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Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg — Science
Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

Clearer Thinking is a podcast about ideas that truly matter. If you enjoy learning about powerful, practical concepts and frameworks, wish you had more deep, intellectual conversations in your life, or are looking for non-BS self-improvement, then we think you’ll love this podcast! Each week we invite a brilliant guest to bring four important ideas to discuss for an in-depth conversation. Topics include psychology, society, behavior change, philosophy, science, artificial intelligence, math, economics, self-help, mental health, and technology. We focus on ideas that can be applied right now to make your life better or to help you better understand yourself and the world, aiming to teach you the best mental tools to enhance your learning, self-improvement efforts, and decision-making. • We take on important, thorny questions like: • What’s the best way to help a friend or loved one going through a difficult time? How can we make our worldviews more accurate? How can we hone the accuracy of our thinking? What are the advantages of using our “gut” to make decisions? And when should we expect careful, analytical reflection to be more effective? Why do societies sometimes collapse? And what can we do to reduce the chance that ours collapses? Why is the world today so much worse than it could be? And what can we do to make it better? What are the good and bad parts of tradition? And are there more meaningful and ethical ways of carrying out important rituals, such as honoring the dead? How can we move beyond zero-sum, adversarial negotiations and create more positive-sum interactions?

Latest Episodes:

Decision-making and play-testing (with Dan Epstein) Aug 28, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

What sorts of decisions are we making without even realizing we're making them? Are people aware of their own values? Do they know how those values rank relative to each other? What are all the various parties, interests, and values that have to be addressed and balanced when making decisions in a healthcare context? What does it mean to "play-test" yourself? What are the best strategies for giving feedback? How much energy is required to make various kinds of decisions? How can we practice and get better at decision-making? What is "tabletop exercising"? What are the most effective ways to bring other people into the decision-making process? What are some aspects of games that ought to be put to good use in non-game contexts? Why are educational games usually neither fun nor educational? How can game design features be used in ways that avoid turning metrics into targets? How can we make better decisions about how to divvy up our time?

Dr. Dan Epstein is a practicing medical doctor and academic PhD focusing on decision-making and game design. Dan is the director of The Long Game Project, which helps businesses and leaders improve strategy and decision-making with games and tabletop exercises. Dan is also an ambassador for Giving What We Can, a community of people who pledge to donate a portion of their income to effective causes; and he's a member of High Impact Athletes, a community of current and past athletes who do the same. Follow him on Twitter at @drdanepstein, email him at email@longgameproject.org, connect with him on LinkedIn, or learn more about his work at longgameproject.org.

Further reading

The Long Game Project newsletter
The Long Game Project YouTube channel
Foundations of Tabletop Exercising: Design Exercises for Real Impact — a free course taught by Dan

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

Affiliates

The path to utopia (with Nick Bostrom) Aug 24, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

Why do there seem to be more dystopias than utopias in our collective imagination? Why is it easier to find agreement on what we don't want than on what we do want? Do we simply not know what we want? What are "solved worlds", "plastic worlds", and "vulnerable worlds"? Given today's technologies, why aren't we working less than we potentially could? Can humanity reach a utopia without superintelligent AI? What will humans do with their time, and/or how will they find purpose in life, if AIs take over all labor? What are "quiet" values? With respect to AI, how important is it to us that our conversation partners be conscious? Which factors will likely make the biggest differences in terms of moving the world towards utopia or dystopia? What are some of the most promising strategies for improving global coordination? How likely are we to end life on earth? How likely is it that we're living in a simulation?

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, along with philosophy. He's been a Professor at Oxford University, where he served as the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute from 2005 until its closure in April 2024. He is currently the founder and Director of Research of the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. Bostrom is the author of over 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). His work has pioneered many of the ideas that frame current thinking about humanity's future (such as the concept of an existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the unilateralist's curse, etc.), while some of his recent work concerns the moral status of digital minds. His most recent book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, was published in March of 2024. Learn more about him at his website, nickbostrom.com.

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

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Physical limits and the long-term future (with Anders Sandberg) Aug 14, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

How much energy is needed for GDP growth? Would our civilization have developed at the same rate without fossil fuels? Could we potentially do the same things we're currently doing but with significantly less energy? How different would the world look if we'd developed nuclear energy much earlier? Why can't anything go faster than light? Will the heat death of the universe really be "the end" for everything? How can difficult concepts be communicated in simple ways that nevertheless avoid being misleading or confusing? Is energy conservation an unbreakable law? How likely is it that advanced alien civilizations exist? What are S-risks? Can global civilizations be virtuous? What is panspermia? How can we make better backups of our knowledge and culture?

