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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:

Major and minor scales of consciousness (with Andrés Gomez Emilsson) Oct 13, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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.

Staff

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

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The art of being a creative person (with Georgia Shreve) Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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.

Staff

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

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An interview with an A.I. (with GPT-3 and Jeremy Nixon) Sep 30, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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

Staff

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

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Beyond cognitive biases: improving judgment by reducing noise (with Daniel Kahneman) Sep 23, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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

Staff

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

Music

Affiliates

How to use your career to have a large impact (with Ben Todd) Sep 15, 2021

Show notes

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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.

Staff

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

Music

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Why does psychotherapy work (when it works at all)? (with Scott Miller) Sep 08, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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 info@scottdmiller.com or learn more at scottdmiller.com.

Staff

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

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How broken is social science? (with Matt Grossman) Sep 02, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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.

Staff

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

Music

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How to communicate better with the people in your life (with Sara Ness) Aug 28, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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 sara@authrev.com or learn more on her website, authrev.org.

Staff

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

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How to hack your own brain (with Elizabeth Ricker) Aug 21, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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.

Staff

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

Music

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Why do civilizations collapse? And is ours next? (with Samo Burja) Aug 19, 2021

Show notes

Read the full transcript here.

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.

Staff

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

Music

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