Podcast Episodes

“Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture” by DaystarEld

"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire, 1765

A man in his late forties discovers a new passion…

3 weeks, 3 days ago

“Stop asking “how good is this” to decide between donation opportunities I recommend” by Zach Stein-Perlman

Prospective donors often ask how cost-effective my team's various recommendations are — they want to donate to the most cost-effective opportunity. …

3 weeks, 3 days ago

“Nick Bostrom: How big is the cosmic endowment?” by Zach Stein-Perlman

Superintelligence, pp. 122–3. 2014.

Consider a technologically mature civilization capable of building sophisticated von Neumann probes of the kind …

3 weeks, 4 days ago

“Don’t Overdose Locally Beneficial Changes” by Mateusz Bagiński

If you are very overweight, then you should aim to cut down your daily caloric intake. This doesn't mean the optimal daily caloric intake is zero.

I…

3 weeks, 4 days ago

“Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?” by David Gross

A landmark of social psychology research was “The Milgram Experiment,” but a new look at the audio tapes and other evidence collected during that ex…

3 weeks, 4 days ago

[Linkpost] “What if superintelligence is just weak?” by Simon Lermen

This is a link post.

In response to “2023 Or, Why I am Not a Doomer” by Dean W. Ball.

Dean Ball is a pretty big voice in AI policy – over 19k subscri…

3 weeks, 4 days ago

“Pray for Casanova” by Tomás B.

I am fascinated by the beautiful who become deformed. Some become bitter, more bitter than those born less pulchritudinous. Most learn to cope with …

3 weeks, 4 days ago

“AI #161 Part 1: 80,000 Interviews” by Zvi

The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday.

The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be…

3 weeks, 5 days ago

“Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules” by Zvi

Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days.

Emil Michael is a very angry person right now. So is the Hon…

3 weeks, 5 days ago

“AI’s capability improvements haven’t come from it getting less affordable” by Anders Woodruff

METR's frontier time horizons are doubling every few months, providing substantial evidence that AI will soon be able to automate many tasks or even…

3 weeks, 5 days ago