Neel Nanda is a final year maths undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and a gold medalist in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He teaches regularly – from revision lectures to a recent ‘public rationality’ workshop. Neel is also an active member in rationalist and effective altruism communities.

In this episode we discuss

• How to view self-improvement and optimising your goals
• Forming good habits through the 'TAPs' technique
• How to build effective plans by using our 'inner simulator' and 'pre-hindsight'

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/neel. You can also read Neel's teaching notes for his planning workshop here.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Also, Neel has created an anonymous feedback form for this episode, and he would love to hear any of your thoughts!

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Dr Toke Aidt is Director of Studies in Economics at Jesus College, Cambridge as well as Director of the Keynes Fund.

In this episode we discuss

• Why some economists believe corruption can be a force for good, or at least a lesser evil
• Why Toke believes this view does not hold up to scrutiny
• And how self-reinforcing cycles of corruption can make tackling it very hard (but also rewarding)

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up (which we highly recommend!) hearthisidea.com/episodes/Toke.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Cristina Bicchieri is the S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

In our conversation we discuss —

• How to define social norms and distinguish them from similar concepts
• How social norms evolve and why they often persist, even in situations where they are harmful
• Real world policy applications of social norms, including covid and high-level decision making

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/bicchieri

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Dr S. J. Beard is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. With a background in philosophy, he works on ethical problems relating to the long-term future of humanity, as well as evaluating extreme technological risks.

In this episode we discuss:

• [2:00] Existential risks defined in brief;
• [4:45] SJ's background;
• [12:30] What made philosopher Derek Parfit so influential;
• [17:30] What is the repugnant conclusion?
• [22:12] What is the non-identity problem?
• [28:40] Meeting Parfit;
• [34:20] Why SJ chose a career in existial risk research;
• [36:43] What existential risk research looks like;
• [45:58] How can we estimate the probability of catastrophes with no strict precedents?
• [56:52] Under what circumstances could climate change cause a collapse of global civilization?
• [1:07:52] Why SJ ran as an MP for the Liberal Democrats;
• [1:17:25] Is academia broken? How can we fix it?
• [1:23:23] Why SJ changed his mind about whether COVID is a potential global catastrophe

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/Simon.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.

If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at https://www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Kent Berridge is a distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience at the university of Michigan and the joint recipient of the 2019 Grawemeyer Award for psychology. Through experiments on rodents, his research addresses questions about how pleasure is generated in the brain, the relation of fear to desire, and what causes addiction.

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it (really) helps listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea.

Matt Ives is a Senior Research Associate in Complex Systems Economic Modelling at the University of Oxford. We discuss the reasons behind the astonishing decline in costs of renewable technologies, especially solar power, and the implications this has for fighting climate change. We also touch on modelling energy systems, financial discolour of climate/transition risks, and complexity economics.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/matt. There you'll find links to all the videos and books Matt mentions, plus further reading.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

In this bonus episode we are sharing an episode by another podcast: How I Learned To Love Shrimp. It is co-hosted by Amy Odene and James Ozden, who together are "showcasing innovative and impactful ways to help animals".

In this interview they speak to David Coman-Hidy, who is the former President of The Humane –League, one of the largest farm animal advocacy organisations in the world. He now works as a Partner at Sharpen Strategy working to coach animal advocacy organisations.

Eve McCormick is the co-director of Effective Altruism Cambridge and a grant recipient from the Centre for Effective Altruism.

In this episode we discuss

• What 'effective altruism' is all about;
• Philosphical arguments for doing the most good;
• Key concepts and cause areas;
• Common criticisms

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up hearthisidea.com/episodes/Eve.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and author of many bestselling books.

In this episode, we talk about

• The need to reform the international financial system;
• The role of mitigating global catastrophic risk in sustainable development;
• The importance of expert advice and political leadership.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/sachs. There you'll find links to all the videos and articles Sachs mentions, plus further reading.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like some of our other interviews:

• Eva Vivalt on evidence-based policy;
• Armond Cohen on climate change;
• Luke Freeman on Giving What We Can.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. And if you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

We were flattered to be invited to discuss longtermism by Ben Chugg and Vaden Masrani from the wonderful Increments podcast. It's not as serious or polished as our interview episodes, but we had heaps of fun trying to figure out where and why we disagree.

• Increments on Apple podcasts
• Increments on Spotify
• Increments on Google podcasts
• Ben on Twitter — @bennychugg
• Vaden's website — vmasrani.github.io

What is Hear This Idea?

Hear This Idea is a podcast showcasing new thinking from the University of Cambridge and beyond. It is hosted by two undergrad students, Fin and Luca.

This university, like so many others, is filled with academics who have fascinating things to say. We thought their work and research deserve hearing outside the lecture hall.

We want this podcast to be a starting point for more people to find out about these ideas, whether you are a student looking to learn beyond your course or just curious to learn something completely new. We also just wanted an excuse to talk to some interesting people for an hour.

So even if you’re not a philosopher, you might be interested in the ethics of future people, of how we measure happiness, or the philosophy of addiction and self-deception. And even if you’re not an economist, you may want to learn more about the Industrial Revolution and how women contributed to the birth of modern economic growth.

Each episode is an in-depth interview where we ask academics to explain their field and their research. If topics are technical or in the weeds, we ask them to walk us through it first. Every episode also has an accompanying write-up that we publish on our website. So if you find a topic that piqued your interest, you have an article filled with links, readings, and book recommendations.

Our guests have mainly come from the social sciences and philosophy, because that is what we study, but we are happy to invite any guest on who has something interesting to say.

You can listen to the episodes by following the links here, and you can read the write-ups here. Do please get in touch (through our social media accounts) if you have any comments or suggestions for future guests. Thanks for finding us, and we hope you enjoy the podcast!

Keith Frankish is a philosopher of mind. He is an Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete.

In our interview, we discuss:

• What is the hard problem of consciousness?
• What is the illusionist theory of consciousness?
• What does illusionism have to do with ethics?
• When should we care for robot dogs?
• How should academics use twitter?

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/keith.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Ajay Karpur is a senior research software engineer at RAND, working with the Meselson Center. He's hoping to start tweeting again soon, at @ajaykarpur.

Joining as a guest co-host on this episode was Janvi Ahuja, who is a PhD student in computational biology at Oxford University, and part of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security ‘Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity’ program. She's tweeting at @jn_ahuja.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• What is metagenomic sequencing, and why could it matter so much for it to become affordable and ubiquitous?
• How and why can nonprofits help positive technologies become more accessible?
• How emerging biotech can help the world respond better to the next emerging (potential) pandemic
• Refuges against biological threats
• Analogies between fire protection and pathogen protection through monitoring and cleaner air
• Career advice for entering biosecurity, especially with an engineering background.

