Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
87 published records
01 / belief
“I think humans are programmed to kill and eat animals and that we’re programmed to see that it’s not that wrong.”
02 / belief
“I agree that the current technology isn’t going to produce self-awareness, but it seems to me there’s some chance in the next couple of hundred years we’ll have computers that are both as smart as humans — maybe more so — and that there’s at least a good reason to think that they might have conscious experiences the way that humans do.”
03 / belief
“The notion that you have human-like beings augmented, cyborgs, I think, will outcompete the notion of robots in the Isaac Asimov sense that they walk like a robot, but they are self-aware and have all the smarts of AI.”
04 / belief
“” Polio’s gone further than malaria, but I think malaria will come about, as well.”
05 / belief
“I think academia is not producing enough generalists who produce information that a broader well-educated, intelligent public can consume.”
06 / observation
“The whole notion of culture — which no one is even sure what the word means — but it’s reminding you all the time how much what matters is something that’s hard to pin down or have a simple theory about.”
07 / belief
“I agree that the practical problem gets very severe when you’re comparing humans and insects. But I think, in principle, the solution follows the same kind of process as when you’re comparing humans and other humans and chimps.”
08 / uncertainty
“I don’t feel I have the expertise to answer that question, but I don’t know of any reason why we couldn’t.”
09 / belief
“Correct. So if taco trucks are banned in a city and that’s a bad law, as it usually is, that everyone goes rogue, I think, has some negative long-run consequences.”
10 / belief
“I think most people are actually pretty good at knowing their weaknesses. They’re often not very good at knowing their talents and strengths.”
11 / belief
“We have intuitions across a lot of different features of the utility distribution, and some of them, I suspect, are implanted in us in a false way and not really valid for moral theory.”
12 / uncertainty
“We may have arrived at that outcome, whether we wanted it or not. I don’t know how influential peace activists are on many issues.”
13 / belief
“I think from memory in Superforecasting, that was perhaps the most important characteristic for making accurate forecasts, was that you had gone through the step of arguing actively for the other side.”
14 / belief
“I guess I agree with what you’re saying, but the mere fact that the ordinary citizens in some country might be better than it seems doesn’t itself mean we shouldn’t intervene.”
15 / belief
“I agree. I don’t favor either veil of ignorance, but Rawls was at Harvard. Rawls was a professional philosopher.”
16 / uncertainty
“USA, USSR. But if it’s three compared to a world with many centers of power, I don’t know that three is very stable.”
17 / belief
“I found that that really stuck in my head for many years and became a bit of a rule of thumb to me, that when I see my credences moving out of the 40 to 60 percent range, I have to stop and really pause and think about whether the evidence is strong enough.”
18 / belief
“Widely read, deeply read. Super underrated, I would say. He’s who comes to mind.”
19 / belief
“I think a lot of schools–people should not do research at all and should devote more attention to teaching.”
20 / belief
“I agree, but let me make another argument against myself, and that’s the Pascal’s Wager argument.”
21 / commitment
“My best guess is we will never have a way of really solving that question using ethics.”
22 / belief
“People can only get so happy, even with some kind of biological genetic engineering, and then we just max out on lives. I think at some point that’s how it will be.”
23 / belief
“In my view, those are not human lives as we understand the terms, even if they look like humanoid beings.”
24 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. In general, if you worked for the Trump administration early on, you might have had the notion you can do a lot to make things better.”
25 / belief
“Here’s a tension I think that we all have to face up to. Parfit talks about something called the person-affecting principle.”
26 / belief
“I think I’m with you. I’m not sure whether more surveillance or less surveillance is better right now.”
27 / belief
“I agree with Steven Pinker, that the chance of a very violent war indeed has gone down and is going down, maybe every year, but the tail risk is still there.”
28 / belief
“There’s a consilience across deontological and utilitarian approaches. And I think the case for rules is somewhat underrated in the literature.”
29 / belief
“Absolutely, but the idea of there being this general public movement where you get people to do the right thing by scaring them, I think that’s the opposite of how politics usually works.”
30 / belief
“I think the most plausible alternative to my view is simply to say the actual time horizon is not very long, that maybe in an extreme case, either the world will end soon or history will start collapsing and run in reverse.”
31 / belief
“I think, in the effective altruism community, we tend to give top priority to making sure that people are working on a really pressing problem, a problem that has a really huge scale that plausibly you can solve, and also that it’s neglected by other people.”
