the incentive structures in universities make them difficult or even impossible to reform?
Matt Grossmann is Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. He is also Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and a Contributor at FiveThirtyEight. He has published analysis in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, and hosts the Science of Politics podcast. He is the author or co-author of How Social Science Got Better, Asymmetric Politics, Red State Blues, The Not-So-Special Interests, Artists of the Possible, and Campaigns & Elections, as well as dozens of journal articles. You can find more about him on his website.
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What are the "relating" languages? What strategies do we use when interacting with each other under various conditions? How does one formulate a new taxonomy in a field? What information can we glean from our own emotional and physical reactions? What is authenticity? What are the strengths and weaknesses of various personality typologies?
Sara Ness is a facilitator, teacher, and community-builder who is internationally known for popularizing the field of Authentic Relating. Among other things, she co-founded and ran two of the longest-running AR communities in the world, compiled the source text for Authentic Relating, and built an online platform for AR and Circling practice that has run events for more than 1,200 consecutive days. Sara has worked with tens of thousands of students in sectors from Google to Mindvalley to Burning Man, teaching authentic leadership and social health. Her passion is in understanding how people can work together to create fulfilling groups that balance belonging, productivity, and self-expression. You can email her at [email protected] or learn more on her website, authrev.org.
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Why should we be doing more experiments on our own lives? How should we approach and get started with self-experimentation? Why are such varying dietary changes able to improve people's well-being? What are some measures and interventions for improving executive function, memory and learning, emotional self-regulation, and creativity? Do brain games actually make you smarter? What are some promising nootropics? Should people use neurostimulation and/or neurofeedback devices at home? What sorts of skills can be trained through video games? When is blue light useful?
Elizabeth Ricker is the author of Smarter Tomorrow: How 15 Minutes of Neurohacking a Day Can Help You Work Better, Think Faster, and Get More Done (Little, Brown Spark / Hachette). She's the founder of Neuroeducate, a citizen DIY neuroscience and neurohacking organization, and Ricker Labs, a consultancy that helps organizations unlock mental performance. Ricker's clients have included Silicon Valley venture capital firms, technology startups, schools, and the Fortune 500. Her work has been featured on public broadcast TV, in books, in the popular press, and she's given talks in the US and abroad. Ricker's degrees are from MIT (Brain & Cognitive Science) and Harvard (Mind, Brain, & Education). Her website is ericker.com and her username is @eliricker on Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
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What is "long" history? Why don't historians usually focus on what happened before recorded human history? What (if anything) is special about agriculture when it comes to the development of civilization? How far back does human civilization go, and why should we care? Have humans always been gardeners? What factors cause civilizations to crumble or thrive? Should we reboot standardized tests and college admissions every few decades so that measures don't become targets? Which destructive factors are particularly salient to modern human civilization? Why is there such a disconnect between our intuition that progress is inevitable and our knowledge that virtually all civilizations have collapsed in the past? In other words, what makes us think that we'll succeed where others have failed? How does a functional social institution differ from a failing one? What is the "great founder" theory?
Samo Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm that investigates the political and institutional landscape of society; a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation; and a senior research fellow in political science at the Foresight Institute. Samo's studies focus on the social and material technologies that provide the foundation for healthy human societies, with an eye to engineering and restoring the structures that produce functional institutions. He has authored articles and papers on his findings. His manuscript, Great Founder Theory, is available online. You can find him on Twitter at @samoburja, on YouTube at @samoburja, or on his website, samoburja.com.
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What are some of the challenges of defining utopia? What should a utopia look like? What are concrete versus sublime utopias? What are some of the failure modes related to various conceptions of utopia? Is it really that hard to create a shared, positive vision of the future? What is the value (or disvalue) of creating new people, especially in relation to the utopic or dystopic state of the world? What is "whole-hearted morality" versus "morality-as-taxes"? How can we encourage people to be more moral without harming them psychologically (e.g., by loading them down with guilt)? Which sorts of worldview changes are reversible? Where does clinging fit into the constellation of concepts like valuing, caring, envying, etc.? How does non-attachment differ from indifference? Is clinging always bad? Is philosophy making tangible progress as a field? Is philosophy's primary function to show us how our questions are confused rather than to give us direct answers to our questions? Has philosophy given us a clearer picture of what consciousness is or isn't?
Joe Carlsmith is a research analyst at Open Philanthropy and a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on risks to humanity's long-term future. He has a BPhil from Oxford and a BA from Yale, both in philosophy. His website is josephcarlsmith.com, his blog is handsandcities.com, and his Twitter handle is @jkcarlsmith.
