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Divia Eden and Ben Goldhaber of Mutuals interviewed me about what I’ve been thinking about over the last 5 years. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. (Link to audio on Youtube with clickable timestamps.)Topics discussed include:* what religion and spirituality might have to offer moral philosophy, AI alignment, and AI coordination* Christopher Langan's theory-of-everything, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, and how it might provide coherent intellectual foundations for synthesizing the metaphysical claims found across religious and spiritual traditions* speculations about non-naive interpretations of "the afterlife" * my interpretation of the Second Coming of Christ as a potential self-fulfilling prophecy, along with speculations about what it might look like* what embodied cognition means to me, and why it's led me to have longer AGI timelinesTable of contentsShow Notes[0:00] Introducing Alex[1:51] What is metaphysics?[2:54] Tenuous metaphysical assumptions behind the is-ought problem[4:43] Alex's AI alignment journey[8:30] Healing infant trauma – Alex's first formative spiritual experience[10:25] The relevance of spiritual experiences for moral philosophy[12:34] Convergent philosophical views among religious and spiritual traditions[14:43] Alex’s take on Buddhism[16:19] Mathematical formalizations of truth, goodness, and beauty might essentially coincide[18:21] Alex’s take on Christ’s crucifixion[20:14] Alex’s first "direct experience of God"[22:23] Psychological distortions as a central problem in AI alignment and AI coordination[25:18] A secular lens on spirituality – addressing psychological distortions[28:53] Introducing Chris Langan and the CTMU[29:41] How Alex got interested in the CTMU[32:48] Alex attempts to summarize core ideas of the CTMU[35:25] Alex’s ITT-passing habit[37:15] On Chris Langan’s political views[39:08] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 1 – acting from behind the universal veil of ignorance[40:03] Logical time and the "lazy evaluation" of reality[41:31] Spirituality vs the orthogonality thesis[46:19] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 2 – elaborations on "ethics as self-interest"[48:15] Speedrunning the AI "danger zone"?[49:20] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 3 – "we are all one"[50:52] "Reincarnation" and "the afterlife"[54:53] How might information get transferred across lifetimes?[58:17] Is love a spandrel?[59:18] "Reincarnation" and "souls"[1:04:56] Karma[1:06:47] Overt physicalist vs subtle physicalist vs non-physicalist explanations[1:07:36] Cross-lightcone effects of prayer via influencing wave function collapse[1:10:18] The physicalism null hypothesis, pt 1[1:11:19] Cross-hemisphere remote healing with ayahuasca?[1:12:13] Learning from "plant spirits"[1:17:22] The physicalism null hypothesis, pt 2[1:19:45] "The afterlife" as already happening, but occluded by psychological distortions[1:23:37] The CTMU as an articulation of the metaphysical a priori[1:24:54] CTMU vs Tegmark IV vs ultrafinitism[1:26:19] The Distributed Second Coming as a self-fulfilling prophecy[1:30:26] Synthesizing the world religions with each other, and with science[1:31:35] AI coordination – the Second Coming as the prevailing of the "Schelling coalition"[1:33:31] AI peacemakers, for empowering human peacemakers[1:35:24] Cellular intelligence, "embodied cognition", and AI timelines[1:42:05] Transformative AIs may not outcompete humans at everything[1:43:04] Is the "AI" part of "AI alignment" a red herring?[1:45:16] ClosingSubscribe for upcoming pieces about related topicsShow notesDouble-crux: a conversational technique for arriving at mutual understandingPaul Dirac on truth and beauty: “If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.”Eliezer’s LessWrong comment about a superintelligence stably believing that 51 is prime: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Djs38EWYZG8o7JMWY/paul-s-research-agenda-faq#:~:text=E.g.%3A%20Eliezer,ounce%20of%20understanding Reincarnation book that Alex recommended to Divia: https://www.amazon.com/Lifecycles-Reincarnation-Life-Christopher-Bache/dp/1557786453 Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ Ayahuasca retreat centers where Alex "interfaced with plant spirits": https://templeofthewayoflight.org/ and https://niweraoxobo.com/Metareligion as the Human Singularity: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/694 Michael Levin interview excerpt about cellular robustness, from 1:25:15 -1:27:08: [0:00] Introducing AlexDivia: Today we're here with Alex Zhu, whom I've known for a long time. I think I met you almost a decade ago? Alex: That sounds about right. Divia: Yeah, Alex is currently working full time. You have an institute now, you just said? Alex: Yes. Divia: What's it called? Alex: The Mathematical Metaphysics Institute.Divia: Okay, the Mathematical Metaphysics Institute, which makes sense, because Alex has been interested in AI safety for a long time, but then it seemed like part of where you ended up with that was that the insights that the different religions and spiritual people had seemed super relevant to AI safety.Alex: That's right. Divia: And sort of diving into that, and… your views have evolved and changed, certainly over the time I've known you, and now you have an organization there.Alex: That's right. Divia: And you certainly have a really strong background in math as well. I don't know to what extent you've been formalizing things recently, but I imagine that as always something that's on your mind. Alex: I was very good at math competitions. I am not very good at creating new formalisms, but I am good at learning existing ones and trying to synthesize them, and taking vague, handwavy ideas and expressing them in these formalisms. Divia: Cool. I’ve wanted to have you on the podcast for a long time, because I feel like we tend to have conversations that I find really interesting, and you haven't written a lot of it up, so I was hoping that maybe more people could hear some of what's been on your mind.Alex: Thanks! I appreciate that. Divia: And we're here with Ben too. As a little bit of context for our listeners, I recently moved and had a baby, which is why we haven't had a podcast recently, but we're hoping to get back into putting them out somewhat more regularly than we were. Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very excited that we're chatting with Alex, who –  for context for our listeners – I know far less about his work than Divia does, which is also very exciting (A) for me to learn, and (B) for me to play the role of the audience when I get to ask stupid questions.[1:51] What is metaphysics?Ben: Like for instance, when we talk about metaphysics, I have some idea of what this might mean, but is there a good definition? How do you operate with this? Alex: I used to think it meant abstract nonsense philosophy that is fake and completely irrelevant for everything. I now think of it as – there are a bunch of very, very basic questions, like "What is an object? What is an observer? What is existence?" that are basically bottlenecking the other fields of philosophy, like epistemology and metaethics. And that there are real and important questions here that are also tractable. Ben: One of our previous guests, I think it was Ben Weinstein-Raun, talked a little bit about metaethics. And the way I think about this is like deciding which ethical framework you're going to follow. Is that what you mean by it, when you talk about how metaphysics interacts with metaethics? Alex: I was thinking of it more as, how do you ground ethics? If there are a bunch of different ethical frameworks, how do you pick one over the other? [2:54] Tenuous metaphysical assumptions behind the is-ought problemAlex: Like, the is-ought problem is considered super fundamental. And the way I think about it now is: actually, our default intuitive conception of "is" has a bunch of metaphysical assumptions baked into it, that like, if you take them out, the is-ought problem as it naively appears isn't actually nearly as strong of a force as it might seem.Divia: Can you name some of the assumptions? Alex: Yeah, like that there is such a thing as an "is" that's independent of any observer. Divia: Right, I see what you're saying. Alex: And so if you take the view that all "is"s are part of observation, and all observations are part of conscious beings, and all conscious beings by necessity have some implicit "ought"s that are related to their existence at all, then… Divia: Interesting. I like that. What I thought philosophers meant by the is-ought problem was that they didn't see a way to derive an "ought" from an "is". Like, you can say a bunch of things about "is", but then, how could that ever possibly imply anything about what's good? Ben: Ah, okay, okay. Alex: It's the strongest argument for moral anti-realism that I'm aware of. Divia: Yeah. And maybe we discussed this with Ben Weinstein-Raun on our podcast too, but I'm often not quite sure what people mean by moral realism and moral anti-realism, not because I haven't read the definitions and googled about it. I think I basically am familiar with the definitions, but I often get the sense when I have conversations with people that there's something I'm missing about what they mean, which kind of reminds me of what you're saying. Alex: I share that view, by the way. I cringe a little bit when I call myself a moral realist for basically this reason. Like, if someone asked "Do you believe in God?" I would cringe for a similar reason because there's just so much that's loaded in that word. Divia: Right. Ben: Right. [4:43] Alex's AI alignment journeyDivia: Okay. Can we take that as a jumping off point? I mentioned this in the introduction, but can you maybe say in your own words what your path has been in terms of caring about AI safety and then looking to different spiritual traditions for insights and how you've related to that, especially recently? Alex: Sure. When I was 14, I was thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I just listed a bunch of big ambitious things, and on that list was building superhumanly intelligent AI. And then I noticed that if I did that one, I could do all the other things on that list. That was when AI first became interesting to me. I think AI alignment first became interesting to me when I went to SPARC, the Summer Program for Applied Rationality and Cognition, which was basically my first deep immersion in the ideas of the rationality community and AI alignment. I think I always thought of it as probably one of the most important problems out there, and something worth dedicating your life to, but also pretty far away.I went to SPARC in 2012 and I basically held this view until about 2017, when people I trusted were like, "No, actually, maybe it might not be far away. It might be coming in 10 years." And I was like, "Wait a minute. These are smart people I respect. And I should be at least trying to figure out whether they're full of s**t, rather than just cordoning off what they're saying and just continuing to do what I'm doing." So that was when I went full time into exploring the world of AI alignment. I spent a lot of time then trying to think about AI timelines and double-crux with people who had long timelines and short timelines to try to really understand where people's models were coming from. And around this time I also went around trying to talk to all the leading AI safety researchers from the different research camps, like people at MIRI… I talked with Paul Christiano a lot, I talked with a bunch of the safety researchers at DeepMind… and a bunch of the people who were like, yeah, maybe we can actually get reasonable global coordination around AI, and here's how we're thinking about it. And I felt like I got up to speed with what people were thinking about around then. This was like 2017, 2018. And I basically walked away with the conclusion that no one was really directly addressing any of the actual biggest, thorniest questions underneath either technical AI safety or AI coordination. And, in parallel, I also started exploring, I don't even know how to describe it… "woo" / spirituality-type things…  Divia: Like circling? Alex: Yeah. Circling, CT charting from Leverage… I talked to Leverage people about CT and learned… Divia: Yeah. For our listeners who may not know, this is called connection theory. Geoff Anders came up with this, I think before he started Leverage actually, but it's a theory of psychology he has. There are parts of it that I end up referencing myself, for sure. It includes such things as that people have a number of intrinsic goods that they care about for their own sake, and it's a constraint of the theory that people need to believe there's a path to achieving their intrinsic goods.People could also look at some information online about it if they want to, but anyway, it's a psychological theory. Alex: Yeah. For me, the object-level details don't even really matter that much. The thing that I got most from it was watching how people who believed the theory thought in terms of it, and were able to come up with explanations for things, and help me understand myself in ways that I wasn't previously able to.I felt like I picked up a bunch of valuable tacit implicit models from their tacit implicit models, that were wrapped in this package they called connection theory. But in any case, I was basically learning that psychology was a thing, and that I could refactor my psychology.[8:30] Healing infant trauma – Alex's first formative spiritual experienceAlex: And… the first time I had a sense of, oh wait, maybe something in the reference class of spirituality might be crucial for thinking clearly about AI alignment and addressing the biggest problems there, was when I was working with a bodyworker, and I was just expressing to her that I felt small and I wanted to curl up into a little ball and cry. And she suggested that I do that, which I found very surprising, but then I did that and she sat next to me and started holding me like a baby. And as she was holding me, I basically felt like I was a baby again. When I access memories of being a kindergartner, I have a sense of what it's like to feel smaller – my limbs are smaller and stuff. In that particular moment, I had a sense of being really, really tiny, with really tiny limbs. Basically, no conscious thoughts at all. I was just like a reflex bag, and there was this deep, deep, deep sadness that I was carrying that was coming out, that I felt like was being released.When I regained consciousness, I had the sense that there was this weight I'd been carrying on my shoulders my whole life that I was no longer carrying. And, not literally my whole life, but definitely at least for as long as I've had episodic memory. And so, it expanded my concept of what conscious experience could be at all. Like, I just discovered that there were new degrees of freedom in what consciousness could be at all. I also, in that same session, could suddenly feel my body a lot more, and suddenly just understood what people meant when they were like, "Alex, you're in your head all the time." And I'm like, "Ah, yeah, compared to what I'm feeling now, I was in my head all the time." And I also just started being able to emote more, and use hand gestures more, in social interactions afterwards.[10:25] The relevance of spiritual experiences for moral philosophyAlex: And so, the reason it felt relevant was because it seemed to me like any actual account of human values, or how to think clearly about ethics, would be incomplete if it didn't take into account that there were experiences like this.I basically made the update of: people's endorsed values and ethical positions might rest on psychological wounds they've had before they developed episodic memory. And therefore, any complete account of what the good is, or what it is that humans ultimately value, must also take into account that there might be distortions of our judgments of those things that were laid in place from before we were conscious. And so I was like, wow, very interesting! This seemed like such a huge, massively important fact about the world that seemed basically almost completely unknown by most of the intellectual elite that I'd encountered before.And then I remember talking to a meditation coach [Michael Taft], and I was just like, man, this just happened to me. And he was like, oh yeah, that's a thing. The Buddhists have known about this for thousands of years. They didn't call it infant trauma because they didn't have a concept of trauma. They thought of it more as like evil spirits leaving your body, but this is really what they were referring to.And I was like, "Very interesting!" And then I just talked to other people in my circles who thought it was a thing, and they were like, yeah, that's a thing. And all of these people were really into spirituality and thought there was something to religion. I felt like I was graced with this surprising experience that almost nobody has – that, in particular, most of the intellectual elite don't have, that's clearly crucial for understanding a bunch of really important philosophical questions – that a bunch of people in spiritual traditions are familiar with, and furthermore, they tend to have, at least of the ones I talked to, fairly convergent philosophical views. And so I'm like, okay, that's really interesting! Let me try to understand them. And, maybe the solution to all the biggest questions of AI alignment and AI coordination are actually just sitting under our nose, but just not legible to most people who haven't had these kinds of bizarre experiences. [12:34] Convergent philosophical views among religious and spiritual traditionsBen: What are some of these convergent philosophical views?Alex: So, first I'll caveat that I'm filtering this through my understanding, and this isn't necessarily a good representation of what representatives from various different traditions actually think. But, one that I'd say is that the true and the good are actually the same thing, and to the extent that they [appear to] differ, it's actually because of psychological distortions we have [such as trapped priors, and ignorance of dependent origination].Divia: Which is kind of the opposite of, like, you can't derive an ought from an is. Alex: Yes. Divia: So, having acknowledged that we think it's sort of a problematic term, that they were moral realists was a convergent philosophical position. Alex: Yes. There's a way in which every religion is kind of moral realist – Follow God! And the prophets tell you how to follow God. Divia: Right. Alex: And there's a thing where everything that is, is God's will, and what is true is what is, and what is is God's will, and therefore it's good. Ben: My immediate reaction to hearing this is thinking about the parallels to the famous physicists saying about, um, beauty and elegance being heuristics they use for figuring out whether or not a physics insight is true, or something around like… God I wish I remembered the actual quote, I'll find it and link it in the show notes, but like, that, and some deep appreciation for aesthetics, having insight or truth– Divia: Truth, beauty, and goodness, those are the three, right? Am I right that that's Plato? I'm not actually sure. In my head it is.  Ben: I think so. Yeah. Divia: Yeah. And I mean, certainly what comes to mind for me there, and this is a topic that I have, I've been pretty interested in over the past few years, like in contrast to, presumably, the orthogonality thesis. Which is something that comes up – there's a weak version and a strong version – but basically the idea that an AI could sort of have whatever values and that we shouldn't really assume that there would be much relationship between its capabilities, and its intelligence, and what it cares about.Alex: Right.[14:43] Alex’s take on BuddhismDivia: Okay, so there are a bunch of different directions… I don’t know, I think I get, talking to you I’m like, ah, there are so many interesting things we could talk about. But one of them is, since I've known you, you've then gone and tried to investigate a bunch of different religions, and talk to leaders and practitioners of these religions and draw out a bunch of different insights. And it seems like you think that there are a bunch of convergent things, and that there are particular strengths of different religious traditions. Is there anything that you can maybe say about insights you've gotten from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism… and how they relate to each other?Alex: Sure. I kind of think of them as different articulations of the same core message tailored to different cultures and time periods. And so the kinds of things they emphasize are different across each. What I get most from Buddhism in particular is clear metaphysical views, metaphysical insight, and all their instructions on meditation. Buddhism as a religion is basically like, here are instructions for attaining mystical insight, and I'm like, yup, I'm really glad that exists. Divia: Have you meditated a lot yourself? Alex: Yes, but not that much in Buddhist traditions. But I have learned a lot talking to people from Buddhist traditions who really grok the metaphysical insights because they're part of a tradition that keeps it alive. I think the people I've talked to who seem to most deeply grok the metaphysical insights on an embodied level are hardcore Buddhists [like Soryu Forall from MAPLE].Divia: Who have meditated a lot. Alex: Yes. Divia: Yeah, that makes sense. Alex: And they're part of a continuous lineage from however long back. [16:19] Mathematical formalizations of truth, goodness, and beauty might essentially coincideBen: Sorry, but I'm super curious about this now, as I'm trying to think through how I would relate to this… I guess I can think of things that I feel are beautiful, but not good, and I'm feeling like I'm probably missing something here, but I'm like, I don't know… some beautiful flower that's poisonous if I touch it, or something like that. This is such a naive take on my part, but can you just speak more on what you think of this relationship between true and good and beauty?Alex: Yeah, I think my position is: if we were to ultimately understand what each of these concepts is really trying to point at, then we would see a convergence, but also, I think our everyday understandings and usages of these concepts are pretty far from what I'm calling the ultimate versions of these concepts.Ben: Okay. And to tie this into your points on meditation, or something about Buddhists having it deep in themselves, is it some way in which when you sit with some of these ideas longer, they become less confused, and you're more able to orient to them correctly? Alex: Yes. Although the way I would put it is like, if we were to ground them in as non-confused an ontology as possible – if we found a mathematical theory of metaphysics that was rigorous, in the way that calculus was rigorous and formalized the field of natural philosophy – I think the concepts of true, beauty, and good within this mathematical metaphysics would essentially coincide. Divia: I don't know, my own take when I think about the flower that is beautiful but poisonous, is that there’s something that seems important about the context. Like I'm reminded of what Alex was saying about observers and their values, where I'm like, if what I saw is somebody about to eat the flower, is that still beautiful?I don't know. I think I don't like it. But like if I saw it in some context where somebody got to look at it, but there was no danger, then it actually does seem more beautiful… also kind of a shallow treatment of the subject, but… [18:21] Alex’s take on Christ’s crucifixionAlex: I do appreciate that concretization, and I think a pretty good segue to what I get from Christianity. There's a way in which Christ is like, "Yeah, me getting crucified? That's good. I'm being tortured to death because I'm being scapegoated and publicly humiliated. And you know what? That’s good. "I asked God [my deepest sense of truth and goodness] if there was any alternative to this, and God was like, nope, this is the thing you should be doing. And I was like, all right, I'm going to go do this and it's going to be really hard."But even while I'm doing it, I'm going to be radiating out in my consciousness that there's no resentment; I forgive everyone who's crucifying me. What's happening to me is a central example of what anyone would normally intuitively consider bad, evil, worthy of punishment, unworthy of acceptance or forgiveness. And I'm just going to totally upend that in my own consciousness, radiate that out to everyone in public, and have that reverberate for thousands of years for the rest of humanity."That is my headcanon for what happened with Jesus. I do not actually know if he actually existed. Not a crux for me! Divia: This is maybe a response to a conversation Alex and I have had a number of times, where I'm like… but do we even know for sure there was a historical Jesus? And you're like, that's not the point. Alex: Yes. Divia: Whether he did this or not, there's something about the archetype. Alex: Yeah, I think there was definitely a meme that got created that is extremely powerful and captures extremely deep truths.Divia: Right. And the sort of narrative account as described in the Bible of it happened exactly like this isn't the point. You think that, clearly, because Christianity has had the impact that it has, there was something archetypal that that got in there. Alex: Yes. Jesus is an inspiration for me, especially for how I should show up in interpersonal relationships. [20:14] Alex’s first "direct experience of God"Divia: You weren't raised with much religion, right? Alex: That's right. My parents were always like, this never made sense. I would talk to other kids at school, and I'd be like, this doesn't make much sense. At MIT, I would have interfaith dialogues where I'd be like, this doesn't make sense, here's why I think this doesn't make sense.Divia: Interesting. I didn't know, I mean, I guess that tracks that you would have gone to the interfaith dialogues. That’s pretty cool to hear. Ben: Was there a singular moment for you where this changed and it started to make sense, or was it more gradual? Alex: In my… I think my second ever ayahuasca ceremony, I felt like I got a direct experience of God, whatever that means. What I can say was that it was awe-inspiring, and that when I looked at religious texts afterwards, their usage of the word "God" made a lot more sense to me. Divia: Yeah, it's, I like that you put it that way, because it's sort of tricky, from my perspective, to operationalize what it even means when people talk about believing in God or not. But that's something concrete, where like, you can read the sentences with "God" in them, you can be like, oh, there's something about that that makes sense, whereas before you were like… what?Alex: Yeah, before I was like, I have no idea what you could possibly be even trying to say with this, besides Interventionist Sky Father, which is clearly fake.Divia: Right. And yeah, and it's not so much that you've updated your position about the Interventionist Sky Father. Alex: Definitely not!  Divia: But that, now you're like, okay, I see what they could mean. And why someone might write these things and expect other people to have some experience that's worthwhile reading them, something like that.Alex: Right. When Jesus was like, you need to leave your family for me, it just reads as super narcissistic. But after the experience, I was able to understand God as this hybrid of true and good that… I don't understand yet, but have some sense that maybe there is some way to actually understand in principle.And if I hear Jesus instead as saying, "You need to put truth and goodness above all your familial relationships", I'm like, oh yes, of course, that makes perfect sense! That's not narcissistic at all! That's just straightforwardly true. [22:23] Psychological distortions as a central problem in AI alignment and AI coordinationDivia: Yeah. And can you help tie this in again to how this relates to the AI stuff? Because I think I've heard you say a lot of things about, I don't know, the centrality of addressing cognitive distortions, and how spirituality from your perspective seems to be a lot about that. Alex: Right now, I think the central problem in both AI alignment and AI coordination is: if someone is very distorted about what they actually want, and doesn't want to admit it, and is willing to fight with all their force to not admit it, how do you relate in that situation? If an aligned AI can tell that their operator is acting from a deep psychological wound that they're covering up, that they're trying their best to not see, should the AI just go along with what the operator is doing, or should the AI actually help them recognize that they're misguided?When I ask this question to mainstream AI alignment researchers, the answers I get are actually quite divided. A lot of them are like, the goal of the AI should be to satisfy the preferences and intentions of their operators, and if their apparent intention is to just continue with the distortion, then that's what the AI should do. And others are like, that seems bad. That seems theoretically difficult, in that it seems plausible that there might exist a theoretical technical solution to, like, how do you get the AI to help a human get true beliefs and work through their distortions? And less likely that there might exist a theoretical technical solution to, like, how do you build the AI to help them arbitrarily maintain their lies or self-distortions in the future?And the thing I find most compelling: it wouldn't be sufficient to end the problems in the world if we built AIs that were aligned with people's psychological distortions without healing them, because I think these psychological distortions are basically what's driving Moloch right now, and if we're building AIs that are just amplifying them, then we’re just amplifying Moloch.Divia: So, I mean, would you say something stronger? Like you think that wouldn't be enough to solve the world's problems, but do you also expect it to even be good? Alex: That feels a lot like asking, is having more powerful AIs around good? Divia: Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious for your view on that, for sure. Alex: I don't know. Many strong cases both ways. Divia: Sure. Alex: Like lots of people are like, yeah, maybe RLHF was bad. Because it accelerated capabilities, and I'm like, yeah, maybe you could say the same thing for intent alignment. But maybe it's good that capabilities are getting accelerated. Divia: Yeah, you think it's hard to say. Alex: Yeah. And I don't know how much I actually buy the argument about RLHF being bad because it accelerates capabilities, I'm just using it as a comparison. Divia: Sure. [25:18] A secular lens on spirituality – addressing psychological distortionsAlex: And so I think the question of, how do we relate with these deeply embedded psychological distortions that we try our utmost to not see, is sort of the central theme of what spirituality is all about, according to me. On this lens, the practice of spirituality can basically be understood from a totally secular lens of, like, hey, you have a psychology! It's got a bunch of distortions in it. There are things you can do to address these distortions, that will cause you to have more true beliefs, and be more the person you actually are! Maybe you should consider trying something like that! Ben: But you think that spirituality provides a more powerful or different frame than just a secular one, is what I'm picking up on here. There is more to this than just the secular conception of it as a useful mental trick.Alex: Yes. In particular, I think that – again, caveating that when I say spirituality, this is Alex's steelman of spirituality that he endorses, and that there are many "spiritual" people who just drive me insane when I talk to them about how they think about things – Divia: And you're not necessarily saying, I don't know, you take somebody who has difficulty in their human relationships because of distortions (almost everybody I assume), and then they start going to their local church every Sunday. You expect, like, you're not necessarily saying, oh, well, that'll for sure fix it. Alex: Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that. Divia: You're saying something more like, you think the actual wisdom seems to be there in the lineage of a bunch of different religions, and the people that know it best seem to have some embodied understanding of that, that they are attempting to pass on. Alex: And that there's a rhyme and reason behind the kinds of things they say that are not present in Scientology, for example. And I think Leverage Research missed a lot of these things, and that's part of why they imploded, for example.There's kind of a broad, high-level sense of what the end goal should be for clearing through psychological distortions, that I think is deep and subtle, and that I don't see from therapeutic traditions or cults like Scientology.Divia: But it does seem convergent across the major religions that people would typically agree are religions. Alex: Yes, I think especially among the mystic practitioners of the religions. I think the mainstream versions of all the main religions are also missing a bunch of the important stuff. Divia: But the major religions all have mystical traditions within them that you think are more convergent. And in particular, convergent in terms of, like, how a mind ought to be? Or how a human mind ought to be? Alex: Yeah, although I would frame it more as what the most relaxed, desirable, natural state of the mind is. Divia: Okay. And, I think you've already done this, but if you could try again to say in your own words, what would that state of the mind be? Alex: Basically, just embodying true equals good. Like, everything that comes up in your experience, you don't resist. Including, for example, if there's something you find aversive, not resisting the aversion either. Divia: Yeah. Something in old… I think I got this from Michael Vassar many years ago… I think what he said was something like, I'm not supposed to have preferences over the current state of the world, only over future states of the world. Alex: I have never thought of it like that. I think that resonates. Divia: Okay. Maybe a little like that, maybe not. Alex: Yeah. [28:53] Introducing Chris Langan and the CTMUDivia: Okay. So can I switch gears a little and ask you about something different, but related? Which is the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. This is something else that we talked about some, I think I understand a little of it, but I don't really understand it, so yeah, can you tell the listeners what that is?Alex: It's this theory of everything by this guy named Chris Langan, who was featured in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as an example of someone who's very, very, very smart, but didn't have an upper-class background, didn't learn the ways of the elite, and therefore didn't find much success within his lifetime. He's also been on the news a couple of times, billed as "America's smartest man!", "Man with the world's highest IQ!", or something like that. [29:41] How Alex got interested in the CTMUAlex: And I was always curious about it when I heard it mentioned, and it never made any sense to me, until one day, three years ago, when I got high one night and looked at the website and noticed that some sentences made some amount of sense at all, and resonated with a bunch of the most inchoate, deepest, inarticulate metaphysical thoughts I had. Divia: Interesting. Do you happen to remember which sentences? Alex: I remember there was a particular diagram… Divia: I mean, it's a hard question, because you said most inchoate, so… Alex: Yeah. And Chris invented a lot of new terms and uses them liberally in ways that I now think are very defensible and very precise. But I still think they're extremely hard to understand for the uninitiated. I remembered after that night I got high, I shared the website with a couple of friends to see what they thought. And different friends would light up at different portions of the website. And, so, I got even more curious about it. And then I shared it with one particular friend who is much, much smarter than me technically, and who has read way more philosophy than me as well, and has explored esotericism much, much more than me. And he looked at it, and he was like, "Oh yeah, this generally makes sense. Like, I've seen a bunch of these ideas before. It sounds a lot like Neoplatonism." And I was like, huh, maybe my friend here can actually understand Chris's work directly. And I asked him to review Chris's work, and he did, and he said, "That was a very dense read. It was challenging to comprehend, but I comprehend it. It's legit. It seemed very insightful, and I'm glad I read it."And then I just googled how to contact Chris, and found his Patreon, and then gave him a donation so I could schedule a call with him. And then me, Chris, and my friend talked, and Chris basically vetted that my friend seemed to get it. And then I was like… okay, this makes the CTMU even more interesting to me. Divia: Yeah, it sort of passed a bunch of checksums. Where the original round was like, a bunch of it sort of resonating with stuff that was important that you hadn't known how to say. The next round was like, your friends had similar reactions, including to parts that were not the same as each other or the same as yours. And then the final one was this guy that you respected a lot understanding it, including according to Chris. Alex: Yes. Over this time period, I would also look at other papers he wrote, and mostly not be able to understand any of it, but understand bits and pieces, and be like, "Oh, he seems exactly correct about these things in very deep and nuanced ways that I don't hear people talk about very much."Divia: Do you have any examples? Alex: He was critiquing Bohm's pilot wave interpretation of quantum mechanics in exactly the right way. That was the most salient thing.