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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:

Inventions, stories, and ideas that don't matter (with Pablos Holman) Oct 05, 2022

Show notes

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 backing mad scientists, rogue inventors, crazy hackers, and maverick entrepreneurs who are implementing science fiction, solving big problems, and helping our species become better ancestors. Pablos is a top public speaker on technology whose TED Talks have over 30 million views. With his Deep Future Podcast, Pablos is sharing his conversations with people who understand the biggest problems in the world and the technologies that could help us solve them. Follow him on Twitter at @pablos, email him at pablos@deepfuture.tech, or find out more about him at deepfuture.tech.

Staff

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

Music

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Humble-bragging, counter-signalling, and impression management (with Övül Sezer) Sep 28, 2022

Show notes

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 scientist, stand-up comedian, and Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University, Columbia Business School. She received her A.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Ph.D in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University. Follow her on Twitter at @ovulsezer or learn more about her at ovulsezer.com.

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

Ambition and expected value at extremes (with Habiba Islam) Sep 21, 2022

Show notes

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-one, helping them to pursue high impact careers. She previously served as the Senior Administrator for the Future of Humanity Institute and the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford. Before that she qualified as a barrister and worked in management consulting at PwC specialising in operations for public and third sector clients. Follow her on Twitter at @FreshMangoLassi or learn more about her work at 80,000 Hours at 80000hours.org.

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

Career science, open science, and inspired science (with Alexa Tullett) Sep 14, 2022

Show notes

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"? What is "importance laundering"? Is generalizability more important than replicability? Should retribution be part of our justice system? Are we asking too much of the US Supreme Court? What would an ideal college admissions process look like?

Alexa Tullett is a social psychologist who works at the University of Alabama. Her lab examines scientific, religious, and political beliefs, and the factors that facilitate or impede belief change. Some of her work takes a meta-scientific approach, using psychological methods to study the beliefs and practices of psychological scientists. Learn more about her at alexatullett.com, or send her an email at atullett@ua.edu.

Staff

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

Music

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Estimating the long-term impact of our actions today (with Will MacAskill) Sep 07, 2022

Show notes

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 particular individual succeeding is incredibly low? (For example, if I have a one in a million chance of stopping World War III, then should I devote my life to pursuing that plan?) If we want to know, say, whether protests are effective or not, we merely need to gather and analyze existing data; but how can we estimate whether interventions implemented in the present will be successful in the very far future?

William MacAskill is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. A Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, he also cofounded the nonprofits Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Y Combinator–backed 80,000 Hours, which together have moved over $200 million to effective charities. He's the author of Doing Good Better, Moral Uncertainty, and What We Owe The Future.

Staff

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

Music

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The differences between analytic and continental philosophy (with Alexander Prescott-Couch) Aug 31, 2022

Show notes

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 Journal of Political Philosophy, and he contributes to a regular interview column in the ZeitMagazin. Email him at alexander.prescott-couch@philosophy.ox.ac.uk or follow him on Twitter at @prescottcouch.

Staff

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

Music

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Voting method reform in the US (with Aaron Hamlin) Aug 24, 2022

Show notes

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 that happen? Are centrist candidates always boring?

Aaron Hamlin is the executive director and co-founder of The Center for Election Science. He's been featured as an electoral systems expert on MSNBC.com, NPR, Free Speech TV, Inside Philanthropy, 80K Hours, and Popular Mechanics; and he has given talks across the country on voting methods. He's written for Deadspin, USA Today Magazine, Independent Voter Network, and others. Additionally, Aaron is a licensed attorney with two additional graduate degrees in the social sciences. You can learn more about The Center for Election Science at [electionscience.org(https://electionscience.org/) and can contact Aaron at aaron@electionscience.org.

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

Critiquing Effective Altruism (with Michael Nielsen and Ajeya Cotra) Aug 19, 2022

Show notes

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 itself, cause it to miss important features of the world? To what extent do EA people rationalize spending resources on inefficient or selfish projects by reframing them in terms of EA values? Is a feeling of tension about how to allocate our resources actually a good thing?

Ajeya Cotra is a Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy, a grantmaking organization that aims to do as much good as possible with its resources (broadly following effective altruist methodology); she mainly does research relevant to Open Phil's work on reducing existential risks from AI. Ajeya discovered effective altruism in high school through the book The Life You Can Save, and quickly became a major fan of GiveWell. As a student at UC Berkeley, she co-founded and co-ran the Effective Altruists of Berkeley student group, and taught a student-led course on EA. Listen to her 80,000 Hours podcast episode or visit her LessWrong author page for more info.

Michael Nielsen was on the podcast back in episode 016. You can read more about him there!

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

How to form habits effectively (with Jim Davies) Aug 10, 2022

Show notes

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 target difficulty? How does willpower connect (or not) with habit formation? Why should we care about animal consciousness? When it comes to estimating how much good specific interventions will do, are bad estimates better than no estimates at all?

Dr. Jim Davies is a professor of cognitive science at Carleton University. He is the author of Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power; Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make us Laugh, Movies Make us Cry, and Religion Makes us Feel One with the Universe; and Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You. He co-hosts (with Dr. Kim Hellemans) the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. Learn more about him at jimdavies.org or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

Are scientific journals just parasites? (with Chris Chambers) Aug 07, 2022

Show notes

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 academic systems implement in order to improve in parallel with the proposed improvements for journals? How likely is it that a random preregistered study will replicate? Why can't we come to a consensus about some fraught topics like ego depletion?

Chris Chambers is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University. His primary research focuses on the psychology and neurobiology of executive functions and higher cognition. He is also interested in the relationship between science and the media, ways the academic community can better contribute to evidence-based public policy, and methods for improving the reliability and transparency of science. You can reach Chris via email at chambersc1@cardiff.ac.uk, follow him on Twitter at @chrisdc77, or learn more at his website.

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

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