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PODCAST

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

Spencer Greenberg

Clearer Thinking is a podcast about ideas that truly matter. If you enjoy learning about powerful, practical concepts and frameworks, wish you had more deep, intellectual conversations in your life, or are looking for non-BS self-improvement, then we think you"ll love this podcast! Each week we invite a brilliant guest to bring four important ideas to discuss for an in-depth conversation. Topics include psychology, society, behavior change, philosophy, science, artificial intelligence, math,

science social sciences

All Episodes

02:06:34

Experiments for enlightenment and fundamental...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/09/27

Read the full transcript here. Is enlightenment the same as being happy all the time? Or being at peace all the time? Or something else? What is "fundamental wellbeing"? What are the "locations" within fundamental wellbeing? What is "persistent non-symbolic experience"? How effective is the Finders Course? Are control groups necessary when researching enlightenment?Jeffery Martin is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness (nonsymbolic.org) and a research

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01:20:07

Mothers who harm their children for attention (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/09/20

Read the full transcript here. What is Munchausen syndrome? How does Munchausen syndrome differ from malingering? Does Munchausen usually correlate with lying or exaggerating in other contexts (i.e., pathological lying)? What is "Munchausen by Proxy" (AKA "factitious disorder imposed on another", or FDIA)? Why are women the offenders in the overwhelming majority of cases? What are some consistent patterns of behavior exhibited by people with MBP? What is a "reality distortion field"? How do people

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01:12:42

Is evolutionary psychology just a bunch of "just so"...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/09/13

Read the full transcript here. Why do even people who accept evolutionary explanations for most biological phenomena often push back against evolutionary explanations for human psychology? To what extent should humans adjust their behavior in light of evopsych findings? How do evopsych researchers avoid formulating "just so" stories to explain specific behaviors? What can we infer about human behavior from the behaviors of chimps, bonobos, gorillas, or orangutans? What is the evopsych view of

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01:26:19

Systems of governance built on prediction markets...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/09/07

Read the full transcript here. What is futarchy? Why does it seem to be easier to find social innovations rather than technical innovations? How does it differ from democracy? In what ways might a futarchy be gamed? What are some obstacles to implementing futarchy? Do we actually like for our politicians to be hypocritical to some degree? How mistaken are we about our own goals for social, political, and economic institutions? Do we enjoy fighting (politically) more than actually governing well and

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00:48:04

Using metacognitive therapy to break the habit of...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/08/30

Read the full transcript here. What is metacognitive therapy? How does MCT differ from CBT, DBT, and other mental health therapy paradigms? How do we know we're spending time worrying about the right things? How much time spent worrying is actually useful? How aware are we of our own tendencies to ruminate on certain negative thoughts? Does MCT avoid all content-based problem-solving? What is the state of the evidence for MCT?Dr. Pia Callesen is one of Denmark's most educated and experienced

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01:08:47

How quickly is AI advancing? And should you be...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/08/23

Read the full transcript here. Along what axes and at what rates is the AI industry growing? What algorithmic developments have yielded the greatest efficiency boosts? When, if ever, will we hit the upper limits of the amount of computing power, data, money, etc., we can throw at AI development? Why do some people seemingly become fixated on particular tasks that particular AI models can't perform and draw the conclusion that AIs are still pretty dumb and won't be taking our jobs any time soon

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01:07:19

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

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/08/16

Read the full transcript here. 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

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01:26:45

Normalizing catastrophes and catastrophizing normalcy...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/08/09

Read the full transcript here. Besides the need to attract attention, what are some other drivers behind the news media's tendency to "catastrophize the normal"? To what extent does paltering take place on the politically left and right ends of the new media spectrum? Should journalists try to be as objective and unbiased as possible, or should they strive to make a difference in the world by highlighting particular issues that are important to them? Is the US on the verge of a civil war? Are

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01:25:32

What's wrong with society, and how can we fix it?...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/08/02

Read the full transcript here. What's wrong with society? And what can we do to fix it? Centuries ago, a person's grandparents lived in a world that was basically identical to that person's world; but what are the implications of living in a time when the rate of technological change is such that our grandparents' world was almost nothing like ours, and ours will be almost nothing like our grandchildren's? How do Tim's concepts of the "primitive mind" and the "higher mind" map onto System 1 and

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01:02:47

AI creativity and love (with Joel Lehman)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/07/26

Read the full transcript here. Where does innovation come from? How common is it for "lone wolf" scientists to make large leaps in innovation by themselves? How can we imbue AIs with creativity? Or, conversely, how can we apply advances in AI creativity to our own personal creative processes? How do creative strategies that work well for individuals differ from creative strategies that work well for groups? To what extent are models like DALL-E and ChatGPT "creative"? Can machines love? Or can they