[32:48] Alex attempts to summarize core ideas of the CTMUBen: And is there also a high-level overview of what this philosophy or belief is?Alex: That's what I'm working on right now. I mean, if you go to http://hology.org, you are going to see Chris’s high-level overview, but it has a lot of words that he coined himself. And that was the thing I was initially looking at, where I was like, oh, this makes more than zero sense to me. In terms of something that can actually land with people in my circles, I currently don't have anything I can point people to. [Jessica Taylor has since published her review of the CTMU, which is the most approachable introduction to the CTMU I know of.]Divia: And, maybe just your own short description? Alex: What I'm about to say is not going to be remotely close to a summary. It is going to try to describe some of the high level ideas. One is that it's fundamentally dual-aspect monist, in that it says that neither matter nor mind is primary, and it's more like there's a third thing that's not quite both, that gives rise to both, or can be interpreted in both ways, that's the actual true ontological primitive of reality. Another is… the idea of logical time, as Scott Garrabrant talks about it, is totally central to the CTMU. Chris calls it metatime rather than logical time. And that in the beginning of logical time, there was pure potentiality – "the Godhead", so to speak – and what creation is, is this pure potentiality evolving through logical time.The CTMU also posits that conscious observers, like you or me, are sort of like holographic shards of the entire conscious entity that is reality progressing through logical time, and that what our consciousness is, is sort of our shards progressing through logical time. Divia: Yeah, that reminds me a lot of my – who knows if it even has any relationship to the real thing – understanding of the Hindu myth also.Alex: Yes. One way I describe the CTMU is that it's the best synthesis I've encountered of all of the metaphysical claims across all the spiritual traditions. Divia: Is he also a scholar of religions? Alex: He is actually a genius according to me. And he knows a lot about religion. I ask him a lot about religion, and he’s like, "Yes, this is how you understand it in terms of the CTMU! Very straightforward. Those guys were smart and onto something, but I figured out how to fill in the details." And I'm like, "Wow, you actually did. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate you a lot."[35:25] Alex’s ITT-passing habitDivia: Yeah, cool. Another thing also that I think is a pretty strong thread in how you relate to things, which is sort of coming up here too, is that I think you… I don't know, rationalists talk about steelmanning a lot. Like, taking an idea and trying to imagine the strongest possible version of it. But I feel like you do it more than most people, in a different way from most people, and this is pretty central to what you're up to. Does that seem right? Alex: Yes. Divia: Want to say more about that? Alex: When I'm around other East Asians, I don't feel like I'm doing this atypically much. I think steelmanning is just actually a large part of East Asian intellectual culture. And even just social culture. Divia: So you think it's because you're Chinese, basically. Alex: And that I have a predilection for this, even among Chinese people. Divia: But it's more typical. Ben: In your experience, is the steelmanning that's done in Chinese culture explicit or implicit? Like, is it explicitly restating a belief in as strong as possible terms? Or do you feel like this is more of a norm that people have in how they react and relate to each other? Alex: It's more like, I think in East Asian cultures, people have way wider error bars on what other people mean. And so they are not fully willing to critique or dismiss a position before they can pass that person's ITT. Ideological Turing test.Divia: Meaning, being able to state their belief back to the point where they're like, yes, that's what I meant. Alex: Yeah. Divia: Yeah. I appreciate very much the way you have, for example… like when you got interested in AI safety, you did go around and ask all the people what they thought about all the things, and try to make sense of that and synthesize.Alex: Yeah. Divia: I think it's, I don't know. I certainly want more of it. [37:15] On Chris Langan’s political viewsDivia: Also, just sort of, I don't know, to check a box or something… if people look up Chris Langan on Wikipedia, under his views section, they'll be like, ah, these are some far right views. The CTMU is obviously not about that, but… anything you want to just fill in for people that might be curious about that part of it? Alex: Yeah, I think people largely associate Chris with his political views now, which is… Divia: Yeah, I didn't actually realize this. I'd only heard of him in the context of talking to you, and I had read Outliers, but then I looked him up on Wikipedia. and I was like, oh, okay, that's there. Alex: Yeah, his political views are extremely offensive to the mainstream, and also I think not what he fundamentally cares most about. What he cares most about is people understanding his theory, but most people don't understand his theory, but they can understand his political views, and that's why he gets associated with it. I basically never talk with him about politics. Sometimes he expresses his views and then I ask for clarification for where he's coming from, and I'm like, oh, I get where you're coming from. I can empathize. I don't agree, but that's neither here nor there.When people bring up his political views, I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn't mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright. I don't think Chris is remotely a Nazi. In my personal interaction with him, he's been a wonderful person. He's been kind and generous with me, and I respect him personally. People also often ask: if someone has views like this, why should we trust their alleged spiritual insights? And my sense is that Chris is truly, earnestly doing the best he can to live in a way that's kind and compassionate to everybody, to live from behind the veil of ignorance as though everyone else's suffering and joy were his own. And he has the best theoretical explanation of why one ought to live this way out of anyone I've talked to. [39:08] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 1 – acting from behind the universal veil of ignorance Ben: And can you say more on what this theoretical justification is? Or, I'm curious… I think I get a little bit more now of what you're pointing out with the philosophy, but how does this translate into this "why be good" question?Alex: A short version is something like, we're all "children of God", in the sense that we're all logical descendants of "the one Godhead", and we should all act in the way we would want to act behind the veil of ignorance. And behind the veil of ignorance, we share an identity with everybody. And this bit about, like, we all ought to act the way we would act behind the veil of ignorance… I mean that, from certain updateless decision theory interpretations, it's actually in your best interest selfishly as an agent to act in that way. Not, like, you're being a good boy.Divia: Separate morality juice. Alex: Yeah. There's not separate morality juice. [40:03] Logical time and the "lazy evaluation" of realityDivia: Yeah. And do you wanna say a little more about what you mean by logical time? Alex: The best example is Newcomb’s paradox, I think. Which, by the way, Chris Langan wrote extensively about in the ‘80s or ‘90s. His analysis of it was like, to understand this, you need to be thinking in terms of simulations, and you need to have a different notion of time, which is basically MIRI’s take on it now.I think one of the apparent paradoxes with the setup of Newcomb's Paradox is that somehow the contents of the opaque box are physically determined already – in temporal time, they're already there. You can't cause what was physically past to be different from what it is. But there's another sense, in which the contents of the box "come after" what your decision is. And this notion of "coming after" is my preferred pointer or gateway into the whole concept of logical time. Divia: That makes sense. So it’s like, "come after" in terms of, that it caused it.Alex: Yeah, for some notion of causality that's different from the usual physical notion of causality. One analogy I found from David Bohm… he gave an analogy once about how reality can be thought of as being like a painting that gets filled in brushstroke by brushstroke, where the usual physicalist interpretation is like, you fill in one vertical row of pixels of the painting, and then from that, you get the next vertical row of pixels.And the order in which the painting gets filled in roughly corresponds to the kind of thing I mean when I'm talking about logical time, or metatime. Divia: And by the painting, you mean like, everything that we… Alex: Reality as a whole. Everything in reality. Divia: Yeah, there's definitely something about that that I find intuitive, though I also find it hard to put into words what I even mean by it.Alex: Uh-huh. Chris has put it into words, but the words are hard to understand. Divia: I mean, it reminds me a little of like, lazy evaluation in programming. Alex: Yes, it does feel a lot like that. Ben: Mmm. Can you say a little bit about lazy evaluation? Divia: Oh, sure. I don't even remember… some of the functional languages do this, right? Like, Haskell does it? Where, if something is… Alex: Things only get computed once they're referenced. Divia: Yeah. And by reference… I mean the reference thing is sort of interesting. Like, referenced by what?Because in the Haskell program, I think I understand it! You run the program in a way that's pretty easy to understand with temporal time, and it's going to produce some outputs, and then, that's what it means by "referenced". Whereas in this case, I'm like, yeah, until it's referenced. But then I'm like, well, what exactly do I mean by reference? I don’t know. Alex: Yeah. I’m also confused about this point. Divia: It also reminds me of like, there's moral realism and then there's mathematical realism too. But what exactly does that mean? But it seems important for sure. Like, and I think the thing there is like, do mathematical facts exist on their own, before something’s referencing them? And it seems like he's saying no, basically.Alex: Yes. Or I mean, it's complicated and I intend to ask Chris about some nuanced questions there. Divia: That makes sense. Alex: Yeah. I mean, ultrafinitism is like, these extremely large numbers that we’re never actually going to be able to reference directly, maybe don't actually exist in some relevant sense of "exist"... is a position that I'm very open to and care about understanding better. It’s one of the things I intend to ask Chris about in a future call. [41:31] Spirituality vs the orthogonality thesisBen: One thing I wanted to jump back to is something Divia brought up at the start, which I feel like if I understood this topic better, I could make some great pun about logical time or time, whatever.The orthogonality thesis. Which often is shorthand for, like, intelligence and values don't have to be aligned. Like, you can have very smart things that might end up having very different values than humans. And this is plausibly a problem in an AI alignment context. One of the things that I'm trying to predict here from what we're talking about is like, maybe there's some implication of… well, maybe actually the orthogonality thesis is wrong, that you would expect intelligent agents to be descended from this same Godhead. Is that true? Alex: The orthogonality thesis. My first thought is that just like markets can stay irrational longer than you might say solvent, I think intelligences can get powerful sooner than they become moral enough to realize that they shouldn't kill everyone. Even though there's a sense in which I no longer believe in a strong form of the orthogonality thesis, there's still a weak form that seems pretty real to me.Basically, I would say like, yeah, it no longer seems plausible to me that a paperclip maximizer could tile the universe with paperclips thinking this is what it actually truly cared about, without first realizing that it was confused and that there's some morally real thing that should be done instead. But I do still think it might kill us all before it realizes this.Divia: That it shouldn't have done that. Alex: Yes. That being said, like… an analogy I use is that I don't think a superintelligence could stably maintain the belief that 51 is prime. I think Eliezer… disagrees about this?Divia: I think he said that in a LessWrong comment, right? Alex: Yes. And that was always extremely confusing to me. It just doesn't really make sense. It just doesn't really add up to me. You just can't fight truth for that long! Divia: My interpretation of what you're saying is that there would be some sort of complicated structure that would have to be in place for it to not notice, and then at some point you notice that structure.Alex: Yeah. Ben: I'm confused by Eliezer’s comment there as well, because I remember Nate Soares of MIRI as well – they both work in the same org – had the comment that pointed out that this is a problem for a lot of alignment schemes to count on, like deceiving the AI in some way, or getting it not to notice ways that it might become more powerful, but that an AI that is intelligent would start to notice its confusion in some way they could route around. So… yeah, I see what you're pointing at, which is just that an intelligent agent of the type that we're talking about would notice the thing with 51. [46:19] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 2 – elaborations on "ethics as self-interest"Alex: Right. And I think they would likewise also notice that they ought to act behind the veil of ignorance for the benefit of all beings, to borrow some terminology from Buddhism.Divia: And can you unpack that a little? There's something about it that makes intuitive sense to me, thinking about updateless decision theory, but can you try to make it more explicit what you mean by it being in their selfish self-interests? Alex: If you and I are agents and we can both recognize each other as the kinds of agents who would act behind the veil of ignorance, we would coordinate with each other better and selfishly benefit from that.Divia: No, sorry. I feel like there's some component that's like, there's a practical fact of the matter, as far as I can tell, that human communication is pretty high-bandwidth. And so, in fact, in practical cases, we can't fully see each others’ source code, but people in my experience have highly imperfect, but pretty high-bandwidth, often correct impressions about things like, if I imagine you in some situation, what would you do?Alex: Yeah. Divia: And that this does make it easier to coordinate, if, when I imagine those things, it comes up like, yeah, Alex would help me, maybe Alex can tell that I would help him, maybe we help each other, that sort of thing. But like, my impression is that you're saying something metaphysically stronger, that like, even if there were no practical opportunities for two agents to coordinate, there would be something…Alex: I think it depends on what you mean by "practical opportunities for agents to coordinate". I think the same principle that causes me to be nice to ants, I think, would cause a superintelligence to be nice to us, which I think would cause a super-superintelligence to be nice to it.Divia: Right. And so it's not that you expect the ants to be able to tell that you would help them, and therefore they would help you. Alex: Yeah, that's right. Divia: The ant's not gonna help you. Not in a straightforward way, anyway. It's not gonna bring you a piece of food or something. Alex: Yes. [48:15] Speedrunning the AI "danger zone"? Ben: So is one implication that you're excited or bullish about schemes that would push AI past the "danger zone"? Where it's intelligent enough to kill everyone, but not intelligent enough to know it should operate from timeless decision theory? I'm almost being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but I also do wonder if that is an implication. Alex: Sidestepping the danger zone might be more like how I think about it. Ben: That seems wise. Yeah. Divia: Yeah. Instead of speedrunning the danger zone. Ben: Speedrun the danger zone! We're just trying to figure out how to be an e/acc podcast after all. So like, wow, let's accelerate to wisdom! But sidestepping seems wise. Divia: More de/acc than e/acc. Ben: That's it. That's right. Vitalik, please sponsor the pod! Alex: I mean, I think if it's actually easy to figure out how to do the sidestepping, then e/acc. And if it's hard, then de/acc. Divia: Something like that. With the caveat that these are all more, like, vibes-based internet memes than coherent philosophical positions, as far as I can tell. Sorry, I especially mean that about e/acc. [49:20] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 3 – "we are all one"Divia: But yeah, I'm trying to better understand here… so you're saying something more like, you should be nice to the ants so that the AI will be nice to us, and less like, but maybe also sort of like, you just sort of also are the ants, and if you really understood metaphysics you would know that you are also the ants. Because people say that too, right? Alex: Yes. The latter feels more deeply true and the former feels like a downstream consequence. It lands to me more like "we're actually all the same consciousness" than it lands to me like "instrumentally be nice so that these other beings will be nice to you". And insofar as the latter is true, I think it's downstream of the former. The reason I described it in the latter way is because I was trying to make it more concrete from the lens of being an individual. Divia: No, that does make sense. Yeah, I guess it seems important to me because it seems like there's some… I don't know if they're edge cases or fake thought experiments, but, I mean, if Jesus is gonna die afterwards, it’s sort of not in his self-interest as commonly understood as like, you're an ego in a bag of skin, and then when you're dead, you're dead…Alex: Another thing that I think is convergent across the spiritual traditions is that… Divia: You're not the ego in a bag of skin?Alex: Yes. The thing that we think of as the self is not the ego in the bag of skin. It's not the mind and the body. Those things in fact end when you die. But you will find that that's never what you actually were in the first place. And for the thing that is what you actually were in the first place, that's where the real values live. [50:52] "Reincarnation" and "the afterlife"Divia: Do you want to say more about… certainly, the afterlife is a big topic in spiritual traditions, and at face value, they seem to say some different things about them. Alex: Yes.Divia: What do you think about that? Alex: My first thought is that "afterlife" and "God" are similarly charged for me, in that there are so many connotations people associate with them that are very different from how I think about them.Divia: Right. Okay, so if we taboo "afterlife"…  Alex: An analogy that I often hear is that, if our experience of reality were like a waking dream, we tend to identify as the protagonist of the dream rather than as the dreamer. And it's more correct to locate our identity with the dreamer. And the type signature of the dreamer isn't something that is emergent from physics. It's more like the aspects of physics that we experience are emergent within the dreamer. Divia: Which is similar to what Chris was saying about dual-aspect monism? Alex: Yeah, that's right. Chris has this term "distributed solipsism", which he says is what God / reality is. And you and I are components of this process of distributed solipsism.Divia: Okay. Alex: And, Chris's models of what happens after you die are the best, most coherent ones I've encountered. There's a book on reincarnation that I've read that I have recommended to you, Divia.Divia: Yeah. First you recommended one that wasn’t on Kindle. I didn't do it. But then this one where there was a Kindle version, I did read it. I thought it was pretty interesting, or I read the first third or so of it, and you said I got the basic idea. I could say a little more about it, but I did find it pretty interesting. Alex: Right. And so, there are a bunch of… Divia: Though it left me with some questions about what… yeah, anyway, you might be about to say that.Alex: Yeah, so there are lots of accounts from people with near-death experiences. There are accounts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead about what the life-between-life realm is like. There are accounts of people who were literally in hypnotherapy and regressed to a past life and then asked to go into the light that you go to in the death transition and then describe what they saw there.And there's a lot of mutual consistency and rhyme and reason behind what's said there, such that when I first read about these accounts, I was like, wow, it sounds not totally crazy that they might actually be talking about something at all, as opposed to not something at all. That's pretty wild. Divia: Yeah. Though I think that the weak version for me of "something at all" is that there's some sort of powerful archetype that, when people manage to access their beliefs… like there's some shared, deep, implicit understanding of something… that doesn't necessarily mean that that's what actually happens. I could try to give my model of what I thought the book said, but then I think it only makes sense when I think of it in terms of logical time, more than temporal time. Alex: Mhm. Yes. Divia: Which I assume is a feature. But then, I feel like some people who have claims about reincarnation want to claim that it adds up in a more temporal time type of way… this is the part I feel most skeptical about.Alex: Yeah, I'm skeptical of that too. I think Chris pretty explicitly to me was just like, that is a pretty naive understanding. Divia: Right, like, I don't expect to find any stories that really check out where, like, somebody was this other specific reincarnated person and they can, like, produce some sort of artifact, like they can read some ancient language or something. I don't expect to ever hear a story about that that seems true. Alex: Chris has accounts for how that kind of phenomenon could work. I think the typical interpretations or assumptions around it, I'm very skeptical of. Divia: Also like, and this is another thing we discussed in the past, but the rate of spiritual fraud is also pretty high in the world. So that's also part of what's going on. Alex: Yes. It would not surprise me if this all turned out to be fraud. [54:53] How might information get transferred across lifetimes? Divia: Okay, so can you talk me through how… like you know Scott Alexander's short story about DMT entities refusing to factor the prime number? Ben: Which we’ll definitely put in the show notes.Divia: Yeah, please do. So can you give me your account of how they could actually, I don't know, know the ancient language or whatever it is, like some sort of thing they really couldn't have known, like concrete information that got passed through? Alex: The first thing is I expect that most of the concrete information is somehow encoded in low-fidelity to begin with. Like, I think Scott Alexander once had a musing of like, how did evolution tell us to be attracted to breasts or genitals or whatever? Divia: No, I have wondered about this. Alex: Yeah. But somehow they managed. I'm like, maybe there's some similar kind of thing going on with… Divia: Okay, so can I say an aside about that though?Alex: Yeah. Divia: So, at one point it really stressed me out that, supposedly there's some thing where, like, we're more easily scared of snakes than spiders. I think I'm more skeptical about the spiders, but I believe it about the snakes. And I'm like, okay, but so like, is there some like JPEG in my DNA of a snake? What's going on here? Like, how is that encoded? I don't know, it bothers me that people seem to have not figured this out. But then my friend Andrew was like, well, look, there are some things that are easy to… his explanation, which made me relax about it somewhat, was like, the snake is one of the easier things to encode and that's why snakes get to be so poisonous. It's because we can easily encode them and know that they're scary, and so that's a part of why it all works. In the same way, it seems like it makes sense that bees are black and yellow, because… bright colors, high contrast, sort of fundamentally seems easy to encode. And he's like, yeah, it's the same with the snake. Anyway, that's my aside. Alex: That's a good point. Divia: And similarly, I think the thing with breasts is that they kind of look like eyes. Probably. But I don't know. I mean the obvious one is the peacock tail! They like it because it looks like a bunch of eyes, I think! Alex: My guess is that there are certain… it's not like there's a JPEG, but there are certain high-level features that get triggered when you visually process them, and those high-level features can be encoded pretty cleanly. It wouldn't surprise me if there were certain visual stimuli that gave people strong snake sensations, even if there wasn't a snake. Kind of like an adversarial example. Divia: Yeah, no, totally. Anyway, sorry, this is some aside about encodings of things. Okay, so you think it's possible that all of these cases are fraud, but what sort of things do you think could plausibly be encoded how? Alex: One picture that's been forming, talking with Chris a bunch… Chris describes reality as a self-simulation. He basically thinks, like, yeah, we are in a simulation, and our simulator is reality one logical time step earlier, and it goes like this all the way back to the beginning. There's a way in which the simulator needs to obey all the laws of physics, but there are a bunch of free parameters that it gets to fill in, in a way that is for the benefit of all beings, and this can affect how the wave function collapses. Chris thinks that quantum wave function collapse is pseudorandom and not actually random. Divia: And not many-worlds. That it does actually collapse. Alex: Yes. And… [58:17] Is love a spandrel?Ben: Hey, I have questions on this, but unfortunately I'm going to need to jump off shortly. Sorry, this might derail some of the quantum, which I also have questions about, but I wanted to check in on something around the topic of spandrels… which has come up, I think Divia, in your conversation with Robin, around the question of, is something like love a spandrel? Or is it something that’s more etched in the fabric of the universe, such that superintelligent agents or other intelligent beings would discover similar conceptions of love or fun that we humans have? And, so, I want to check my understanding here that this is maybe one of the core beliefs that you have, or that's being influenced by your study of the esoteric and religion?Alex: Is what one of my core beliefs? Ben: I'm sorry, core belief is probably a poor phrase there, but something around the belief that, yes, these values are not spandrels, that they are in the fabric of the universe. Something like moral realism. Alex: Yeah, the reason we have the values that we have is because we became sensitive to the fundamental structure of the universe and started trying to approximate it in certain ways.