Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 26evaluation 4observation 3commitment 3uncertainty 3prediction 2preference 1recommendation 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
43 published records
“I think in part people's intuition is maybe formed in cases like extinction, where if you have an animal that's going extinct, if half of the animals get wiped out, that's somehow less bad than if both halves of the animals get wiped out.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I've done Oxford to Morocco, when I moved from Princeton out to Stanford, I hitchhiked a bunch of other times, down to New Orleans, various other places. I think probably the biggest tip for hitchhiking is to stand in a good place.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“There's structure at the scale of viruses all the way to structure at the scale of galaxies.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think we've mentioned a couple of other bounds like this where there's no principled reason you might have anticipated ex ante why there would be such a bound that prevents something that just gets in our way, but it just so happens to be this way.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“There's something to that sort of finality which makes existential risk salient in the first place. And if you agree with that intuition, then I think you should be inclined to think that there is something significant about the fact that in some base reality, like genuinely the story carries forward.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I mean, that's partly part of the reason is that it's a much more specialized field.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Clearly, there are many disanalogies between human intelligence in these large language models, but I think at the right level of abstraction, it may be the same.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“On the other hand, we also have plans for our future that involve exponential growth, and eventually we will run low on that mass.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“We think that in particular, if we're going to do computations with it, for example, that there's going to be—and that computation makes errors—that there is a fixed cost of a bit, basically a bit of free energy, in order to correct those errors.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I'm not sure if you're suggesting in the physical universe or in some hypothetical universe where the vacuum could be different, as in, in reality there are other pockets with different vacuums, or that hypothetically they could exist, or that our universe counterfactually could have been one of these? I don't know.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think that's certainly true, that it is definitely seeing more examples than any of us will ever see in our life.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The problem is that if you have a rope that saturates the bound as strong as any rope can be, it is just strong enough to support all of its own weight exactly on the edge there, with exactly no strength left over to support any payload it might wish to carry.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“You have an intuition that if something is real, it needs to be spatially localized, and things that are delocalized in space somehow can't be real. I would say that that's not my intuition.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I would say we should definitely build another one if it was cheap to do so, and we should build another one once AGI has made us all so rich that it's cheap to do so.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If for no other reason than there is a minimum background temperature caused by the expansion of our universe—again, it all comes back to the cosmological constant—that gives a very small but non-zero temperature to our universe, that I think will inevitably mean that we make errors.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Ah, you know, I think maybe we need to back up to in what sense the humans do or don't think natively in higher dimensions.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If universes can expand a lot, then at all, according to the gravitational theory, then quantum mechanics will naturally populate those bits that can expand a lot, and so you'll naturally end up with an expanding universe. So I would say probably in my heart, slightly higher than 50%, but I'm going to round it down to 50 out of epistemic humility.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I would say that typically theoretical physicists are not particularly well-calibrated and tend to be in love with all their own theories and make highly confident predictions about their own theories.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“What I'm describing is changing the way that the universe looks around you, changing the cosmological constant. So I think again, changing water into water vapor into water is a great analogy here.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In the late 90s, he wrote down an exact, we believe, an exact duality between a particular theory of quantum gravity, some particular flavor of string theory, and a non-gravitational theory that lives on the boundary of that space.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don't know how many people are in research, but it's like thousands and thousands and thousands.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think general relativity is really an extraordinary story. It's pretty unusual in the history of physics that you, to first approximation, just have one guy who sits down and thinks really, really hard with lots of thought experiments about jumping up and down in elevators and beetles moving on the surface of planets and all the rest of it, and at the end of that time writes down a theory that completely reconceptualizes nature's most familiar force and also speaks not just to that, but speaks to the origin and fate of the universe and almost immediately achieves decisive experimental confirmation in the orbits of astronomical observations or the orbits of planets and the deflections of lights during eclipses and stuff like that.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Absolutely, it does. But quite how much counterfactual progress we'd make if that weren't true, I don't know.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I would say that there are three categories. There are things like quantum mechanics and general relativity that are not logically inevitable but do seem to be attractors in some sense.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If the laws of physics are as we believe them to be, and if we do not blow ourselves up in some other way, this is an issue that our distant descendants will eventually have to confront.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think earlier you said, "I wouldn't be that crazy." But also, "It's not as easy as a Dyson sphere.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think if you ask them hard research problems, you certainly can come up with problems that they can't solve.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“My answer would be that if the isomorphism was just an approximation -- if it was really one thing and you were just pretending it was the other thing, and that approximation worked in some region of validity and not others -- then I would say that one was right and the other one was just an alternative, fanciful description.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Let's just take that as an example bound. We think you can't, according to the laws of science as we understand it.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Many of the tasks that I might have performed in the past, I think, are already automated at some level.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think maybe this is a philosophical difference, where you maybe think that the way that a theory is good is that it best matches the data with some loss minimization.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If you make me make a number, I think that there is a greater than 90% chance that in 100 years, we are still limited by the speed of light.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think some people are just totally normal people. Families moving their child to college, and you get there and you help them move some stuff into the dorm room just to, just to thank you, all the way through to absolutely wild cases.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I enjoy the experience of meeting people and the weird episodic sense of which, just, you never know what's going to happen. I think I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity, and I enjoy that.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If you get a bad spot, get out of there on any means necessary because there's, because there's probably a thousand X variance in how high quality hitchhiking spots are, I would say.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“An example that sometimes people use is a puddle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is, that this depression in the ground seemed to have been made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist. And our view would have said, "No, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it isn't self-adapted to the hole in the ground.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If we can make them long enough and pure enough, then they will be strong enough that we will be able to build a space elevator around Earth in, you know, maybe sometime in the next century, that you only need a couple of doublings of the thickness of the carbon nanotubes along its entire length.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Then this is a matter of extreme interest, I would say, to us. It won't be relevant for tens of billions of years, probably, because that's the timescale on which the cosmological constant operates.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In my mind, you need to worry about that less because if you are a mass murderer, it's really not a high expected value strategy to cruise around looking for hitchhikers since there are so few of them.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“A solar mass black hole, if you don't help it, will take about 10 to the 55 times the current age of the universe to have given out all its energy back into the universe.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“It's a little bit confusing because in one context, we're laying out very practical—I don't know if you can call black hole batteries practical—but very tangible limitations on the what future, like very distant future descendants, could do with all the matter in the galaxy and so forth.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In fact, there's many lower minima out there to which we can transition spontaneously or because of our own deliberate action.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Just because enough people have generously picked me up down the years that I just feel as though it's my duty and sort of not subject to a cost benefit analysis.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast