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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

01:16:16

Who really controls US elections? (with Bradley Tusk)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/10/02

Read the full transcript here. What's the reality of how politicians get elected in the US? How much of a role does gerrymandering play? Are Democrats and Republicans equally guilty of gerrymandering? Do the parties secretly collaborate on gerrymandering? Is gerrymandering legal? What determines who wins a primary election? What percent of all government positions are actually contested? What are the five main types of politicians? We use our phones to manage our bank accounts, medical records, and

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01:34:35

Communities of belief vs. communities of chemistry...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/09/25

Read the full transcript here. Do people need more community in their lives? What makes for a good community? Can you really belong to a community if you don't share its core values? Is social chemistry transitive? Do "communities of belief" form and build trust more quickly than "communities of chemistry"? Do rationalists avoid taking "vibes", intuition, or instinct into account when forming communities? Can you learn how to do a thing simply by pretending that you're a pro? What can you learn

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01:21:09

Everyone — including you! — should host more events...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/09/19

Read the full transcript here. Why should people host more events than they do right now? Under what conditions shouldn't a person host more events? Do these suggestions apply to introverts? What's the best RSVP tool? What is "double opt-in"? What's the ideal length of time for a social event? What kinds of ice-breaker activities, if any, should hosts use? What are the primary factors that affect people's enjoyment of an event? What does it mean to "compress and release" in an event or party

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01:21:10

What do we know for sure about human psychology?...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/09/11

Read the full transcript here. How much progress has psychology made on the things that matter most to us? What are some psychological findings we feel pretty confident are true? How much consensus is there about the Big 5 personality traits? What are the points of disagreement about the Big 5? Are traits the best way of thinking about personality? How consistent are the Big 5 traits across cultures? How accurately do people self-report their own personality? When are psychophysical measures more or

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01:18:03

Pattern-breaking ideas, and startups that change the...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/09/04

Read the full transcript here. What mistakes do investors make when trying to predict which startups will succeed? Which matters more: a startup's team or its central idea? How do startup founders differ from other capitalists? What makes something a "pattern-breaking" idea or behavior? Are startup founders less sensitive to negative feedback than the average person? Is it possible to achieve startup success without challenging the status quo? Is it true that 90% of startups fail? What is

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01:09:56

Decision-making and play-testing (with Dan Epstein)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/08/28

What sorts of decisions are we making without even realizing we're making them? Are people aware of their own values? Do they know how those values rank relative to each other? What are all the various parties, interests, and values that have to be addressed and balanced when making decisions in a healthcare context? What does it mean to "play-test" yourself? What are the best strategies for giving feedback? How much energy is required to make various kinds of decisions? How can we practice and get

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01:03:54

The path to utopia (with Nick Bostrom)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/08/24

Why do there seem to be more dystopias than utopias in our collective imagination? Why is it easier to find agreement on what we don't want than on what we do want? Do we simply not know what we want? What are "solved worlds", "plastic worlds", and "vulnerable worlds"? Given today's technologies, why aren't we working less than we potentially could? Can humanity reach a utopia without superintelligent AI? What will humans do with their time, and/or how will they find purpose in life, if AIs take

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01:44:04

Physical limits and the long-term future (with Anders...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/08/14

Read the full transcript here. How much energy is needed for GDP growth? Would our civilization have developed at the same rate without fossil fuels? Could we potentially do the same things we're currently doing but with significantly less energy? How different would the world look if we'd developed nuclear energy much earlier? Why can't anything go faster than light? Will the heat death of the universe really be "the end" for everything? How can difficult concepts be communicated in simple ways

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01:53:29

Becoming a goat to avoid existential dread (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/08/07

Read the full transcript here. How hard is it to construct a toaster from scratch? Do we in modern times individually have more knowledge than individuals living 100 or 1,000 years ago? Should corporations be thought of as a kind of emergent artificial intelligence? To what extent are corporations — and more broadly, whole economies — aligned with human values? Which animals experience the smallest amount of existential dread? Are humans at the top of the evolutionary "pyramid"? Is it possible to

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01:04:48

AI apocalypticism vs. AI optimism (with Adam Russell)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/08/01

Read the full transcript here. What is "apocaloptimism"? Is there a middle ground between apocalypticism and optimism? What are the various camps in the AI safety and ethics debates? What's the difference between "working on AI safety" and "building safe AIs"? Can our social and technological coordination problems be solved only by AI? What is "qualintative" research? What are some social science concepts that can aid in the development of safe and ethical AI? What should we do with things that

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01:41:47

Should we trust papers published in top social...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/07/24