[59:18] "Reincarnation" and "souls"Divia: Okay, so Ben had to go for now, but Alex and I are going to keep talking about some stuff. So I'm pretty motivated to try to dig into the reincarnation in logical time and what that might mean. Though I do continue to be interested in what could be encoded, but maybe that's not the most interesting part of it.And do you want to try to summarize the metaphysics of what people tend to convergently report under hypnosis or near death experiences about this going to the light bit and all of that, or do you want me to try to say what I remember from the book? Alex: Why don't we start with that, and then I'll see if there's anything that feels important for me to add.Divia: Okay. If I'm trying my best to think in terms of logical time, there's some sort of process where the karma is kind of advancing from life to life. And so, they'll give an example of like, okay, a person lived this life, and then they die, and then their spirit guide will either come get them or they don't need a spirit guide, and they'll sort of review how they did in that life and what they can do better. And it could be one that's like, "Okay, cool. This is basically on track, and you were presented with these challenges and you did pretty well". Or it could be one… like, they gave some examples of somebody where the guide would be like, "Ah, you were supposed to maybe be a better person! What happened?" And not in a mean way, but in a "let's take stock of this because this is not the point of what we're doing here" type of way. There's one reading of it that's something about the continuity of individual experience that I don't know what to make of. That, I think I'm pretty skeptical of. Alex: Yeah. Divia: But something about… that there would be some phenomenology of the way that this karma kind of gets processed in at least a collective way, doesn't seem – I have some pretty panpsychist-type intuitions, I guess – and so in that sense, it doesn't seem necessarily super off to me.That was the most important thing I think I got from it. What am I missing? Alex: I mean, there's talk about an intra-life realm at all, which sounds super wild on priors under the default metaphysics. Divia: They were meeting other people that had died, right?Alex: Yes. Although, personal identity gets really strange when we start going to these places. Like, the sense in which you go into these realms, so to speak, is like… what's left of you after the body/mind/ego is stripped away? Most of us have almost no intuitive conception of what that is.Divia: Well, I mean, that said, it seems like people in many times and places want to talk about souls, and want to describe souls as something that, among other things, persists after death. Alex: Right. Divia: This is a convergent idea in spiritual traditions, right? That there is something called a soul. Yeah, what would you say? Alex: I mean, Buddhism is like, there is no eternal unchanging soul. There is a mindstream, and that thing can reincarnate, that's also the storehouse of your karma. And I'm like, yeah, that's closer to my understanding of what's going on. But I mean, you can also think of it as a soul in some ways, I think. Divia: Well, yeah, so but if you didn't use the word "soul", how would you describe the thing?Alex: I would probably just reference the Buddhist terminology for this, which I think is the most precise non-CTMU existing terminology. Divia: And how would you unpack it? I mean, I'm a little bit familiar. I've tried to look this stuff up sometimes, but I don't totally know what the Buddhists are trying to describe either.Alex: I mean, they make a distinction between the mindstream, which I think is just the flow of consciousness through logical time, and a stable unchanging self, which in some sense their whole deal is about seeing through. Divia: You don't have a stable, unchanging self. Alex: That's right. Although I think there are some schools of Hinduism that are like, actually your true self is this mindstream type thing, which is different from your body/mind/ego thing. And so you should recognize your true self, lowercase self, to be this big uppercase Self, which is a totally different type signature from how you were thinking of things before. I understand it as different terminology to try to refer to the same general thing. Divia: I feel like the most mundane thing that I know how to say about this is, I think many people come to realize that, okay, what they care about is not just exactly their body and their conscious experience persisting, but things they care about persisting. Which is, I think, in some sense, actually pretty obvious. Like, me as a teenager who was trying to be consistent in a particular type of way, was like, wait, do I care about anything outside my conscious experience? I think many of us sort of ask this question. But it's like, well, yes. I think the answer to that is obviously yes, and there are things where almost anybody would be willing to trade off some amount of life for some amount of other thing they care about. Even people that claim to be as selfish as they come. And so in that sense, I'm like, okay, that's maybe a very elementary understanding of why I'm sort of wrong to just think about myself as caring about… like, I'm not really a hedonist or something like that. I don't only care about how pleasurable my moment-to-moment experience is. But I would personally like to better understand what you mean by the mindstream. Alex: Me too. That's one reason why I engage so much with Chris. This is one active area of confusion for me. Divia: Okay. Okay, well, let me try to articulate some of my questions better, and then you can see what you think. Alex: Sure. [1:04:56] KarmaDivia: So, the idea that karma is kind of a coherent concept is maybe one thing. I live my life in a particular way, or anyone lives their life in a particular way, and then the world is kind of different afterwards. And some of that stuff could be, I don't know, maybe some of it dies when they die, like that information wasn’t… My best guess is that it is best understood in pretty mundane ways of information transfer, like I live my life, but then maybe I write some of it down, maybe other people see me, and ultimately that information propagates, and so everybody who encounters me is a little bit different because they knew me.And in that way, sort of, the plot advances. And that's what it means that there's this thing that happens where some karma was processed through my life. Alex: There's a lot of resonance there. The picture you're describing sounds very physicalist-compatible, in a way that I think is good. And also, I’ve been coming to think that if you actually want to understand karma completely and exactly, such that, for example, what goes around does in fact come around for the relevant zoomed out notion of personal identity that isn't localized to a single material lifetime, I think you need a non-physicalist understanding of karma for those kinds of things to work out.I think what you described is part of the picture. One metaphor that I use, that I still wouldn't say I quite understand, is that there might not be obvious material traces of the life you lived left in the world, but "the simulator", so to speak, still remembers every single detail of what transpired in your life, and every single detail affects how the simulator decides how the rest of the simulation runs. This ties in with the quantum wave function collapse thing that I was gesturing at earlier. [1:06:47] Overt physicalist vs subtle physicalist vs non-physicalist explanations Divia: Yeah, and we were talking about this the other day, where in many ways it seems to add up to something similar, whether there's like, I don't know, maybe three different categories: legible physical effects, like the one where, I don't know, I wrote a book and some people read it. And then there are subtle physical effects, which many people seem to think are important in many cases. I can think of individual cases where they seem quite important, like maybe I entered some room and nobody said anything, but there was some subtle body language thing, there was an exchange, and now, something happened there.And you're like, okay, but you think there's something that's neither of those, that's the thing you're gesturing at with "the simulator remembers". That you would not ever expect to see something that violated the laws of physics, but you think it's underconstrained. [1:07:36] Cross-lightcone effects of prayer via influencing wave function collapseAlex: Yeah. One way I might put this is like, if you make a prayer for someone in a different light cone, God might "hear your prayer" and affect how things unfold in that different light cone.Divia: If we try to specify what you mean by that… I think that's where I'm like, what does it even mean for me to know that there is somebody in another light cone? Like, from what stance is this even a thing, or something? Alex: Well, if you and someone started moving away from each other at both close to the speed of light, you would be in different light cones.Divia: [...] But do they even exist anymore from my perspective, now that they're in a different light cone? Alex: I think so. I mean, for me intuitively, it feels very much like that. Divia: Yeah, I guess that's true. If I imagine someone getting on a spaceship, and I'm on a spaceship, then I'm like, alright, fine, I don't actually think of that person as gone. Alex: Yeah. I'm just like, yeah, physics, as I understand it, says we'll never interact again, which means we'll probably never interact again, directly, physically. Divia: Okay. So you think that you could pray for the person in the other light cone and it might make a difference?Alex: Yes. Divia: So I, I think one thing you have said about how you came to believe this is that people you respect seem to take it seriously. Alex: For this one in particular, I'm just going off of Chris. Divia: Just Chris. Well, it is true that a lot of religious people I think also believe this. But in this case it's about what Chris thinks.Alex: Yeah, I mean they also don't talk about light cones. The stuff religious people say I think can't be distinguished from the first two kinds of things you were saying, of both overt and subtle-but-still-physicalist. I never asked about light cones. Divia: Okay, if you want a potential physicalist-compatible explanation for those, it could be that there was some subtle interaction we had before we separated that meant that you knew that I was gonna pray for you, but you only knew it because of the time we did interact. And then I didn't pray until later in temporal time, but in logical time I'd already prayed and you could tell. Alex: Yeah, I think this is actually consistent with Chris's picture of what's going on. Divia: Okay, this one seems compatible with physics, leaving aside something extra happening with the wave function collapse… I think?Alex: What's coming to mind now is that in Chris's models, how the wave function collapses is intimately tied with the wills and desires of conscious observers, which cannot be understood from a purely physicalist frame. And so, I think the way that it was already logically overdetermined that you would pray, would manifest as like, it was already logically determined that some wave functions would collapse a certain way. Divia: I have to think about that. [1:10:18] The physicalism null hypothesis, pt 1Divia: It always occurs to me, like… what is my stake in whether it's physicalist or not? And it definitely interests me. I don't know, but it causes me to wonder. Alex: As a general side note, how to be appropriately skeptical and rational while engaging with all this other stuff has been a persistent question for me.And I try to keep things as physicalist as possible as my null hypothesis. And I'm also open to physicalism as we understand it being not nearly as constraining as we think it is, or just straightforwardly being false. I feel like I don't understand either of those scenarios well enough to be like, I feel comfortable attributing any particular thing I'm aware of to those. It's more like, as I've gotten into this world, the weird s**t I see just gets weirder and weirder. Divia: Anything you can easily share? Alex: I mean, there's the not super weird stuff, like energy healing appearing to have an effect. Divia: Right. [1:11:19] Cross-hemisphere remote healing with ayahuasca?Alex: I think one of the weirdest things I've encountered is a friend of mine at an ayahuasca retreat in Peru having an experience in the DMT realm of his partner and her energy body, and him going into her energy body and cleansing something out in her heart, and then purging at the same time, as one does in ayahuasca ceremonies when you're letting something go.And his partner was in the US, and he was in Peru. And later that night he got a text from her, being like, "I just had the weirdest experience. I felt this fish-like thing swim into my chest and clear out some energy there." And I'm just like… that's really weird! Remote healing is just part of the tradition of the indigenous healers that I’ve worked with there, and I still don't really know how to relate with it, but… Divia: But it does seem like they're doing it.Alex: … they've shattered my ontology enough already… [1:12:13] Learning from "plant spirits"Alex: …the way they sing to me during ayahuasca ceremonies… these Shipibo healers [from the Temple of the Way of Light], in ceremony, sing individualized healing songs to each person, where, as they're singing, it sort of feels like they're doing surgery on your energy body.Like, they're vibrating their vocal cords in just the right ways to resonate with the precise deep blockages in your system, that you didn't even have a concept of before. And then when you ask them how they do it, they're just like, "Oh, we're not really doing it. We're just channeling the plant spirits, and they're just telling us what to do." And I'm like, what the f**k does that mean?? So then I went and dieted with a plant spirit the way they do [at Niwe Rao Xobo], to commune with the plant spirits, and I felt the presence of something in my system. Divia: Wait, so when you say that, what does that mean? With a plant spirit? Alex: Each morning I would be drinking a solution with a plant in it. And during the ceremonies, the healers would be "connecting me to the spirit of the plant", and over the course of the retreat I would have vivid dreams of a particular flavor.I would feel the presence of… in my normal layer of consciousness, like my normal "stack trace", it feels like there's another layer that's inserted in between somewhere, that causes everything to get filtered a certain way… all my thoughts feel like they get filtered a certain way, and biased in a particular direction, as opposed to how they normally would.And there was one day when there was a writing prompt to journal from your plant spirit, and I felt like I was doing automatic writing. The stuff that was coming out was not something that ego/body/mind Alex would have been able to generate. There's nothing supernatural about this, but… Divia: It's weird though. Yeah. Alex: Yeah, it is weird! It's like, wow, maybe learning from the spirit of a plant is not a type error. I experienced it, so it's not a type error. Divia: Well, so, are you able to say what you learned from the plant? Alex: There’s the feeling of unconditional love that I had during MDMA, or something. I felt like it was sort of just propagating really deep in my system all throughout.There's a sense that it sutured a bunch of emotional and relational wounds that I had with family and friends. Like I remember one day just waking up from a dream and just picturing my first girlfriend smiling widely, and me just feeling like, I'm fully healed from that breakup.Divia: Huh. Okay, so, but, if I go with it, that it was the plants… I don't know, what is plant consciousness like? What sort of things do they know, and how do they know them? Alex: There's no voice. I described it as, like, a soft, subtle presence that was there in my mind that was filtering my thoughts to bias in a particular direction.That was my direct experience of it. My sense is that there are certain aspects of their biochemistry, and how they convert energy into more of themselves, that can be transferred to… like, there are analogs of that in us, and that's the thing that we're directly learning. But, I'm just wildly speculating.Divia: Yeah, interesting. I mean, it does seem like human consciousness is pretty complicated in a way that makes it more fragile. I mean, plants are complicated in certain ways, but it does seem like a more basic thing is going on, that I could imagine getting in touch with would be positive.Alex: Yeah, I think there's basic stuff that plants do that lots of people aren't doing. Divia: Yeah, like even just like, okay, this has nutrients I need, therefore I will move in that direction. This is causing me to grow, so I will go more towards that. That, like, because humans are complicated, sometimes we end up doing more like the opposite of that. Does that seem sort of roughly right? Alex: Yeah. Divia: Okay. And your model is that the actual thing you were drinking was important. It wasn't like you imagining it being a plant was the most important part of it. Alex: Yes. An important thing worth noting is that people often describe it as, like, you're growing the energy of the plant inside of you. And as it's happening, a bunch of stuff is getting rejiggered in your system. Like, after this, we were told to adhere to pretty strict restrictions for about a month afterwards. Divia: Like, what's it like, behavioral, dietary? Alex: Diets, stuff like no sex or masturbation. And people who violate these restrictions often report feeling physiological and psychological consequences, in a way that has left me a little bit afraid of how deep along this path I personally want to go. Like when I hear about these consequences, like someone feeling like, yeah, I had to go to the hospital to get my kidneys checked out or something… I'm like, okay, something real is definitely happening! That much is clear to me. Divia: Oh. Yeah. Okay. Alex: Yeah. This was a tangent for like, yeah, transcript I've seen some weird stuff, including from the Shipibo healers, and remote healing is part of their tradition, and I'm still like… I don't know what to make of this, I still feel very skeptical, but also, after having my ontology shattered for what is remotely possible in the world enough times by this tradition… I'm just like… look, yeah… Divia: You take it seriously. Alex: Yeah. [1:17:22] The physicalism null hypothesis, pt 2Alex: And this was part of a rabbit hole from, like, yeah, I try to stick with the physicalism null hypothesis as much as possible, and sometimes I just see really weird stuff, and I'm just like, I have no idea how to explain this under the physicalism null hypothesis. I would prefer to have the possibility of some alternative explanations than to just gaslight myself, and be like, well, that didn't actually happen. Divia: Right. It causes me to think about what's load-bearing about the physicalist stuff. Cause I think there's some of it that's like, okay, are other people going to think I'm crazy if I take this seriously? And that… I mean, it does matter to me, but that isn't really how I want to figure out what's true. That seems like that's not really about truth-seeking.But then there's something else that's… maybe the way I would put it is something like, I have not personally seen any accounts that seem super credible that anything has happened that isn't compatible with physics. And if things like that were happening, then why wouldn't I have seen any? And people have answers to that, but for the most part, that seems pretty persuasive to me. But then I guess there's yet another thing, where I'm like, I get some sense of security about having some checksums, especially because people really do lie about stuff a lot. But as we've said, physics doesn't actually constrain a lot of things that people sort of often relate to it as though it does constrain. And even so, people could lie about plenty of things. It's interesting for me to notice that, because in fact people lying to me is a big problem regardless, and so I sort of have to have a bunch of strategies for that anyway. Alex: I mean, I feel like I basically held the same null hypothesis of, like, maybe everything can just be explained by physicalism. And then I had these very strange experiences, hear these very strange anecdotes, and I'm just like…  maybe that can be explained by physicalism! But I also… when they get weird enough, I start looking for possible alternative explanations. Divia: Yeah, that makes sense to me. The most compelling part about it is that we don't want to be preemptively gaslighting yourself. That seems obviously wrong. [1:19:45] "The afterlife" as already happening, but occluded by psychological distortionsDivia: Okay, let me back up a little. We got into this talking about karma and the wave function collapse. This was sort of an aside about some things. You were like, mostly I'm trusting Chris, and also, you have some experiences that make you wonder about this stuff. So, can I go back to the idea of the spirit realm, or the intra-life realm? So there are some things that, if I take them sort of at face value, like, okay, that you could then go talk to this person… again, it seems like it strains credibility if I imagine it in a personal identity sort of way, but then if I'm like, okay, but what could they mean by that, that there is some sort of communication between… this type of processing that's happening, and this type of processing that's happening… that doesn't seem obviously wrong. And then I'm like, okay, but would there be some phenomenology of it? Which, as I said, I have sort of vague panpsychist intuitions the way I think a lot of people end up with them. It's like, I don't really know what consciousness is, so maybe everything has some of it.And then I can try to refine it a little, by being like, if things are modeling themselves, then that seems like maybe an important part of what it means to be aware, and this kind of loopy thing… something like that. And then I'm like, okay, but would these experiences have something like that? I don't know, do they? Do you have thoughts on any of these random ideas? Alex: Yeah, so the first thing is, I think Chris basically thinks there's reality as a whole, and then there's physical reality, which I think Chris sort of thinks of as the surface layer of reality as a whole, and he calls it the terminal realm, and he calls the nonterminal realm the place where all the real stuff is actually happening, which has the terminal realm as the surface layer.Going with the simulator analogy, I think he describes the terminal realm as the display of the simulation, and the nonterminal realm as where the processing is actually happening. And I think Chris doesn't think about the afterlife as a place you go after you die. It's more like, when you die, you stop inhabiting the surface layer, and sort of rest back in the deeper layers where the stuff is actually happening, which is… Divia: But when you say when, I'm like… what do you mean by when?Alex: At death, all the parts of your identity that weren't the parts that were already there and causing stuff to happen from that place the whole time get dropped… I think is closer to a more accurate way of thinking about stuff. I think even Catholics say that heaven and hell is like… it's not a place you go after you die, it's the state of your soul in relation to God, which is present even when you’re alive. I think that's a lot more like how Chris is thinking about it. And it's more like, any psychological distortions that are causing you to not be in touch with that fall away. And that's what you get in touch with in the process of death.Divia: In the near-death experience, also. Because, empirically, in at least many cases, when people think they're gonna die, they do let go of a bunch of psychological distortions. Alex: In some sense, I think there's a root psychological distortion, which is like, I can't die. Divia: Fear of death. Alex: Yeah. And then, when you're directly confronted with death, it's like, oh, I guess there's no more point to all these other distortions… won't hurt to look at this point! Divia: And then you're like, okay, now I can see what I really am. Alex: Yes. Divia: So your model is that this is sort of always what's going on, that it's more real, and that in some sense it would be obvious to everyone, except for psychological distortions, which are downstream of fear of death, or like, inability to comprehend death, or something like that. And that's why people can sometimes speak about it, because it's not impossible to let go of those psychological distortions while still alive. Alex: Or to pierce past the veil, so that they… Divia: Temporarily see something. Yeah. Okay. [1:23:37] The CTMU as an articulation of the metaphysical a prioriAlex: On that note, one way I think about what the CTMU is trying to be at a type level, like… the anthropic principle tells us that, on the one hand, the fact that the physical constants seem fine-tuned seems kind of surprising, but on the other hand, it's an a priori necessity for us to even be wondering about this question, and from that perspective, it's not surprising.I sort of think of the CTMU as answering the question of, what must be metaphysically true a priori in order to support the existence of observers like us in a world that is like the one that we are in? Divia: I think I don't quite follow. Alex: I think I'm just imagining someone asking, "Why should we think this is how reality works? It sounds like you're painting a pretty specific picture of how reality works. What's your evidence of this? Why are these not just a bunch of random details that are being strung together?"And my understanding of Chris's understanding is that this picture of reality is actually the metaphysical a priori. It has Kolmogorov complexity zero. Given that we exist as observers of the world like this, if we strip away all of our psychological distortions and metaphysical confusions, we see that it actually has to work kind of like this by a priori logical necessity. [1:24:54] CTMU vs Tegmark IV vs ultrafinitismDivia: Okay, maybe this is a dumb question, but can you compare and contrast with, like, a Tegmark IV understanding?Alex: Tegmark IV treats all mathematical objects as kind of platonically existing. Including all the natural numbers, and an ultrafinitist would object to that. And I think for a good reason. And when you add in how much these structures exist… Divia: Yeah, that's where I was going to go with this too. This seems like a big question about everything existing… it seems like surely some things must exist more than other things. Alex: Yeah. I think the way Chris thinks about it, all things exist as potentiality in the pure potentiality, no constraints, Godhead thing. But actual objective existence, and the consciousness that perceives the existence of these objects, must in general co-arise. This is the dual-aspect monism part. Divia: Wait, sorry, can you say that one more time? Alex: Any object that can exist objectively co-arises with the thing that perceives it. And so, Tegmark IV in some sense does exist, but as pure potentiality. And the aspects of it that get actualized somehow depends on who the observer is, and what they're paying attention to, and why they pay attention to that, and so on and so forth. And the dynamics of that are a lot of what the CTMU is about. Divia: Yeah, definitely. I don't know. When you say it that way, it seems timeless in a different way from how it already seemed or something. Interesting. [1:26:19] The Distributed Second Coming as a self-fulfilling prophecyDivia: Okay, you have some more time, but I just want to make sure, are there any other things that I should have asked you about that I have not yet asked you about?Alex: The Second Coming of Christ? Divia: Yes, that was on my mental list. So, before, when you were talking about how you think that in the main religions, there are sort of convergent mystical traditions that seem to see the same truths, but the religions themselves are sort of about the time and place and the people that they're trying to speak to…Alex: Mm-hmm. Divia: With the Second Coming of Christ, is this sort of like trying to bring the Christ-consciousness to the current context more? Is that what that's about? Alex: That's more or less how I think about it. The idea I'm trying to point at is not specific to Christianity, although I think it is consistent with the Catholic account of the Second Coming of Christ.Divia: What is the Catholic account? I'm not familiar. Alex: It's not that well-specified. I just remembered looking on the Wikipedia page and being like, oh, this all sounds surprisingly reasonable. There's this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who has this theory of the Omega Point as the culmination of spiritual evolution. Errr, of evolution.Divia: Is he a Catholic? Alex: Yeah. And his conception of the Second Coming of Christ was as a culmination of evolution, which… where like, evolution is now in its phase, through us, of spiritual evolution. And when we collectively spiritually evolve, basically to the point where Christ-consciousness descends upon us all, that’s what he calls the Omega Point. That's how he thinks of the Second Coming of Christ. And he was considered heterodox when he was presenting his ideas, by the Catholic Church, but now he's kind of just accepted and respected.Divia: Interesting, okay. And how do you relate to this? Alex: There is a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a Buddhist teacher, who passed away recently, who Martin Luther King nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.Divia: Oh, I did not know that. Alex: Yes! And he said something about the next Buddha, which I think resonates a lot. Divia: Same thing. Alex: Yeah. He says, it is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation. We know that in the spirit of the Lotus Sutra, we are all [students] of the Buddha, no matter what tradition we find ourselves in. We should extend that spirit to other traditions that are not called Buddhist. We can find the jewels in other traditions — the equivalent of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Once you're capable of seeing the jewels in other spiritual traditions, you'll be working together for the goals of peace and brotherhood. And… "Second Coming of Christ" in popular imagination tends to connote, like, Jesus Christ reincarnates, and… Divia: Yeah, there's gonna be like an individual guy. Alex: Yeah, and he makes everything good… somehow. Which, to me, seems about as plausible as Bearded Sky Father Interventionist. Divia: Right. So, do you think something like this is going to happen? Alex: Before I get there… I think of it more as a distributed Second Coming of Christ-consciousness. I think of Christ-consciousness and Buddha-consciousness as not literally the same, but morally equivalent for the context of what I'm trying to talk about right now.Divia: And it's basically being able to see through… Alex: The veil of psychological distortions, yeah. And I think of it less as something that's definitely going to happen, and more as a possible self-fulfilling prophecy, where if we get our s**t together enough, then this is going to happen, but also, whether we get our s**t together enough might depend on whether we believe this happens. Just like if you want your company to succeed, you have to believe that it's going to succeed. Divia: I think there's some nuance there. Alex: Yeah, yeah.Divia: But sure, yeah. Which is presumably part of why you want to talk about it. Alex: Yes. Divia: Yeah. I think I maybe heard you say that part of your life's work is to try to make this happen more. Does that seem right? [1:30:26] Synthesizing the world religions with each other, and with science Alex: Yes. I think that, in fact, the world religions can be united in a meaningful way. The thing that captures the synthesis [of the religions]… I think the median current Christian or median current Muslim will look at that, and be like, that's not my religion. Also, the median current atheist would look at that, and be like, that seems wrong. Like, the synthesis of all the religions and atheism, I think is a thing, and it’s real, and I think the CTMU captures a lot of it. Divia: Okay. And, you're saying that part of what you’re actively working on is trying to translate the CTMU into something more accessible? Alex: Yes. Something that scientists and every world religion can understand. Or at least the intellectually sophisticated representatives. Divia: Are you with Chris on this? Alex: Pretty much, yes. Chris has an actually understandable… relatively understandable paper called "Metareligion as the Human Singularity", which is basically about exactly this. Divia: Okay, we can try to link that in the show notes, also.Alex: Okay, yeah. This is basically how I currently think about AI coordination. Divia: Yeah, I was gonna say, this is what you think we need to do about AI. [1:31:35] AI coordination – the Second Coming as the prevailing of the "Schelling coalition"Alex: Yeah. I think psychological distortions are going to prevent meaningful peace from happening in the world. People are gonna double down on their wounds, and be like, "We should be the ones who have the most power!", and that's just gonna escalate. Rather than being like, "Oh, maybe more power isn't actually the thing that we want in the first place." There's a quote that's popularly attributed to Jimi Hendrix: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace," and I think that resonates completely with how I'm imagining stuff. Divia: Yeah! Do you have more of a vision of how this is gonna play out? It seems like part of this routes through, like, maybe a shared conceptual understanding of the way things really are. Alex: Yes. I'm basically imagining the Rosetta Stone of the religions and science being the centerpiece of a "Schelling coalition" of… the power of love, basically. And like, when I think of the Second Coming of Christ succeeding, I'm basically thinking of the Schelling coalition overcoming all the forces that are opposing it. And the overcoming might be, like, inviting and including them in. And when I think about AI alignment from this perspective, the main thing I'm thinking about is, how can we build technology that differentially empowers the Schelling Coalition? For me, some central questions now are, how can you build a social network that promotes what's true and good, as opposed to what grabs attention?Divia: So yes, a social network that would differentially promote things that are true and good, basically? Alex: Yes. And I think in order to do that, we would need enough of a technical understanding of what these concepts are such that we can actually build it. Divia: Are you at all bullish on using technology to help people meditate better?Alex: Seems helpful. It seems like it might be a nontrivial piece of the puzzle. Divia: Not particularly where your focus is. Alex: Yeah, that's right. [1:33:31] AI peacemakers, for empowering human peacemakers Divia: Got it. Are there other things that you're particularly focused on as far as differential tech to empower the Schelling coalition? Alex: AI chatbots that are actually good at conflict resolution, and genuinely helping people. Divia: Presumably, I assume you come down on the side of: yes, the AI should in fact help… should not do what people say if it's obviously not what's actually good for them. Alex: Right, like AIs that help people overcome their psychological distortions, while also not being like L. Ron Hubbard. Divia: Right. Yes. And that would be an interesting case study in how exactly that happened. I don't know a ton about the history of Scientology, but okay. Alex: I mean… AI girlfriends who can cybersex with you feel more like they're in the L. Ron Hubbard territory. Divia: Yeah, you're not bullish on those. Alex: Definitely not in their current formulations. It's plausible to me that there's some version of those that could help reach a broad audience in the right way or something, but that path seems very fraught. Divia: Well, certainly mainstream religions tend to be down on that sort of way of reaching people, right? And it seems to be more popular among the things people want to call cults. So if we go with that heuristic, it doesn't seem super promising. Alex: Yes. Divia: Is a decent framing of it that you want… AI priests to help people? Alex: AI peacemakers is actually how I'm currently framing things. To empower the human peacemakers. Alex: Right now I'm picturing it less as like… like, I think if there’s like… if deep neural nets are going to become coherent agentic long-term planners, I'm like, okay, we're probably just fucked. Divia: Yeah. Alex: And also, I don't think that's very likely. Divia: You think they're not going to?Alex: Yeah, I think they're not going to. [And, therefore, I think most of the peacemaking is going to originate from humans, not AIs – hence, the emphasis on empowering human peacemakers.][1:35:24] Cellular intelligence, "embodied cognition", and AI timelinesDivia: That's one I actually haven't asked you about. Do you have any thoughts on AI timelines and different scenarios, or anything like that you want to share? Alex: Yeah. Back when I was double-cruxing people about timelines, there was one guy in particular who had long timelines, my friend Gary Basin. And I did not understand his views back then, but now I basically just agree with everything he said back then. Divia: Are they written up somewhere? Alex: I don't think so. But after double-cruxing with a friend at length, the thing I've come upon is, I now think that our higher level cognition is meaningfully built on top of stuff happening on the cellular level.Divia: Cellular. Okay. Can you say more about that? I was expecting you to say something like "embodied", and I'd be like, yeah. And now… what do you mean by cellular? Alex: I mean, cells are really good at being robust and adaptable. Like, you can put them in environments pretty different from what they're supposed to be in, and they somehow adapt in a way that seems super foreign to someone working in ML. Divia: Are you talking about stem cells or something? Can you give a concrete example? Alex: Michael Levin had an example in a Lex Friedman podcast. [Video link, 1:25:15 -1:27:08] I can try fishing out the quote, but I don't remember the details. Divia: But it wasn't a stem cell. It was some other type of cell. Alex: Yeah, it was a non-stem cell being placed in a situation that's different from what it was supposed to be, and it somehow just adapted in the right way. Divia: This sort of reminds me of what you're saying about the plant.Alex: Yes. Divia: Because I’m like, okay, if I go with the plant having some sort of consciousness, then I can see why it would have something to teach me. But then again, there's this question of like… I'm drinking the plant… how am I getting the consciousness from drinking the plant? Alex: For that point, I think if it's just you drinking the plant, you might not get that much. In the ayahuasca ceremonies in the evenings, the healers are allegedly directly connecting you with the energies of the plants, and that's how you form the connection with them. That's what they say, I don't know what that actually means.Divia: Anyway. I don't know. There may not be any there there, but what you're saying about the cells being very adaptable, and how you think that might be load-bearing for higher cognition… it seems intuitively related to why drinking the plant in the right context might actually… Alex: Right, totally. And my experience with drinking the plants is part of what's updated my intuitions in this way. Divia: You know what’s funny? I ran into an old classmate of mine many years ago, and she was talking about eating consciousness of plants. Makes me rethink that whole conversation a little bit. She had been doing some sort of raw diet that she felt like she'd learned a lot from. Hard to know in any particular case, but… But okay. So, Gary Basin thinks that one reason it will be hard for the neural nets to replicate the sort of agentic behavior that humans have is because they're not cells? Alex: This is my current gloss. I don't know what Gary Basin thinks. Divia: Never mind what Gary Basin said. Alex: Gary did tell me that paramecia are capable of doing a fair bit of learning and stuff. And that seemed like a point of evidence. Divia: Slime molds, too. Alex: Yeah. And, like, at first I was like, okay, what is this relevant