Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
30 transcript-backed records
01 / commitment
“The fact that our horizons are unlimited, does not guarantee that we will get anywhere and that we won't start declining tomorrow.”
02 / belief
“I don't claim that they are privileged over other arguments. I just put them out because I think that argument works.”
03 / preference
“I think that the choice of the word fun for the thing that I explained more precisely, but still not very precisely as, as a “creation of knowledge where the different kinds of knowledge in explicit, unconscious, conscious explicit, are all in harmony with each other.”
04 / prediction
“A program for a robot to locate another robot of the right species and then have sex with it is beyond present-day robotics, but it will be done. It does not require creativity because that same program will lead the next wolf to do the same thing in the same circumstances.”
05 / evaluation
“Or maybe I should make it fun. And if I can't, that's a reason to stop all those things, if all those things are excluded, because by definition, the thing is good, and your pain, your suffering doesn't matter, then that opens the door to not only suffering, but to stasis.”
06 / evaluation
“Now, once we have an experiment, such as my thought experiment, if that was actually done, then people could not use their arguments based on a fallacious idea of empiricism, because their theory would have been refuted, even by the standards of empiricism, which shouldn't have been needed in the first place.”
07 / evaluation
“He thinks that we can comprehend quantum mechanics and apes can't, and maybe the extraterrestrials can comprehend something beyond quantum mechanics, which we can't comprehend, and no amount of brain add-ons with extra hardware can give us that because they have the hardware that is adapted to having these concepts which we haven't.”
08 / preference
“We have knowledge that is inexplicit, like our knowledge of grammar is always my favorite example, as we know why certain sentences are acceptable and why they're unacceptable.”
09 / uncertainty
“But I don't think we're doing the wrong thing to an existential risk level. And over the next 700 years, or whatever it is, well, I don't want to prophesy, because I don't know most of the advances that are going to be made in that time.”
10 / evaluation
“Then, you would expect that thing we don't know about, and nobody has bothered to control for it to be correlated with IQ.”
11 / uncertainty
“Now you’re asking me, Why do so many philosophers make mistakes? I’ve heard a variety of theories about this, but I don’t know.”
12 / belief
“I think that there is more than one mode of existence, but the theory that all modes of existence are equally real — I see no point in that.”
13 / disagreement
“OK, well, that’s a mixture of the anthropic principle, which I disagree with, and the idea that some features of reality are inherently incomprehensible, which I also disagree with.”
14 / belief
“I think the libertarian movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda.”
15 / belief
“I think there is no fundamental difference between humans and artificial general intelligence when we invent it, humans many centuries ago, between men and women, between adults and children.”
16 / prediction
“” Now, when you’re taught like that and intimidated by those kinds of things coming from on high, some proportion of you (of young people) will quit, some will take that on board and do the same to their students in turn, and some will think, “No, that’s ridiculous.”
17 / belief
“What is underrated about him and why did he get to be underrated? I think the reason he got to be underrated is that he made tremendous mistakes.”
18 / belief
“I think, for a start, there have been sophisticated theories of freedom, not just freedom in the sense that we can do this and we can do that, but theories about what freedom should constitute.”
19 / uncertainty
“Of course, we don’t know for sure what they are, but our best theories — in particular, quantum theory — say that there are other such entities and how they affect ours and how matter behaves as a result of that.”
20 / belief
“I think in philosophy, especially the human philosophy, as opposed to philosophy of science, I think all I’ve done is just add some footnotes to Popper and to a few other people, J.”
21 / evaluation
“No, because living in a simulation is precisely a case of there being a barrier beyond which we cannot understand.”
22 / disagreement
“I don’t think it’s a good argument that political parties know more, because in a coalition, the energy of political negotiations or political arguments — what politicians talk to each other about in the bar, in the corridor, in between the sessions — is all about form.”
23 / evaluation
“I think Gödel’s theorem, for example, with its roots in self-reference paradoxes, shows us that even within pure mathematics, there is no such thing as a solid foundation for all our knowledge.”
24 / evaluation
“I think that is the most error-correcting possible electoral system, although I must add that the electoral system is only a tiny facet of the institutions of criticism and consent.”
25 / evaluation
“He developed his theory of propensities because he thought that the problem was, What can a probability possibly mean in a universe that develops deterministically, and so on?”
26 / prediction
“I think what happened is that the capacity of the brain to store memes, to store programs in the brain rather than in the genes, increased, for some reason, very fast because, for some reason, these memes are very valuable.”
27 / preference
“My starting point was The Open Society & Its Enemies, volume 2, which is about Marx, which is probably the aspect of his philosophy that I was and am least interested in — and yet I was totally captivated by this book because previously the only philosophy I’d read was Bertrand Russell.”
28 / evaluation
“It’s funny you should say — I think that he’s very good, much too good, at steel-manning opponents. This relates to your first criticism that he’s too obsessed with refuting not just Marxism, but every bad philosophical theory that has gone before: I think he puts it into its best possible form and then spends pages and pages and pages going into every possible good aspect of that theory.”
29 / evaluation
“It takes absolutely ages, months and months, for a gorilla to be able to copy another gorilla’s behavior well enough to do something complicated. They can copy “wave hand” and that sort of thing, but to copy a complex behavior like required to open a difficult kind of nut which no other animal can open (this is why they have memes, because that’s a very useful ability), it takes them a long time.”
30 / evaluation
“It complicates the discussion of probability, but there’s no overlap between that notion of infinity and the Everettian notion of infinity, if we are infinite there, because the differentiation (as I prefer to call what used to be called splitting) — when I perform an experiment which can go one of two ways, the influence of that spreads out.”