Can we choose who we are? (with Gavin Leech)

Can we really deeply change who we are? Can we choose our preferences, intrinsic values, or personality more generally? What are some interventions people might use to make big changes in their lives? Why might it be harder to be a generalist than a specialist? What are some of the most well-known "findings" from the social sciences that have failed to replicate? Do some replications go too far? Should we just let Twitter users take over the peer-review process? Why hasn't forecasting made major inroads into (e.g.) government yet? Why does it seem like companies sometimes commission forecasts and then ignore them? How worried should we be about deepfakes?

Gavin Leech cofounded the consultancy Arb Research. He's also a PhD candidate in AI at the University of Bristol, a head of camp at the European Summer Programme on Rationality, and a blogger at gleech.org. He's internet famous for collecting hundreds of failed replications in psychology and for having processed most of Isaac Asimov's nonfiction of the mid-twentieth-century to score his predictive performance.

Amendments:

• Gavin says: "Google shut down their 2007 market, Prophit, but they started another one in 2020 called Gleangen. It's also not going well."

Further reading

• "Long-term stability in the Big Five personality traits in adulthood" by Johanna Rantanen, Riitta-Leena Metsäpelto, Taru Feldt, Lea Pulkkinen, and Katja Kokko

Staff

• Spencer Greenberg — Host / Director
• Josh Castle — Producer
• Ryan Kessler — Audio Engineer
• Uri Bram — Factotum
• WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
• Miles Kestran — Marketing

Music

• Broke for Free
• Josh Woodward
• Lee Rosevere
• Quiet Music for Tiny Robots
• wowamusic
• zapsplat.com

Affiliates

• Clearer Thinking
• GuidedTrack
• Mind Ease
• Positly
• UpLift