#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
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...
11 Feb 20232h 42min
#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena
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 Athen...
26 Jan 20233h 15min
#79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh...
16 Jan 20232h 35min
#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the develo...
9 Jan 20232h 37min
#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is a...
4 Jan 20232h 17min
#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control W...
29 Des 20222h 40min
#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
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 ...
20 Des 20221h 47min
#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simpl...
13 Des 20222h 44min