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/karpur

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Luke Freeman is the Executive Director of Giving What We Can. Before this, he was a entrepreneur and marketing specialist, including co-founding Positly.

In this episode we discuss:

• [00:01:52] Background: History of EA
• [00:04:02] Luke's story: Discovering EA
• [00:09:30] Foreign Aid: Myths and valid critiques
• [00:14:58] Evidence: RCTs and the ITN framework
• [00:20:12] News: "Man bites dog"
• [00:26:35] GWWC: Taking the pledge
• [00:43:43] Donations: Risk and hidden zeros
• [00:46:41] GWWC: Common misconceptions
• [00:51:34] Entrepreneurship: Positly and WEIRD science
• [00:54:31] Tech: Market for Donations
• [01:05:46] Final questions: Change in mind and book recommendations

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/luke

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at https://www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Jacob Trefethen oversees Open Philanthropy’s science and science policy programs. He was a Henry Fellow at Harvard University, and has a B.A. from the University of Cambridge.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/trefethen

In this episode we talked about open source the risks and benefits of open source AI models. We talk about:

• Life-saving health technologies which probably won't exist in 5 years (without a concerted effort) — like a widely available TB vaccine, and bugs which stop malaria spreading
• How R&D for neglected diseases works —
• How much does the world spend on it?
• How do drugs for neglected diseases go from design to distribution?
• No-brainer policy ideas for speeding up global health R&D
• Comparing health R&D to public health interventions (like bed nets)
• Comparing the social returns to frontier (‘Progress Studies’) to global health R&D
• Why is there no GiveWell-equivalent for global health R&D?
• Won't AI do all the R&D for us soon?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

A full writeup of this episode is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/esvelt-sandbrink.

Kevin Esvelt is an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he is director of the Sculpting Evolution group, which invents new ways to study and influence the evolution of ecosystems. He helped found the SecureDNA Project and the Nucleic Acid Observatory, both of which we discuss in the episode. Esvelt is also known for proposing the idea of using CRISPR to implement gene drives.

Jonas Sandbrink is a researcher and DPhil student at the Future of Humanity Institute. He is a fellow at both the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and with the Ending Bioweapons Program at the Council on Strategic Risks. Jonas’ research interests include the dual-use potential of life sciences research and biotechnology, as well as fast response countermeasures like vaccine platforms.

We discuss:

• The concepts of differential technological development, dual-use research, transfer risks in research, 'information loops', and responsible access to biological data
• Strengthening norms against risky biological research, such as novel virus identification and gain of function research
• Connection-based warning systems and metagenomic sequencing technology
• Advanced PPE, Far-UVC sterilisation technology, and other countermeasures against pandemics potentially worse than Covid
• Analogies between progress in biotechnology and the early history of nuclear weapons
• How to use your career to work on these problems — even if you don’t have a background in biology.

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/farmer.

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Armond Cohen is the executive director of the Clean Air Task Force. CATF has been rated as the most cost-effective climate change charity, including by organisations such as Founder's Pledge, SoGive, and Giving Green.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/armond. There you'll find links to all the videos and books Armond mentions, plus further reading.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Dr Richard Bruns is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and before that was a Senior Economist at the US Food and Drug Administration (the FDA).

In this episode we talk about the importance of indoor air quality (IAQ), and how to improve it. Including:

• Estimating the DALY cost of unclean indoor air from pathogens and particulate matter
• How much pandemic risk could be reduced from improving IAQ?
• How economists convert health losses into dollar figures — and how not to put a price on life
• Key interventions to improve IAQ
• Air filtration
• Germicidal UV light (especially Far-UVC light)
  • Barriers to adoption, including UV smog and empirical studies needed most
• National and state-level policy changes to get these interventions adopted widely

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley is an associate professor at George Mason University and Deputy Director of their Biodefence Programme

In this episode we talk about:

• Where the belief that 'bioweapons are easy to make' came from and why it has been difficult to change
• Why transferring tacit knowledge is so difficult -- and the particular challenges that rogue actors face
• As well as lastly what Sonia makes of the AI-Bio risk discourse and what types of advances in technology would cause her concern

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Ben Garfinkel is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Acting Director of the Centre for the Governance of AI.

In this episode we talk about:

• An overview of AI governance space, and disentangling concrete research questions that Ben would like to see more work on
• Seeing how existing arguments for the risks from transformative AI have held up and Ben’s personal motivations for working on global risks from AI
• GovAI’s own work and opportunities for listeners to get involved

Further reading and a transcript is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/garfinkel

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Phil Trammell is a research associate at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, where he is working at the intersection of economic theory and moral philosophy. In this episode, we discuss his latest working paper about the different ways through which AI might transform the global economy.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/phil. It's more than just a transcript!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/alexanian-ahuja

Tessa Alexanian is the Safety & Security Program Officer at the iGEM Foundation, which organises a worldwide competition in synthetic biology and helps foster a collaborative community. She is a fellow at the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative, was previously a fellow at the Foresight Institute, and co-founded the East Bay Biosecurity Group.

Janvi Ahuja is a PhD student in computational biology at the University of Oxford, where she is affiliated with the Future of Humanity Institute and works with MIT’s Nucleic Acid Observatory on metagenomic sequencing. Janvi is also a fellow at the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative, and was previously an intern at the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention ISU

We discuss:

• How synthetic biology began and why it is an exploding field
• The iGEM competition and how to get involved in the community
• Challenges and trade-offs in creating a culture of responsibility in synthetic biology
• Emerging risks in synthetic biology and what this means for global catastrophic risks
• Technical projects in biosecurity and career advice for how to get involved

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Michael Aird is a senior research manager at Rethink Priorities, where he co-leads the Artificial Intelligence Governance and Strategy team alongside Amanda El-Dakhakhni. Before that, he conducted nuclear risk research for Rethink Priorities and longtermist macrostrategy research for Convergence Analysis, the Center on Long-Term Risk, and the Future of Humanity Institute, which is where we know each other from. Before that, he was a teacher and a stand up comedian. He previously spoke to us about impact-driven research on Episode 52.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The basic case for working on existential risk from AI
• How to begin figuring out what to do to reduce the risks
• Threat models for the risks of advanced AI
• 'Theories of victory' for how the world mitigates the risks
• 'Intermediate goals' in AI governance
• What useful (and less useful) research looks like for reducing AI x-risk
• Practical advice for usefully contributing to efforts to reduce existential risk from AI
• Resources for getting started and finding job openings

