The Valmy

Podcast: EdgeCast Episode: Toby Ord - We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don'tRelease date: 2020-04-06Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationTOBY ORD is a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University and author of _The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. _The Conversation: https://www.edge.org/conversation/toby_ord-we-have-the-power-to-destroy-ourselves-without-the-wisdom-to-ensure-that-we

Podcast: Astral Codex Ten Podcast Episode: Book Review: HooverRelease date: 2020-03-21Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/ You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy. How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims “the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times. Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 to poor parents in the tiny Quaker farming community of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a schoolteacher. His childhood was strict. Magazines and novels were banned; acceptable reading material included the Bible and Prohibitionist pamphlets. His hobby was collecting oddly shaped sticks. His father dies when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover’s various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.

Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast Episode: #78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progressRelease date: 2020-05-22Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationCompanies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks.These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today's episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy. Danny and I talk about how to understand his team's results and what they mean (and don't mean) for how we should think about progress in AI going forward. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. Debates around the future of AI can sometimes be pretty abstract and theoretical. Danny hopes that providing rigorous measurements of some of the inputs to AI progress so far can help us better understand what causes that progress, as well as ground debates about the future of AI in a better shared understanding of the field. If this research sounds appealing, you might be interested in applying to join OpenAI's Foresight team — they're currently hiring research engineers. In the interview, Danny and I (Arden Koehler) also discuss a range of other topics, including: • The question of which experts to believe • Danny's journey to working at OpenAI • The usefulness of "decision boundaries" • The importance of Moore's law for people who care about the long-term future • What OpenAI's Foresight Team's findings might imply for policy • The question whether progress in the performance of AI systems is linear • The safety teams at OpenAI and who they're looking to hire • One idea for finding someone to guide your learning • The importance of hardware expertise for making a positive impactChapters:Rob’s intro (00:00:00)The interview begins (00:01:29)Forecasting (00:07:11)Improving the public conversation around AI (00:14:41)Danny’s path to OpenAI (00:24:08)Calibration training (00:27:18)AI and Compute (00:45:22)AI and Efficiency (01:09:22)Safety teams at OpenAI (01:39:03)Careers (01:49:46)AI hardware as a possible path to impact (01:55:57)Triggers for people’s major decisions (02:08:44)Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Ben CordellTranscriptions: Zakee Ulhaq

Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS Episode: Wollstonecraft on Sexual PoliticsRelease date: 2020-04-28Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationMary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is one of the most remarkable books in the history of ideas. A classic of early feminism, it uses what’s wrong with the relationship between men and women to illustrate what’s gone wrong with politics. It’s a story of lust and power, education and revolution. David explores how Wollstonecraft’s radical challenge to the basic ideas of modern politics continues to resonate today.Free online version of the text: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3420Recommended version to purchase: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/wollstonecraft-vindication-rights-men-and-vindication-rights-woman-and-hints?format=PB Going Deeper:In Our Time on Mary Wollstonecraft Wollstonecraft in the Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophySylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)Virginia Woolf on Mary WollstonecraftEdmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in FranceJane Austen, Sense and Sensibility See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS Episode: Hobbes on the StateRelease date: 2020-04-27Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationThomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) reimagined how we could do politics. It redefined many of the ideas that continue to shape modern politics: representation, sovereignty, the state. But in Leviathan these ideas have a strange and puzzling power. David explores what Hobbes was trying to achieve and how a vision of politics that came out of the English civil war, can still illuminate the world we live in.Free online version of the text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htmRecommended version to purchase: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/hobbes-leviathan-revised-student-edition?format=PBGoing Deeper:David Runciman, ‘The sovereign’ in The Oxford handbook of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Richard Tuck, Hobbes a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)(Video) Quentin Skinner, ‘What is the state? The question that will not go away’(Video) Sophie Smith, ‘The nature of politics’, the 2017 Quentin Skinner lecture. Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)David for The Guardian on Hobbes and the coronavirus See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Podcast: Conversations with Tyler Episode: Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a FoxRelease date: 2020-04-22Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationAccuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, and to minimize regret–such as that caused by not taking a global pandemic seriously enough. The best forecasters aren’t just intelligent, but fox-like integrative thinkers capable of navigating values that are conflicting or in tension. He joined Tyler to discuss whether the world as a whole is becoming harder to predict, whether Goldman Sachs traders can beat forecasters, what inferences we can draw from analyzing the speech of politicians, the importance of interdisciplinary teams, the qualities he looks for in leaders, the reasons he’s skeptical machine learning will outcompete his research team, the year he thinks the ascent of the West became inevitable, how research on counterfactuals can be applied to modern debates, why people with second cultures tend to make better forecasters, how to become more fox-like, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded March 26th, 2020 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Philip on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Podcast: The Portal Episode: 30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the FallRelease date: 2020-04-16Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationJust before the great indooring due to the Pandemic of 2020, Eric sat down with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss his book "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success." Over champagne flutes filled with bubbly, the two discussed the various ways that the success and excesses of American Capitalism were now distorting the American Dream into a dystopian fever vision, making it far harder to wake up from this stasis in time to avoid the previous fates of fallen empires. Thank You to Our Sponsors:Pitney Bowes: pb.com/portalWine Access: wineaccess.com/portalSkillshare: skillshare.com/portalMack Weldon: mackweldon.com and enter promo code PORTALSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Podcast: The Portal Episode: 27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding ApocalypsesRelease date: 2020-03-27Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationIn this second episode of the Portal to be released during shelter-in-place restrictions during the Corona Virus Pandemic, we release an older discussion with Daniel Shmachtenberger on whether there is any plausible long term scenario for human flourishing confined to a single shared planet. Daniel is seen as a leader of the growing Game B subculture of the human potential movement. This group bets that there is a second evolutionary stable strategy for cohabiting not based on conflict or rivalry, even for life raised in Game A (i.e. standard evolutionary and economic environments based on scarcity and rivalrous goods. Eric asks Daniel about where the bright spots and progress might be in this movement which refuses to accept the fate that that Eric has elsewhere put forward as the Twin Nuclei Problem of having unlocked the power of both Cell and Atom in the early 1950s without the wisdom to use it. Thank You To Our Sponsors:Athletic Greens: AthleticGreens.com/PortalMack Weldon: MackWeldon.com - enter promo code PORTALFour Sigmatic: FourSigmatic.com/PortalSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing Episode: An enlightening, frustrating conversation on liberalism (with Adam Gopnik)Release date: 2019-06-27Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarization“Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.”That’s from Adam Gopnik’s new book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. It is, by turns, a bracing, charming, insightful, irksome defense of the most successful political movement of our age. Liberalism is so successful, in fact, that its achievements are taken for granted while its shortcomings throb through our politics.What caught my eye about Gopnik’s book is his argument that liberalism is a temperament more than an ideology, an approach more than a prescription. As I read his argument, it felt to me that he had identified something essential and often missed in discussions of agendas and plans. But he was also developing a definition of little use in settling the core debates of our age, a liberalism that could be seen as too flexible to mean anything in particular.And so, as liberals do, we argued it out. This conversation has something to thrill and frustrate every listener. In that way, it’s like liberalism itself.Book recommendations:Life of Johnson  by James BoswellThe Open Society and Its Enemiesby Karl R. PopperNo Other Book: Selected Essays by Randall Jarrell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Podcast: 13 Minutes to the Moon Episode: Ep.01 ‘We choose to go’Release date: 2019-05-12Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationWith no idea how to get there, the race to the moon begins – "we intend to win". To understand how the story ends, we need to start at the very beginning. With Kevin Fong. Starring: Michael Collins Steve Bales Margaret Hamilton Jim Lovell Charlie Duke Theme music by Hans Zimmer for Bleeding Fingers Music #13MinutestotheMoon www.bbcworldservice.com/13minutes This episode was updated on 14 May 2019.