The Advantages and Disadvantages of Polymaths

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You're quite an academic polymath, studying a bunch of different things. How has having this cross-disciplined approach or ability to study all these different areas? How has that impacted your capability in going deep to individual areas? We haven't touched on aliens as well, and maybe we'll have to do another episode just on that altogether. Yeah, exactly. But how is that more general purpose, kind of large learning allowed you to go deep into these specific areas so well? Well, polymaths have advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that if a topic just requires that you understand and bring many things, then the polymath is up to that.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason. He is known for a number of his works including Prediction Markets and Futarchy, writings on the possibility of alien life with both the Great Filter and Grabby Aliens, his book The Elephant In The Brain about our social programming, as well as extensive work and thought in the field of artificial intelligence including a very prescient series of debates and writings with Eliezer Yudkowsky 15 years ago.

(0:00) Intro

(0:54) Introducing Robin Hanson

(5:47) Defining basic concepts

(9:47) The alignment problem

(19:43) Property rights in A.I.

(21:48) The recent A.I. ecosystem

(30:01) GPT4

(33:51) A.I. Doomerism

(38:04) Rabbit hole analogy

(43:47) A.I. Critic Scenario

(51:57) Risks associated with A.I.

(57:24) Pausing development on A.I. to focus on implications

(1:02:33) Predictions by 2028 A.I. will not be able to cross

(1:08:15) Fast takeoff scenario

(1:15:39) Brain emulation

(1:22:19) Cryonics

Show Notes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuXl-iidnFY

Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky

Produced: Rashad Assir

Executive Producer: Josh Machiz

Music: Griff Lawson

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About the Show

Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.

Executive Producer: Rashad Assir

Producer: Leah Clapper

Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky

Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

🎙 Listen to the show

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1

Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg

🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1

Follow on Socials

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow

🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow

🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow

About the Show

Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.