Key links:

• Apply to be a Compute Governance Researcher or Research Assistant at Rethink Priorities (applications open until June 12, 2023)
• Rethink Priority's survey on intermediate goals in AI governance
• The Rethink Priorities newsletter
• The Rethink Priorities tab on the Effective Altruism Forum
• Some AI Governance Research Ideas compiled by Markus Anderljung & Alexis Carlier
• Strategic Perspectives on Long-term AI Governance by Matthijs Maas
• Michael's posts on the Effective Altruism Forum (under the username "MichaelA")
• The 80,000 Hours job board

Chris Miller is an Associate Professor of International History at Tufts University and author of the book “Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology” (the Financial Times Business Book of the Year). He is also a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Eurasia Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Over the next few episodes we will be exploring the potential for catastrophe cause by advanced artificial intelligence. But before we look ahead, we wanted to give a primer on where we are today: on the history and trends behind the development of AI so far. In this episode, we discuss:

• How semiconductors have historically been related to US military strategy
• How the Taiwanese company TSMC became such an important player in this space — while other countries’ attempts have failed
• What the CHIPS Act signals about attitudes to compute governance in the decade ahead

Further reading is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/miller

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

Tads is an undergraduate economist at St John’s College, Cambridge and current Director of the Cambridge Development Initiative. His dissertation looks at how behavioural economics can help explain patterns in gym membership.

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it (really) helps listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a drink here.

Glen Weyl is Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST), where he advises Microsoft’s senior leaders on macroeconomics, geopolitics and the future of technology. Glen also co-authored Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society; a book about "Revolutionary ideas on how to use markets to bring about fairness and prosperity for all".

In our conversation, we discuss —

• Quadratic voting and funding
• The new political divides of the 21st century
• What the history of personal computing teaches us about the possibility of shaping technological progress
• Glen's impression of rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism
• Why and how longtermism should be more generative of new ideas
• Underrated thinkers relevant for today

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the author of Open Borders, The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

In our interview, we discuss:

• Causes of poverty
• Charter cities
• The case for open borders
• Democracy — is it overrated? Why do voters keep choosing bad policies? Do democracies last longer, grow faster, and go to war less?
• Stable global totalitarianism
• Should longtermists care more about having more children? Is the cost of subsidising a new life competitive with the cost of saving a life?
• What the philosopher Michael Huemer gets right
• How many kids is Bryan counterfactually responsible for?
• Life lessons from Hairspray and The Room

You can read more about the topics we cover this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/bryan.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Professor Diane Coyle, CBE, is an economist and co-directs the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her current focus is on the digital economy and competition policy. She is the author of more than 15 economics books, and creator of the popular 'Enlightened Economics' blog. In this episode, we talk about the effects of digital monopoloes. How different are they from other kinds of monopoly? Is there anything new or concerning about their use of big data and algorithm-tailored adverting? And should we try to break them up?

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/diane.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Habiba Islam is a member of the 80,000 Hours career advising team.

First, the two most important links:

• Apply to receive free career coaching: 80000hours.org/hti
• Apply to join the 80k career advising team here

In this conversation, we talk about —

• How to begin planning a high-impact career
• What one-on-one calls with 80k are like (and why you might consider applying)
• Different motivations and framings for longtermism
• The case for being ambitious if you want to do good in your career
• Concrete next steps for beginning the process of career planning

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/habiba.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Steven Teles s is a Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. His work focuses on American politics and he written several books on topics such as elite politics, the judiciary, and mass incarceration.

You can see more links and a full transcript at hearthisidea.com/teles

In this episode we talk about:

• The rise of the conservative legal movement;
• How ideas can come to be entrenched in American politics;
• Challenges in building a new academic field like "law and economics";
• The limitations of doing quantitative evaluations of advocacy groups.

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening! Key links:

AI might bring huge benefits — if we avoid the risks.

This episode is a rebroadcast of an article written for 80,000 Hours Preventing an AI-related catastrophe. It was written by Benjamin Hilton and narrated by Perrin Walker for Type III Audio.

The full url is: 80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence

Why are we sharing this article on our podcast feed? Over the next few months, we are planning to do a bunch of episodes on artificial intelligence. But first, we wanted to share an introduction to the problems: something which explains why AI might pose existential-level threats to humanity, and why you might prioritise this problem when you’re thinking about what to work on or just what to learn more about. And we don’t think we’re going to be able to do a better job than this article.

You can view all our episodes at hearthisidea.com, and you give feedback at feedback.hearthisidea.com/listener.

Thomas Moynihan is a writer and researcher interested in the history of ideas surrounding existential risk and human flourishing. He completed a PhD on the history of human extinction, and currently works with Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. His most recent book is called X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/thomas. It's not a transcript!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Dr Spencer R. Weart served as the Director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics from 1974 to 2009. He is the author of several books, including The Discovery of Global Warming and The Rise of Nuclear Fear. In our conversation, we discuss:

• How climate science emerged, what it took for scientists to form a consensus in the mid-1960s, and how that consensus has evolved since
• The IPCC’s emerging understanding of so-called “tipping points” in the climate system, and our current best guesses as to what kind of threat they pose
• Exploring the changing cultural relationship humans have had with nuclear energy — and why it remains stigmatised amongst many environmental groups

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/weart

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Joe Carlsmith is a writer, researcher, and philosopher. He works as a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy, where he focuses on existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. He also writes independently about various topics in philosophy and futurism, and holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/carlsmith

In this episode we talked about a report Joe recently authored, titled ‘Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?’. The report “examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later”; a behaviour Carlsmith calls scheming.

We talk about:

• Distinguishing ways AI systems can be deceptive and misaligned
• Why powerful AI systems might acquire goals that go beyond what they’re trained to do, and how those goals could lead to scheming
• Why scheming goals might perform better (or worse) in training than less worrying goals
• The ‘counting argument’ for scheming AI
• Why goals that lead to scheming might be simpler than the goals we intend
• Things Joe is still confused about, and research project ideas

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Elizabeth Seger is the Director of Technology Policy at Demos, a cross-party UK think tank with a program on trustworthy AI.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/seger   In this episode we talked about open source the risks and benefits of open source AI models. We talk about:

• What ‘open source’ really means
• What is (and isn’t) open about ‘open source’ AI models
• How open source weights and code are useful for AI safety research
• How and when the costs of open sourcing frontier model weights might outweigh the benefits
• Analogies to ‘open sourcing nuclear designs’ and the open science movement

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Note that this episode was recorded before the release of Meta’s Llama 3.1 family of models. Note also that in the episode Elizabeth referenced an older version of the definition maintained by OSI (roughly version 0.0.3). The current OSI definition (0.0.8) now does a much better job of delineating between different model components.