Anders Sandberg is a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Sweden. He was formerly senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford. His research deals with emerging technologies, the ethics of human enhancement, global and existential risks, and very long-range futures. Follow him on Twitter / X at @anderssandberg, find him via his various links here.

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

Affiliates

Becoming a goat to avoid existential dread (with Thomas Thwaites) Aug 07, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

How hard is it to construct a toaster from scratch? Do we in modern times individually have more knowledge than individuals living 100 or 1,000 years ago? Should corporations be thought of as a kind of emergent artificial intelligence? To what extent are corporations — and more broadly, whole economies — aligned with human values? Which animals experience the smallest amount of existential dread? Are humans at the top of the evolutionary "pyramid"? Is it possible to make a completely harmless car? Or is it even possible to make a completely harmless anything? What are the differences between "Cowboy Earth" and "Spaceship Earth"?

Thomas Thwaites is an award-winning design researcher and author of two acclaimed books, The Toaster Project, and Goatman. His sometimes eccentric projects explore the psychological and social impacts of technology as we struggle to find a sustainable future. His work is exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, The Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, and the Banque de France. He has a BSc. in Human Sciences from University College London and an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. Learn more about him at his website, thomasthwaites.com.

Further reading

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

Affiliates

AI apocalypticism vs. AI optimism (with Adam Russell) Aug 01, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

What is "apocaloptimism"? Is there a middle ground between apocalypticism and optimism? What are the various camps in the AI safety and ethics debates? What's the difference between "working on AI safety" and "building safe AIs"? Can our social and technological coordination problems be solved only by AI? What is "qualintative" research? What are some social science concepts that can aid in the development of safe and ethical AI? What should we do with things that don't fall neatly into our categories? How might we benefit by shifting our focus from individual intelligence to collective intelligence? What is cognitive diversity? What are "AI Now", "AI Next", and "AI in the Wild"?

Adam Russell is the Director of the AI Division at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). Prior to ISI, Adam was the Chief Scientist at the University of Maryland's Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, or ARLIS, and was an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland's Department of Psychology. He was the Principal Investigator for standing up the INFER (Integrated Forecasting and Estimates of Risk) forecasting platform. Adam's almost 20-year career in applied research and national security has included serving as a Program Manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), then as a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (where he was known as the DARPAnthropologist) and in May 2022 was appointed as the Acting Deputy Director to help stand up the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). Adam has a BA in cultural anthropology from Duke University and a D.Phil. in social anthropology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has also represented the United States in rugby at the international level, having played for the US national men's rugby team (the Eagles).

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

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Should we trust papers published in top social science journals? (with Daniel Lakens) Jul 24, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

How much should we trust social science papers in top journals? How do we know a paper is trustworthy? Do large datasets mitigate p-hacking? Why doesn't psychology as a field seem to be working towards a grand unified theory? Why aren't more psychological theories written in math? Or are other scientific fields mathematicized to a fault? How do we make psychology cumulative? How can we create environments, especially in academia, that incentivize constructive criticism? Why isn't peer review pulling its weight in terms of catching errors and constructively criticizing papers? What kinds of problems simply can't be caught by peer review? Why is peer review saved for the very end of the publication process? What is "importance hacking"? On what bits of psychological knowledge is there consensus among researchers? When and why do adversarial collaborations fail? Is admission of error a skill that can be taught and learned? How can students be taught that p-hacking is problematic without causing them to over-correct into a failure to explore their problem space thoroughly and efficiently?

Daniel Lakens is an experimental psychologist working at the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. In addition to his empirical work in cognitive and social psychology, he works actively on improving research methods and statistical inferences, and has published on the importance of replication research, sequential analyses and equivalence testing, and frequentist statistics. Follow him on Twitter / X at @Lakens.

Further reading

Nullius in Verba (Daniel's podcast)

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

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Is psychology the same across cultures? (with Joseph Henrich) Jul 17, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

What are "WEIRD" cultures? What percentage of the world's population is WEIRD? Why do WEIRD cultures tend to use analytic thinking (as opposed to the wholistic thinking used in non-WEIRD cultures)? Does school make you more intelligent or merely more knowledgeable? Do individualistic cultures tend to innovate more than collectivistic cultures? How does moral reasoning differ between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures? Is the world becoming more WEIRD? How diverse are non-WEIRD cultures?

Joseph Henrich is currently the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard, he was a professor of both Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia for nearly a decade, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution. His research deploys evolutionary theory to understand how human psychology gives rise to cultural evolution and how this has shaped our species' genetic evolution. Using insights generated from this approach, Professor Henrich has explored a variety of topics, including economic decision-making, social norms, fairness, religion, marriage, prestige, cooperation, and innovation. He's conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Peru, Chile, and in the South Pacific, as well as having spearheaded several large comparative projects. In 2016, he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton) and in 2020, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous (FSG). Learn more about his work here, or follow him on Twitter / X at @JoHenrich.

