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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

00:54:26

How can we un-break politics? (with Magnus Vinding)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/12/21

Read the full transcript here. How can we as individuals and as societies un-break politics? What is the two-step ideal of reasoned politics? How might this ideal apply to specific political issues, like free speech? Is it possible to reach agreement or even compromise on political issues that are rooted in intrinsic values? How can we reduce our own political biases? Are there some political issues which must always or by definition be zero-sum, or can all issues conceivably become

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01:16:47

Why capitalism doesn't live up to its promises (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/12/14

Read the full transcript here. Why doesn't capitalism seem to be living up to its promises of free and fair competition, low prices, and high quality goods and services (at least in Western nations)? What did Adam Smith fail to foresee about the ways economic systems would change on the way to 2022? What is "common ownership", and what effects does it have on economies? What interventions should be implemented to keep an economy healthy? Is it easier to put pressure on business leaders or

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00:53:42

Anti-interoperability, vendor lock-in, and high...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/12/07

Read the full transcript here. What is interoperability? What counts as "unauthorized" access to computers or parts of computers? If the rendered design of a web page is copyrighted, then does blocking ads on that page count as copyright infringement by creating a derivative product? Does Facebook really want what's best for its users? Is Google evil? Could blockchain-based solutions provide much-needed privacy or interoperability? Why doesn't the U.S. government (for example) fight harder to

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01:11:43

Separating the sinner from the sin (with Khomotso...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/11/30

Read the full transcript here. What is a criminal label? What implications should criminal labels have (or not) for a person's future? To what extent are the long-term social effects considered as part of the sentence for a crime (e.g., not only considering sending a person to prison for 5 years but also considering how likely they are to be shunned socially or to be prevented from working certain kinds of jobs after their release)? How does the concept of dignity differ from the concept of rights

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03:24:44

The FTX catastrophe (with Byrne Hobart, Vipul Naik,...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/11/28

What the heck happened with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried? Were there early warning signs that most people failed to notice? What could've been done differently, and by whom? What effects will this have on the EA movement going forward?Timestamps:00:01:37 — Intro & timeline00:51:48 — Byrne Hobart01:39:52 — Vipul Naik02:18:35 — Maomao Hu02:41:19 — Marcus Abramovitch02:49:38 — Ozzie Gooen03:21:40 — Wrap-up & outroByrne Hobart writesThe Diff, a newsletter covering inflections in finance and tech,

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00:54:50

How to find out what people in rural communities...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/11/23

Read the full transcript here. What is the field of development? What are the differences between rapid and participatory rural appraisal? Under what conditions should qualitative surveys be preferred over quantitative and vice versa? What is participatory mapping? How has the field of development changed over the last few decades? Why do people get taller when sanitation improves?Robert Chambers is a British academic and development practitioner. He spent his academic career at the Institute of

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00:59:44

Building healthy relationships (with Jayson Gaddis)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/11/16

Read the full transcript here. What are the main categories of interpersonal relationship problems? What's really going on when most people say they have a "communication" problem? What are the criteria for being a good listener? What's the "right" amount of conflict to have in a healthy relationship? How can we best express our wants and needs? What sorts of requests are reasonable (or not) to make of our relationship partners? People can get along just fine when they differ on little things, like

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01:17:16

Bringing rationality into politics (with Elizabeth...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/11/09

Read the full transcript here. How do campaign and election dynamics affect the sorts of people that politicians court and the kinds of platforms they build? How well can we really know non-voters' preferences? What would your life be like if your most treasured belief turned out to be false? What are all the ramifications of voting against your own party? To what extent is "political capital" a real, legit thing? Do politicians actually manage to get anything useful done despite the constant

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01:47:09

Sex workers — empowered, or victims? (with Melissa...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/11/02

Read the full transcript here. Content warning: Please be aware that rape and sexual abuse are discussed in this episode. If you are particularly sensitive to these issues, then please take care when listening.How have identity politics and social media changed sex work? To what extent is sex work work? Under what conditions is a sex worker a victim of abuse? Why does rape seem so much worse than other kinds of physical abuse? Does an increase in access to sex workers necessarily cause an increase

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01:15:30

What, if anything, do AIs understand? (with ChatGPT...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/10/26

Read the full transcript here. Can machines actually be intelligent? What sorts of tasks are narrower or broader than we usually believe? GPT-3 was trained to do a "single" task: predicting the next word in a body of text; so why does it seem to understand so many things? What's the connection between prediction and comprehension? What breakthroughs happened in the last few years that made GPT-3 possible? Will academia be able to stay on the cutting edge of AI research? And if not, then what will

