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
42 published records
01 / uncertainty
“The answer is I don’t know, but one argument that I have heard is that these singular big gods actually serve moral purposes.”
02 / belief
“I think certain sex differences are largely hardwired, and so, parents shouldn’t blame themselves if they find their son is walking around pretending to fire guns at people, and their daughter’s doing more maternal play.”
03 / belief
“I can say, I think, some reasonably intelligent, maybe surprising things about social movements and how people behave in groups.”
04 / belief
“I think we tend to be good parents because the sort of person who becomes a psychologist is probably more sensitive to other people’s feelings, well-educated, and tends to be affluent enough to provide kids with good stuff.”
05 / recommendation
“I read Against Empathy, and it changed my life.” I don’t want it to sway me, but it’s hard for it not to, and so yes, that’s our weakness.”
06 / belief
“The signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too.”
07 / belief
“In some work with Laurie Santos, who had a thriving monkey lab, we found that Capuchins did the same thing.”
08 / belief
“I think we can make limited claims of potential gains from trade with humans and dogs a lot; humans and pigs quite a bit less, but still somewhat; and that ultimately, maybe we can apply some semi-Christian-like idea of mercy to how we should treat animals, and that we only have partial comparisons.”
09 / belief
“I think part of Canadian politics or parliament encourages more vibrant debate and discussion, often at a pretty high level that you don’t see in the States.”
10 / belief
“In our society, I think the life of a young baby is probably pretty difficult if your needs are not immediately satisfied.”
11 / belief
“Oh, yes, hardly rated at all these days, I think maybe just because of Jordan Peterson, who has been promoting him.”
12 / belief
“I think we should, in some way, try to reason to make the world a better place even if it involves strangling some cats.”
13 / belief
“Often, when people complain about the replication crisis, they throw away all of psychology, but personality psychology has proven surprisingly robust, and I think there’s a lot of sense in the idea.”
14 / belief
“Memories, Dreams, and Recollections is a great book, I think. I believe, with LLMs, Jung will make a comeback.”
15 / belief
“I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes and moral mistakes in my life by being too caught up in empathy.”
16 / belief
“I’ll give another argument, which is — again, trying not to be disgust-based — which is that I think that there’s a range of human relationships that are tremendously valuable, and sometimes they’re better off without sex.”
17 / belief
“I could not fashion myself as a tiger dad, but I think we should take it more seriously.”
18 / belief
“I think what we have yet to see is whether they could have a long, sustained conversation, holding in memory over multiple sessions.”
19 / belief
“If somebody said, there’s a research we’re going to do which will save a child’s life, but it will involve killing a million dogs, I think people might balk at it, but if it was killing two dogs, people wouldn’t.”
20 / belief
“I think you have a disgust reaction. That’s fine. It sounds to me like an argument that it’s imprudent, which can slide into morally wrong, but I still think there’s something out of sync between the strength of our disgust reaction and the degree of moral wrongness it has.”
21 / belief
“There’s not much of a narrative to that, but I agree that when you get it more complicated in life, it could serve all sorts of other functions.”
22 / uncertainty
“Maybe I benefit from other forms of privilege, being an older white man, but I don’t know.”
23 / belief
“I think, in other ways — I think that that’s actually a very emerging ability, the ability to tell the good from the bad.”
24 / belief
“In less wealthy countries, the kid co-sleeps and sleeps in the same room. I think that’s better off for the kid.”
25 / belief
“I think my endings are often much better than what they end up putting on the screen.”
26 / belief
“I think Oxfam has claimed it’s a few thousand dollars well spent if it could save a human life.”
27 / belief
“The skeptics will say — I think Bryan Caplan says — you get better at taking tests, you get better at a scholastic way of thinking.”
28 / belief
“If you include, by “therapy,” somebody just regularly talking to an LLM about their problems and getting some advice and everything, I think that human interaction within not too many years will be the minority of interactions.”
29 / uncertainty
“Oh, yes. It’s like everything else — cell phones, smartphones, and social media, and — I don’t know — sex, alcohol, where if you’re one individual within the community doing it, it’s extremely difficult.”
30 / belief
“You might have a very detailed argument for why all those earlier benefits have vanished, but I think I would be skeptical.”
31 / belief
“Partly, yes, but it’s something else as well. There’s some kind of G [G factor] where I think I’m actually much weaker.”
32 / belief
“You could imagine an LLM program for that, but I think when we encountered the LLM, we’d find it repellent.”
33 / evaluation
“I think that that’s right, where we take some sort of pleasure from negative emotions: sadness and fear and disgust and even guilt, shame.”
34 / evaluation
“Because although as adults, there’s a strong supposition that they’re free to do what they want, I think that the problem is that when they’re not adults, the fact that later on they can have sex — and worse, between, say, a stepfather and a stepdaughter or an uncle and a niece — the idea that sex is a possibility in the future when they’re adults corrodes the relationship early on.”
35 / evaluation
“I think I take good care to try to apply what I know, and people mistake that for, again, high IQ.”
36 / recommendation
“In fact, part of my advice, to put it somewhat cynically, is for people on job interviews, know the person you’re talking to, do the research, because it’s flattering.”
37 / recommendation
“I read your talent book, and it was actually very, very useful to me because it taught me other ways, other things to look for.”
38 / evaluation
“He also asked people, “How much would I have to pay you for you to take a pair of pliers and pull out one of your front teeth?” And people want more money to strangle a cat than to have this painful, agonizing, disfiguring thing, which, I think, says something nice about people.”
39 / prediction
“LLMs will succeed on them because they’ve seen thousands and thousands of instances on them.”
40 / evaluation
“I think in some ways, Santa Claus is an easier climb because he’s just a big guy who looks like a big beard and who climbs down chimneys and gives gifts.”
41 / evaluation
“I think you need some cultural support to make it into a God, as opposed to just some sort of strange stuff is happening that you can’t explain.”
42 / preference
“I recently asked Claude — I use it a lot — I asked it, “There’s a phenomenon in children I found.”