for? But I feel like I now better parse the kind of point he was trying to make with that. He did talk a lot about embodiment, and… Divia: But maybe embodiment has more to do with cells than I might have thought? Alex: Yeah, I think embodiment is kind of a red herring for what it connotes, because people are often like, well, if you have a robot, does that make it now embodied? And I'm like, no, that actually misses the point completely. And then they're like, but how does it miss the point? Divia: …completely?Alex: Okay, maybe like 80%. Divia: Yeah, I mean, certainly I don't look at my Roomba, and I'm like, yeah, that– Alex: It's like, ah, because you have a physical body, it’s– Divia: But if I imagine a really sophisticated physical body, I don't know. So can you help unpack why you think even a pretty sophisticated physical body that's still, like… Alex: Well, I think the cruxy bit of the sophisticated physical body is that it was built iteratively out of simpler parts…Divia: Oh… Alex: …which in turn were built iteratively out of simpler parts, like Matryoshka dolls, where the smallest ones are cells. Divia: There's some law about that, right? That, like, the only way to have a complex system that actually works is to have it evolved out of simpler systems that worked? Alex: That is the kind of thing I'm trying to gesture at. Divia: Interesting. Okay. Alex: For what it's worth, Chris Langan was the person who first communicated the general idea of this to me, that I then hashed out with another friend [Ashwin Sah] to come up with my current articulation. So, Chris gets intellectual credit for how I'm thinking about this. Divia: Okay. We haven't even talked about Ken Wilber on this podcast, but it definitely starts to remind me more of his worldview – that the problem with the robot is that it's not made of things that are made of things in the same way, sort of alive all the way down, or something like that. Alex: Yeah. And I do think that in principle, you could get an AI to replicate what's going on at one at these low levels. Divia: Like you're a functionalist? Is that sort of what you're saying? Alex: At least for intelligence, if not consciousness. Divia: If nothing else, you could just run a simulation of cells, right?Alex: Yes. Although I don't think that would be efficient. Divia: No, it doesn't sound efficient at all. Just as a proof of concept. Alex: Yes. Divia: And then you think in practice, you could do that, but somewhat more efficient? Alex: Also in principle. I think I'm more laying out why I don't think you need a literal physical body in order to be intelligent in the way we are.Divia: Like you can be made out of silicon. Alex: Yeah, or the silicon can be simulating what's happening at a somewhat low level in us, and try to rebuild all the higher stuff on top of that. And that could work, but that sounds really hard also. Divia: And it's not mostly what people are doing. Alex: Yeah, it's completely not what most people are doing.Divia: Yeah. Okay, so you have pretty long timelines then, overall, is that right? Alex: There's a funny thing where, like, I think the doomers’ epistemic state these days is a lot like what mine was like six years ago, and now mine is more like what Gary Basin's was six years ago. Yeah, I think timelines for crazy f*****g AIs are pretty short, but timelines for… Divia: Like narrow AIs? Or… Alex: …pretty general and crazy and "transformative" AIs might be pretty short. Divia: Like how short? [1:42:05] Transformative AIs may not outcompete humans at everythingAlex: Well, I don't actually know what "transformative" AI actually really means. I mean, Holden talks about when you can automate science and technology research as a particularly interesting bar. Divia: Yeah, do you think, when do you think…?Alex: On my current inside view, it's not ever going to get fully automated. I think human-AI teams are going to vastly outcompete individual humans, but it's hard for me to picture a world where AIs are full-stop just outcompeting AI-human teams, in general. Like, for any specific narrow domain that you pick out, I think it can happen, but in general, it seems kind of implausible to me. Divia: In general includes for science and technology research. Alex: That's right. But on the other hand, maybe narrow AIs can still accelerate science and technology research by many orders of magnitude. And that would still be with… Divia: Humans in the mix, but that is transformative. Alex: Yeah. Divia: Yeah. OK. Let's see what else we should cover in wrapping up. Anything else we missed? [1:43:04] Is the "AI" part of "AI alignment" a red herring?Alex: Yeah, I've been updating recently toward… the "AI" part of AI alignment is actually kind of a red herring, and there's a general… Divia: There’s room for alignment in general. Alex: Yeah. Of complex systems in particular, such as us, and which AIs are going to be as well. Which feels like the more relevant level of abstraction at which to be thinking. And, yeah, AI interpretability – good! Obviously good. In the sense that big black-box AIs having huge effects that we don't understand is obviously bad. There are obviously massive downsides to that. But also, I'm kind of like, if you look at the economy, it's pretty legible. It's made of a bunch of parts, like businesses, and you can track all the transactions… the economy is pretty transparent to us, and we still don't really know how to think about how to structure it in such a way that it isn't Moloch-y. And I feel like even if we could see all the internals of an AI, we would end up bumping into a similar kind of issue. And also I think that the Moloch-iness has to do with the fact that people in their psychologies are Moloch-y. Divia: Okay, can I bookmark this? I feel like this is gonna be a too-long conversation because we only have a few more minutes, but I have some beef with the term Moloch. I think there's obviously something that it's talking about that's real and important, and I hear it, and I'm like, I can't handle that concept. So anyway, bookmark. Though in general, I'm pretty on board with what you're saying about alignment of complex systems in general, being more potentially the thing to think about. Especially if I sort of take it as a given that humans will still be in the mix with the AI systems, and that the combination will outperform the AI systems in general for a long time. Alex: Yeah. Another analogy I use: sometimes you want to prove that a particular proposition is true for [a particular] number, like… 556978. It's easier to just prove it for all numbers, than to prove it for that particular one. And if you just try to focus on that particular number, it's a red herring. And it's feeling to me more and more like that's what the deal is with AI alignment, in relation to complex systems alignment in general. Divia: Got it. [1:45:16] ClosingDivia: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You've definitely given me a lot to think about. Even though I've already talked to you about all these things before, I have more to chew on. And I think I'm gonna maybe remind you that you said you might be willing to do this again sometime. Alex: Mhmm! Divia: But, yeah! Where can people find you if they want to follow up on any of this? Alex: I am on Twitter, and I check my DMs there sometimes. Divia: Okay. Well, so that's it. Do you want to say what your handle is?Alex: @zhukeepa. Divia: Cool. We’ll link that in the show notes also. All right. Thanks again! Subscribe for upcoming pieces about related topics This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zhukeepa.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Sarah is a director at Nanotronics and writes on Twitter and on Substack.Timestamps[00:01:00] Why AI is probably a good thing[00:08:00] The limits of current robotics[00:13:00] Nanotronics and process improvements with AI[00:23:00] Predictions on AI[00:26:00] Input output limitations on AI models[00:35:00] Drug discovery[00:45:00] Instrumental convergence[01:05:00] Progress studies[1:13:00] Morality[01:27:30] Game Theory and Social Norms[01:41:00] Shrimp Welfare[01:48:00] LongevityShow NotesAlphaDev discovers faster sorting algorithmIt Looks Like You’re Trying to Take Over the WorldEA has a lying problemGoals (and not having them)Sarcopenia Experimental TreatmentsReality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Coordination among 8 billion people is very tough. We're very far away from doing that with the intelligence that we have now, it's incredibly costly to send information to different people and for different people to learn about each other in order to trust each other…  we should kind of expect that people will have a lot of trouble coordinating on a big scale. But if we could then we’d grow a lot!…In terms of least ‘failing with dignity’ do we think that the public did a good job in trying to investigate this and was misled? Or do we think that the public just like did a terrible job in like doing anything coordinated and just got hoodwinked super easily? I think we fall a lot more into the latter campOzzie Gooen is the president of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI). In this episode we discuss Utilitarianism, improving trust in organizations, communities, and governments, and his work in building better software for thinking, forecasting, and estimation.Links from the Show* The Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute* The QURI Medley* A video explaining QURI’s new Relative Value Estimation tool.* Reports on the failure to identify Bernie Madoff’s fraud* How to Measure Anything* The OpenAI BoardTimestamps[00:01:00] Worldview[00:08:00] Starter Pack Philosophies[00:12:00] How tools for better Epistemics fits into Utilitarianism[00:20:00] Mistake theory vs Conflict Theory[00:24:00] Improving EA institutions[00:30:00] Justified Trust in Governments[00:38:00] Contracts and monitoring for evaluating orgs[00:46:30] Estimation utopias[00:52:00] Centralization vs Decentralization[00:58:00] The value of a good investigation in the case of FTX[01:05:00] The importance of the OpenAI Board[01:09:00] Estimating Relative Values[01:18:15] Shared intellectual infrastructure[01:26:00] Epistemically mature civilizations This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

This episode may make more sense after reading Quintin’s LessWrong post about evolution and the sharp left turn, but I think we end up talking through most of it.Our conversation appeared as two Twitter Spaces:https://twitter.com/diviacaroline/status/1649925920529223680?s=20 andhttps://twitter.com/diviacaroline/status/1649957263535394821?s=20 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Robin talks about why he thinks developments in AI will be on a continuum with civilizational progress in general, and Ronny, who is mostly trying to understand Robin, talks some about why he thinks many of the things he values about humanity aren't on track to being preserved, and that he cares about that.Video version available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-fBdPnwFrI This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

In this episode we discuss several ‘frames’ - ways of processing and orienting to information - that are appearing in public discussions around AI, and in particular reflect on how grounded they are in longstanding debates within the AI X-Risk community."It’s sort of like the democratic ideal where everybody's sort of out there at the public square arguing with each other, talking about the things… I don't think there are a lot taboos about what to say yet either. It hasn't gotten super corrupted.Like it's very rare that in the real world, I'm encountering trolleys running over people right? And you can set up these fake scenarios that mess up my moral intuitions…  but maybe it’s not always virtuous to endorse the repugnant conclusion that these very limited, decoupled thought experiment bring you to."Links:* MusicLM from Google* TV’s War With the Robots Is Already Here (Writer’s Strike connection with AI)* Ronny Fernandez and Robin Hanson Discuss AI Futures* Roko and Alexandros on AI Risk* Universal Fire* SpandrelsTimestamps[00:01:00] Updates on Politics[00:07:00] The State of the AI Discourse[00:13:00] The Yudkowskian Foomer vs Hansonian Continualist[00:18:00] Mood Affiliations[00:22:00] Biting Bullets vs Rejecting Fake Hypotheticals[00:28:00] Divide between Game Theorists and Engineers[00:36:00] The complexity of predictions about the future[00:47:00] How similar are the values of optimizing systems?[00:54:00] The rupture of the GMU Rationalist Alliance[01:00:00] Public Perception that AI has Moral Weight[01:03:00] AI Veganism/Freeganism[01:06:00] Overton Window Shifts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

No transcript for this episode yet, but I wanted to get it out there anyway, since it can be hard to listen on Twitter Spaces. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Ben Weinstein-RaunAnd so my guess is that that fairness seems like a plausible candidate for something like an alien species might have… kind of universal, like given some sort of assumptions about how evolution worked or works.Like there is something happening that results in us making choices. And if your philosophical determinism denies that, like you're wrong. And, I think it makes about as much sense to talk about will and free will in making choices as it does to talk about a glass of water.Ben Weinstein-Raun’s Twitter and Website.Timestamps[00:02:00] - Meta-Ethical Stance[00:11:00] - Contrasting with Moral Realism[00:26:00] - What EA misses[00:47:00] - Fanaticism and Outside of Distribution Sampling[01:28:00] - Building new Tools for Forecasting and Thinking[01:44:00] - Actually using Tooling for Better Decisions[01:53:00] - Guided by the Aesthetics of our Distributed SystemsThis transcript is machine generated and contains errorsBen Goldhaber: [00:00:00] And hi I'm going to maybe make a quick introduction to our guest here, and then we'll just dive into some conversation. Ben - who has a great first name - Ben Weinstein-Raun has worked at a number of top tech companies including crews and council, number of innovative tech research organizations such as MIRI and Redwood Research, and Secure DNA.Ben is currently building a tool for forecasting estimation, and dare I say, thinking. Having known Ben for some time now, I'd describe Ben as a careful, discerning thinker on issues of not just technology, but also philosophy.And so, yes, welcome to the pod, Ben. Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, we're excited to have you. I was saying to Divia, one of the reasons I was excited to invite you on[00:01:00] was because of a really great conversation that you and I had a few weeks ago about. Naturalism and ethics and how it's put into practice and like all good conversations about philosophy, it was like 3:00 AM around a kitchen table.And I felt like you really captured something important about I don't know, naturalism and ethics, and I really just wanna see if we could recapture some of that magic in our conversation today. Cool.Ben WR: Yeah, totally. Great. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about it. Awesome.Divia Eden: I'm excited. I haven't heard most of this yet, so I'll get to hear it for the first time.Ben WR: Yeah. Nice.Ben Goldhaber: Well, lemme just ask for the start. How would you describe your moral stance?Ben WR: Yeah, I guess, I guess at the moment, I would describe my, like best I don't know, my, my best stab or something. My best stab at understanding ethics as more like a pretty strong stance [00:02:00] on meta ethics. And not as strong of a stance on like, sort of object level ethics.Where meta ethics is sort of questions about like where ethics comes from. Like why do we say moral sentence or like sentences about morality, sentences about good and bad and should whereas like ethics, like object level ethics would be sort of like, what sentences do we say about or like should we say about good and bad?And like sort of what's true on the, on the direct object level there? I guess the, yes, so the meta ethical stance that I really wanna take is basically derived from an observation, which is that MetaEthical questions are under I think some pretty reasonable assumptions entirely empirical.So whatever the truth of the object level, ethical facts insofar as they exist. [00:03:00] There's some reason that people go around talking about shoulds and, and good and bad and so on. And, and that reason is like entirely inside of physics. It's not mysterious. It's the kind of thing that we could figure out by like, looking carefully at humans and at human societies and at maybe, maybe game theory and math.We don't need fundamentally different tools to answer that kind of question. If we're interested in answering like, the straightforward question, why do people say sentences like that? What is sort of the driver for humans having these intuitions and having these sort of discussions and, and and so on.And so that's sort of like the, the, the meta ethical stance. And then I think it has some kind of interesting implications for taking this stance has an interesting implications for the more object level stuff. So I think the most obvious one to me is that it, it does [00:04:00] not seem like it lends itself well to sort of very simplified rule-based systems.So I think it, it pushes me pretty far away from like a sort of total utilitarian kind of a view where you're aiming to make your object level ethical system very simple and make that sort of like this very beautiful sort of object that you know, is unassailable.Ben Goldhaber: I'd love to ask a question there about that because I could see some people actually like in intuition that I feel like I have, when I hear that from a meta ethical point of view, everything is within this same kind of system and I suppose all derived from physics on down it. Lends itself to thinking about things in a very maybe not very, but like I could see it applying in like a simplified manner.Like thinking okay, well because it's physics and because it's something knowable, we can construct theories about [00:05:00] it that are simple and derive into this kind of utilitarian calculus. But it sounds like you're actually pushing in the opposite direction and saying, no, it's much more complicated.Ben WR: Yeah, I think basically my sense that like you get something complicated is not like solely based on the idea that it's from that meta ethics is like empirically addressable. It's also based on sort of like observing what is going on when people talk about good and bad and should.I think it seems to me that if you want to have, like, if you wanna have your meta ethical stance basically look correct or like consistent with the evidence I think you need it to include some things, which to me do not. Seem like they would come from an approximation to utilitarianism.You need it to include things like I don't know. So, so Jonathan Hate has this [00:06:00] book oh shoot. I'm gonna forget what it's called cuz I'm being recorded. But it's the Jonathan Hate book. I feel like there's one Jonathan hate book people quote in this situation. No, it's definitely the out one.Ben Goldhaber: There's,Ben WR: let's look out and then we can, and then you can go back and say that. Yeah. Yeah. Ok. Is it the Righteous Mind? I think that is it. Yes. Ok. Okay. So, so Jonathan Ha has has this book, the Righteous Mind where he sort of goes into like doing, excuse me, a lot of the sort of like empirical like analysis of what is going in, what's going on in people's minds when they're having this sort of like set of ethical intuitions and conversations.And he comes out with like several factors like I think, I think it has like five sort of like key key things that, that are sort of factors of people's morality. And one of them like, like an especially important one and one that like, I think is especially important to me is [00:07:00] sort of harm focused morality.Which is I mean, it's quite widespread, but it's not like the only thing going on for almost anyone when they're thinking about sort of like what's ethical. So,Ben Goldhaber: So there are like multiple different things going on when people are calculating, thinking about what's ethical and like a certain re reductionist point of view.That's just looking at the harm's point of view is probably missing a lot of things. Is this one way to put this? Ben WR:Yeah. Yeah. I think that's basically,Divia Eden: yeah. Can I, I just, I just pulled up what the different ax axis, the five one s he has can, do you mind if I say them? Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay. So he has care, harm, fairness, cheating, loyalty, betrayal, authority, subversion and sanity degradation.I have some, at least that's what I found when I looked it up. I have some imperfect memory that he added, like freedom in there later because he found that that was important to some people and it wasn't originallyBen WR: covered. Yeah, and I think, I mean his I think he also has sort of generally this take that [00:08:00] there could be a, a bunch more, and these were just sort of like the most obvious when he was sort of like going through like the available, like the available evidence.And so, yeah, I think, I think it's, it's not clear that that is like a complete list, but I think it is clear that like your meta ethics has to sort of explain all of that. And it's not impossible, I think to, to end up with an explanation, like from my current standpoint, it's not impossible that you would end up with an explanation that sort of like is more or less simple like utilitarianism but it doesn't feel like what you're gonna learn if you like, started off sort of like with a clean slate.Like just sort of examining humans sort of a, as some, as like a species that has these sort of intuitions and and ways of functioning in a society. It just doesn't seem quite like, it doesn't seem like that's gonna be like near the top of my like, list of plausible [00:09:00] explanations. I want to kind of like almost pop back for a second or maybe double click on the word meta ethics. Cause one thing when I hear that I think about it is like selecting among some set of ethical philosophies. Is that how you meanit? Not exactly. I think, so when I say meta ethics, which may not be quite what people like, typically mean by meta ethics when they're like professional philosophers.I mean something like Like, what are the sources of our, like ethical intuitions and our like the sentences that we say about ethics? I think that like, some, like, I don't know. It's, it's the sort of like, it's the domain where like you might a wonder about like whether moral realism is true.Like whether there [00:10:00] really is some kind of like, like objective moral truth. Whether, you know, is moral realism real? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I mean, it's a, it's a real concept although I think it might actually be a lot of different real concepts. But yeah. Are youupDivia Eden: for saying what the different, what some of the different real concepts might be?Ben WR: Oh yeah. I mean, so I think so in the like local social sphere, I guess like people use the term mo moral realism in a way that I think is not quite the same as the way that philosophers use the term. Excuse me. I think philosophers, when they say moral, moral realism, they mean something sort of broader.Like is there any sense in which like, you know, morality is real or like good and bad or real or, or anything like that. And I think that that admits a lot more ways that things can be real than [00:11:00] often people are imagining when they're saying moral realism. So if you're, if you spend a lot of time around ea you might like, like.Come across disagreements where people are sort of like talking about moral realism versus moral anti-real. And the anti-real are saying like, are are sort of, they're taking this view that like there's no supernatural, like the universe doesn't care. It's sort of like a combination of like, I dunno, they, they think it's like maybe morality is subjective.They think it's like, maybe not like aliens might not have the same moral systems as we would. They think that like, you know, there's no sort of like underlying supernatural like thing that is that is mor morality or ethics. Whereas the, the realist think that there maybe is some kind of a thing like that.Like the, the, I don't know you might get sentences like the arc of history bend toward justice or like, you know, [00:12:00] I only care about the worlds in which morality is real because like the other ones have no value according to me. And I think that like, it is pretty, I think this sort of like this sort of like splits too many things into those two categories.And I think I, I would, my current sense is that like there is a sense in which morality is real. I, I don't think that it's supernatural. I don't think that the universe cares about morality. My guess is that some of it is kind of universal. Like if you were to like, go find some alien society, they would like share some of our moral intuitions and probably some of it is not.Ben Goldhaber: And and you suspect those universal features are derived from shared evolutionaryBen WR: patterns. Yeah. Shared evolutionary patterns, game theory basically the sort of [00:13:00] thing that like might be common between our culture and an alien culture. Can you give an example of some things that you, where you think the aliens would probably have the same moral intuitions?Yeah. I think one thing that seems interesting to me is that like fairness seems like it's quite common as like a, a sort of, i, I don't know if it's quite fair to say moral intuition, but it's like, it's a common sort of motivator across lots of different animal species, like not just humans. It, it seems like sort of quite like an early thing to, to like evolve in terms of like Something like things that sort of look like morality.And so my guess is that that seems like a plausible candidate for something like an alien species might have or something that would look sort of like how we would think of fairness I think, so fairness seems like a, a strong candidate for something that like, might be kind of universal, like given some sort of like assumptions about how evolution worked or works. I [00:14:00] guess it does seem to me like something like sort of like slightly weirder decision theories is also another plausible candidate where like, If you have a decision theory that isn't just c d t, sorry, caus causal decision theory like that is potentially going to help you coordinate with other people a lot better or other like members of your sort of species or people who you sort of like see as similar to yourself.And so I pre predict that things like that are also gonna be quite common in, especially I guess like social animals or like, yeah, I guess, you know, generalized animals.Ben Goldhaber: I'm still kind of thinking about something that you mentioned around like why utilitarianism doesn't seem like a good approximation of the meta ethics you might endorse.[00:15:00] And I think you answered this in a way, but I didn't quite gro it around the point of like Jonathan Height and the like different ax axis. And I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about it. The way I'm like kind of thinking about it is something like maybe you can't like, make trades between those axes in some way that all sums up to a number or something that the like stereotype view of utilitarianism might have.Yeah. Is that somewhere in the ballpark? Or, or maybe just say more about that.Ben WR: I do think that there's some, like, you probably could mathematically describe a way of making trade-offs because like, you know, obviously you, you sort of like can't Like, I, I mean, it's gonna be hard to construct a system like that where it's not, where you're, where you're not allowed to make any trade offs.But I don't think that's necessarily gonna be like a simple sort of like add up all of the, the field and like, you know, with different weights or whatever. I think [00:16:00] some of it is gonna look not very consequentialist and look sort of more like, are you being honest? Like, is that like, you know things that don't have direct like, I don't know where the, where the morality of the thing does not like route through its effects.Right. If that makes sense.Divia Eden: I, yeah, I was trying to think of an example of this in my head. And so I guess one of the, like, I took one of those eight quizzes years ago and there's some question that, you know, I probably, a lot of people I know I'm somewhat low on, maybe a little higher than I used to be as I get older, which is something like sanctity or it's like, how bad is it to, I don't know, like play a game of cards in a graveyard or something like that, where like it might seem in, you know, there are no there are no concrete consequences that can be easily tracked at least.But a lot of people have some sense that this is wrong. And maybe what you're saying is like, you know, if I'm imagining some pole that's like how many. I don't know, like how many, how many dollars would you have to give [00:17:00] to the against Malaria foundation to make up for playing a Rockus game in a graveyard?That this, there's something Ill-conceived about this. Is that sortBen WR: of what you're getting at? Yeah, I think that's basically right. Where like, it's not, it's not quite clear that there's like no trade that you could make or, or anything like, quite that extreme. But I think it is sort of like the question is like not actually giving you the information that like, might be needed to answer the question.For example like it might depend a lot on your state of mind, like when you were playing the game, it might like, you know, it may just be that there isn't really, like the thought experiment does not actually like, give you the relevant details. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't like any kind of trade off that you could make at any given situation or that, like, there aren't details that could be given.But I think it does mean, I don't know that a lot of these yeah, that, that it's like, it, it's not going to end up [00:18:00] being a very, very straightforward kind of a, like a function from like the state of the universe to like how good or bad it is. I think I especially expect it to not be a simple, a simple function of something like summing up all of the positive experiences.So, so I think, I think I find total utilitarianism especially suspect as a, like object, the let system it's not crazy to me to have like a utility function. I think that's like maybe the kind of thing that you, you can still have. It's just that I, I don't expect it to be a very simple one. And I think I might expect it to sort of have like terms about what your mental state is and not just terms about like what's out in the world.Ben Goldhaber: Right.And how do you maybe personally or philosophically relate to this? Is it something where you try to hold like multiple points of view and like make decisions from that? [00:19:00]Ben WR: Yeah, I mean, so since I had this thought a while back, I've been thinking more in terms of like, what would my, like, I mean, it, it's a little silly to say to me, but, but I've been thinking a lot in terms of like, what would my grandfather do?Or like, what would my grandfather think is the right thing to do? Oh, that's nice.Ben Goldhaber: I like, I just like that immediately, but please continue. Yeah.Ben WR: And I guess maybe similarly thinking about like, What seemed to be kind of like universal features of moral systems. So I think it, it has caused me to sort of like up weight being honest, like because I feel like that is like quite a common, like admonition.It's also like caused me to up weight, like the golden rule roughly. Like, you know, treat some kind of thing vaguely shaped, like treat people like you wanna be treated. Maybe I mean there's lots of different ways you can sort of like add epicycles to make it [00:20:00] better cuz there are obvious problems with it.But but using that kind of thing where like, I, I just, I I have observed that like lots of different cultures and lots of different groups like seem to value those things. And that, that seems like if you, if you were to take a, the set of things that are like that, that would sort of be a minimal collection of like what might be considered like human morality, right?Ben Goldhaber: Try to shoot for like a minimum rule pack of human morally. Yeah. And then layering on top of that, does that kind of come from your personal exper or maybe, maybe like, you're not supposed to almost like add more things on top of that and what do youBen WR: Yeah, I, I think I mean, so one question here is like why if I have this view, if I'm like, okay, where like ethics is all sort of like explainable by physics, whatever, like why should I find it compelling?Like why would I want to be moral? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think that in some ways I. Shouldn't want to be like, [00:21:00] like absolutely moral. However, I do care about the systems that I'm embedded in. Like I, I care about like the world that I'm in and like seeing it continue to, to thrive and continue to exist.I like, you know, I care about my friends and, and all this stuff. And my sense is that like some of morality is going to be tied up with like the preservation or you know, creation of systems like that. And, and probably quite a lot of it. And some of that is gonna be directly helpful to me.Like it's gonna be, it, it's gonna be derived from like patterns which like helped other people with those memes to like get more whatever, like basically propagate themselves or their memes. And some of it is gonna be like, it helped the societies that those people were in. And I think both of those can be like quite compelling reasons to want to be moral.And so I [00:22:00] guess that's sort of another way that I like another sort of source of like maybe layering on top is like, can I sort of like figure out. How this is like, I don't know how this fits into that kind of picture. And like, like also sort of like helps to some extent like eliminate aspects of morality that I like, don't think are as important.So for example, I think like believing in a particular God to me is not the kind of thing that I expect to like, come around to thinking I should do. Just because like, it, it doesn't seem like, I don't know, there are too many different choices there. It's like not, it's not like really well justified.Any particular one. I might be like more open to the idea that like maybe I ought to pray or something or do some kind of like sacred ritual which seems sort of more common. But yeah, I think [00:23:00] my sense is that like, insofar as that would be helpful to me or the societies that I live in, like there are better things that I can do with that belief, like believ through things instead.And so I'm not especially inclined toward that.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. It's funny that you started mentioning God and religion in this because in part of what you were saying, I feel like I was hearing real. Echoes and shades of Cs Lewis's concept of the Dao, like some set of rules or principles behind civilization that seems to be universal and that he tightly coupled with both morality and the Christian faith right.And yeah, I, I, I certainly see like the way also in which, in you're bringing this into almost like a game theory kind of mode of like justifying it through like, all right, well these are the principles and rules, but with civilizations and people flourish. These are the kind of underpinnings of morality here, and I should look towardsBen WR: those.Yeah. Yeah, that feels really right to me.[00:24:00] I mean, yeah, I, I'm not sure if I've read the specific CS Lewis thing that you're re referencing, but I have read a, a bit, and I think basically I, I, I often feel like I'm with him like 70% of the way, and then like as soon as he starts being like very specific about why it's Christianity in particular, I'm like, Hmm that doesn't really make sense to me.Mm-hmm. But I do, yeah, I do resonate with a lot of the stuff that he says about like, I mean, sort of like Yeah. The kind of thing that you're, that you're talking about.Divia Eden: So I, I have a question about when you were saying, like, it almost sounded like what you were, when you were describing it before, that the grounding of why, to, why, like the motivation to follow these moral principles was to be helpful to you and the societies.You're, the systems you're embedded in, but then that starts to sound more consequentialist in a way that I think you don't mean, and so my guess is that it's sort of hard to use language. So talk about this, and that's kind of what's up here, but I, I guess I wanted to like, if you could expand onBen WR: that point a little.Yeah. I think [00:25:00] like, it's not so much when I say that, like, I, like why do this thing? I think it's actually, it is actually a bit consequentialist. It's just not, it's just not sort of like morally consequentialist. It's not that like, I think that I ought to do the thing which causes the best outcomes.It's that like I separately like happen to want good outcomes. And along with a lot of other things that I want and like wanting good outcomes, like I think leads to wanting to be moral by sort of like observing that I'm like embedded in these systems. And that I like, you know, there are these apparent rules by which people seem to try to steer the systems to like whatever, like better, more productive aims.Ben Goldhaber: Is there a moral principle or? Universal feature of some of the groups that you [00:26:00] think maybe is absent from one of the societies or groups that you're in, like something you think they should be doing more?.Ben WR: So one of the things that I think feels really important to me about this is that I, I agree with effective altruism, like the movement on a lot of like, key points that most people disagree on. And I observe that ea seem to make sort of classes of mistakes that I think that they would not make if they understood this like this general sort of like direction of thinking at least a little bit better. So so like S B F I, I think like really is like a true believer. Totally utilitarian. And he's a smart guy. And, and I kind of think that, like, I, [00:27:00] my sense is that like you.You can sort of only end up doing things which like, like the, the kind, you can only end up making the kind of mistakes that it seems like SPF F and others at FTX made. I think by sort of neglecting some of these sort of more traditional like ethical principles, like, like try to be honest, try to be scrupulous with people's money.You know, things that I, I guess it does seem like like, I don't know. I mean I, I, I really respect his and, and also Caroline Allison's commitment to their, like, moral principles. And I, and I don't, you know, maybe controversially, I, I don't actually take Ft X's collapse and like fraud as that much evidence that they like abandoned those principles.In fact, I, I, it seems quite [00:28:00] consistent with those principles to make that kind of mistake. And I think, I think it does feel really important to me insofar as this is like a correct observation to like point it out to the people who I think are trying to do as much good as possible so that they like, might not make mistakes like this in the future.That makesBen Goldhaber: sense.Divia Eden: Yeah. So can, like, can you be more specific about what it is that you wanna point out to people?Ben WR: Yeah. I think something like, like your, my mainline guess, and I think a very reasonable mainline guess about sort of like the metaphysics of the world is that basically physics is what's going on. Like, you know, the universe is sort of more or less mechanical at, at the bottom layer.And that everything that we say and do has perfect explanations inside of [00:29:00] physics and therefore like can be explained by looking at like by, by basically just being empirical. So I think a lot of people who I know have this sort of pseudo like sort of pseudo supernatural, like the people who I think of as, as, as thinking of themselves as moral realists in the ea sense.They have a sort of pseudo supernatural view of like, like what it would mean for there to be like, like real morality in the world. And I guess it seems to me that there's a whole, there's like a category of belief that one can have that is not. Like almost inherently disconnected from the truth of the matter of that belief.And there's a way in which if someone is like, ah, yes, I think that there is some sort of [00:30:00] supernatural like, goodness thing. And like, you know, it's gotta be the sort of beautiful, most beautiful, simple thing, probably utilitarianism. I think there's a way that that belief, if it were true, like there's no route for the truth of the belief to influence the belief.And if it were false, there's no route for like, the falseness of the belief to, to, to influence the belief. So it's, you're saying it's unfalsifiable, it's not exactly that, it's unfalsifiable. It's that like there just isn't like if, so physics is probably causally closed, like in insofar as like anything can be like there, there everything that happens in physics, including all the things I'm saying and all the things I'm like experiencing and we're talking about like have perfect explanations in terms of physics.And so if you're gonna pause it, something outside of physics that thing, like there's no route because I have perfect explanations for everything in terms of physics. [00:31:00] There's no route for anything outside of physics to influence my belief. I think. So it's different than falsifiable because like it might be the case that like, I have a belief about.Like how evolution happened that in fact, I will never get enough information to like, know the truth of, and that's actually like a, I think that that does not fail this test, but does fail the falsifiability test. Where like, at least that belief, like there is some way that, that like could in principle, like be connected to the truth of the matter.And yeah, I think that's, that feels kinda like an important distinctionBen Goldhaber: and I'm still kind of puzzling on this. Like, so like maybe some folks have this kind of conception of some thing outside of the realm of physics that is the source of like moral truths. And your point is many people [00:32:00] in the EA space don't necessarily think that is God, but that they still treat it in some way like that.And you'd wanna bring that back down into the realm of physics while still holding. Also hold, also believing that there is some source of truth that is beyond like, or that is like somewhat universal.Ben WR: Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, that source of truth can be, and in fact, like I think more or less, the only source of truth as far as I can tell is like things that exist in the world.And like, and that seems like a, like a totally reasonable place to me to look for like true morality is just like, yeah, try to figure out what it is we're talking about when we're saying these sentences. And so it's,Divia Eden: it's part of where you're coming from that you think it's sort of, it's, it's appealing to people to create something elegant in their minds and give it, like, elevate it to a special place that's [00:33:00] ultimately ungrounded.And is is part of what you're saying that with your meta ethical stance is that no, that's sort of unjustified and people actually need to do the work of looking at the world and grounding their ethical intuitions. Does that seem, is that closer?Ben WR: Yeah, I think that's almost exactly right. And yeah, the, the only place where I guess maybe I would like slightly modify it is something like it's not, it's not clear that you like even have to ground it all the way out.I think it just sort of like, it, it's going to be like, I think it's important to keep this in mind and like let it influence your like, Probability distribution over like what the truth is. Like if you are, if you are as I am, like, you know, relatively confident that like physicalism is roughly true that should impact your beliefs about why people say sentences about good and bad.Imagine I sense imagine people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Like if I imagine [00:34:00] my sense people first go, but yeah, go ahead.Divia Eden: Yeah. If I imagine you say, you know, hypothetically you're running a bank, you have some customer funds, you're deciding what to do with them. Can you sort of walk me through how your physicalist meta ethical stance would infor, like, can you, can you sort of lay out the steps for that from then what you do with the customer money?Ben WR: Yeah. I mean, I think for one thing like I think it, it pushes quite hard on. Things like honesty which I think as I sort of mentioned before, like my sense is that honesty is like like fairly universally seen as like, you know, like the ethical thing to do. Like all other things equal. And I guess it's not necessarily the case that all of the actions with the money will, will like be dic dictated by an ethical system.Like it might be that I like, have a lot of leeway over like exactly what investments to make. Like maybe I would like to just [00:35:00] maximize my return. Like, that's probably ethical as at least assuming that I'm like being honest about that with with the people whose money it is. Maybe it's that I like want to invest in things that I think will make a positive difference in the world.It's not super clear to me that like that like this is like sort of required by an ethical system. My guess is that it is probably like better to do things that are better, but I don't think, my sense is that like the true moral system is not extremely demanding. If that makes sense. Partly because in fact humans mostly are not fanatics.And things seem to work out basically fine and in fact kind of better when they're not fanatics. And so I don't expect like to find that like the true moral system insofar as there is one, [00:36:00] or like, maybe there is one relative to me or relative to me in my situation or something like is going to make demands of me.Like, you must find the most, like the, the best possible thing to do with this money. And like, I guess it seems to me like it's, it's totally, it's likely to be very compatible with like many options especially ones that are sort of like being what is recognized locally to be like like rather like fulfilling the role of a good bank manager or whatever.Insofar as that's like what people are expecting from me. And that that may not be like I don't know, it may or may not be like involves sort of like maximizing profit. It may or may not involve sort of like, you know, being lenient with people on their loans or whatever. I dunno, I'm not sure if this is a good a good answer to your question.[00:37:00] IBen Goldhaber: like it because it did help me grasp something much worldview here and then also kind of what I feel like is a common. Well, I'm not even sure failure mode, but like a tension point. I feel like with a lot of the philosophies that we talk about, which is like on the margin, what's the next action that you're gonna take and like how much should it be influenced by some other thing, like on the margin, are you going to like, donate the next dollar to a M f or Miri or some other charity?And then there's always this question of like, well, why am I not donating the next dollar and the dollar after that? And I guess what I'm hearing you say is something like, no, we should kind of resist or at least be very skeptical of this idea that ethics can be a universal operating system for your choices.Is that an accurate kind of statement?Ben WR: Yeah, I think I think basically it, it, yeah.I think I do wanna say something like, [00:38:00] I don't think that the, like insofar as there is gonna be a true ethical system, I don't expect it to make a prescription about every action. Hmm. I expect expected to make prescriptions about lots of actions and to like, you know, strongly push against some and strongly push in favor of others, but.I don't think it's gonna be like, you know, like, I think, I think there is something kind of wrong with the sort of the like obligation framing, which I guess a lot of VAs sometimes talk about with respect to ethics, where I think like the obligation framing of a particular ethical system is like basically going to lead you into fanaticism for basically the reason that you're talking about.Like, ah, yeah, well I spent my first, you know, 60% of my income on am m f I guess maybe I ought to spend the [00:39:00] next 30% too. And then, I don't know. And my guess that this just doesn't actually work that well for like, you know, building a society like, like actually in fact causing the most good outcomes if that really is what you want.And I mean, in particular, I just, I just think it isn't probably good like making reference to what I expect to, to find about like what good and bad mean. Mm-hmm.Divia Eden: I, yeah. I think the part that I'm most trying to clarify in my mind is something like the step from the sort of non supernatural, empirical view on morality to then you are sort of looking, there's both some question about what actually makes societies work.And then there's some sort of additional sense that looking around at what seems to, which principles seem to people converge are convergent seems like a pretty good source [00:40:00] of information about what the true morality is. Mm-hmm. Am I, doesBen WR: that seem right? Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that, that seemed like it basically hit the nail in the head.Like there sort of is, my sense is that there are, like, if you take this, I guess the way that I would phrase it or something is like there's sort of a, a. First step, which is like, you notice that you can answer these questions empirically, and then there's like a second step. And I've, like, I, I think it's easy to take the first step.The second step is hard, which is like, okay, now we actually have to do the empiricism and like actually try to figure out what's going on. And I don't think that we've like, succeeded at that. I, I don't think that I can just like go crack open Jonathan Hate's book and like read out what the true morality is.And like, I think it is in fact a quite difficult project. I actually think my sense is also, this is basically to some extent like the project of like the original [00:41:00] sociologists. And I think sociology in the meantime has sort of gotten like, redirected to other things. But my sense is that, that they were really interested in sort of like cultural universals and specifically around sort of like sacredness and and like morality and religion.And so I think my sense is that like people have sort of like made these sort of like halting steps towards the second step in this, in this sort of program. Like enough that I, I feel like there, I can say more than nothing about like what I expect to find, but I don't think that I can say anything with all that much certainty.Like I think like probably 80% of the things that I've said in this, in this like conversation so far I feel very un uncertain about really. And like I would be unsurprised to learn that they were basically wrong, but some of them Yeah, you go, yeah. And maybe that. Yeah, and [00:42:00] I think partly I, I'm even like open to the idea that in fact moral realism is false and like there is no sense in which morality is, is like a real thing and that like, you know, there's sort of this like non-cognitive view that like, we're basically just sort of making emotional expressions when we talk about good and bad or something like that.And that there's like no sort of consistent, real thing there. It's, it's like pretty strongly not what my guess is. Like, I, I think there's like enough things that I can point to where I'm like, okay, but that thing definitely exists and like, it seems like it's part of what we're talking about. But but I don't know.I, I, I'm open to being like wrong about even that.Ben Goldhaber: It strikes me that some embrace of uncertainty or toleration of uncertainty is kind of central to your worldviewBen WR: on this. Yeah, totally. I think there's a way in which, so some is talk about like like, like moral uncertainty like I guess especially like Will McCaskill has written some stuff [00:43:00] about it.And when I first read that I was sort of like like, or read about moral uncertainty. I, I had this sort of like visceral yuck reaction to it where I'm like, ah, but like I feel like it's not really like he's describing it as sort of like, oh, well maybe like 30% on utilitarianism and 30% on like virtue ethics or something.And I just kind of get the sense that that discussion is often not grounded in like, how you might actually answer the question. And like, like trying to constrain your predictions like so that they match as well as you can, like the evidence that's actually available. And yeah, I think it is, I think it is basically, it feels really key to me to have something like moral uncertainty but to in fact ground it in.Like what, like, I don't know how you, how you would, how you would expect this kind of [00:44:00] exploration to, to, to play out.ThisBen Goldhaber: kind of exploration. Could you say more there?Ben WR: Yeah. So like step two, I guess, where like you're sort of going from the observation that probably like all of this stuff is empirically like sort of discoverable, right? And then in fact trying to go and discover it, so, right, right. Yeah. Like trying to figure out why it is that people have like fairness intuitions and like you know, things like this.This makes a lot of,Ben Goldhaber: I, I sense to me, or at least it's like one of the things where I really enjoyed talking with you about this was some sense of like, yeah, there's something here that feels like both very true and very humane, almost like kind of human-centric. While also as soon as I get to that word I'm kind of thinking like, oh wow, there's gonna be a, there'd be a lot of fighting.There would be a lot of different points of view on this. And I imagine that's like some of the appeal of some other like, Modes where you can be like, no, we, we have the answer. [00:45:00]Ben WR: Totally. And like I think, you know, I think there are a lot of like benefits to making simplifying assumptions. I'm not necessarily saying that people shouldn't like, use something like utilitarian calculus as like an input into their decision process.But I don't think, I think that that, that people are sort of I don't quite wanna say diluted, but like something like diluted into like thinking that's please say diluted.Ben Goldhaber: We need more good clips to be able to kinda like, get some spices in, you know, viaBen WR: totally Twitter fans. Yeah. So like, I guess I have a sense that people are sort of diluted into thinking that that's all they need to do that that's like, in fact the whole deal.And as long as they've done that, then like they're doing as much good as they can do. They're, they're, they're sort of unassailable morally. And I think that is not really true. I, [00:46:00] I mean, I think it's both. Yeah. I think that that point of view is both like too harsh and too, and like not harsh enough.Mm-hmm. It like excludes a bunch of things that I think people sort of in fact ought to be paying attention to and aren't when they're sort of in that mindset. And also, yeah, it, it like does this sort of like pushing toward fanaticism thing and like pushing away from like sort of having a, a healthy life?Divia Eden: Yeah. Can you say more about why you think fanaticism is not good?Ben WR: Yeah. I mean, I guess my sense is like if I have a bunch of, if I think about like the central examples in my mind of like fanaticism from history they, like the fanatics often end up in the historical memory as being like a. Basically the bad guys is, I think one, kind of, one part of it.Or the people who, like, were more fanatical of [00:47:00] the possible, like choices seem like they're sort of, they, they sort of end up seeming like the bad guys. That's like not itself that much evidence, I think. But I also observe that like, I don't know like the people around me who are the most fanatical are like, in fact not the most productive or like doing the best.And in fact, I think there's probably like an anticorrelation between those like another, another I guess point that feels like it's on the scales there. But yeah, I mean, I also think about like times when like the more fanatical group, like clearly caused a lot of harm. Like I think I, 2, 2, 2 examples in my mind that that come up a lot are like the French Revolution and like the Russian Revolution, where like, I think both of these were sort of like more or less driven [00:48:00] by like a kind of fanaticism, which like ultimately resulted in like both directly a lot of bloodshed and, and suffering like during the revolutions.And also like after the fact inst like installed regimes, which themselves were like, I think. Like quite clearly bad like, yeah. Napoleon and the U S S R both seemed to me like they caused a lot more harm than like many other possible, I guess regimes might have. I dunno. And I think another one would, another example would be like like China, like Maton and and like various like cultural revolution stuff.I guess it just seems like many recent historical examples to me feel like they sort of have this correlation between like high fanaticism and like worse outcomes. Whereas [00:49:00] like in the American Revolution, my sense is that like people were much less fanatical. They were sort of much more pragmatic.They like, I think sort of still saw themselves as like, you know, roughly British people and like, sort of were just like, they were pissed off, but they weren't like fewer, fewer people were sort of like calling for like the blood of the elites or something. And I think, I guess like it just seems to me like that resulted in a better outcome.Divia Eden: Yeah. So that makes sense to me in a lot of ways it seems like sort of the, the term that comes to my mind is like a genre savviness thing. It's like, I'll read the baddies, like that gift,Ben WR: whatever. Yeah, exactly.Divia Eden: And then, so, and I'm sympathetic to your point, if I imagine myself coming from a more utilitarian.Point, I would say something like, okay, sure, but if I were, I would simply do the utilitarian calculus and count it as super negative that, you know, that all the people would die of starvation and therefore I would [00:50:00] not do that. Yeah. Which, I mean, I don't think you would particularly, you know, I think you'd probably be happy to have them taking that into account, but like, I, I think I'd like you to hear, I'd like to hear a more direct response to like, okay, but why not double down on the fanaticism and get better at calculating theBen WR: consequences?Yeah. I mean, I do think that like, there is some appeal to that, like, especially insofar as like the world changes over time and we're sort of like in a new regime where like maybe we actually could calculate all of the consequences. Like, I don't know, maybe a hundred years from now we'll have Jupyter brains and like be able to like actually figure out what all the consequences are.And I think in that world I'm like a lot more sympathetic. For now, I, I don't think that's the world we're in. My sense is that like, I, I don't expect to be able to do those calculations well. If I were to try I basically expect to do better, like by my own lights. By sort of like internally [00:51:00] appealing to my sense of like what's wholesome and like what is sort of like morally good in the sort of more, more traditional kind of a sense.Like you expectDivia Eden: that sort of calculation to sort of fail on its own merits, you think it Yeah, totally. To give a worseBen WR: answer. Right. And, and that's sort of like what my, my feeling is about what might have happened at ftx. I think that there's sort of like ways that you can sort of think that you are like maximizing the good when actually you're sort of like neglecting a bunch of things that like in fact will lead you to sort of like, in some sense predictably fail to do anything like maximizing the good.And you could also, I mean, I think a, a a different way that you could see the Ft X thing, which is like counter to that is like, well, maybe they were actually maximizing the good, but like it they just were taking on a lot of risk and like the risk, you know, didn't pay off for them or something. And like, yeah, that is sort of always gonna be a possibility.[00:52:00] But I don't know, I think it's at least some evidence that that kind of thinking like didn't pay off for them and, and probably won't for others. You mentioned the idea that if you're in a new regime, potentially you might change your mind on this, like a regime in which we have Jupiter brains or some type of advanced AI to solve this calculation problem.Ben Goldhaber: Another thing that I sometimes hear arguing against the idea of certain universal moral precepts or ideas like morality running through history is like, well, we are in a different time period and a different environment where perhaps different sets of values end up leading to better outcomes. I'm curious if you think one that seems plausibly true about today and or two, like is there a, like new [00:53:00] environment you might anticipate where like you would throw out your like rule for honesty?Like are there certain things you expect might be like faster to be like be pushed over the ship?Ben WR: Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great question. I don't know. I think my sense is that like the current world is still basically composed of like regular humans, like doing regular human things, like existing in more or less regular human societies.I think what I would say about a world where that no longer seems to be the case is that like if I were to throw out the sort of like. Like, you know, things like injunctions for honesty I would not know what to replace them with. That would actually be better. Like I think it would at least require some sort of like, period of ex of like ex of like, exploration either on like a personal or a societal level or probably both [00:54:00] to like try and figure out which things like actually would, would work.Like, my guess is that like, it, it's not the kind of thing where you can just sort of be like, oh, well, you know, we, we no longer care about honesty because we're like, in this weird world, we instead like wanna just do the, just do the calculus straight up or something. At least not like confidently at any given moment.Ben Goldhaber: We'll kind of switch tracks here and talk a little bit about ai.You're someone who was like, Both worked in various orgs that have worked on some of AI and AI alignment, and also you're someone who's been around this kind of scene that has been thinking about it for a while. So, you know, first question, how do we solve the alignmentBen WR: problem? Yeah. I wish I knew.I, yeah, I, it it may be that I don't actually have that much useful to say on this topic. IDivia Eden: mean, do, do your views on moral realism, [00:55:00] do you think they have any implicationsBen WR: there? Yeah, I, for, yeah, I, I do think that is relevant for like, questions of alignment. Like for example, I, I think at least in terms of whether I expect like an aligned AI system to basically make hiton or not, I think I basically expect it to not, right.Because I, I don't actually think that's like what human values push towards. And yeah, I, I mean that's, that's like one thing to say about it. I, in terms of like aligning an AI system with human values, I do think that like there probably is a real thing like that is that we're talking about when we're talking about human values and that like, therefore, like in principle, it's sort of possible to align in ai which is maybe a thing that you might, that, that someone, some might disagree with.I'm also not sure, like separately, I think [00:56:00] A lot of people talk about sort of like c e V or like coherent orated volition where like if you sort of take this as like, I don't know, like roughly speaking, it's sort of like if you had a lot of time and like, like a reasonable process for sort of like aggregating everyone's preferences into like what we would really want.Like that's sort of like what we should be aiming for. And that's like not crazy to me. I think there's like a way that I disagree with sort of like an implicit claim in c e V talk, which is like that there is a single C E V that like that if you had a reasonable process for like, bringing together all these preferences and like sort of hashing it out like sort of like leaves a lot to I I guess like what that process actually is.Like, I sort of expect it to be kind of path dependent, like what the like end result is. I basically just like don't see a particular way, a particular [00:57:00] reason to think that like whatever it is the human's value, like taken collectively, like that thing is like going to be well defined without sort of specifying more about like exactly how you're aggregating preferences and and so on.Ben Goldhaber: And this is slightly different than, than your kind of view around this almost like baseline morality in some sense. Cause you expect that to be relatively. Maybe not well defined, but relatively broad spread, spreadBen WR: among humans. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I, I basically expect like the, like it does in fact seem to me that humans almost universally like have some kind of thing like morality that they like, you know, have fairness intuitions.They have like, you know, they sort of like scold each other for doing things that they think are bad, you know? Right. ButBen Goldhaber: preferences in the whole broader range of human experience might be much more path dependent, much more varied.Ben WR: Yeah. I think that's sort of right. Like, I, I don't expect, I don't [00:58:00] expect that, like that set of things, which is more or less universal to like, as I sort of said before, I don't expect it to even like, make like necessarily make recommendations about every action that you would take.And so I also don't expect it to like, sort of make a particular recommendation about like what to do with the future like a single specific one. I do expect there to be like compatible ways of, of like handling the future and incompatible ones. And like, I think the way that I personally think about the alignment problem is like more like, how can we get the AI to like help us into a compatible future rather than incompatible one.I haven't read the book Human Compatible, so I have no idea if this is about that or, or, or if that's about this or what. And so my guess, I'm not sure either.Divia Eden: And my guess from how you're talking is that you think your, your views on moral realism. As you say that you think that they, they have some implications for like, if we had an AI that was going to implement some sort of reasonable [00:59:00] process, how that might go and whether that would be possible.Mm-hmm. But it seems like you, my guess is you don't think that the AI would independently be like, oh, this is obviously what I should do and I Yeah, that makes sense to me. But can you explain, cuz I think sometimes people think, well, if moral realism is real, then the AI would come up with it and then we'll all be fine.So why do youBen WR: not think that? Yeah, I think basically because the AI is not going to be a human and like, my sense is, and, and it's not even going to be like an organism that evolved in like in like a social context. I mean, it might in fact be something like that depending on like questions about how the future goes.In which case maybe it would have something like fairness intuitions or, or, or something like that. I don't know. But if there were, if there were to be like a singleton, I don't see any reason that it would like happen to find the same sorts of like [01:00:00] the same sorts of like strategies for perpetuating itself that human societies have found.And like, and, and as I said, sort of like the, the reason for me to like. B moral is because it works better. Like there's sort of like this, this, first of all, I like have these values that like are sort of independent of morality and then I like observe that like in some cases, probably in many cases acting morally actually helps me achieve those values.Like more effectively. It's sort of like aDivia Eden: capabilities boost for you.Ben WR: Yeah, exactly. And it's like very unclear to me that it would be capabilities boost for like a super intelligent ai. In fact, I would guess that it wouldn't be, especially for Singleton. And I would pretty strongly guess that it, that most like human morals would also not be capabilities boosts for like sort of more multipolar worlds.Ben Goldhaber: And so in general, do you feel more optimistic [01:01:00] about the multipolar worlds and or do you think we're trending in that direction?Ben WR: I, I feel pretty pessimistic about all possibilities really. I don't like, even if, so, if you did have a multipolar world and they did inherit some like aspects of like what we would consider like morality or sort of like, you know, evolve that or like come like, you know, realize it independently or something I don't think that, my guess is that a lot of it is is pretty dependent on like.What kind of species you're interacting with. And like, I, my guess is that they would, that they would potentially, they would potentially enact a future that was compatible with like morality relative to them and not relative to us. Like, I mean, you know, for example, maybe their future [01:02:00] has no humans in it because they like, don't especially care about humans.And that might not itself be like, you know, that might not itself be part of the, like the, the thing that they come to come to adopt in a similar way to like, I don't know, like, like ants I think are like probably, I, I mean, sorry. I think it's like a little bit, it's like a little bit stretching to be like, oh yeah, answer super moral.But I do think that like answer very social like, I don't know, they're like, you know, you social insects and they sort of like, basically their whole lives are like devoted to you know, the functioning of their, of their like local group. And humans I think basically don't have a term for ants in their, like, even though like many of our like many of the things that we think of as moral, probably like somewhat line up with like how ants behave.We don't think of the ants as being valuable.