#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to a...
8 Nov 20222h 47min
#139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth y...
28 Okt 20223h 38min
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe (Article)
Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe, written by Benjamin Hilton. We expect that there will be substantial progress in AI in t...
14 Okt 20222h 24min
#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisd...
30 Sep 20222h 24min
#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to 'do the most good.' Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to 'produce the greatest good for the greatest number.' It's clear enough why utilitarians ...
8 Sep 20222h 21min
#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration.The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good.We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exi...
15 Aug 20222h 54min
#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into the background of our news coverage. But with the benefit of time we're in a much stronger position to...
8 Aug 202254min
#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obe...
22 Juli 20223h 41min