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How can we leverage our own limitations? Why does converting the average human lifespan from years to other units (like weeks) give us such a shock? What are the most useful kinds of reactions to contemplating our own mortality? What causes our feeling that time speeds up as we age? What is the "importance trap"? How should we handle the frustration or disappointment caused by our inability to do everything we want or need to do? Why is patience important in the world today? What information sets are available to us in various communication media? Is there — and should there be — a disconnect between the "meatspace" world and the internet world? Which kinds of self-help advice are actually useful?
Oliver Burkeman's new book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, published in the US on August 10, 2021. He is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and he wrote a long-running weekly column on psychology, productivity, and self-help culture for The Guardian newspaper called "This Column Will Change Your Life." His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can pre-order Four Thousand Weeks and sign up for Oliver's email newsletter "The Imperfectionist" at oliverburkeman.com or find him on Twitter at @oliverburkeman.
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How can we accelerate learning? Is spaced repetition the best way to absorb information over the long term? Do we always read non-fiction works with the goal of learning? What are some less common but perhaps more valuable types of information that can be put on flash cards? What sorts of things are worth remembering anyway? Why is it important to commit some ideas to memory when so much information is easily findable on the internet? What benefits are derived from being involved in all stages of a project pipeline from concept to execution (as opposed to being involved only in one part, like the research phase)? Why should more researchers be involved in para-academic projects? Where can one find funding for para-academic research?
Andy Matuschak invents tools that expand what people can think and do. His current research focuses on a new written medium which makes it much easier to remember what you read. In previous roles, Andy led R&D at Khan Academy and helped build iOS at Apple. You can read more about his work at andymatuschak.org and follow him on Twitter at @andy_matuschak.
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What is metamodernism? How does metamodernism relate to spiral dynamics? What does it look like to apply a metamodern approach to large-scale problems? What are shadow traits, and what is shadow projection? What do our reactions about others' behavior tell us about ourselves? What's going on psychologically and physiologically when we relive past traumas? What dosages of psychedelics are most effective in a therapeutic context? How soon will psychedelic substances likely be decriminalized or legalized at the state and/or federal level in the United States? How can we enter into blissful, ecstatic, intense, or other less common psychological states without drugs or alcohol? What are the pros and cons of (especially intergenerational) co-living?
Aurora Quinn-Elmore is on a mission to understand "what's going on, and what should we do about it?" As a labor of love, she executive produced and published an audiobook version of Hanzi Freinacht's The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics. Professionally, she is on a mission to expand legal access and to speed adoption of psychedelic therapies shaped by the wisdom and insights of the deeply rooted psychedelic guide community. She also leads the SoulSupport team at SoulPlay, which is a substance-free festival focused on ecstatic dance, contact improv, and tantric connection games. She helped form and lives in a beautiful intentional community of 12 "hackers, hipsters, and hippies" in Berkeley, California, who use the microcovid.org tool to manage covid risk in a household of diverse needs. Feel free to reach out to Aurora on Facebook at @aurora.q.elmore.
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What is a choreographic interface? Is dance for everyone? What is dance for? What can dancers learn from roboticists, and what can roboticists learn from dancers? What are some of the practical difficulties one encounters when programming a robot to dance? Why do robots break or fail so often? What are the pros and cons of using virtual reality to train or test robots? Why don't we see more robots in everyday life? What are some everyday robotics applications coming up on the horizon? Are humans still needed in the robot training process? Can robots create art?
Catie Cuan is a dancer, choreographer, and researcher. Catie is currently a PhD Candidate in the Mechanical Engineering department at Stanford University, where she recently completed a Master's of Science in Mechanical Engineering in Spring, 2020. Her artistic and research work focuses on dance and robotics. She is a 2018 TED Resident, 2018 ThoughtWorks Arts Resident, and the 2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Robotics, Automation, and Dance Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can find Catie on Instagram at @itscatie and on her website, catiecuan.com.
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What is "metaphysical geometry"? What do we get out of surrendering to the idea of death? Why do some people find the sensation of intense fear to be pleasurable? Is psychosis valuable? Are all mental states valuable? Why are altered states of consciousness typically socially unacceptable, and why should we move towards accepting them? Could oxytocin be used as a less risky alternative to MDMA in therapeutic contexts?
Anthony David Adams is a visionary, inventor, activist, artist, entrepreneur, and the transformational coach / trusted advisor to the founders of the worlds greatest organizations and their teams. He's known for his capacity to support the world's most powerful leaders in doing deep inner and outer work. He holds a BA in Psychology from Edinboro University and an MS in Urban Planning from Wisconsin. As an activist, he's one of the country's leading voices on psychedelics and mental health reform — recently becoming the first person to hold space for an "underground" MDMA therapy session on national television. You'll find him in Brooklyn's Prospect Park or Presque Isle's Beach 11 playing Ultimate Frisbee and online at AnthonyDavidAdams.com, BioMythic.com, and FoundersHike.com; you can follow him on Instagram (@anthonydavidadams) or Facebook (@anthonydavidadams); or you can email him at [email protected].
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