[01:03:00] If that makes sense. And I sort of imagine something like that. Also holding in the case, like if thereBen Goldhaber: were, there's likely a specious attitude inBen WR: morality, something like that. Something like that. Like part of it is gonna be because you have a collection of like agents with similar capabilities and those things are going to be like mortal patients in whatever, like social system arises.I would expect and probably that's not all of it. Like, I think in fact it is probably like not moral to torture your ants, but it's like much more moral to kill ants than it is to like kill humans.Divia Eden: Right. So you're sort of saying that your views on morality say that it'll be, it'll you, you, you follow your moral system because you think it works better for achieving your values.You expect an AI would do the same and you expect that there's some sort of action that's like, treat this as a moral patient. And whether to [01:04:00] do that is kind of contingent on whether doing that in general for that type of thing would help you achieve your values more. And you, you don't thinkBen WR: that would happen with ai?Yeah, that's basically right. And it is, it's not always going to be like your values. I think there is, there is definitely gonna be a component here that's sort of like more like slave morality or something where like I think it probably is gonna, like, part of morality I think is going to be about purely like preserving the systems that you're a part of and not like necessarily your own values.And so I think that's, that's like maybe another, another component of it. But but yeah, I think otherwise that, that was basically right. Yeah. Do you feelDivia Eden: good about the, the slave morality component personally? Like if you could sort of separate it out and know, okay, well this is something that I'm doing that'll preserve the system I'm a part of, but doesn't actually enact my values.Like Yeah. How do you relate to that?Ben WR: Yeah, I mean, I think if I, if I knew how to reliably separate that out, I, I think I would want to and mostly discard the things that are sort of more like only about preserving the system [01:05:00] even in ways that I like, don't endorse. I think it is gonna be hard to do that without like doing all the rest of step two of like figuring out yeah, like, just generally what's up.And so I'm kind of hesitant at the moment to like, you know, unless I have a really strong story for why I think is sort of like more like slave morality like to discard things like that. This is like another calculationDivia Eden: problem basically. Yeah. To try to separate this out. And So you wouldn't goDivia Eden: there?Ben WR: It's, it's like very structurally similar to the thing about like, why not just like add up all the consequences. And like under what circumstances might you like change your mind?Divia Eden: mean, the other, the other place where the personal philosophy, I would think intersex with the AI thing is there's this pat, it's been a lot on Twitter recently, which I, I almost hesitate to even repeat it, but people will be like, well, if you really took AI alignment seriously, obviously you would then do all of these horrible, you know, morally [01:06:00] horrific things.Yeah. So do you wanna respond to that from your, fromyour stance?Ben WR: Yeah, I mean, I think the easy answer f from my point of view is like, no, those things are bad. And like, it's usually not a good idea to do things that are bad. I mean, and, and like in proportion to how bad they are. And they seem like often extremely bad.Yeah, sure.But, and then I would say, okay, usually, but this is some out of distribution event, supposedly. That's the claim.Yeah. I mean, it does, it does push me toward like slightly more extreme policies. Like I think, I mean, so Eli's like, like you know, article and time is I think an expansion of like the normal sort of for foreign policy world where like, you know, yeah.Like you would also plan to enforce this this ban even against nons signatory countries. And I don't know, I mean that, that, that is, that, that does seem to me like kind of extreme and like in most cases, [01:07:00] like, would not be called for, like, would not in fact be worth it. And I think, you know, if you were to consider that aspect in isolation, I think it's, it's not good.It, it is like, you know, it's the kind of thing that like is kind of immoral to do. And nonetheless, I am pretty compelled that it would be good to do in this case. But I think that's like, there's a pretty big difference between like, insofar as it is possible coming to a global consensus that that's the right thing to do.And then carrying it out versus like, a lot of the things that I'm seeing on Twitter are sort of much more like vigilantism and like you know, sort of like recklessly going around, like murdering people. And I'm like I don't think, I don't think that's good. Kinda like, like you want some kind of like, Rough consensus, open source, almost like that ethos of how you govern something where it's like, maybe if we get 80% of the way [01:08:00] there, it's like, probably all right.Yeah, I mean I, yeah, I'm not sure exactly how to think about the consensus aspect, but I do think that like a, a procedure which like involves going around and trying to like, get people on board with this plan as much as possible and also making very clear like what exactly your policy is so that people can like, steer clear of it seems like way, way better as like, as a procedure.Like I think it, it pretty clearly for me pushes it from like, that's insane, obviously stupid bad, like policy to like Yeah, I mean I, I, it seems very reasonable given the stakes.So you wouldDivia Eden: say something like, okay, it is an extreme, it is, you know, potentially an extreme out of distribution situation, which does push in the direction of doing things that have downsides you normally wouldn't consider, but certainly not infinitely. [01:09:00] So Yeah, and you would still sort of take the normal costs and benefits into account a lot.Ben WR: Yeah, absolutely. I, I also think that like there's a way in which like seeking consensus is a way of avoiding a lot of the like, sort of failure modes of sort of individually like calculating wrong. So like if, if I thought, oh, you know, what we should really do is bomb all the data centers, I'm just gonna like go out and do that.Like, that seems way more clearly immoral than like, like maybe what we should do is bomb all the data centers. I'm gonna like, try to get the, like, governments on board and also first of like, also try to get people to like shut down the data centers first. Like, just like that process of like sort of gathering, like there's like a way that that sort of like, I think can diffuse a lot of the failure modes of trying to do the calculation yourself [01:10:00] from a wisdom of the crowds point of view.Yeah. But also I think like in, in terms of like I think it, it just is gonna be a component of, of sort of like how moral a thing is, like how much agreement there is about it. Like, I don't know, I think it's, it's totally fine to make a, to like ask someone to give you their bicycle for the afternoon.It's like not fine to like steal their bicycle and bring it back later.Divia Eden: Okay. So I, I'm trying to sum up in my head how you're relating to the. So the moral, what should I call it? Is it moral physicalism? I think that was a term somebody, yeah.Ben WR: I mean, the, the thing I'm, yeah, it's sort of a part of like a broader like, sort of metaphysical shift that I made recently, which I've been like referring to as physicalism.Okay. I, I don't know, like I, I think it is sort of like quite tightly connected to like philosophical physicalism. Can you say,Divia Eden: now I'm interested in that. Can you, can you first say a few words [01:11:00] about that shift?Ben WR: Yeah, yeah. So I think, yes, so, so for a while. Yeah. Hmm. How do I say that? So yeah, I guess this observation that like everything that's happening with people is sort of like the result of physics on like a lower level is like, or sorry. Well, probably, I guess I should say probably the result of physics on like a lower level is like a reframing of a lot of different questions that I had.So, so, so meta ethics is like the most obvious and sort of like the most relevant for a lot of things. But also sort of like the question of like what is real, which is sort of also related to the moral realism thing is like, Somehow feels much more clarified to me at like now than it used to where there's sort of [01:12:00] like physics is like the fundamental stuff, and then there's sort of like real stuff, which is like more or less like things that have a particular relationship to the physical stuff which are not necessarily, like, it's not correct to say that like that glass of water isn't real just because like the glass of water isn't sort of like a well-defined physical like, set of things.It's sort of like fuzzier it's still like clear to me that like it's, it makes much more sense to think about the glass of water is real. And I think that vague insight also like applies really directly to like the question of like free will. And like how, so it gives kind of a clean story for like how like if real things are sort of like structures or like sort of fuzzy structures built out of the physical stuff I think it's totally reasonable to me to think in terms of like free will being [01:13:00] real despite sort of like being built on a deter deterministic sort of physical substrate where like it is describing a particular phenomenon in humans that like we make choices.Like there is something happening that like results in us making choices. And if your like philosophical determinism denies that, like you're wrong. And like, I think it's just sort of like, it, it makes about as much sense to talk about will and free will in making choices as it does to talk about a glass of water.Like I think it, it's, and can, can youlikeDivia Eden: cash out? Like how does it, what are the ways in which it makes sense to talk about either? I can imagine, but like what would you say to that? Yeah.Ben WR: So, okay. I guess one thing that, one of the ways that I'm framing this in my head has to do with sort of like isomorphism between different parts of physics.So if like so it happens to be the case that the physical world we live in, like has a lot of structure. And it's sort of like this very strict pattern where [01:14:00] there are lots of different sort of like like I guess different parts of physics, which are isomorphic to each other. And if you've read the, the, the ELIEZER sequences post the Simple Truth, I think it, it sort of gets into, okay, but it was a long time ago.Yeah. It's the one where there's like a, a shepherd and he's like, you know, trying to figure out like how to count his sheep and like he's got these rocks and he's like, he, he sort of like notices that like if he, if he puts one rock in every time a sheep goes through the gate and then like takes one rock out every time a sheep passes the other way through the gate, like he will have correctly counted like whether all of his sheep have left the paddock or not.Mm-hmm. Like. This is sort of like, it's an isomorphism that he's like sort of constructing between the rocks and the sheep. Like the, the rocks are like telling him true facts about the sheep because of the way that like, the number of rocks and the number of sheep, like are connected. If that makes sense.Yeah. And this is like [01:15:00] everywhere I think in physics and in like, I, I guess just in the world, like these sort of isomorphism and in particular sort of like useful isomorphism where like, you know, a map is sort of isomorphic to the territory, meaning like, I have this like nice little piece of paper and I can like, use the nice little piece of paper to like navigate in the real world out there because there's a dysmorphism between them.Yeah. This reminds me, this, this is the thing I got from Anna Solomon was talking about it recently, the unreasonable effectiveness of math in the naturalsciences. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think this is like a big part for me of like, what I think is going on there is like, math is about these like really, really good isomorphism and like towers of isomorphism, right?Where like, you know, you can count sheep with rocks. You can like, I don't know, count fish with tally marks or something. And like there's sort of an isomorphism between those two isomorphism where like what you're doing in both cases is sort of like this counting thing. And like, I think you [01:16:00] can build.As far as I can tell, like all of math basically that way. Which I think is, is another one of the major sort of like reframing for me from this sort of physicalist viewpoint. I think I was natively thinking often in terms of sort of like a platonic view.Divia Eden: Oh, are you a mathematical realist now too?No. So, well, so sort of, I mean, maybe, I don't know. I'm not sure quite sure what you mean by mathematical reals.Ben Goldhaber: Can you all explain that? What do you mean by mathematical realists?Divia Eden: I think what it means, and I, yeah, I, I'm sort of starting to like, imagine what your viewpoint on this might be. I, I think what it means is there's some question people like to ask of something like, does the math exist?Even if there isn't a physical instantiation of it?Ben WR: Yeah. Yeah. And I think like historically I would've been like, yeah, duh. Like physics is made out of math. Interesting. Yeah. But like recently I've been like, oh, but if physics, like, I don't know. I feel like that belief is in the similar category has sort of like the supernatural view of, of [01:17:00] ethics that I was talking about before.Like, I have no story for how that could get into my head and be true. Or like the, the truth of it could have gotten into my head.Yeah, though I guess like, you know, it's funny because when, normally when I think of like, is there at least, you know, is there any physical instantiation of this? I tend to think of things that are not.Inside people's minds, but then hearing you say it, I'm like, okay. But then the fuzzy abstractions, they would count too, right? Yeah. As as the physical instantiation.Ben Goldhaber: Totally. Yeah, exactly. And I think my, my sense is basically that like math is roughly like the most general sorts of, like, isomorphism like the things that sort of apply everywhere in the world and like, would apply under many ways that we can be uncertain about the world.Like I have no idea how big the world is. Like, I, I think it makes a lot of sense to sort of think about infinitely large sets, even though I, I, I doubt the universe is infinite in terms of like space. [01:18:00] And like,Ben WR: yeah, I think I'm trying to put this together in my head, so I'm like, okay, how, how is this infinite thing compatible with mathematical realism?Well, maybe it's that if, you know, if the universe produces beings which observe it and try to make isomorphism about it, they're gonna predictably come up with these types of structures and then instantiate them in their own heads,basically, right? Yeah. That's basically Right. Okay. And like, and in a way that like, is very scalable.It, it, like if you use like the infinity is sort of like, like infinity in this view is just like basically a way of representing this like very clear regularity, which clearly would apply in the physical world no matter the size. Mm-hmm. Or something close to that. Yeah, I don't know. And this felt like super clarifying, like this general sort of shift to seeing like the, all of math as sort of like being more or less secondary to physics.Right, right. Yeah. [01:19:00] Yeah, I do. I think, I think that was a particularly good point cuz I'm like starting to see some way in which it's like, all right, math is this unreasonably effective way, unreasonably effective isomorphism for patterns we see in the world. Maybe that's the primary one. And then your pointing out like, there are these other patterns that seem very effective, like these kind of universal, the moral patterns.Moral patterns.Yeah. No, it definitely ha like, I feel like I was getting there too.Divia Eden: Yeah, so hearing you talk about the physicalism in general and sort of, I don't know, humoring me with the mathematical realism bit, I, I think I have a better sense of what might have been the shift that happened for the way you're thinking about morality. Where there, yeah. The, and I think I, maybe this is the same as what I said before, but like that there's something that's grounded that was not previously grounded.And that there was some sort of bit that was there before that you're now like, no, no, I'm rejecting that bit. Cuz it seems sort of supernatural and that now it seems [01:20:00] like, like morality, not exactly, but it's more like just another thing that you can have thoughts about it. Yeah. And you could try to do sense making the way you would about other things and it's empirical and it's complicated and that it you ha that there's some sort of impulse for El elegance on the object level that you.That you're, you mistrust a lot more now in part because, yeah, because I don't know, because there's, you do see some pretty elegant principles on the metal level for how to make sense of this, and they don't add up to something particularly simple on the object level.Ben WR: Yeah, I think that's totally right.And this is,Divia Eden: yeah, it's, it's a shift for you and it, it has some implications for how you relate to this system around you in terms of the EA stuff and. I don't know, maybe rash. We didn't really talk about the rationality, meme plex and how it is with this. I, if you have any brief thoughts on that, I'm interested too.Ben WR: I think there's a way that you could go kind of crazy. Like thinking about all of [01:21:00] the different mathematical structures that you like, might be embedded in sort of like reference VAs yeah.That kind of thing. For sure. And like, I don't know, I think it's just better to like, I don't know, plan for, or like, and like, like sort of be thinking in the main line, which is just like, there is this world, it's kind of mundane you know, almost by definition of the word mundane. But like, It's just there, we have a lot of evidence for this is the wordDivia Eden: mundane?Is that the etymology of that? Like the world?Ben WR: Oh, I didn't realizeBen Goldhaber: that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Until you said that. No, I didn't either. Munus. Yeah,Ben WR: yeah, yeah. And like, yeah, I mean, it's, it, it, it encompasses all of the like other crazy amazing stuff and like, it's amazing, but it is still sort of You know, it, it's just there and you don't have to, and in fact, it's a little bit weird and I'm not sure why you would appeal to like Sort of [01:22:00] crazy mathematical stuff.Like I, I guess things sort of more like like techmark four or like belief that like all mathematical objects exist. Or like at least, yeah, at least without. Having some other kind of motivation within physics, like I think Eliezer and Benya at Miri, I, I think, I think do have a lot of this sort of like as background and then like notice that in fact a lot of the evidence about physics points toward like some kinds of infinity, like many worlds sort of like points towards some of infinity.And like you, you do need to sort of like reason about that. And so I think there are sort of reasons to like invent Something like solomonoff induction or like, you know, sort of some of the crazier stuff. But like, you'd be veryBen Goldhaber: skeptical of things like thought experiments around simulation hypothesisBen WR: perhaps.Yeah, I think that's basically right. Like I, I mean [01:23:00] it's, it's not exactly like, it's not entirely like being skeptical of the arguments. It's more like, I don't know. Seems like I'm at least embedded in a particular physical world. Yeah. Maybe I'm also elsewhere, but like, yeah, likeit's,Divia Eden: you can tell me if this analogy is, it makes any sense or has kind of gone off the rails, but like, When I try to inhabit your frame, I'm like, okay, so morality, let's say, I'm thinking of it as like a map of some useful fuzzy abstractions, some useful isomorphism.It's meant to apply in my local environment to help me achieve my goals. And now I've take, I've like looked at my map and I've been like, okay, I'm gonna like, these lines seem pretty straight, so I'm gonna extend them out like 50 million times as long as they ever went. And this sort of looks like this tessellating pattern.So like same thing there, like a bunch of analogous things. That seems to have some moral implications, and you're like, no, it, it doesn'tBen WR: really, does it seem right? Yeah, I think that's basically right. And like, yeah, so, so I guess it seems to me like sometimes [01:24:00] I don't know, like, and this one I'm a lot less clear on.I think, I think there's a, like a much stronger chance here that I like, just haven't thought as hard about it as like the rationalists who seem a little bit crazy on this access to me or something. But. I do have some sense that like the reasons that I previously thought that that was plausible, like no longer feel compelling like after sort of like having the shift, right?Divia Eden: Because it seems like they were, maybe the reasons you used to find it plausible were something about something that now you consider kind of supernatural plus maybe some. So I want the object level to be elegant.Ben WR: Right. It was sort of like, I mean, yeah, like I think it is sort of true. Like I could be embedded in a lot of things and like it's just kind of like, well you know like some of those I like could know things about and other ones I can't.And like it seems [01:25:00] clear that there's this particular one that I'm definitely in and. Maybe that has, I don't know, maybe there are other, maybe there are other things too, but like, it seems pretty weird to me, like if people, like, I don't know. So like modal realism, like the idea that like, you know, all possible worlds are real in the same way like exactly the same way, if you like, without adding any sense of like, measure or like which ones are more likely or whatever.Seems to me like it's sort of obviously has to contend with this problem, which is that like our world looks really consistent, like barely anything crazy happens. If anything, and like I think if Mortal Realism were true, like almost everywhere just looks totally crazy. What, what'sBen Goldhaber: an example of the kind of crazy you'd expect?Yeah.Ben WR: I mean, like, I think I would expect to have memories of like elves popping into [01:26:00] my, like, like, like through my hand or something. Like, I dunno, just like anything you can imagine as being like, sort of possible in some sense. Like would be real.Ben Goldhaber: Okay. Yeah. I think I'm a little lost on this, like conception of like, there's this view that like maybe, like any possible world is in fact likely to happen.And so we might see these types of like random events like in Alpha appearing or like, I don't know, some, and we tend, as far as we can tell not to.Ben WR: Yeah. I, it's sort of like, I mean the, the particular claim that I think is the most like. Hard to square with. My experience is like that they all have exactly the same amount of realness or like they're all real in exactly the same way.I think if you're instead like, oh, well, you know, those ones are not very real or like they're less real. They're a little bit real, but like, I don't know, solemn enough. Induction says they're like way less probable or something that that's like less crazy. But. [01:27:00] Yeah. I mean that's, that is not in fact, the claim that philosophers are often making about modalism.And I think it, it should be at least suspicious if modalism is true that that our universe is sore, you know? Yeah, exactly. Okay. So yeah, I think,Divia Eden: I don't know, I think we've maybe collectively understood a least a decent amount about where you're, where you're coming from here. Thank you so much for sharing your, your perspectives.I, I really like hearing it.And I think, I think Ben, you, you have some questions about things that are, that are slightly different though of course, all things are related. So does, does it feel right to go there?Ben Goldhaber: I think so. I thinks I think, yeah, that's, that's exactly right. I mean, and these might be a little bit more scattershot, like might just throw a few out there.But I really wanted to hear more about what you're currently working on in the tools for thought space and how you're kind ofBen WR: approaching this. Yeah, totally. So. I, about a year ago, a little bit more realized that I [01:28:00] don't know anything about the future. I mean, like I, I think I probably actually know more than like the average person, but I don't know enough to know what I should do.And I, I think almost no one does. And this seems like a real problem because. There are a lot of scary things that sort of look like they're coming. And if we don't like, have models for how things will work I don't know how we can sort of survive as a species. And I don't know, I mean, that's all sort of like a, like a grandiose way of putting it.But like, actually the, the thing that I most viscerally feel is like, I don't know what the, and you wanna fix that? And I want to, yeah, I wanna understand what's happening and like what's going to happen. And I thought about like how I would go about figuring out what would happen and I was like, okay, I think I like want [01:29:00] Rome except like, like a less bad.This isDivia Eden: Rome Research is a, a notetakingBen WR: push knowledge graph, note taking tool. We can put a look at your shelve. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's basically, I mean, it's a great idea like, and and I, I really like Rome. It, it's basically sort of like a, like a tree of bullet points and you can sort of like, I don't know link between different pages and things, and it's like really it's, it's very convenient to use.QuickDivia Eden: note. Our podcast notes for this episode were in fact created in Rome. This is a Rome supporting podcast.Ben WR: Yeah, so the problem with it is that like most of the features, there are a bunch of other features that are sort of built on top of this, like nested list sort of system including some that are sort of like calculation E and database E and stuff.But they're [01:30:00] like s in my, in my opinion, like implemented in kind of a haphazard way. And that's one, one reason that I didn't think I could do it in Rome. Another thing is I think any thinking on like, of things in this sort of general genre, like is gonna be very uncertain. And I, as far as I know, it's, I don't know, I haven't been paying attention because I, I, I, you know confession time switched to Loge, which is sort of a, a Rome clone.But like the they might have added something like this, but, but my guess is not Like if you're familiar with Guesstimate, which is this a web app made by Ozzy Kuen which is sort of like it's like a spreadsheet, but with sort of samples from probability distributions instead of like individual values.I found it [01:31:00] extremely useful, but not very scalable. Like if you're, if you're trying to make a large model in guesstimate it becomes pretty unwieldy pretty quickly. It's also not like, it's not easy to collaborate with people on models in Guesstimate. And I think both of those felt like pretty key issues there.So I didn't feel like I could use guesstimate either to do the kind of thinking that I wanted to do. And so ultimately I was like, okay, well I'm a programmer. I know how to do things like this. I am just going to like go ahead and make this thing. And so the current idea which I'm temporarily calling calcs, C A L X, but I don't know if that may not stick is basically to have a similar sort of tree-like structure to Rome.Where, and like, sort of similar like linking and stuff in between documents and things like that. Where every node in the tree gets a, a, like [01:32:00] basically a spreadsheet cell. That is also like like sampled from a distribution. So. Ultimately, like you can basically have a top level question, which is like, I don't know, like, what should I do about AI or something.And then like you can sort of break that down into sub-questions and sort of combine your answers in like the, in the top level question. And you can sort of like have Basically this, it's not quite a probabilistic programming language because it doesn't let you at least the first version won't let you do inference.Like, it, like it won't let you like, learn a distribution from data, but like, we'll let you have sort of this uncertain estimate which propagates your sort of like, known uncertainties through and can sort of show you like here is roughly What my other beliefs kind of imply about, like what I should believe about this thing.And yeah, I don't know. I, I'm really excited about it. [01:33:00] I think yeah, it's, it's not probably the easiest thing to like visualize if, if you're just listening to me describe it. But it's, it's,Divia Eden: I mean it's, I guess what I heard you say is it's sort of like a cross between Rome and guesstimate, and by crossing them it makes it more scalable for sort of tracking how the beliefs affect theBen WR: other beliefs.Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's basically exactly right. It's also gonna be like like entirely collaborative basically. So, so also sort of like it'll be a lot easier than in guesstimate, for example, to like, use someone else's like, you know, like calculation that they've done in your calculation. And do things like that.Or like sort of maybe, you know, treat things more like Google Docs as well. Is this something people canDivia Eden: play with or not yet?Ben WR: Okay. Not yet. I have like a couple of terrible screenshots of like the, I've, I've built the sort of core logic engine of it, but it's, right now the user interface is just like a command line interface on my laptop.So it's not it's not quite to the point where[01:34:00] where people can use it. But this week I'm. Planning to go ahead and make the server for it like so that I can then go ahead and build the actual web front end. And then, so maybe two, two or three weeks from now, I, I hope to like have aBen Goldhaber: prototype.That's exciting. Do you imagine doing this on like many of the questions you're facing day-to-day or, yeah. Yeah,Ben WR: absolutely. I mean, and I, I have used estimate for a lot of questions like day-to-day, like like, which job offer should I take?Or like, you know, should I like apply to this thing or whatever. And then and I found it really useful for that kinda thing. Oh yeah, sorry. If you,Divia Eden: if there's something, you know, that you're willing to walk us through a little bit about, here's how you were thinking about it before you put it in guesstimate and then afterwards.What was it like?Ben WR: Yeah, I mean, so a lot of the time, so I mean, before I knew about Guesstimate, I would like have spreadsheets that would sort of be like, okay, well here's my like estimate for X and like here's like, you know, my estimate for Y and here's how they should like combine to like, give me an estimate for Z.And [01:35:00] that's like, I think pretty useful and like I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that in my life. But It's also potentially really misleading if you're like, using these point estimates because like, if you like, the point estimate is probably gonna be like your mean guess or something, or your average guess.And like that is not, like, it's not a good representation of like what your actual uncertainty is. Like it, like what your error bars are roughly. And you can, if you're like, you know, sufficiently anal about it, you can like go through and like, you know, make a hundred samples in like a hundred rows and like do your calculation across the spreadsheet.But like, it's just kind of like, I don't know, it's just like a, a, a pain and I never actually did it in practice. And I, I don't know if anyone else did, just, I bet a lotDivia Eden: of our listener know listeners know, but can you actually explain what a point estimate is in case people don't?Ben WR: Yeah, sure. So, so basically if I have some uncertainty about some values, so say like, I don't know maybe I've got [01:36:00] a friend and I wanna know his height.Like, I don't know, a point estimate would be like he is probably about six feet tall. It's like a single number, which sort of like represents my best guess for like some uncertain value. Whereas like the distribution itself that I have, Like that better represents that uncertainty. Might be like something, kind of like a normal distribution that's sort of centered around six feet.And like has some standard deviation, which tells me like sort of how much, how much variance is like there is in my, in my estimate. Like do I think it, he's a similarly likely to be like six feet and like like, or, or like six feet and like six feet, five inches or like six feet and six feet, one inch.And so like, those are like very different like, like uncertainties that I might have over his height. And the wake estimate works is basically instead of having a single value[01:37:00] like the six feet gas, it sort of takes a sample. It it takes many samples from the distribution that you tell it.So if I said, you know his height is like, A normal distribution centered at six feet with like, you know, a standard deviation of one inch. It'll like, you know, take, you know, thousands of samples and then propagate those samples through the same co computation. And then at the end I get to see this sort of histogram.And like other facts about the distribution, like, As a result of sort of seeing all these samples which yeah. Cool. They just sort of like all, all of the calculations get applied to the distributions. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So then how, andBen Goldhaber: you're not losing information as you are like cutting off the tails and just seeing the mean or something likeBen WR: that.Divia Eden: Yeah, exactly. And this is like, yeah. Again, if you could describe like how this. Has made you see potential decisions differently?Ben WR: Yeah. I mean, I think it ma it sort of like removes a lot of the illusion of like certainty which I think is really [01:38:00] valuable. So yeah, I mean, one particular example is like thinking about.Is thinking about like which job should I take? Like, I think in 2016 or something, I was like, considering whether I should work at Cruise or I think it was like oh shoot. What was the, the other competing offer was like Flexport, I think. And like, At the time, I had like a couple of different things that I cared about and I wasn't really sure how to like, combine them like I cared, like cruise was gonna be better for a lot of things.At that, at that time I was already a little bit into like AI safety and like wanted to get more experience with AI stuff. And so Cruise was gonna be better on that access and I wasn't really sure how much, or like, how, how helpful that would be. And I also was really uncertain about like the compensation between the two.So like, I don't know. Flexport had given me, like, it had had an offer with like a lot more equity and crews had like a lot more like salary. [01:39:00] And so like I tried my best to sort of like figure out what I expected, like in terms of uncertainty, like, you know, the valuation of the companies to be at the time, like when my shares would vest and so on.And like, I mean, I don't know, I think it's, it's just really useful to be able to see what that like results in when you like, convert it into like your distribution over like total compensation over time. And then you can sort of like, Take that distribution, and then you can also have like some other crazy distribution over like how useful this is for AI safety, which is like a pretty weird question to ask.But like, I don't know, like at least in that case, you're not sort of deceiving yourself that like, you know, like, I, I think a lot of the time before using Guesstimate, I would sort of have You know, like pro con lists and then I would like add up all the pros and add up all the cons and like, oh yeah, well there's like six in this column and three in that column.