A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/nemet

Greg Nemet is a a Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. He is also the author of How Solar Energy Became Cheap

We discuss:

• The distinct phases that helped solar PV move down its learning curve
• What lessons we can learn on how to accelerate and affect other technologies
• Theories about National Innovation Systems and lock-in

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Tom Kalil is the CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy.

He also served in the White House for two presidents (under Obama and Clinton); where he helped establish incentive prizes in government through challenge.gov; in addition to dozens of science and tech program. More recently Tom served as the Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, where he helped launch Convergent Research.

Matt Clancy is an economist and a research fellow at Open Philanthropy. He writes ‘New Things Under the Sun’, which is a living literature review on academic research about science and innovation.

We talked about:

• What is ‘influence without authority’?
• Should public funders sponsor more innovation prizes?
• Can policy entrepreneurship be taught formally?
• Why isn't ultra-wealthy philanthropy much more ambitious?
• What's the optimistic case for increasing US state capacity?
• What was it like being principal staffer to Gordon Moore?
• What is Renaissance Philanthropy?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Anders Sandberg is a researcher, futurist, transhumanist and author. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. His research covers human enhancement, exploratory engineering, and 'grand futures' for humanity.

This episode is a recording of a live interview at EAGx Cambridge (2023). You can find upcoming effective altruism conferences here: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global

We talk about:

• What is exploratory engineering and what is it good for?
• Progress on whole brain emulation
• Are we near the end of humanity's tech tree?
• Is diversity intrinsically valuable in grand futures?
• How Anders does research
• Virtue ethics for civilisations
• Anders' takes on AI risk and whether LLMs are close to general intelligence
• And much more!

Further reading and a transcript is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/sandberg-live

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Liv Boeree is a former poker champion turned science communicator and podcaster, with a background in astrophysics. In 2014, she founded the nonprofit Raising for Effective Giving, which has raised more than $14 million for effective charities. Before retiring from professional poker in 2019, Liv was the Female Player of the Year for three years running. Currently she hosts the Win-Win podcast (you’ll enjoy it if you enjoy this podcast).

You can see more links and a full transcript at hearthisidea.com/episodes/boeree.

In this episode we talk about:

• Is the ‘poker mindset’ valuable? Is it learnable?
• How and why to bet on your beliefs — and whether there are outcomes you shouldn’t make bets on
• Would cities be better without public advertisements?
• What is Moloch, and why is it a useful abstraction?
• How do we escape multipolar traps?
• Why might advanced AI (not) act like profit-seeking companies?
• What’s so important about complexity? What is complexity, for that matter?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Jaime Sevilla Molina is a visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, and is beginning a PhD studying Bayesian reasoning. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and his academic background is in mathematics and computer science.

In this episode we discuss:

• How the social sciences infer causation from natural experiments;
• Evidence for 'cultural persistence', particularly in the context of the Atlantic slave trade;
• What is forecasting, and why does it matter? Why is good forecasting so hard to come by?
• What are the likely implications of quantum computing for cryptography, drug discovery, and AI?

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up hearthisidea.com/episodes/Jaime.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're still just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Marcus Daniell is an Olympian tennis player from New Zealand with 5 ATP titles, quarterfinal appearances at both Wimbledon and the Australian Open. He became involved with the Effective Altruism in 2015 and has since donated 5-10% of his annual income to effective organisations. In January of this year, Marcus took the Giving What We Can pledge, committing to donate at least 10% of his annual winnings to effective organisations for the rest of his life. Alongside his tennis career, Marcus is presently completing a Masters in Philosophy.

In November 2020, Daniell founded High Impact Athletes, a non-profit organisation connecting athletes and the general public with the most effective, evidence-based non-profits in the world.

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/marcus.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/robichaud.

Carl Robichaud co-leads Longview Philanthropy’s programme on nuclear weapons.

We discuss:

• Lessons from the Ukraine crisis
• China's future as a nuclear power
• Nuclear near-misses
• The Reykjavik Summit, Acheson–Lilienthal Report and Baruch Plan
• Lessons from nuclear risk for other emerging technological risks
• What's happened to philanthropy aimed at reducing risks from nuclear weapons, and what philanthropy can support today

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Sebastian Joy is the founding President of ProVeg International, a food awareness organisation working to transform the global food system. He is also a social entrepreneur: having developed several vegan products and helped launch the international 50by40 alliance.

In this episode we discuss:

• [00:01:53] Welcome, Sebastian!
• [00:07:52] Direct animal advocacy
• [00:11:48] Career capital
• [00:14:46] ProVeg International
• [00:23:42] Corporate engagement and the meat industry
• [00:26:49] The business of meat
• [00:36:00] Entrepreneurship
• [00:45:25] Scaling up organisations
• [00:48:05] New areas for helping animals
• [00:51:26] Working within organisations
• [00:54:12] Closing questions

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/sebastian.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Bruce Friedrich is the co-founder and executive director of The Good Food Institute — a nonprofit that works with scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs to support the development and marketing of cell-cultured and plant-based alternatives to animal food products.

In this episode we discuss:

• [00:02:21] Bruce's path to GFI
• [00:06:01] Inefficiencies of animal agriculture
• [00:10:06] Other external harms of animal agriculture
• [00:18:27] GFI's theory of change
• [00:27:54] Why focus on affluent markets?
• [00:32:53] Is regular meat-eating an historical abberation?
• [00:35:22] Protein alternative research
• [00:38:49] Plant-based vs cultivated meat
• [00:42:40] Marketing protein alternatives
• [00:47:27] Nomenclature
• [00:49:44] Policy
• [00:53:46] Why do we need government spending on R&D?
• [00:57:40] GFI's counterfactual impact
• [01:01:08] Religious influences
• [01:04:43] The supreme court
• [01:09:16] Three book recommendations
• [01:13:14] Outro

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: earthisidea.com/episodes/bruce.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this (e.g. Apple Podcasts_ — it's probably the easiest (free) means of growing the show. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

Dr Bateman is a fellow in economics at Gonville & Caius college Cambridge. Her research encompasses economic history, macroeconomics, and feminism.

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it (really) helps listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a drink here.

Gillian Hadfield is Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She is a Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto.

In our interview, we discuss:

• Why humans invented law, and what Gillian describes as "the demand side" for legal infrastructure;
• Why social norms continue to be important today and how Ancient Athens managed to use a decentralised system of collective punishment;
• The case for "regulatory markets" in governing artificial intelligence, and how governments in the 21st Century need to keep up with rapid advances in technology
• "Silly rules" and why seemingly arbitrary norms are actually really important in creating society's normative infrastructures

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/gillian.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

George Rosenfeld is the founder of May Week Alternative, an initiative encouraging students to donate a significant amount of money to an effective charity. In our longest episode yet, we discuss:

• George’s inspiration for starting MWA;
• What he has learned about growing and sustaining a student-based charity;
• The psychology of what gets people to join the movement and donate their own money;
• The myths and misperceptions surrounding what it means to have a positive impact, and the most credible ways to do so. And a lot more besides!

If you’re interested in starting a charitable movement, or in how to use your career or time to do more good, then I hope you’ll find this especially useful. You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/george.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/erwan

Dewi Erwan is a co-founder of BlueDot Impact, the Biosecurity Advisor to the Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative, and the previous Executive Director ofEffective Altruism Cambridge.

We discuss:

• Setting up BlueDot Impact and scaling pilot programmes
• Talent gaps in the EA community and more strategic goal setting
• Career advice and leadership skills

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Michael Cohen is is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford with Mike Osborne. He will be starting a postdoc with Professor Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley, with the Center for Human-Compatible AI. His research considers the expected behaviour of generally intelligent artificial agents, with a view to designing agents that we can expect to behave safely.

You can see more links and a full transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/cohen.

We discuss:

• What is reinforcement learning, and how is it different from supervised and unsupervised learning?
• Michael's recently co-authored paper titled 'Advanced artificial agents intervene in the provision of reward'
• Why might it be hard to convey what we really want to RL learners — even when we know exactly what we want?
• Why might advanced RL systems might tamper with their sources of input, and why could this be very bad?
• What assumptions need to hold for this "input tampering" outcome?
• Is reward really the optimisation target? Do models "get reward"?
• What's wrong with the analogy between RL systems and evolution?

Key links:

• Michael's personal website
• 'Advanced artificial agents intervene in the provision of reward' by Michael K. Cohen, Marcus Hutter, and Michael A. Osborne
• 'Pessimism About Unknown Unknowns Inspires Conservatism' by Michael Cohen and Marcus Hutter
• 'Intelligence and Unambitiousness Using Algorithmic Information Theory' by Michael Cohen, Badri Vallambi, and Marcus Hutter
• 'Quantilizers: A Safer Alternative to Maximizers for Limited Optimization' by Jessica Taylor
• 'RAMBO-RL: Robust Adversarial Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning' by Marc Rigter, Bruno Lacerda, and Nick Hawes
• 'Quantilizers: A Safer Alternative to Maximizers for Limited Optimization' by Jessica Taylor
• Season 40 of Survivor

Carolina Alves is the Joan Robinson Research Fellow in Heterodox Economics at Girton College, Cambridge and a co-founder of D-Econ. Her work mostly focuses on macroeconomics and international political economy.

In this episode we discuss:

-

• You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/Carolina.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.

If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at https://www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Michael Aird is a senior research manager at Rethink Priorities, where he co-leads the Artificial Intelligence Governance and Strategy team alongside Amanda El-Dakhakhni. Before that, he conducted nuclear risk research for Rethink Priorities and longtermist macrostrategy research for Convergence Analysis, the Center on Long-Term Risk, and the Future of Humanity Institute, which is where we know each other from. Before that, he was a teacher and a stand up comedian. We discuss:

• Whether you should stay in academia if you want to do impactful research
• How to start looking for roles at impact-driven research organisations
• What simple changes can improve how you write about your research
• The uses of 'reductionism' and quantitative thinking
• The concept of ‘reasoning transparency’
• Michael’s experience investigating nuclear security

Key links:

• Michael's posts on the EA Forum
• Interested in EA/longtermist research careers? Here are my top recommended resources
• Don’t think, just apply! (usually)
• List of EA funding opportunities
• Rethink Priorities
• Reasoning Transparency
• A central directory for open research questions

You can find more links, and read the full transcript, in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/aird.

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter.

Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Dan Williams is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/williams.

We discuss:

• If reasoning is so useful, why are we so bad at it?
• Do some bad ideas really work like ‘mind viruses’? Is the ‘luxury beliefs’ concept useful?
• What's up with the idea of a ‘marketplace for ideas’? Are people shopping for new beliefs, or to rationalise their existing attitudes?
• How dangerous is misinformation, really? Can we ‘vaccinate’ or ‘inoculate’ against it?
• Will AI help us form more accurate beliefs, or will it persuade more people of unhinged ideas?
• Does fact-checking work?
• Under transformative AI, should we worry more about the suppression or the proliferation of counter-establishment ideas?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Leah Edgerton and Manja Gärtner are respectively the Executive Director and a Senior Researcher at Animal Charity Evaluators — a non-profit whose mission is to find and promote the most effective ways to help animals.

In this episode we discuss:

• [00:05:27] Why care about Effective Animal Advocacy?
• [00:09:09] Cognitive dissonance and the meat paradox
• [00:13:46] What does ACE do?
• [00:21:10] Measuring effectiveness and doing research
• [00:30:54] Value of information and capacity building
• [00:38:37] Working with NGOs
• [00:48:02] How Animal Advocacy has changed
• [00:51:14] Hopes for the future
• [01:00:23] Closing questions

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/ace. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Saloni Dattani is a Researcher at Our World in Data, and a founder & editor at the online magazine Works in Progress. She holds a PhD in psychiatric genetics from King’s College London.

You can see more links and a full transcript at hearthisidea.com/episodes/dattani.

In this episode we talk about:

• The history of malaria and attempts to eradicate it
• The role of DDT and insecticide spraying campaigns — and why they were scaled down
• Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner
• What comes after vaccine discovery — rolling out the RTS,S vaccine
• New funding models to accelerate similar life-saving research, like vaccines for TB and HIV
• Why so much global health data is missing, and why that matters
• How the ‘million deaths study’ revealed that about 50,000 deaths per year from snakebites in India went uncounted by health agencies

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Isabelle Boemeke is a model, digital fashion designer, and the world's first (and only) nuclear power influencer. She makes educational videos as Isodope.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/isabelle. There you'll find links to all the videos and books Isabelle mentions, plus further reading.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Katja Grace is a researcher and writer. She runs AI Impacts, a research project trying to incrementally answer decision-relevant questions about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Katja blogs primarily at worldspiritsockpuppet, and indirectly at Meteuphoric, Worldly Positions, LessWrong and the EA Forum.