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01:17:06

Glimpses of enlightenment through nondual meditation...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/07/19

Read the full transcript here. How does nondual meditation differ from other forms of meditation? Is nonduality the sort of thing a person can just "get" immediately? What value is provided by the more effortful, less "sudden" forms of meditation? Is there such a thing as full or complete enlightenment? And what would such a state entail? To what extent do nondual meditation teachers agree about what nonduality is? Are glimpses of enlightenment available to everyone? How long does it usually take a

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01:03:01

Crumbling institutions, culture wars, and the...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/07/12

Read the full transcript here. What is the New Enlightenment? What might it mean to improve our epistemics with regard to institutions? How should we fix imbalanced salience in contexts where misinformation is a problem (like news media)? How have the economics of institutions deteriorated? How can we continually reinvigorate systems so that they remain ungameable and resistant to runaway feedback loops? In the context of government in particular, how can we move away from "one dollar, one vote"

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01:19:02

Virtual reality, simulation theory, consciousness,...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/07/05

Read the full transcript here. What does philosophy have to say about virtual reality (VR)? Under what conditions is "normal" reality preferable to VR? To what extent are VR experiences "real"? How likely is it that we're living in a simulation? What implications would the discovery that we're living in a simulation have for our beliefs about reality? How common is Bayesian thinking among philosophers? How should we think about identity over time if selves can be split or duplicated? What might it

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01:20:06

Deep canvassing, street epistemology, and other tools...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/06/28

Read the full transcript here. What is persuasion, and what is it not? How does persuasion differ from coercion? What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion? How are the concepts of assimilation and accommodation related to persuasion? Motivated reasoning is usually seen as a cognitive bias or error; but what if all reasoning is motivated? Are we motivated more by physical death or social death? How much evidence would Flat-Earthers need in order to be convinced that Earth is

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01:25:26

Will AI destroy civilization in the near future?...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/06/21

Read the full transcript here. Does AI pose a near-term existential risk? Why might existential risks from AI manifest sooner rather than later? Can't we just turn off any AI that gets out of control? Exactly how much do we understand about what's going on inside neural networks? What is AutoGPT? How feasible is it to build an AI system that's exactly as intelligent as a human but no smarter? What is the "CoEm" AI safety proposal? What steps can the average person take to help mitigate risks from

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01:01:24

Is AI development moving too fast or not fast enough?...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/06/14

Read the full transcript here. Many people who work on AI safety advocate for slowing the rate of development; but might there be any advantages in speeding up AI development? Which fields are likely to be impacted the most (or the least) by AI? As AIs begin to displace workers, how can workers make themselves more valuable? How likely is it that AI assistants will become better at defending against users who are actively trying to circumvent assistants' guardrails? What effects would the

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01:24:40

Where philosophy meets the real world (with Peter...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/06/07

Read the full transcript here. How have animal rights and the animal rights movement changed in the last few decades? How has the scale of animal product consumption grown relative to human population growth? On what principles ought animal ethics to be grounded? What features of human psychology enable humans to empathize with and dislike animal suffering and yet also eat animal products regularly? How does the agribusiness industry convince people to make choices that go against their own values

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01:24:49

Large language models, deep peace, and the meaning...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/05/31

Read the full transcript here. What are large language models (LLMs) actually doing when they churn out text? Are they sentient? Is scale the only difference among the various GPT models? Google has seemingly been the clear frontrunner in the AI space for many years; so how did they fail to win the race to LLMs? And why are other competing companies having such a hard time catching their LLM tech up to OpenAI's? What are the implications of open-sourcing LLM code, models, and corpora? How concerned

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01:06:09

Censorship, cancel culture, and truth-seeking (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/05/24

When is a certain speech act an opinion versus a call to action? Does that distinction matter for censorship purposes? Why does it seem that human behavior tends towards censorship rather than towards freedom of expression? Is feeling emotionally or politically harmed a valid reason for censoring certain speech acts? Will it always be the case that, given enough time, truth will win out over ignorance, bullshit, misinformation, and lies? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for creating

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01:12:23

Why are birth rates plummeting? And how much does it...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2023/05/18

Read the full transcript here. What is pro-natalism? How fast are birth rates falling around the world? How long will it take for us to really feel the effects of population collapse? What are the primary drivers of population collapse? How does the current difficulty of raising children compare to other periods in history? What roles do various religions and philosophies play in population dynamics? What are some non-coercive ways to encourage population growth? What constitutes an

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297 results

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