[01:40:00] And I think it just sort of like it's all sort of fake and it's not always obvious that it's fake. And I think it's more obvious if you're like adding, if you're like describing like, Oh yeah. Well this is my guess, but like also I have no clue.Ben Goldhaber: One, one thing I, I've found that can be really hard with large estimate models for that matter, large spreadsheet models is something like comprehensibility and like ability to like come back to them.Like some sense of like, yeah, you get like of all these different cells and then it's like maybe it's good. Totally. Yeah. Is is some hope with your tree structure layout that is more.Ben WR: Reusable. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think, so one thing for me is like, as a programmer, I have, I've, there's like the structure that most programming languages have which is almost sort of like Rome in that like everything is sort of tree shaped.You have like, you know, expressions which are themselves made up of other expressions. And this is a really great way to [01:41:00] organize like complicated calculations. And spreadsheets don't really do this. They're like yeah, nope, you've got this like 2D grid. Sorry, I'm gonna take a sip of water. Yeah, hydro homies. So yeah, so I basically do have this intuition that like, This tree structure also like from Rome that this tree structure is like really, really good as like a way to organize like sort of complicated questions and like think about them just to kind of like start from a broad thing at the top and like.You know, dive down and like have sort of these collapse. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sub-questions or, or like little bits of extra information, which you can incorporate if you want and, and so on. I, I also think it's important, it feels important to me that like every cell has a, like, also has like a text [01:42:00] bullet next to it.So like the default. Workflow I'm imagining is sort of like you build a tree, which is sort of like describing your uncertainty in English and like very probably because it's like, well, I don't even know what units this is supposed to be in or whatever. And then you can sort of iteratively like starting from the bottom or like sort of like the most concrete, simple questions to answer.Yeah. You can sort of like, Work outward and sort of make it like, sort of figure out how to combine the sub sub elements at, at each level. So yeah, I mean, yeah, that's definitely, I think comprehensibility is like a huge part of it. Yeah. Great.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, I'm, I'm gonna throw something out here, which feel free to not pick [01:43:00] up at all. It might not be interesting or, but like, I, I've also been really interested in forecasting for a long time, and one like thing that kind of comes up in certain parts of the forecasting space a lot is like, well, what decisions have really been changed by some of these forecasts?Like, you hear this with like prediction markets a fair bit. Like, all right, is this info actually going to change somebody's decision? And I feel like one thing I'm kind of catching from your description of Calc X or is, is like some hope that many of these decisions can get changed if it's like, if it like starts at like the, at like the person level.Like if you make them better at thinking about uncertainty as opposed to like creating some kind of external system. Is that, is that right? And also like you disagree with me That, or do, do you agree or disagree that likeBen WR: it's almost, almost, I definitely agree that like, That like a lot of the forecasting stuff that happens, I'm not totally sure how useful it ends up being.Especially sort of the, the more like sort of public forecasting [01:44:00] stuff. Although, I mean, I don't know. And I do think a lot of the sort of more public prediction markets have like produced a lot of value. I. Or especially like the ones that are sort of high volume, I think partly because those are like, you know, the interesting ones.But yeah, I, I do think there can sort of be this like disconnect between like the people who are making the decisions and like how they're making the decisions and like the people who are doing the forecast and like how they're choosing which things to forecast. And it does seem really valuable to me to sort of like connect.Like the, like sort of the agency with the forecasting say a little bit more to the agency with the forecasting.Like Yeah. Like, I mean, so I think like me choosing a career, it feels like it's pretty tightly connecting like the agency Yeah. With like, yeah. You want it, like, I have this particular decision Yeah.That I have to make. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use this to help me make that decision. And it's like, there, there's no, like, there's no wasted motion. I guess. I, IBen Goldhaber: strongly agree with it. I've like felt this in my own life a fair bit. Like the way in [01:45:00] which like, all this stuff seems really fake until like, I actually just need to figure out if I'm gonna move to city A or city B, and then it's like, oh, all right, this is a little more helpful.IBen WR: care. Yeah. And it's a little bit weird. Like I, I think there's actually some evidence to me that sort of feels counter to this, which I'm confused by, which is like, In science, it seems like a decent amount of the time. There's just some guy who gets really into categorizing all the rocks and he just like goes around and categorizes all the rocks and like, doesn't have any particular reason for doing it really.And like it's just sort of his special interest. Yeah. And then later that's like extremely useful and it's like, I don't, I don't really understand how that works. And I think it, it's like it's pushing me a little bit toward thinking like, ah, maybe I'm just wrong. And like, actually people. Doing, like following their random interests and like produ producing artifacts is good.Even though yeah, though those don't seem totallyBen Goldhaber: opposed to me. [01:46:00] Like, I don't know, I'm like pretty, I'm, I'm pretty stoked by the like, random person going out and doing that. And also the random person super into forecasting in some way. Like I, I don't know, that doesn't seem like the same type of opposition.They almost seem a little bit more tightly. Nearby. Like there's both some kind of purity of they just want this thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's fair. Yeah.Divia Eden: Yeah, I agree with that. I think there's, there's something where like the, the guy categorizing the rocks, like we maybe don't know why he cares, but he does care.Whereas I don't know if, I'm trying to like bet on who's gonna win the midterms. I think that's sort of, there's something about that that is missing that is there with both the rock guy and you trying to figure out what to do next.Ben WR: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That seems maybe right, although I'm not sure what it's well, I meanDivia Eden: with me betting on the midterms, like I, there's just more of a disconnect.Like maybe I wanna make money on prediction markets. Maybe I [01:47:00] wanna like show my friends how. Cool.Ben WR: I am. Yeah. It's like about, it's about the rightness andDivia Eden: maybe I even care who wins the midterms, but it's not under my control. So there's not some like Right. Rapid feedback between like if the dinosaur guy, sorry, I keep saying that because there's that meme.I keep thinking that because there's this meme about the guy that just really wants to do something with dinosaurs that I think of him as like what you're saying with the rocks,Ben WR: but we'll definitely link this in the show notes. Yeah. LikeDivia Eden: if that guy is thinking about the rock things, that it, it is tied to his agency, like he's gonna go search for rocks in a different area based on his theory about rocks or something.Like, there's some sort of feedback loop that I, I think is at least much harder to get if I'm betting on the midterms.Ben WR: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I'm still a little bit confused though, like why does he care or something. And like, I don't know, like what is causing him to care in a way that like is somehow predictive of what other people will find useful.This gets backDivia Eden: to the unreasonable [01:48:00] effectiveness of mathematics in the naturalBen WR: sciences. Oh yeah, no, that's actually a really good point. Okay. So like I I, if I, if I understand where you're going with that it, it, it's something like like people. Inexplicably have these like special interests or whatever like basically because that helped in the past or like the, the like the process would produce these special interests, like are useful?I do think so. I think, yeah, I thinkDivia Eden: there could be something like that. I think, like, it reminds me of some stuff that Seth Roberts said about how he thinks that there's maybe some sort of cultural or genetic evolution towards people liking artisanal things to like to, because it helps with technological progress.I don't know if that's, I dunno if that's true, but it definitely reminds me of that. I also think, I think these days I tend to not reach for evolutionary explanations as much. Not that I don't think they have value, but I also think sometimes people have either some weird combination of neuroses or aesthetics or whatever, where then [01:49:00] it's like, I don't know, it's like there's some itch in their minds.And then I think because of. The sort of unreasonable structuredness of the world, like whatever itch in somebody's mind is gonna be isomorphic to something interesting in the territory a lot of the time. Huh? Yeah. Interesting. Not necessarily for EV evolutionary reason, but because abstractions kind of line up it seems like.Ben WR: Yeah. Let me see if I can think about that a little bit deeper. One sec. Like, I can sort of imagine that like people's minds just happen, like are structured because it's useful in such a way that like the things that are even there in your mind to get obsessed with, like are sort of worth getting obsessed with.Is that like closer to the thing? Yeah.Divia Eden: I mean, I don't know that they're like, certainly I don't think they're always worth it,Ben WR: but like, yeah. Yeah. But like more likely to be, or like, yeah. Or am I hearingBen Goldhaber: some way in which you like trust the instinct or the impulse? You get obsessed about a thing. [01:50:00]Ben WR: I,Divia Eden: I per, I trust it for a number of reasons.Partly because, and this is sort of like a separate issue that is maybe, maybe more what you're saying about the useful thing where like, I think that insofar as there is this tight feedback loop between what people are doing and what they care about, they can produce outsize impact. And so even if they're like, well, I, maybe this is like I'm taking a.Like, I'd have a multiplier of, you know, 10 x if I'm working on the thing that seems useful, maybe my actual ability to do it goes down by even more if I'm not interested in it. And so in some ways it seems pro-social because if people wanted to maximize their personal impact, they might, they might try to steer themselves more.But if people have a, like a more hit space model of people doing what they're interested in, maybe like. Everybody do what you're interested in is a more promising societal strategy than like, okay, everybody tried to do the most important thing. I think, I don't think it's super clear and probably some mix, probably not quite that simple either.Like, I think it's a sort of naiveBen WR: framing, but Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I like it. I, I think [01:51:00] it fits really well with my like personal like experience of just like when I ever do anything worthwhile like I think a lot of the time. Yeah, like a lot of the time when I've tried to do like the thing that would be best or something like in an abstract sense, rather than trying to do the thing that I feel excited about it, like just basically goes nowhere.And I do think there's someDivia Eden: real calculation problem there about what isBen WR: best. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I, like, I think I am making a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that seems like, yeah, the team's very like very apt or something for, at least for me.Ben Goldhaber: Makes me even more excited for eventually playing with Calex just because it, I don't know.Sounds like you've gotten obsessed about it and there's a bit of a, like a tour thing going on.Ben WR: Yeah. I'm also, yeah. Separately, I've been really obsessed with this thing called C RDTs for years now, the conflict free replicated data types. Yeah. What's that? And It's just [01:52:00] like a way of building applications such that like they can be easily turned into distributed systems.So like, so if you wanted to build Google Docs but have it be end-to-end encrypted, so like the Google server couldn't see your doc you can't do it the way that Google Docs is built. You have to do it in such a way that like your browser, like the client machines can do all the conflict resolution themselves.This is a super I don't know. Not, I don't know. It's, it's way in the weeds. But well be aDivia Eden: segue to one of our next topics. I think youBen WR: should keep going. Oh, cool. Yeah. So, so basically it's just like, it's basically if you have your, like the state of your application like fit into like this, this particular like mathematical, like very simple mathematical structure called the semi lattice.You can Easily, like basically trivially solve all of these like, very hard distributed systems problems, like, you know, accidentally getting the same [01:53:00] message twice. Or like things that normally would sort of cause like hiccups in in your application when multiple people are editing it or, or, you know, interacting with your application.Like you instead can just deal with them gracefully. And anyway, so. I have basically finally, I finally like have this project where I like, actually can use this, like, really amazing, like, I don't know, like cool trick. And like, I don't know, I, I'm really excited because I think, I think I am gonna be able to make this tool like end-to-end encrypted in a way that like most similar tools can't be by sort of like using this I don't know, uncommon, uncommon way of making the thing.Divia Eden: No, sorry, I I think that's, I actually, I, I wanna eventually try to tie that back to some other things, but I, I, I'm also gonna try to tie it forward because we, we had on our list to ask you about secure d n and I might be [01:54:00] overfitting to say that it seems a little bit related to what you just said, but I, I'm, I'm gonna try anyway.Ben WR: Yeah, I mean, I think aesthetically it feels very related to me. Like, I mean, so security a is like, is building basically this like system where like basically for screening orders to like gene synthesis labs Sorry, let, maybe I'll start, start from further back. Okay. So there are these companies which can synthesize DNA n a for you.You send them a sequence of like, you know, bases, nucleotides, like a G C T. And then they send you like, like synthesize d n a that matches that sequence. And this is really great. It's like, I mean, it makes lots of like biological research a lot easier. But it's also a little bit scary because, you know, many [01:55:00] viruses are basically just made out of nucleotides.And so you could basically just make like a pathogen and potentially like a, a, an unusually dangerous pathogen like by sending an order like this. And so there's this question of like, how can you Basically avoid, like how can these these synthesis companies avoid making the next pandemic while like preserving the privacy of their customers.And like, you know, like without also leaking the, like, the list of pathogens or the, like the, the like leaking the information that would allow someone to like figure out what the next, and by that you mean is like havingBen Goldhaber: some kind of like public list of the things that you're not allowed to order.Ben WR: Yeah. I mean, and there is in fact a public list of things that you're not allowed to order. We'll link it in the show notes. Yeah, it's [01:56:00] called the Australia Group. But it, it, like, this is so, and, and in fact that is what like the first iteration of security A is targeted at is, is preventing people from ordering things that are like known hazards.But a second iteration is gonna be targeted at what they're calling emerging hazards. So basically things that are not, like publicly, the sequences are not publicly known but like are important to screen against anyway. Like maybe they were things that were just just learned about And yeah, so basically like there is, there's a lot of like, I mean I think there's a lot of sort of this aesthetic similarity just in that like they're both sort of trying to sort of elegantly solve these problems with like privacy and security and distributed systems.And like, and the security a stuff. I should be very clear. I did not design any of the like, cool crypto stuff that is [01:57:00] like making it possible. It was all like you know actual cryptographers. But so this is something you're working on that's really, really cool. It, it's something that I, so I was working on security and a most recently as like a full-time job.And so Yes. So basically I was the like, I guess first like programmer that they had hired to work on it apart from sort of like grad students. Sounds very important. Yeah, I mean, it was really, it's, it's a really cool project. I think if I thought that bio risk was a bigger deal than AI risk, I probably would've like just working there.But I eventually was like, oh man, I feel like I should get back to the. The real stuff or something. No offense. I mean, I think it is real stuff for sure. But the stuff that is like realist to me or something [01:58:00] Something I was just, I'm just kind of mulling on about your explanation of what Secure DNA was, because I also was just kind of curious and didn't honestly know that much about it. Is the likeBen Goldhaber: idea of systems that. Enforce certain norms or rules in a like multi-party kind of game, but like also are not just a strict like centralized, like I don't know, like top down kind of model. And I don't know, I'm feel like picking up a little bit on that like aesthetic thing that you're pointing at, like what a similarity is between that and the C R D T in some way in which it's like not a yeah, I don't [01:59:00] know.It's not a single like, government enforced thing in the same way in which like you need to have a distributed kind of system to handle it. Are, are there any systems of this type that you're. Optimistic about, or that you're kind of thinking about within the thing that feels real to you of ai?Ben WR: Yeah, I mean in, I guess in ai, I don't yet see this kind of thing or this kind of aesthetic, like represented very much, and I'm not totally sure how it might come to be more represented.I mean, I, I guess there like, I don't know, sometimes I hear people talk about like every person gets their own sort of like ai, like personalized AI assistant or something. And like maybe you could end up with something that would have this kind of aesthetic that way. But I don't know, it sort of rings hollow to me to say that or something.It doesn't really feel quite like what will happen. But [02:00:00] yeah, I don't know. I think, I mean, I think it, it's also, I think it's, I mean, I'm a little embarrassed to say this but like I think it's also kind of part of the aesthetic of like the cryptoBen Goldhaber: world, like I was gonna say, and I didn't wanna utter the cursed words of blockchain Yeah.And ai. But I certainly think there's some kind of like aesthetic thing, even if that sounds terrible as I sayBen WR: it. Yeah. Yeah, and I avoided learning about blockchains for a long time because I had like a sense of like that whole world being like super toxic or something. But actually it's really cool and like aesthetically I love it.And I guess, I don't know, I'm not sure what to do with that, but but yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty similar. Yeah, never never let the haters tell you what you should learn about or something, I guess. Yeah. That is a good, gotta followDivia Eden: weird, idiosyncratic interest in rocks, right? [02:01:00]Ben WR: Yeah. I hope so.Ben Goldhaber: Well, is that a good note for us to close on? I, I feel like we've covered a lot of the questions that I had. Divia, is there some that you want, any others?Ben WR: I think,Divia Eden: I think I wanna try a potential additional wrap up type move, which we can, you know, if it doesn't, it doesn't work, then, you know, cut it or something like that. But yeah, I guess, and so when I say that, I'm obviously sort of joking about the, the Rock guy and I, I'm also sort of really not, and. Yeah, I, I think what I, if I try to like sort of digest everything you've been saying since the beginning with the, with the physicalism and the moral realism and the tools for thought and the, and the secure DNA stuff, I think here's my attempt to sort of, I don't know, build a picture of how your mind is working in relation to these problems or something.It, like, I think the thing I see unifying it is something like,[02:02:00]And this is, this is gonna sound similar to things I've said, but that, that there's some impulse maybe that a lot of people have. I, I definitely relate to it, just sort of add an extra meaning layer somewhere and then kind of reify it in a way that is sort of goes with like a top-down type of thinking that has calculation problems.And that this is, this is an issue with how people think about morality. That they're sort of added something and then they're like, cool, now that I added this, like morality juice, I can just calculate it when it doesn't really, doesn't necessarily work that way. And then similarly with the tools for thought, there's some way that I'm gonna be like, okay, cool.I have a number now let's like that number is like my estimate. We're like making it special. And now we can like pretend like we're calculating something when we're not. And I dunno that I can fit this as cleanly into the secure DNA thing, but [02:03:00] like there's maybe some sort, if I were to like map that impulse to be like, okay, here are the dangerous things.We're like putting 'em on a list and now we're gonna like, but where that's maybe also kind of there's some unifying aesthetic around like, no, no, let's like figure out where the elegance should actually go so that we can actually figure things out and it's not necessarily there and we can, it's not necessarily where our first instinct is to put it.And by sort of de reifying that we can get something that's more robust potentially.Ben WR: Yeah, I think that definitely I, yeah, that, that really resonates for me. I, I guess one thing that, to say to sort of riff on that a bit is that like, I think sometimes it actually can make sense to sort of like live in a fantasy world temporarily.Like I, I think there's like a way that when mathematicians are thinking in terms of like the platonic realm that they're like, Eliminating one layer of like like one sort of spatial layer in their [02:04:00] brain of like things they have to track. And I think like to some extent, like I think, I think that's like a super valuable thing to do, but I also think that it's really easy to sort of like accidentally forget that that's what you're doing or not notice that that's what you're doing and to sort of like end up believing that that sort of collapsed version is the truth.Yeah, that makes sense. And it's kind of, yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's basically, you don'tDivia Eden: wanna generate that activity, but you do wanna contextualizeBen WR: it. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally right.Ben Goldhaber: Lovely. Well, I think on that note, I just wanna thank Ben, thanks for again joining us and I don't know, giving us a chance to kind of understand.Your worldview and I think, I don't know the world a little bit better. Yeah, totally.Divia Eden: Thanks so much for coming on and for yourBen WR: time. Yeah, this great. Yeah, I really appreciated it. Thanks a lot. I really enjoy chat chatting. Yeah, I don't know. We should hang out.[02:05:00] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mutualunderstanding.substack.com

Divia and Ben discuss politics, reminisce about elections gone by, and try and make AI predictions.This transcript is machine generated and contains errors.Ben Goldhaber: [00:00:00] so how's it going Divia?Divia Eden: It's going well. Great to have a chance to talk to you on the podcast.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, same back at you and Hi. Who, who else is joining us for the next minutes?Divia Eden: Yeah, this is my 15 month old son. He'll be here just for a few minutes and and then, then it'll be just the two of us.He's our, our podcast guest. Yeah. Likely.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. One of our easiest to understand guests. I would bet. You know, just very clear and direct. Absolutely. In a straightforward way. This is no slur against our previous guests but we, I feel like we invite people on in some ways for loving the Galaxy Brain takes.And the beautiful thing about a 15 month year old is just you know, that's right. Simple, clear wants, I imagine I'm speaking as if I have any actual parenting expertise, but,Divia Eden: It's all good one day. Yes. So we don't, we don't have a guest for today. But we have a plan that sometimes just two of us [00:01:00] are going to talk and catch up about things that are on our mind.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Seems good.Divia Eden: And before we started recording, we were just exchanging a few predictions about some political stuff, you know, as you do. So I thought, I thought maybe we would, we would talk aboutBen Goldhaber: that. Yeah. As maybe some listeners know and, and Dvia knows. I, I was about to say I don't have many vices, but I don't think that's for me to say.But one vice that I do have is I very much enjoy betting on politics. And I will say it has been exciting to see that predict it is looks like it's gonna survive, which, yeah, I was actually much more negative about a few months ago. I did not think it was gonna happen.Divia Eden: Yeah, there wasn't, unfortunately, I think there was no prediction market for predicted unpredicted, so weBen Goldhaber: were left not unpredicted.There was one unlike poly market, which I don't think I ever, I I, I have, the crypto ones have always been just a little, I don't know. I've, I've done some stuff with them, but I've always been like [00:02:00] feel like they're about to fail or about to run away. But yes, poly market had one, but yeah, was not, when I predicted that would've been way cooler.Divia Eden: Yeah. I'm also a longtime political better. I, one of my at the, this is actually, I don't know if you'll ever listen to this. Hello to my dad. If, if we had and wonderful short conversation with my dad back when, so I bet on Obama on, I guess it was Intrade at the time when he was running the first time.And I remember I, cuz my dad was, he was a big, like, he, his read was, Obama's gonna win. He was like, this guy's very charismatic, he's gonna win. And so I was talking to him and I was like, all right, well you think he's gonna win? He's trading it like at whatever it was like 57% right before the first debate or something like that.I was like, well how much do you think I should bet? And he was like, yeah, you should bet like 50 bucks or something. And I was kinda like, well, okay, but if you're so sure. And we talked about it for a while and then he, we hung up. Yeah. And then he called me back maybe an hour later and he was like, wait, how much do you have liquid?And I was like, yeah, this is the right question. Cause in fact, yeah. Yeah, [00:03:00] it was a big, and I mean I was, I think I was just out of college. I did not, I had very little money at the time, but I think I did put little liquid on Obama and Nice. It paid off. So that was then, you know, and then I was kind of hookedBen Goldhaber: after that.Yeah, it's, it's compelling. It's, we don't need to get into all the very good reasons. Prediction markets are, are awesome and, and should be more widely used. But yeah, it's just, it's, it's also just fun because I feel like when you're kind of chatting like with your dad, like I, I talk about politics with my, with my dad as well and with friends.It's really, it's easy to get into the kind of like blather mode and. It's both nice to have as a forcing function, thinking about what your actual bet is gonna turn into or like what this actually means in terms of betting. And also just adds like a nice little, like I, I guess this is for people who are more into sports than I am.It's the same reason why gambling on sports is probably fun. Just add when, then when you keep following it, you get to like have that additional zing of [00:04:00] excitement of like, oh I've got, got money on this debate.Divia Eden: Yeah, totally. And yeah, and I also, like, I've been on Trump the first time, but I didn't have a, the thing I was just saying before we started recording was that I, I think like many very online people, underrated Biden last time.I think I didn't make any big bets. I don't remember. I think I made some small, small ones. I don't remember what they were, but I like, yeah, the people that I personally knew and this was in the primary, weren't that excited about Biden. So I, I guess I didn't really see it, but I think that, I think it's an easy mistake for people like me to make, cuz I think the fundamentals were actually pretty strong.Totally. And my husband Will kept pointing this out to me.Ben Goldhaber: Respect. I definitely did not see that happen in the, in the 2021 either. Yeah. As I was, I was saying, I feel like I'm still a little bit surprised that Biden won the 2020 primary, and it's not just because of the fundamentals thing, me ignoring them, but rather the Democratic party.The way I remember it was like the [00:05:00] Democratic party elites got together in a smoke-filled room, one imagines and convinced the other candidates to drop out so that instead of Bernie winning in their Super Tuesday, I think it was, mm-hmm. Biden was the one . So I think in part I was surprised that the.Unity of the Democratic Party to deny it to Bernie and give it to Biden.Divia Eden: Yeah. So that, I think that's kinda interesting because remember, I forget whose thesis this was, but like the party decides that thesis. Yep, yep. Or like, that was a really good predictor. Like how many of the delegates had pledged a basically like, support within the party was meant to be a very good predictor.And at least the way I remember it, maybe this theory was around for a long time, but like I was started reading articles about that theory not so long before then Trump won the Republican primary. And so I guess I, at that point I was like, well, maybe the party doesn't decide, cuz that clearly wasn't right, what the party elites were going for.He didn't have any of those early people pledged to him. So then [00:06:00] I thought the theory was dead. But as you say, then with Biden, it seems like that theory was line shot.Ben Goldhaber: No, I think split. I, I think the party decides on the Democratic side and I don't think the party decides on the Republican side, and I don't know how long, this does not strike me as a.The evil equilibrium place. Like it doesn't seem like, like something is not finished adjusting. But that is my read over the past, I guess eight years. . Wow. eight Time is weird.Divia Eden: Yeah, I think it's right.Ben Goldhaber: It's right.I think the ultimate example party not deciding is the Jeb Trump matchup and, yeah, I don't know. I guess in some sense then what, like Trump went on to, to do against Clinton. Like that's obviously a different kind of party deciding thing, but certainly some larger narrative of anti-elitism.Divia Eden: Yeah, and in fact, like the thing I, I most strongly remember from those debates was the, I guess it wasn't Trump, but it was when. Chris Christie called out Rubio, do you remember this? For repeating himself. Oh, IBen Goldhaber: remember that, [00:07:00] yeah. Oh, that was great. Watching it withDivia Eden: Will and, and in real time. I was like, wait, wait.Did you just rewind for a second? Because it was so, I, I don't know if you guys, the listeners know what I'm talking about, but Rubio had somethingBen Goldhaber: describe a little bit. They have a young group of them.Divia Eden: Yeah. Cause they were like, oh, but you know, we don't want another inexperienced politician like Obama or something.And he was like, the, the problem with Obama wasn't that he didn't have experience. He knew exactly what he was doing and he said this whole thing. And then Chris Christie responded, and then he started saying it again. And then Chris Christie called him out and he started saying it a third time. And it was very bizarre.And to me it was a little bit of like a mask off moment for like, yeah, this isn't really, A lot of people would prefer something less canned, in fact. Yeah.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. I, I I, I totally agree. It's one of the moments that made me. Quite like Chris Christie, without knowing honestly that much about how he governed in New Jersey.I was just somewhat impressed with his quickness. On the take and ability to kind of like orient and not have Yeah, [00:08:00] totally. The canned lines that they're practicing. Because I do think, what's funny is that I, I think political consultants and strategists tell the politicians like, look, a debate is your chance to get your message directly to people.And the key thing to get your message directly to people is you repeat the lines over and over again. And so I have this story that like Rubio was like really trying to internalize that actually now as I bad.But that's not actually, yeah, exactly what you're saying. It's not what you actually should be doing in on some level.Divia Eden: Yeah. I think it's also tricky because I'm more sympathetic to the Rubio strategy when people are talking to the press. Where the press, at least my dynamic of like what people look, my, my impression of what people learn in press trainings and like how I would wanna talk to the press is that they'll ask me some questions and then I just wanna say my canned statement because they're looking for a quote and all I want them to use is the thing that I thought about.But again, like a debate. Yep. It's a little [00:09:00] different. It's, it's televised. It's a little different.