We discuss:

• What is AI Impacts working on?
• Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case
• Reasons to doubt that superhuman AI systems will be strongly goal-directed
• Reasons to doubt that if goal-directed superhuman AI systems are built, their goals will be bad by human lights
• Aren't deep learning systems fairly good at understanding our 'true' intentions?
• Reasons to doubt that (misaligned) superhuman AI would overpower humanity
• The case for slowing down AI
• Is AI really an arms race?
• Are there examples from history of valuable technologies being limited or slowed down?
• What does Katja think about the recent open letter on pausing giant AI experiments?
• Why read George Saunders?

Key links:

• World Spirit Sock Puppet (Katja's main blog)
• Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case
• Let's think about slowing down AI
• We don't trade with ants
• Thank You, Esther Forbes (George Saunders)

You can see more links and a full transcript at hearthisidea.com/episodes/grace.

Damon Binder is a research analyst at Open Philanthropy. His research focuses on potential risks from pandemics and from biotechnology. He previously worked as a research scholar at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he studied existential risks. Prior to that he completed his PhD in theoretical physics at Princeton University.

We discuss:

• How did early states manage large populations?
• What explains the hockeystick shape of world economic growth?
• Did urbanisation enable more productive farming, or vice-versa?
• What does transformative AI mean for growth?
• Would 'degrowth' benefit the world?
• What do theoretical physicists actually do, and what are they still trying to understand?
• Why not just run bigger physics experiments to solve the latest problems?
• What could the history of physics tell us about its future?
• In what sense are the universe's constants fine-tuned?
• Will the universe ever just... end?
• Why might we expect digital minds to be a big deal?

Links

• Damon's list of book recommendations
• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (history blog)
• Cold Takes by Holden Karnofsky (blog on futurism and AI).
• Highlight from Cold Takes: The Most Important Century series of posts
• Crusader Kings
• Europa Universalis
• The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
• The Five Ages of the Universe by Fred Adams

You can find more episodes and links at our website, hearthisidea.com.

(This episode is a bonus episode because it's less focused on topics in effective altruism than normal)

Dan Williams is a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His research addresses how various forms of irrationality and bias can be socially adaptive. How might false political beliefs and conspiracy theories have a useful 'signalling' purpose? And do we always know the reasons why we form our own beliefs?

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/dan.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it (really) helps listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea.

Dr Sriya Iyer is a Reader in Economics at the University of Cambridge and fellow of St Catharine’s College. Her research applies the tools of economics to topics such as religion, development, and education.

In this episode we discuss:

• [00:02:14] Introduction: Sriya Iyer
• [00:03:08] Background: What is the economics of religion?
• [00:07:25] Wealth: The Secularization Hypothesis (and why it's wrong)
• [00:12:02] Growth: Weber's Protestant work ethic
• [00:14:43] Demography: Religion and fertility in India
• [00:21:39] Fieldwork: Doing surveys in the developing world
• [00:29:31] Competition: Temples providing non-religious services
• [00:36:39] Signaling: The Club Good Model of Religion
• [00:44:00] Education: Religious versus secular schooling
• [00:47:42] Religious riots: The Political Economy of Hatred in India
• [01:02:57] Other research: Beliefs, experimental economics, and Islamic institutions
• [01:06:51] Social Capital: Trust, reciprocity, bonding versus bridging
• [01:09:41] Future of the field: Religion, Covid-19, and mental health
• [01:14:50] Final questions: Change in mind and book recommendations

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/sriya

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.

If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at https://www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Lord Bird is the co-founder of The Big Issue, a magazine supporting street vendors who are homeless, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Future Generations.

In our conversation, we discuss —

• The Future Generations Bill, currently being discussed in the UK Parliament
• Causes of political short-sightedness
• Broader social issues facing the UK

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/bird

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Tamay Besiroglu is a researcher working on the intersection of economics and AI. He is currently the Associate Director of Epoch AI, a research institute investigating key trends and questions that will shape the trajectory and governance of AI.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/besiroglu

In this episode we talked about open source the risks and benefits of open source AI models. We talk about:

• The argument for explosive growth from ‘increasing returns to scale’
• Does AI need to be able to automate R&D to cause rapid growth?
• Which theories of growth best explain the Industrial Revolution; and what do they predict from AI?
• What happens to human incomes under near-total job automation?
• Are regulations likely to slow down frontier AI progress enough to prevent this? Might AI go the way of nuclear power?
• Will AI hit on resource or power limits before explosive growth? Won't it run out of data first?
• Why aren't academic economists more interested in the prospect of explosive growth, if indeed it is so plausible?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Nikhil Krishnan is a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and Fellow in Philosophy at Robinson College. He also writes on on history, literature, and culture. His first book, provisionally titled A Terribly Serious Adventure, tells the story of philosophy in Oxford from 1900 to 1960.

In this episode, we discussed two broad topics. In the first half, Nikhil relates some of this history of 20th century Oxford philosophy — and, by extension, the history of 'analytic' or 'linguistic' philosophy. In the latter half, we consider some questions about the present and future for academic philosophy, the role of universities, and the place of the peer-reviewed journal.

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/nikhil.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Sanjay Joshi is the co-founder and CEO of SoGive, a non-profit which evaluates the impact and cost-effectiveness of UK charities.

In this episode we discuss

• The meaning and neglectnedness of cost-effectiveness in the charity space;
• Why incentives differ so much between companies and nonprofits;
• Misconceptions about admin costs and senior pay in charities;
• SoGive's 'two-question framework' for evaluating charity's outcomes;
• Advice for nonprofit entrepreneurship

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up hearthisidea.com/episodes/Sanjay.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

Dr Vasileios Kotsidis is a teaching and research fellow in economics at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. His research applies methods from game theory and other formal models in economics to social interactions with strategic motives.

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it (really) helps listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a drink here.

Eva Vivalt is an Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Toronto. Her work is focused on reducing barriers to evidence-based decision-making, global priorities research, and cash transfers.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/eva. It's not a transcript!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Peter Singer is a moral philosopher and public intellectual, most widely known for his writings about animal ethics and global poverty.

In this episode we discuss:

• [00:00:00] Introduction
• [00:01:43] Background — Peter Singer introduces himself.
• [00:02:16] Speciesism — Defining the term, and explaining the case against speciesism.
• [00:06:55] Wild Animal Suffering — hould we intervene to reduce suffering in nature?
• [00:09:00] Weighing and Ending Animal Lives — Are all animal lives equal? What, if anything, is wrong with (painlessly) killing animals?
• [00:13:20] Ignoring Animals: Why did thinkers of the past apparently neglect the moral worth of animals? Why is animal ethics relatively new?
• [00:16:50] History of Western Attitudes to Animals—Can we trace the origins of contemporary attitudes to animals back to ancient Greece and Judeo-Christian values?
• [00:21:07] Counterfactual Impact of Animal Advocacy
• [00:24:10] The Power of Moral Argument
• [00:25:00] The Schwitzgebel Study
• [00:29:30] What should we do now? — Are veganism and vegetarianism all-or-nothing decisions? Or is it worth choosing a more incremental pathway?
• [00:32:25] The case for Human Challenge Trials
• [00:35:46] Trade-off between Lives and Well-being in Lockdowns — Can the cure for the pandemic be worse than the disease? How would we know?
• [00:42:07] Moral Realism — Parfit's 'Future Tuesday Indifference'
• [00:46:10] Other Moral Systems — What about egalitarianism or prioritarianism?
• [00:49:10] Controversial ideas
• [00:52:28] Journal of Controversial Ideas
• [00:54:35] What have you changed your mind about?
• [00:55:57] Book Recommendations
• [00:57:18] Where to Find PS Online

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/peter.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

Anders Sandberg is a researcher, futurist, transhumanist and author. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. His research covers the ethics of human enhancement, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures.

In this episode, we talk about

• The Fermi Paradox: if the universe is so big, where are all the aliens?
• What is 'transhumanism'?
• The case for ending ageing
• The 'reversal test' for eliminating status quo bias
• Online communities and movement growth

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/anders. There you'll find links to all the videos and articles Anders mentions, plus further reading.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. And if you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Sam Hilton is the Research Director at Charity Entrepreneurship, the Parliamentary Coordinator at the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations, and a Research Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk.

In our conversation, we discuss —

• Charity Entrepreneurship's plans for the 2022 Incubation Program
• Exploratory Altruism and finding new cause areas
• Lessons for longtermist policy and thoughts on the Future Generations Bill

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/hilton

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Christoph Winter is an Assistant Professor of Law at ITAM in Mexico, a Visiting Scholar in Psychology at Harvard, and the founder of the Legal Priorities Project

In our interview, we discuss:

• A global survey of legal academics about protecting future generations;
• How constitutional law might best help in this effort;
• Endangerment law and the "risk of creating a risk";
• And lots more!

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/christoph/.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Michelle Lavery is a Program Associate with Open Philanthropy’s Farm Animal Welfare team, with a focus on the science and study of animal behaviour & welfare.

You can see more links and a full transcript at hearthisidea.com/episodes/lavery

In this episode we talk about:

• How do scientists study animal emotions in the first place? How is a "science" of animal emotion even feasible?
• When is it useful to anthropomorphise animals to understand them?
• How can you study the preferences of animals? How can you measure the “strength” of preferences?
• How do farmed animal welfare advocates relate to animal welfare science? Are their perceptions fair?
• How can listeners get involved with the study of animal emotions?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

In this episode, Fin and Luca celebrate 50 episodes of Hear This Idea: all the highs, lows, and near-disasters along the way.

We chat about:

• The HTI origin story
• Favourite behind the scenes moments
• Should we argue with guests more?
• Mistakes we've made (and are still making?)
• What we've learned about asking better questions
• Starting projects from scratch
• Ideas for the next 50 episodes
• Future topics, dream guests
• Why does this podcast exist?
• Podcasting tips
• A potential new program
• Our media recommendations

Show Notes

Tobias Cremer is a PhD student in Politics and International Studies. His thesis examines the relationship between right-wing populism and religion in Western Europe and North America.

You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website.

Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it really helps listeners find us!

If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a drink here.

Professor Doyne Farmer is the Baillie Gifford Professor in Mathematics at Oxford, the Director of the Complexity Economics programme at INET, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

In our conversation we discuss:

• How Doyne and his friends used physics and hidden computers to beat the roulette wheel in Las Vegas casinos
• Advancing economic models to better predict business cycles and knock-on effects from extreme events like Covid-19
• Techniques for predicting technological progress and long-run growth, with specific applications to energy technologies and climate change

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/farmer

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Ben Todd is the CEO & founder of 80,000 Hours, and helped to start the effective altruism movement.

80,000 Hours is a non-profit that provides free research and support to help people find careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

In our interview, we discuss:

• Why your choice of career could be the most important ethical decision you ever get to make;
• 80K’s ‘problem, solution, personal fit’ framework for choosing a career;
• Whether longtermism should be considered a research project or a social movement;
• The idea of using leverage to multiply the difference you're able to make.

Note that if you don't need to hear an introduction to the key ideas of 80,000 Hours, you can skip to about the 34-minute mark.

You can read more about the topics we cover this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/ben.

Key links mentioned in the interview:

• The 80,000 Hours website
• A (free) weekly career planning course for positive impact
• The 80,000 Hours 'Key Ideas' series
• The 80,000 Hours job board
• The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/pannu-monrad

Jassi Pannu is a Resident Physician at Stanford, a Visiting Scholar at John Hopkins, and a Fellow at the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative.

Joshua Monrad is a Biosecurity Program Officer at Effective Giving and a Researcher at Oxford's Future Humanity Institute.

We discuss:

• The post-COVID biosecurity landscape, including the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan
• The Biological Weapons Convention and current issues in dual-use research
• The role of antivirals, increasing vaccine capacity, and market failures
• Similarities and differences between GCBR mitigation and general pandemic preparedness
• How some interventions are underpinned by global cooperation

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Dr Cynthia Schuck-Paim is the Scientific Director of the Welfare Footprint Project, a scientific effort to quantify animal welfare to inform practice, policy, investing and purchasing decisions.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/schuck.

We discuss:

• How to begin thinking about quantifying animal experiences in a cross-comparable way
• Whether the ability to feel pain is unique to big brained animals, or more widespread in the tree of life
• How fish farming compares to poultry and livestock farming
• How worried to be about bird flu zoonosis
• Whether different animal species experience time differently
• Whether positive experiences like joy could make life worth living for some farmed animals
• How animal welfare advocates can learn from anti-corruption nonprofits

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Guive Assadi is a Research Scholar at the Center for the Governance of AI. Guive’s research focuses on the conceptual clarification of, and prioritisation among, potential risks posed by emerging technologies. He holds a master’s in history from Cambridge University, and a bachelor’s from UC Berkeley.

In this episode, we discuss Guive's paper, Will Humanity Choose Its Future?.