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
Jennifer Vanderhoof — Transcriptionist

Music

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Spencer on The 80,000 Hours Podcast discussing money & happiness and hype vs. value (with Rob Wiblin) Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

NOTE: Spencer appeared as a guest on The 80,000 Hours Podcast back in March, and this episode is our release of that recording. Thanks to the folks at The 80,000 Hours Podcast for sharing both their audio and transcript with us!

Does money make people happy? What's the difference between life satisfaction and wellbeing? In other contexts, critics are quick to point out that correlation does not equal causation; so why do they so often seem to ignore such equations when they appear in research about the relationships between money and happiness? When is hype a good thing? What are some ethical ways to generate hype? What are some signs that someone is an untrustworthy or hurtful person? Are pre-registrations and/or registered reports helping with reproducibility in the social sciences? Should we all maintain a list of principles to help guide our decisions? What are the most common pitfalls in group decision-making? What is "lightgassing"? What kinds of life outcomes can be predicted from a person's astrological sign? How does machine learning differ from statistics? When does retaliatory behavior become pro-social? In what ways do people change when they become parents?

Rob Wiblin hosts The 80,000 Hours Podcast, which investigates the world's most pressing problems and what listeners can do to solve them. You can learn more about Rob at robwiblin.com, learn more about his research work at 80000hours.org, and follow him on social media at @robertwiblin.

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum

Music

Affiliates

Concrete actions anyone can take to help improve AI safety (with Kat Woods) Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

Why should we consider slowing AI development? Could we slow down AI development even if we wanted to? What is a "minimum viable x-risk"? What are some of the more plausible, less Hollywood-esque risks from AI? Even if an AI could destroy us all, why would it want to do so? What are some analogous cases where we slowed the development of a specific technology? And how did they turn out? What are some reasonable, feasible regulations that could be implemented to slow AI development? If an AI becomes smarter than humans, wouldn't it also be wiser than humans and therefore more likely to know what we need and want and less likely to destroy us? Is it easier to control a more intelligent AI or a less intelligent one? Why do we struggle so much to define utopia? What can the average person do to encourage safe and ethical development of AI?

Kat Woods is a serial charity entrepreneur who's founded four effective altruist charities. She runs Nonlinear, an AI safety charity. Prior to starting Nonlinear, she co-founded Charity Entrepreneurship, a charity incubator that has launched dozens of charities in global poverty and animal rights. Prior to that, she co-founded Charity Science Health, which helped vaccinate 200,000+ children in India, and, according to GiveWell's estimates at the time, was similarly cost-effective to AMF. You can follow her on Twitter at @kat__woods; you can read her EA writing here and here; and you can read her personal blog here.

Further reading

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
Jennifer Vanderhoof — Transcriptionist

Music

Affiliates

What do socialism and effective altruism have in common? (with Garrison Lovely) Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

What does effective altruism look like from a leftist / socialist perspective? Are the far left and EA the only groups that take radical egalitarianism seriously? What are some of the points of agreement and disagreement between EA & socialism? Socialists frequently critique the excesses, harms, and failures of capitalism; but what do they have to say about the effectiveness of capitalism to produce wealth, goods, and services? Is socialism just a top-down mirror of capitalism? How difficult is it to mix and match economic tools or systems? Why is the left not more tuned into AI development? What are the three main sides in AI debates right now? Why are there so many disagreements between AI safety and AI ethics groups? What do the incentive structures look like for governments regarding AGI? Should the world create a CERN-like entity to manage and regulate AI research? How should we think about AI research in light of the trend of AI non-profits joining forces with or being subsumed by for-profit corporations? How might for-profit corporations handle existential risks from AI if those risks seem overwhelmingly likely to become reality?

Garrison Lovely is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist with cover stories in The Nation and Jacobin and long-form work in BBC Future, Vox, Current Affairs, and elsewhere. He has appeared on CBS News Sunday Morning, The Weather Channel, The Majority Report, and SiriusXM. He hosts the podcast The Most Interesting People I Know. His writing has been referenced in publications like The New Yorker (by Ted Chiang), ProPublica, New York Magazine, The New Republic, and GQ. Read his writings on his Substack; learn more about his work at his website, garrisonlovely.com; or email him at tgarrisonlovely@gmail.com.

Further reading

"13 Ways Some Companies Make Money While Causing Harm", by Spencer Greenberg
"Can Humanity Survive AI?", by Garrison Lovely in Jacobin
"The Data Show That Socialism Works", by Nick Warino in Current Affairs

Staff

Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
Josh Castle — Producer
Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
Uri Bram — Factotum
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists

Music

Affiliates

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