32 / belief
“I think one of the big trends in the world today is that these super powerful countries are much weaker compared to mid-level emerging economies than they were 30 years ago.”
33 / belief
“I think you’re always going to have rival blocs of some kind because the notion of having unity and no enemy doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium to me.”
34 / belief
“Whatever we can do, I suspect we’ll end up doing one way or another, so I wouldn’t put too much faith in, “Oh, we’ll regulate out the bad versions and be left with the good ones.”
35 / belief
“Who do you see as his kind of philosophical successors? Because I think of Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute.”
36 / belief
“As we develop them — if we do — we might have a better idea, but I think most people should be deeply agnostic and also somewhat worried about genetic engineering.”
37 / evaluation
“I’m sure you know the twin studies where you have identical twins separated at birth, and they grow up in two separate environments and they seem to turn out more or less the same. That’s suggesting some kinds of environmental differences don’t matter.”
38 / belief
“I agree that humans are not going to travel to other galaxies — that’s way too hard.”
39 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that counts as very low, but again, it’s going to happen sooner or later.”
40 / belief
“I think I agree that if the US stops growing that would be very bad, principally because of the cultural and political effects that that would have and perhaps that we’ve started to see over the last five years.”
41 / commitment
“Personally, I will lower aggregate societal risk and do more to innovate, save more, work harder, in some way be more dynamic.”
42 / prediction
“One possible way it could go is that it turns out to be the temperature increases much more than we expect, so we get more like 6 to 9 degrees of warming.”
43 / belief
“On Nozick, I think his actual views, which you see in his later works, involve a clear understanding that economic growth is good, but in Anarchy, State, and Utopia — it’s all about deontology.”
44 / evaluation
“I guess many people have something like this intuition that, yeah, if you change the identities of people in the future, such that you can’t see any correspondence between them in the two different scenarios, then perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly what you do because there’s no significant person you can identify who’s worse off.”
45 / belief
“If it’s going to go to zero, you’re knocked out of the box. So you’re maximizing across both of those dimensions, and I think, empirically, there are a large class of cases where more growth and more stability come together.”
46 / belief
“My view is that the US should be racing to eliminate coal, even setting aside climate change, just because of the public health gains.”
47 / belief
“You see remarkable institutions, unprecedented in human history, I don’t take those for granted they’re not automatic. But I think one has to revise the Wilson quote and be more optimistic.”
48 / belief
“Philosophers and economists should be shouting about it much more. I think some of the problem is a political one.”
49 / belief
“I think that’s fair, but it seems like over time, as our technology gets better, the number of people and the amount of expertise and the amount of security that you would need in order to pull off an operation like that is going down and down and down.”
50 / belief
“I suspect another problem there is that people worry whenever their welfare is too close to zero because they feel that it’s going to go negative, and negative experiences weigh very heavily on people’s minds.”
51 / belief
“Absolutely. I think of culture as one of the keys behind economic growth in fact.”
52 / belief
“Yeah, I agree that’s worrying, but because we have these alternative explanations that we might just be the one chance event where life began, I still had some hope that we’ll get there, we’ll be the first ones to colonize at least this part of the universe.”
53 / belief
“I guess summarizing the above, my view is that I’ve characterized you as kind of a total global, objectivist consequentialism, plus respectful of a nonaggression principle.”
54 / uncertainty
“We don’t know, but I think thinking about it more, you become a little more optimistic rather than less.”
55 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that even counts as a conspiracy theory, but it’s some kind of conspiracy.”
56 / belief
“I wasn’t sure whether to challenge you on this because I think, actually, it is good to promote the idea of human rights and to lock those into law.”
57 / belief
“In other domains, I think we need to use common sense and accept a loss of parsimony.”
58 / belief
“I don’t think the rate of growth will rise forever. My view of economic history is that growth comes in spurts.”
59 / belief
“I think where he was most important is simply being the walking, living, breathing embodiment of the philosopher who is obsessively curious and will plumb the depths of any argument to such an extreme degree like has never been seen before on planet Earth.”
60 / belief
“I’ll be shocked for us to still be eating animals the way that we produce them now in a couple hundred years because I suspect that we’ll produce meat in a much more efficient way that doesn’t involve torturing animals.”
61 / belief
“There’s no guarantee that will always hold, but I think that’s an argument for some kind of liberal freedom. But if you look at, say, China since 1979 — yes they grew because they became significantly freer, but I suspect they also did better keeping some elements of Communist Party rule in place than if they had, say, followed the advice of western reformers.”