• What is an 'evolutionary future', and would it count as an existential catastrophe?
• How did the agricultural revolution deliver a world which few people would have chosen?
• What does it mean to say that we are living in the dreamtime? Will it last?
• What competitive pressures in the future could drive the world to undesired outcomes?
  • Digital minds
  • Space settlement
• What measures could prevent an evolutionary future, and allow humanity to more deliberately choose its future?
  • World government
  • Strong global coordination
  • Defensive advantage
• Should this all make us more or less hopeful about humanity's future?
• Ideas for further research

Guive's recommended reading:

• Rationalist Explanations for War by James D. Fearon
• Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander
• The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
• What is a Singleton? By Nick Bostrom

Other key links:

• Will Humanity Choose Its Future? by Guive Assadi
• Colder Wars by Gwern
• The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich (and a review by Scott Alexander)

Jon Y is the creator of the Asianometry YouTube channel and accompanying newsletter. He describes his channel as making "video essays on business, economics, and history. Sometimes about Asia, but not always."

You can see more links and a full transcript at hearthisidea.com/episodes/asianometry

In this episode we talk about:

• Compute trends driving recent progress in Artificial Intelligence;
• The semiconductor supply chain and its geopolitics;
• The buzz around LK-99 and superconductivity.

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Rory Stewart is the President of GiveDirectly and a visiting fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Before that, Rory was (amongst other things) a Member of Parliament in the UK, a Professor in Human Rights at Harvard, and a diplomat. He is also the author of several books and co-hosts the podcast The Rest Is Politics.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The moral case for radically scaling cash-transfers
• What we can do to raise governments’ ambitions to end global poverty
• What Rory learned about aid since being Secretary of State for International Development

Further reading is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/stewart

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Mike Hinge is a Senior Economist at ALLFED (Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters).

In our interview, we discuss:

• Why nuclear fallout blocking sunlight could be one of the most extreme threats to the global food supply, and how this compares to the risk from climate change;
• How scientists and ALLFED model the fallout of nuclear winter, how it affects crop yields, and how it changes food prices for the global poor;
• Potential technologies for feeding everyone in case of a disaster, such as repurposed paper mills and seaweed could help us recover;
• Modeling the economic and political challenges of feeding everyone in the aftermath of a disaster

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/mike/. You can email mike at: mike [at] allfed [dot] info.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Michael Bhaskar is a writer, researcher and publisher. He is a former consultant Writer in Residence at DeepMind, and most recently he wrote a book called Human Frontiers, which tries to answer the question: “why has the flow of big, world-changing ideas slowed down?”

In our conversation, we discuss —

• The 'Adams curve'
• How so much of the modern world was invented in exceptional 20th century research institutes such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC
• Evidence for slowdown in new ideas from analysing the patent record
• Whether scientific progress is limitless, or whether there are things we'll never be able to know
• Whether 'big ideas' are also slowing in the arts
• Reasons for optimism about progress in big ideas, especially from advanced AI

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/michael/.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Julia Shvets is an economist at the University of Cambridge and fellow at Christ's College. Her research focuses primarily on micro- and behavioural economics: exploring why people make the decisions they make.

In this episode we discuss two of her recent papers. The first is about "overconfidence" — why people often think they are better than they have any reason to be. The second is on "rank incentives" — that is, how much people are inherently motivated by social prestige. We also explore many of the challenges that this research faces, especially what biases lab experiments might have.

You can read much more on these topics in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/julia

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Anna Alexandrova is a Reader in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge. She studies the philosophy of social sciences, focusing on the use (and abuse) of formal models, and the measurement of well-being. Anna is the author of A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being (2017).

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/anna. It's not a transcript!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, especially in technology and industry.

In our conversation we discuss —

• What progress is, and why it matters (maybe more than you think)
• How to think about resource constraints — why they are sometimes both real and surmountable
• The 'low-hanging fruit' explanation for stagnation, and prospects for speeding up innovation
• Tradeoffs between progress and (existential) safety
• Differences between the Progress Studies and Effective Altruism communities

You can read more about the topics we cover in this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/crawford

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Jaime Sevilla is the Director of Epoch, a team of researchers investigating and forecasting the development of advanced AI. This is his second time on the podcast.

Over the next few episodes, we will be exploring the potential for catastrophe cause by advanced artificial intelligence. Why? First, you might think that AI is likely to become transformatively powerful within our lifetimes. Second, you might think that such transformative AI could result in catastrophe unless we’re very careful about how it gets implemented. This episode is about understanding the first of those two claims.

Fin spoke with Jaime about:

• We've seen a crazy amount of progress in AI capabilities in the last few months; even weeks. How should we think about that progress continuing into the future?
• How has the amount of compute used to train AI models been changing over time? What about algorithmic efficiency?
• Will data soon become a bottleneck in training state-of-the-art text models?

Further reading is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/sevilla

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief. His book The Weirdness of the World can be found here.

We talk about:

• The possibility of digital consciousness
  • Policy ideas for avoiding major moral mistakes around digital consciousness
  • Prospects for the science of consciousness, and why we likely won't have clear answers in time
• Why introspection is much less reliable than most people think
  • How and why we invent false stories about our own choices without realising
  • What randomly sampling people's experiences reveals about what we're doing with most of our attention
• The possibility of 'overlapping minds'
• How and why our actions might have infinite effects, both good and bad
  • Whether it would be good news to learn that our actions have infinite effects, or that the universe is infinite in extent
• The best science fiction on digital minds and AI

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Max Smeets is a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich's Center for Security Studies and Co-Director of Virtual Routes

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/smeets

In this episode we talk about:

• The different types of cyber operations that a nation state might launch
• How international norms formed around what kind of cyber attacks are “allowed”
• The challenges that even elite cyber forces face
• What capabilities future AI systems would need to drastically change the space

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Dr Jessie Munton is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge, whose philosophical research spans perception, psychiatry, and bias.

In this episode we discuss:

• How to think about statistical generalisations that deal with demographic groups;
• How accurate beliefs about them can go wrong when we 'project' from bare statistics;
• How the salience and ordering of information relates to prejudice;
• How search engines can help or hinder 'cognitive flexibility'.

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/Jessie.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.

If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at https://www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/mathieu

Edouard Mathieu is the Head of Data at Our World in Data (OWID), a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.

We discuss:

• What Ed learned from working with governments and the WHO
• A simple change the WHO could make to radically improve how countries share data for the next pandemic
• The idea of 'experimental longtermism'
• How Ed is thinking about collecting data on transformative artificial intelligence and other potential existential risks
• Figuring out the impact of making everyone slightly better-informed
• Lessons for starting a career in impact-oriented data science
• And finally... Ed's favourite OWID chart

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!