Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And again, not being like, due to my miraculously precise and detailed theory, I am able to make the surprising and narrow prediction of doom. I think I did a fairly good job of shaping my ignorance to lead me to not be too stupid despite my ignorance over time as it played out. And there’s a prediction, even knowing that little, that can be made. Okay, so this feels like a good place to pause the AI conversation, and there’s many other things to ask you about given your decades of writing and millions of words. I think what some people might not know is the millions and millions and millions of words of science fiction and fan fiction that you’ve written. I want to understand when, in your view, is it better to explain something through fiction than nonfiction? When you’re trying to convey experience rather than knowledge, or when it’s just much easier to write fiction and you can produce 100,000 words of fiction with the same effort it would take you to produce 10,000 words of nonfiction? Those are both pretty good reasons.…

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