Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it (80k team chat #3)

In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of ...

10 Helmi 25min

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young p...

3 Helmi 2h 51min

Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of ...

27 Tammi 2h 31min

In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, et...

20 Tammi 2h 56min

When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, considering it the worst biothreat that he’d seen described...

13 Tammi 2h 9min

What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer.But today’s guest Athe...

9 Tammi 3h 30min

John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything...

6 Tammi 1h 35min

It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic’s AI Claude descends i...

29 Joulu 20251h 40min