Read the full transcript here. How much should we trust social science papers in top journals? How do we know a paper is trustworthy? Do large datasets mitigate p-hacking? Why doesn't psychology as a field seem to be working towards a grand unified theory? Why aren't more psychological theories written in math? Or are other scientific fields mathematicized to a fault? How do we make psychology cumulative? How can we create environments, especially in academia, that incentivize constructive

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01:07:53

Is psychology the same across cultures? (with Joseph...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/07/17

What are "WEIRD" cultures? What percentage of the world's population is WEIRD? Why do WEIRD cultures tend to use analytic thinking (as opposed to the wholistic thinking used in non-WEIRD cultures)? Does school make you more intelligent or merely more knowledgeable? Do individualistic cultures tend to innovate more than collectivistic cultures? How does moral reasoning differ between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures? Is the world becoming more WEIRD? How diverse are non-WEIRD cultures?Joseph Henrich is

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02:34:19

Spencer on The 80,000 Hours Podcast discussing money...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/07/10

Read the full transcript here. NOTE: Spencer appeared as a guest on The 80,000 Hours Podcast back in March, and this episode is our release of that recording. Thanks to the folks at The 80,000 Hours Podcast for sharing both their audio and transcript with us!Does money make people happy? What's the difference between life satisfaction and wellbeing? In other contexts, critics are quick to point out that correlation does not equal causation; so why do they so often seem to ignore such equations when

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01:00:21

Concrete actions anyone can take to help improve AI...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/07/03

Why should we consider slowing AI development? Could we slow down AI development even if we wanted to? What is a "minimum viable x-risk"? What are some of the more plausible, less Hollywood-esque risks from AI? Even if an AI could destroy us all, why would it want to do so? What are some analogous cases where we slowed the development of a specific technology? And how did they turn out? What are some reasonable, feasible regulations that could be implemented to slow AI development? If an AI becomes

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01:10:31

What do socialism and effective altruism have in...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/06/26

Read the full transcript here. What does effective altruism look like from a leftist / socialist perspective? Are the far left and EA the only groups that take radical egalitarianism seriously? What are some of the points of agreement and disagreement between EA & socialism? Socialists frequently critique the excesses, harms, and failures of capitalism; but what do they have to say about the effectiveness of capitalism to produce wealth, goods, and services? Is socialism just a top-down mirror

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01:21:13

Raising our happiness baseline (with Sasha Chapin)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/06/19

Read the full transcript here. How easy is it to shift our baseline level of happiness? What sorts of things can most effectively shift that baseline? And are they highly specific to each individual or generalizable to most people? What are the differences between conceptual and phenomenal self-love? Why might it be useful to view shame as a kink? How does self-love or self-acceptance differ from indulging or even just tolerating the worst parts of yourself? What's the best way to think about "woo"

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01:20:10

Worldviews, altruism, and embracing variance (with...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/06/12

Read the full transcript here. How does Emmett's worldview differ from the standard Silicon Valley worldview? What's the difference between an ideology and a worldview? What's middle management useful for? How might democracy be improved? How important is optimism? Why do people seem to get less done each day than they expect to get done? When is high variance beneficial? Does every startup have a point where it seems like they're going to fail? What's the best and worst startup advice out there

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01:25:38

Two things shape the course of your life: luck and...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/06/05

Read the full transcript here. Should people spend more time becoming better decision-makers? What are the main things that determine how our lives turn out? What's wrong with pro / con lists? When should we deviate from making decisions based on expected value calculations? What kinds of uncertainty might we encounter in the decision-making process? Are explicit decision calculations self-defeating? How similar is intuitive decision-making to decision-making that's based on calculations? How useful

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01:24:32

What we know and don't know about nutrition (with Gil...

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/05/29

Read the full transcript here. How do we know what's true in nutrition? Why aren't nutrition studies seemingly as "definitive" as (e.g.) physics experiments often seem to be? What is the "hierarchy of evidence"? Why is there such a disconnect between the kinds of evidence that actually seem to persuade people and the kinds of evidence that scientists view as valid and meaningful? How can we talk about specific foods in ways that avoid labelling them as always good or always bad? Is the Mediterranean

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01:12:41

Measuring everything that matters (with Doug Hubbard)

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg ·

2024/05/22

Read the full transcript here. Can we measure everything that matters to us? When is measuring the correlates of a thing pretty much just as good as measuring the thing itself? Why are some people resistant to measuring certain things? What are some things people should be measuring but aren't? What's the connection between measuring things and assigning probabilities to events? How much do we know about how well human intuition performs against "doing the math"? How inconsistent are we at applying

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290 results

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