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01:32:12

Forecasting the things that matter (with Peter...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/10/21

Read the full transcript here. How can we change the way we think about expertise (or the trustworthiness of any information source) using forecasting? How do prediction markets work? How can we use prediction markets in our everyday lives? Are prediction markets more trustworthy than large or respectable news outlets? How long does it take to sharpen one's prediction skills? In (e.g.) presidential elections, we know that the winner will be one person from a very small list of people; but how can

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01:23:25

Is the universe a computer? (with Joscha Bach)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/10/12

Read the full transcript here. What is intelligence? What exactly does an IQ test measure? What are the similarities and differences between the structure of GPT-3 and the structure of the human brain (so far as we understand it)? Is suffering — as the Buddhists might say — just a consequence of the stories we tell about ourselves and the world? What's left (if anything) of the human mind if we strip away the "animal" parts of it? We've used our understanding of the human brain to inform the

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01:26:36

Inventions, stories, and ideas that don't matter...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/10/05

Read the full transcript here. How does 3D-printed food work? How do hackers and inventors think? What are some ideas that don't matter? Why are humans so driven by stories? What are the current sentiments around nuclear energy? What is an "information DMZ"? Is "cryptocurrency regulation" a contradiction in terms? What are "deep" and "shallow" technologies? How could we handle intellectual property rights more fairly?Pablos is a hacker and inventor that runs Deep Future, a venture capital firm

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01:05:04

Humble-bragging, counter-signalling, and impression...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/09/28

Read the full transcript here. What should we do (or not do) to make a good first impression on others? Is "humble-bragging" better or worse than straightforward bragging? Or is completely hiding our successes an even better strategy than humble-bragging or straightforward bragging? When do our attempts to signal something about ourselves actually end up signalling something else that we don't intend? What are some long-term strategies for gaining others' respect?Övül Sezer is a behavioral

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01:05:39

Ambition and expected value at extremes (with Habiba...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/09/21

Read the full transcript here. Are ambition and altruism compatible? How ambitious should we be if we want to do as much good in the world as possible? How should we handle expected values when the probabilities become very small and/or the values of the outcomes become very large? What's a reasonable probability of success for most entrepreneurs to aim for? Are there non-consequentialist justifications for longtermism?Habiba Islam is an advisor at 80,000 Hours where she talks to people one-on-one,

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01:20:52

Career science, open science, and inspired science...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/09/14

Read the full transcript here. How much should we actually trust science? Are registered reports more trustworthy than meta-analyses? How does "inspired" science differ from "open" science? Open science practices may make research more defensible, but do they make it more likely to find truth? Do thresholds (like p < 0.05) represent a kind of black-and-white thinking, since they often come to represent a binary like "yes, this effect is significant" or "no, this effect is not significant"? What

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01:06:27

Estimating the long-term impact of our actions today...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/09/07

Read the full transcript here. What is longtermism? Is the long-term future of humanity (or life more generally) the most important thing, or just one among many important things? How should we estimate the chance that some particular thing will happen given that our brains are so computationally limited? What is "the optimizer's curse"? How top-down should EA be? How should an individual reason about expected values in cases where success would be immensely valuable but the likelihood of that

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01:16:37

The differences between analytic and continental...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/08/31

Read the full transcript here. What is the genetic fallacy? How do the analytic and continental philosophical traditions differ? What is the role and value of intuition in analytic philosophy? Is continental philosophy too poetic for its own good?Alexander Prescott-Couch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is currently writing a book on genealogy that is under contract with Oxford University Press. His academic work has appeared in journals such as Noûs and

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01:17:39

Voting method reform in the US (with Aaron Hamlin)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/08/24

Read the full transcript here. Does the US have one of the worst implementations of democracy in the world? Why do people sometimes seem to vote against their own interests? Is it rational for them to do so? How robust are various voting systems to strategic voting? What sorts of changes would we notice in the US if we suddenly switched to other voting systems? How hard would it be to migrate from our current voting systems to something more robust and fair, and what would be required to make that

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01:38:17

Critiquing Effective Altruism (with Michael Nielsen...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2022/08/19

Read the full transcript here. What is Effective Altruism? Which parts of the Effective Altruism movement are good and not so good? Who outside of the EA movement are doing lots of good in the world? What are the psychological effects of thinking constantly about the trade-offs of spending resources on ourselves versus on others? To what degree is the EA movement centralized intellectually, financially, etc.? Does the EA movement's tendency to quantify everything, to make everything legible to

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297 results

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