62 / belief
“I think we can make it twice as good and quite a bit longer, but I don’t think it will be inconceivable to what we can imagine now.”
63 / belief
“I think if you’re a pluralist, that life is maybe not better at all. It has more pleasure, but these other plural values seem to be weaker because you’re pursuing only pleasure.”
64 / belief
“I think, the last few years, a lot of those technologies have made more rapid progress than I would have thought — like electric cars, like fracking.”
65 / belief
“Again, I’m not taking that for granted, but I think people would be much more optimistic if they viewed it in that light.”
66 / belief
“Simply no one had thought to write a law banning ride sharing because it hadn’t occurred to people. So if there’s a kind of empty legal space, and you do something that’s permitted, I think that’s fine.”
67 / belief
“Harsanyi had, I think, a much better version of the veil of ignorance argument that advocated in favor of something like total utilitarianism.”
68 / belief
“If you talk to venture capitalists in the Bay Area, where we’re chatting, they tend to focus much more on the person than the project. For Emergent Ventures, I think we need both the person and the project.”
69 / belief
“I think that, just as we do not discount the well-being of people who are distant from us in space per se, nor should we do so across time.”
70 / belief
“There may be this broader consilience of act and rule utilitarianism. But thinking of it in terms of a rule we’re bound to follow, I think .”
71 / belief
“I think I have an argument why that’s wrong, namely the case where you don’t commit the very harmful act.”
72 / observation
“Perhaps another argument for lower liberalism would be — you’re saying that, basically, you think there’s a high chance that humans are going to drive themselves to extinction. The reason is a lack of coordination in conflict .”
73 / belief
“I think at some point, there’ll be a new phase where we can directly make people in some way happier or more fulfilled or be more the people they want to be by manipulating something inside the brain.”
74 / belief
“Almost all of the book is focused on the consequentialist arguments for growth and thinking about the more distant future. But I add in a caveat, which I don’t discuss at length, and that is I think there are some things you simply ought not to do, even if it would boost long-term economic growth.”
75 / belief
“As we get richer, we’ll do more of it, but again, I think we’re largely indifferent to what I’m calling nature.”
76 / commitment
“To this day, when people ask me to give a narrative like that, I just kind of reject it. I refuse to do it because I don’t believe the story I’m going to tell them.”
77 / belief
“What are some occasions when your conception of human rights comes apart from the nonaggression principle? Because most of the examples I think you give in the book are cases where you’re using violence against someone.”
78 / evaluation
“If you take the intuitions they’re using in these smaller decisions and just build them up onto a larger scale, I think the logic of consequentialism is very, very hard to escape.”
79 / preference
“Very little. I’m quite a selfish person, I think, and I enjoy pursuing my own curiosity.”
80 / prediction
“I imagine that, if you were alive then, you would say that the risk of human extinction in the next hundred years would be fairly low. But then in the ’40s, we had the shock where we developed nuclear weapons, and suddenly, I think we would both agree, the risk of human extinction or the collapse of civilization went up quite substantially because, for the first time, we had the ability for one person or one country to basically wipe out most humans alive at the time.”
81 / evaluation
“They will, if they return, return in the much more distant future, but to them, only a small amount of time has passed. So should we take less care to preserve the well-being and lives of those astronauts simply because we’re shipping them away at higher speeds?”
82 / evaluation
“Nuclear weapons, to me, are always the number one issue. But that said, even if you sat down and said, “I’m going to do my best to limit nuclear war,” I don’t know what that means operationally.”
83 / evaluation
“At times, he seems to endorse a stationary state because any savings makes the first generation worse off, and they’re the least well-off people.”
84 / evaluation
“If you look at a lot of smaller countries, they’ve done a lot less wrong-doing, but they also were not in a position to. So to glorify them as the model to copy, I think is begging the question because if they had more power, well, what would they have done?”
85 / evaluation
“Because often, what’s going on is people want to say, “If you change the number of people in the future, that can’t necessarily be good or bad because there’s no specific individual in both cases who is worse off or better off.”
86 / evaluation
“I believe the biggest costs of climate change will be the stupidity of our own responses to the real problems we have, but we’ll make them much worse because we’re not always good at dealing with emergencies.”
87 / prediction
“I think that one of the main, if not quite existential risks — but it’s a risk to ongoing growth — is environmental issues.”