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the best parts I think about everything that happened with 2016 Crazy election, all that is some, look, it's like it was a real win for aliveness. , even if you don't like Trump, it's like he is a very alive person. And similar in that moment, I know I was with Christie and with Rubio, but the whole thing is just like, this is yeah, no, like I think some rejection against tilted.Divia Eden: . So, so the other, that was the other moment I remember from that. And this is, this is one of those little things, I guess I was very into the debates at the time. I don't know if you reme, it was, I think when they didn't introduce Ben Carson. Like they had an order and they were supposed to tell everybody to come out.Okay. And they skipped him for some, or maybe he, sorry, maybe they didn't skip him. Maybe he didn't hear it. Whatever it was, Ben Carson was standing there. He was clearly confused. And then they started calling other people and it was like, it was so fun for me at least to see them reacted real time. Like, I think like Ted Cruz [00:10:00] was kinda like okay.Like, and then he went at least someone else. Yeah. And Trump, Trump was, he was more, he stood there and he like put his hand on Ben Carson and he clearly could tell what was happening. And he didn't wanna go out until bed. Carson also went out. And it was another one of those moments where, I mean, I guess this time it was Trump last time was Chris Christie.But sort of win for like, oh, he was, he was actually paying attention and not, not following a script. Right. Right. And then he, he came out with him as like a gesture of like, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah,Ben Goldhaber: that's a perfect example. Those are my campaign ing. Yeah, I'm trying to, it's for, it's kind of blended together now for me with the 20 12 1 of, like MIT Romney, I keep wanting to give mentions of MIT Romney in the, in debates, but that was obviously four years prior to it.Actually the only thing I remember from the Obama MIT Romney debates were Romney something with his dog on top of his car binder thing full. There was like ran of attacks that like shouldn't have landed. And then also like Romney, [00:11:00] like betting Obama, like 10 grand about something like offering to, andDivia Eden: this might actually, well, I don't remember that.Ben Goldhaber: Exactly. I was like, people pointed this as a gaff, but I'm like, obviously we don't all you know, it's, it's big money, Mr. Ramen. You should have said that. True, true. Should have said a dollar to connect with people, but I still, I liked it.Divia Eden: Yeah. Interesting. I'm gonna look that up. Yeah. Yeah. Again, this was all by the way on my mind cuz I was like, what happened this week?And I was like, oh yeah, I guess Biden's running, which is not really news, but it's, I guess it's a little bit news. Yeah.Ben Goldhaber: In terms of the matchup, it looks like presumably it's gonna be Biden as a democratic nominee though.I do wanna How much weight do you put on somebody else challenging him for the crown?Divia Eden: I think I'm fighting the last war here where I'm like, well I underestimated him last time, so I kinda, I don't wanna make any strong bets. Yeah. But I think it'll probably be Biden if he's running. [00:12:00] He's running. I think the establishment will be behind him.It's not that I think there aren't other people, but I haven't seen anyone so compelling where, I dunno, it seems like a real uphill battle to fight an incumbent supported by the establishment.Ben Goldhaber: I can't think of a time where this successfully happened. Right. I can think of times where in the past people have challenged the sitting president for their nomination and they've weakened him, but never to the point where he didn't get the nomination.Divia Eden: Yeah, I'd have to look it up. I mean, I think it happens with, you know, with Congressmen. Sure. But yeah, it's a, I can't think of a time when it's happened with the president either and I don't think it'll happen here.Ben Goldhaber: The only scenario where I see something like that happen is Biden is incapacitated in some way.It's a health problem withdraws cuz of a health thing. It is definitely anybody's game.Divia Eden: This is maybe a little, I don't know, a little of a tangent, but did you happen to watch the diplomat. It's a newBen Goldhaber: Netflix show. No. Why? Talking about the [00:13:00] diplomat. You're talking about it. Daniel Flins talking about it.Well, I think's thetopDivia Eden: reading show on Netflix, some people saying it's like a West Wing successor. I said yes. A friend of mine, Andrew Reddick on Twitter was like, well, maybe not. Cuz the West Wing really captured the dynamic of what it's like to work, to have that type of job in a way. Anyway, there's some debate about how good it is.I watched it, but it's ok.Ben Goldhaber: Now I wanna go on a tangent. Sorry. You go first. No, I wanna keep your diploma. IDivia Eden: definitely, when I watched it, I was like, oh, this is supposed to be, this president, I think was supposed to be a Biden type and certainly it was like a Democratic president and they were Gotcha. I dunno, these jokes about like, oh, like the doctor won't let him have coffee or like, better not let him go off script or I was like, okay.I think that's, that's what they're doing with this guy.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, that fun. I haven't like seen any comedy about Biden. It hasn't been. About his, I guess I just, it's hard for me to think of comedy about Biden at this point, Joe. No, but that, that all lands. I mean, I, I was just,Divia Eden: I think they made him pretty, it [00:14:00] wasn't like, I think they made him a pretty sharp character ultimately, I feel like.Got it. That was sort of a fun thing about the diplomat was it was usually like, oh, these people are doing something more interesting than we think at first. Not, I guess that's too spoily for some people, but not for me.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, not for me. I now, I've gotta watch the diplomat also because it feels like all of my friends have just suddenly decided that we need to watch the Diplomat.So I, I thought it was pretty good. I'm very susceptible to peer pressure. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I've tried rewatching the West Wing and it did not hold up in the way that I remembered it. When I watched. Yeah. I, I was quite young when I remember when watching it, and I feel like now when I watch a few episodes, maybe I'm just not as idealistic.Maybe the times are not as idealistic as they were in the nineties. Early two thousands.Divia Eden: Definitely some idealistic times.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Very idealistic times. And West Wing is so idealistic and it's like cliche now to compare that show with Veep, but it does, that is the comparison [00:15:00] that comes to mind whenever you watch it.Divia Eden: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, the diplomat, I, it, I would say it, it has some of that idealism too, for sure. Mm. Not, not from all the characters, but I, it, well, I, I, I should probably stop talking about the diplomat, but it, I would say it's like a deepBen Goldhaber: state type of idea. This is how we get the sponsorship. This is, this is how we finally get Netflix to sponsor the pod.Divia Eden: Yeah. That would, that would be a big get. Mm-hmm.Ben Goldhaber: But Okay. No, I was gonna ask you so outside of the nomination, and cuz we both enjoy betting and making predictions on things what's your, what's your take on Biden overall? In the general who, whoever he's up against on the Republican side. Right. I mean,Divia Eden: well, if it's Trump, I, I mean, Biden won last time against Trump.I tend to think they're both weaker candidates this time around. I don't have a strong prediction. Hmm. [00:16:00] I guess like, if I really had to say I, I think maybe Biden, but I'd wanna, it's not a very informed guess. And I think I'm saying that because I'm like, well, that's what happened last time. Right.Ben Goldhaber: So I sort of did.I mean, I feel like it's a, yeah. Yeah.Divia Eden: Have there been rematch? Which one? There have been rematches in presidential election history. Right. But I don't, I don't remember what happened with them.Ben Goldhaber: There was one person, I wanna say Benjamin Harrison, who became president again. Right. It was like out of order like Trump would do ifDivia Eden: you would president.Exactly. I, I think But was he running? He let lemme look it up.Ben Goldhaber: That's a good question. That I'm not sure.Divia Eden: Okay, so he, Benjamin Harrison is the 23rd president of the United States. Let's [00:17:00] see,this might not be the right guy cuz he's just saying he's the 23rd. I think it's gotta be someone, we can cut this out. Maybe. IthinkBen Goldhaber: it's someone else. I'm willing to let people know that I don't know. Relevant facts on Benjamin Harrison.Divia Eden: Yeah, that seems fine. I to be bored.Okay. Oh, do you mean Grover Cleveland?Ben Goldhaber: If that's the right answer, then yes.Divia Eden: Yeah. Grover Cleveland is the only president in US history to serve two non-consecutive presidential. There we go. Terms, he won the popular vote in the middle election though. Wow. That's kinda interesting. And so who, butBen Goldhaber: the question is, and Benjamin Harrison [00:18:00] won the electoral college vote in between.IDivia Eden: get it. Okay. So Benjamin Harrison, you, you were right to reference him, but he was there in the middle, thank goodness. And yes, so he was, And he was or was not an incumbent? No, he beat.Ben Goldhaber: Okay. So he must have beat Benjamin Harrison. I, I, without who he lost to before, which would count in this case.Divia Eden: Interesting. Yeah. Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president. And then did he run again to fail at becoming the 24th?Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, IDivia Eden: I looks like he did. So he, okay. So this [00:19:00] is our one, this is our precedent. This is like the, the Biden Trump. This is our president.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And this is also now the president, I'm gonna quote all the time in the rematch, which is, it's a classic Rover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison set up.Divia Eden: That's right. Yeah. Okay. So, so it has happened. Trump could do it.Ben Goldhaber: Yep. And I was saying I was saying before the show or what I'll just say now is I am I am, I am pro-Trump in this matchup. I think it's more likely I, I, I think I am bullish on Trump in this match, in large part because the 2020 campaign was such an outlier in terms of how it was conducted because of Covid.That I think the kind of advantages that Biden had in that situation, like the drains on stamina that happened in that kind of campaign, he's not gonna be able to pull again. He's gonna need to be out in public, right? Even if the media does give him more of a [00:20:00] past, I don't think that that's going to be enough.And yeah, I just think Trump seems far more. Robust in this environment than Biden does.Divia Eden: Yeah. He's, I mean, literally the campaign doing rallies and stuff, right? So what, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is different. I think it's a good argument.Ben Goldhaber: Mm-hmm. I, I, and I see, I see also on the other side, which is just like, you know, we've run this once, didn't go in Trump's labor that time and went to Biden's.That should have some evidentiary weight.Divia Eden: Well, I, so I guess the next question though is, do you think Trump will be the nominee?Ben Goldhaber: I do. I think Trump is gonna be the nominee. I think it's, I wish I'd done a better job of actually recording my predictions earlier because now I feel a, like little bit, it's a little easier now to make that prediction.I think I had that prediction a few months ago as well, which is just the polling is tracked. The Republican party is not a party that gets to its side, [00:21:00] the nominee. For president for Republicans, it they once upon a time maybe, but at this point that they don't have that, and voters seem to, at this point, overwhelmingly like Trump.I, I need to look back at how the polling has changed since the indictment because my impression is that that caused just popularity among Republican voters to go up and ok. I see. I think that that I, I, and I think that, I think it's interesting to, like, I wonder what I, I have no idea what back room machinations go on in these kind of things.I doubt that it actually influenced this, so I try to push him to be the nominee or against, or what people were thinking. But it does seem like the outcome of all this has just mostly been, he's become more popular as the candidate.Divia Eden: Yeah, I guess I, I guess I make the same prediction because again, I'm like trying to fight the last war.I'm like, I think the same things that caused me to Underrate Biden last time caused me to intuitively underrate Trump this time. And so probably. [00:22:00] Probably will be Trump. It is, it's super early. That's the only thing I can say. That's it. Yeah. On the other side of it, I think the super early thing doesn't really matter for Biden, cuz he's an incumbent, unless, as we say, there's some sort of health problem.But with Trump, I feel like, I don't know, it counts somewhat. Like it makes me more uncertain. It makes me not sure. Yeah,Ben Goldhaber: no, I think I, I mean agreed. If it was this kind of polling and we were about to enter voting or like about to go into the debates, that seems compelling. Like I would, I would feel even more confident.I just seems like the, the only like black WANs am I anticipating, which makes it obviously not a black swan, is if there is some radically different person, not a, anywhere in the, like, not, not a senator, not a governor who comes in and has the money and like some kind of existing base. That could really throw things off, but I just can't even, [00:23:00] nobody immediately comes to mind.Who, who hasDivia Eden: Ellan Can't be a president. He's not a natural board. Elon can'tBen Goldhaber: be president. I think Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Oh yeah. That would do it. A good choice to just be a celebrity wish. It does seem like That's right. That seems like a better lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know what Tom Hanks' politics are, but I, I suspect that he also will just be content.Being a charismatic self. This is a, this is a bet that I had with a friend that did not come out my way last time. And so I don't know what to believe. But it, it seems like we should have many more celebrities entering into politics than we do. And I was betting that the Democratic nominee in the last election cycle would be a celebrity.I was completely wrong. Mariana Williamson underperformed. But it still seems, it still seems weird that we don'tDivia Eden: Yeah, they, I mean they have a pretty high success rate when they choose to run. Right. I think I've tried to look this up. Yeah. [00:24:00] Yeah, I think they do well. But maybe it's like what you say.I know media do media anchor. Oh, well, okay. So the, we have to at least touch on that. Sorry, I forgot what the other current thing is from this week. There is a current thing, which is Tucker Left Fox. Oh yeah. Yes. Perfect. Speaking of media natural segue. Yes. Yeah. I don't have a ton. I don't know. I have sort of the same speculation everyone else has about that, I guess, which is, it doesn't seem great forBen Goldhaber: Fox.Yeah. Doesn't seem great. I don't know what their stock price ended up at, but I do remember looking right after the announcement and it like, I think it took like a 5% hit.Divia Eden: What makes, I mean, yeah. And is it like, do we know how much it was Fox saying it was over versus Stocker saying it was over? I feel I haven't seen anything clear on thisBen Goldhaber: speculation.I've heard, and it seems like it's all come into the same place now, is that mm-hmm. It was Fox saying it is over and that it did [00:25:00] not strike me as a shareholder maximizing decision, but rather the texts and communications that came out as part of pre-trial discovery for the Dominion lawsuit had. Okay.Tucker really badmouthing some of the Fox execs in management. Oh, IDivia Eden: see. That does, that does make sense. I guess why they would do something that seems so against their interests, because I guess that's a typical sort of situation where people do things that are superficially, at least against their interests.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. And this seems much more plausible than what I initially thought it was, was a surprise entrant into the Republican race. Yeah.Divia Eden: No, I mean, I think, but it makes more sense. Absolutely. I mean, I think if Tucker runs, he has a very, very good shot. I think. I mean, I don't, well, I don't, I haven't really thought about this that hard.Intuitively,Ben Goldhaber: it seems to me. Yeah. He seems like he's the only one. Yeah, he's, he's popular. I think a lot of people like him. I, I like him. He's [00:26:00] charismatic. I don't know, he's, he's like got some weird ability to draw from a lot of different pools of energy. That's right. I wonder, I, I don't know, like I saw predicted unpredicted, man, are we just gonna come up predicted podcast?I don't know. I've gotta stop referencing it so much. His, his chairs jump to at least fives like after the news. I bet it has gone down since, but I dunno, maybe, maybe people think now he can no longer be a Fox News host. Maybe he should settle for trying to run for president.Divia Eden: Yeah. He's 3% right now behind Glen Youngen, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley at 6%.Mike, that's only 2%. I mean, I guess. I guess, I don't think it's gonna be Pence, but two. Two seems low for a vp.IBen Goldhaber: don't know. He's pretty low. Yeah, I think that's much lower. I don't know. I would put him over, well, I don't know. Certainly he's, he's in the same camp in my mind as Young Kin and Nikki Haley.[00:27:00]Divia Eden: Yeah. This is, by the way, you know, this is the era of the, of my people, the female South Asian, or partly South Asian women finally in politics. Yeah. Kamala Harris. Finally, the first, I didn't think I was gonna see a half Indian VP in my time. So,Ben Goldhaber: Representation at, at last? We haven't actually talked. Nobody talks about that part.I'll say it. Nobody. I'm, here's, I'm talking about it.Do you, do you feel like now you, there's no longer a glass ceiling?Divia Eden: Less than I might have thought. Less than I might have thought. What's I don't knowBen Goldhaber: is I was not, we might have different opinions on this. I, I feel like she is nobody’s favorite, definitely not mine. Divia Eden: That's right. [00:28:00]Ben Goldhaber: Hmm. It's clearly a sign that if Biden, for whatever reason, did not run again, I do not think the Camala Harris would get the nomination. Who do you think would.Huh. I really don't know. I think maybe I'm blanking on his name, but the California governor, the judge.Divia Eden: Oh, Newsom. Yeah. Newsom. That makes sense. Newsom.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, I think maybe Newsom. But that's another one where I'm a little bit like, well, maybe it'll just be some person who's not on. Oh, Newsom Radar.Radar at the moment.Divia Eden: I didn't really look into this, but there was some headline about that he sent. He was like sending in the, not the National Guard, but like the California state something to like clean up San Francisco.Ben Goldhaber: Oh. Oh yeah. I did see this. I did not look into the details at all. Definitely felt like the kind of thing where if you're maybe setting up a run Yes.You wanna be able to talk to that? That's, yeah.Divia Eden: I mean, cuz otherwise, like, I'm like, why now? [00:29:00] Like that's, I, I don't, I don't get the, unless. Unless it's thatBen Goldhaber: it's absolutely so people can't point to the crash fire that is Francisco and say, you did nothing about this. Oh, no.Divia Eden: National Guard. Okay. I just saw a headline from two hours ago saying, I don't know the, the political leanings of, oh no, this is Fox.I see no signs of California National Guard in San Francisco to tackle fentanyl crisis is what Fox, K T V U has to say about this as ofBen Goldhaber: recently. I think that's I think that's fair reporting. I'm not even, what is National Guard gonna do about, like, are, I don't believe they have the power to arrest.Oh, sorry. Wait, it says theDivia Eden: people, right? California's National Guard to help San Francisco fight fences. Yeah. I don't know.Ben Goldhaber: I, I'm, I feel like there's some amendment in enough. Again, we're stretching my civics know, sorry. But I don't believe the National Guard can come and hideous.Divia Eden: Yeah. I think they're supposed to help law enforcement.They will. Yeah. Through this new collaborative partnership, we are providing more law [00:30:00] enforcement resources and personnel to crack down on crime, et cetera, et cetera. Do you remember? Yeah. Newsom's very, I don't know what to call it, but his rhetoric in the, like March, 2020 on co, he was making Covid speeches and I was watching them cause I was trying to understand what the Covid response was to me.Yeah. And he kept talking about the nation state of California, and I think someone called him on it. And they were like, what do you mean by that? And he was sort of like, well, it's like as big as, you know, many countries. And so that's, that's another thingBen Goldhaber: I, I, I don't remember.Divia Eden: That's maybe a little prone towards some grandiose language.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. That's, that's pretty excellent. I mean, I do I, I, I do think there's a point that he's right about there. Not, not the language that is crazy. It, it, it's like dramatically underappreciated the degree to which California is a, a huge economy, huge cultural force, all that. But then also B is just like, if it were its [00:31:00] own country, would be a failed state or would be like an example of like an Italy level kind of mismanagement.I think. I'm not sure if you agree with me on this, but it just seems like Yeah,Divia Eden: no it does. Right.Ben Goldhaber: It's not even on the housing side, but just on the like kind of one part.Divia Eden: I'll defend it a little bit on the housing side. I mean, I think the housing has been a disaster, but it seems like the ybi movement has outperformed my expectations by a lot and I think it really did come out of California, which maybe becau, you know, people were desperate.And so that's not, that's not to California's credit, desperation,Ben Goldhaber: breed breeds innovation.Divia Eden: Yeah. I mean it's, it's honestly the political, I mean, I guess this is a cold take, but it's the political thing that I am been the most excited about in years is the success of the MB thing.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. No, is I, I I, I, it seems great and as like an example of a actually organic political movement, like fueled by just like people, I mean, [00:32:00] I actually, I should learn more about the history of the Bmb movement before I say this, but it strikes me as something.That was like, no, I think you're right. Yeah. Very grassroots in a laudable way.Divia Eden: Yeah. And then it wasn't that many years before people, like, I think that when London Breed was first elected, I remember in that mayoral election, it was like people wanted the Indian endorsement. I was like, oh, interesting.Like, I didn't even realize, like Right. I didn't know it was net popular enough that, that the candidates would be looking for that. Yeah. But, but they got it. So, or I think, I think London Breed did get it, and I, you know, in terms of actual, like it's a moving at time. Yeah. I could say both. Like, this MB thing seems to have grown faster than I expected, and it's like, okay, but what's the actual rate of housing being built?And I'm like, well, that's, Hmm. I think still very slow, but like the ADU laws, like there is stuff happening and I, I think I expect it to be gaining momentum and, and being a real thing.Ben Goldhaber: I, I, I think you're right about that. Do you think it would. Do you see this becoming a national [00:33:00] movement that translates I do into changes in other states.Okay.Divia Eden: Yeah. I think there have been, at least I, so I'm, I'm far from an expert on this, but I think at least multiple states have like laws on that are either being proposed or maybe some of them passed to allow people to create ADUs accessory dwelling units in their backyards. I think that that, the thing that I've heard about that so far is to kind of like, not bank on it too much in the short term, because even when laws get passed, it's often like lots of challenges and technicalities, and I think the California one has been around long enough that it's sort of well understood and more ironed out.But yeah, I think that's, I see that as maybe a leading indicator. I mean, I think, I think housing is, is a major, is a top issue for people, you know? People our age. Yeah. And people in general, and I don't, I mean, I think. Yeah, I guess that's my prediction. I think em Bism will take off and be more of a national thing and we'll see it like substantially grow in the next four years or so.[00:34:00]Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. I, I think you're right. I haven't given it as much thought, but your description of it resonates in part cuz I feel like in the last election cycle, a number of Republican candidates were running more or less on a, almost on a housing policy agenda. Mm-hmm. Where they were pushing. An idea that I also endorse and think is a good point, which is like, you should be able to own a home raise a family on one person's salary.Like it should not require the entire family to be in the workforce in order to be able to have the. Quote unquote, traditional American dream. And I think many of them, I'm, I'm particularly thinking about the candidates running in Arizona and Ohio on the Republican side were yeah, really pointing out the way in which there's like a systematic discrimination against young people that kind of [00:35:00] manifest itself a lot in housing policy.So, I don't know. I'm optimistic about that in part because I do think tying it into the, the generation gaps, the divides, there also kind of points at the way in which, okay, over the next four years, over the next eight years, you'd expect to see this become more and more of just the default main view of the both of the, of the groups.Yeah, I thinkDivia Eden: that's right. Yeah. That's good. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say one more thing about that and it's gonna include a segue, right? Get excited. Yeah. I see it. This is maybe a bit of a cynical take also on Ybi, but I think, I don't know that in a lot of ways the economic. Fundamentals for America right now are not looking awesome from my perspective.Mm-hmm. And I think that at a certain point, I don't know, I guess I see like a lot of what I would think of as economically inefficient policies, as sort of like a luxury good that politicians are more in favor of when times are good and then if [00:36:00] actually like economic growth is sort of iffy or like people have been like, eh, we don't feel like our wage has been going up for a while.Then like politicians are like a little more eye on their ball for trying to create economic growth. And I, I think MB is one of the easier ways to do that. I think the other one, here's my segue is that I think this is gonna inform, I, I think the AI thing's gonna be really tricky and they're gonna be forces pro and anti in the government.And one of the things pushing politicians to support it is gonna be they're looking for economic growth somewhere, anywhere.Ben Goldhaber: Mm. Right. Okay. So something like, We e everybody wants, all politicians want some baseline little economic growth. Yeah, maybe it doesn't always need to be maximized and can trade off against other values.Maybe in fact, like too much economic growth has some kind of feedback loop trigger where then more signaling values are, are pushed. I don't know. That sounds a little too galaxy brains, but,Divia Eden: well, I mean, I, I would [00:37:00] like someone to do an analysis on this point, but I do, yeah. I think, I don't know. I, yeah, I, I guess that is something I think that like more people can talk more about things that don't matter very much when times are good.That's, yep.Ben Goldhaber: Definitely seems true to me.Divia Eden: Yeah. And, and you know, someone could also argue with me about like, whether, like maybe other people would be like, no, the, the economy's going fine. Like, what are you talking about? I, I'm not super, like I said, optimistic, but I don't know that that's a super uncontroversial position.I, I'm not sure.Ben Goldhaber: No. Seems right. To me at least,Divia Eden: not like, like covid. Ok. I think here's an Uncon uncontroversial thing. Covid was obviously a big hit. Yep. And I think it wasn't mm-hmm. That bad because in fact, a lot of people cut back and saved money. And so, you know, insofar as people were saving, they can now spend it and, and that'll, that'll show up.And I think it has been. But, but yeah. I think still obviously major blow.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. And, and [00:38:00] major blow, the huge amounts of inflation that we've had since. Yes. The general just sense of fragility, that's not really an economic indicator, but it's certainly, to me, one of the takeaways is, was like something about many more things being up for grabs than I expected.And I think that applies to the economy as well. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I guess, well, like, I don't know, what do you think about an argument that AI will. Cause economic benefits, but they'll be very like localized to a few firms or to a few individuals. I guess I tend to have in mind some version of AI where it's like not actually being that widely distributed of a benefit.So I suspect politicians. Yeah, I think that's not be as responsive.Divia Eden: Well, yeah, I guess I wonder, I I think so. Like, I think Tucker actually, he gave a speech about the, I think we talked about this, about like, no, he doesn't want self-driving cars because truck driver is what, like the most common [00:39:00] occupation in America and this is not gonna be a smooth situation.And anyway, so like, yeah, I, I think there's a real thing that politicians will be responsive to there. I also tend to think though, that some politicians, rightly or wrongly, like I don't know how much this feeds into public op opinion. I think somewhat. I think because public opinion is somewhat based on this, we'll wanna be like, no, I want overall GDP to go up and then I can run on that.Right? Right. So I, I guess I see both pressures. And it doesn't seem, I mean, I think, I think, I think that makes sense. It doesn't seem like an entirely pro-social, I mean, I don't know, I guess it seems neither entirely pro-social nor anti-social. It seems like a sort of somewhat unaligned politicalBen Goldhaber: goal.Yeah. I I, in some ways I think a four politicians being, having a multiplicity of values they're trying to benefit most of the time. Yeah. Like, I think I would want the people in office to both be trying to cause GDP d to go up, but also [00:40:00] not sacrifice children to a demonn in order to make GDP grow up.Which is not what I'm saying is happening here, but like, you know, let's have some values there or I dunno what my point is there.Divia Eden: Yeah, I mean, is there anything you wanna say about, I don't know, any of your latest thoughts on AI while we're talking about it? Yeah. If you want, if you want a more specific question to lead you off in the betting house, that would be great.Yeah. So I, I can pull this up on Twitter. There are probably stuff since then, but I believe somebody said something and then Robin Hansen was offering to take bets. Oh, on, yes. Yeah, I think the operationalization was something like only 20% or less of humans, of the economy, of humans are employed in, I wanna say 2037, something like that.Hmm. Which is, it was meant to be like a proxy for like, are we gonna have strong AI soon? Right. [00:41:00] And he definitely got some takers,so, yeah. Do you have thoughts? Are there any bets you'd wanna make? What do you think of this bet? I don't know. Any thoughts of the people making the bets? I think it's a goodBen Goldhaber: bet. I think it's a good operationalization. I,I, I think I would bet against against, against, well, no, hold on. Let me, let me think a little bit more here.Divia Eden: Okay. Sorry. I, I will read the exact terms of his bet in case I got them wrong. Please. I'm happy to bet against anyone who sees full human level, AGI realized across the entire economy as, oh, it's earlier than I said, as likely by 2033.I give you stuff now, and then you give me stuff after 2033. If agi, I doesn't come, you just have to prove to me that I'll actually get the stuff. Then he says, I suggest defining AGI as US adult labor force participation rate is less than 20%.[00:42:00]And yeah, there's some, there's some takers for sure in the comments.Ben Goldhaber: Mm.So I'll give some, like broad models I have about the current wave of development in ai and then hopefully that will yeah. Be interesting and also help inform which side of this bet. I'm gonna have to tweet at Robin that I'm takingone, it, it seems like the wave of G P T innovation that we've had is actually being adopted. It is not just demo tech. That's something that I now believe. Yeah, I expect that it is actually having meaningful productivity boost for a lot of people and random pieces of evidence of that are both for my own life.How awesome it has been coding with the assistance of G P [00:43:00] T. Right. The various ways I've used it to rewrite things. The degree to which it is just better than me at like various engineering style tasks. So I don't know all that. Also because I've started to see products that seem to be like using it well in some fashion where I'm like, oh yeah, this is like smart design.This is like a small example. I think I have better ones. But somebody added it into terminal commands so you can use G P T in your terminal, which I was like, this is great. Cause I've never remembered a terminal command in my life. Yeah. It was a very natural thing to do. I second though, I think I'm still a little skeptical about this current wave of heck fully replacing people in roles.Mm-hmm. I. In part, I've been burned too many times before, cuz I really did believe that like ophthalmologists might be out of [00:44:00] work because of advances in computer vision and they're not. And same with like radiologists and also self-driving cars. I was betting on that maybe like in 2018, thinking that we'd see it much sooner than we have.So yeah, it just does seem, seem like there's a lot No, no, no, no.Divia Eden: Around. I think it's just like an overall thing that I, and I think, not just to me, but definitely I got wrong about ai. I remember when I was in high school, I went to some computer science competition and that somebody did a presentation about self-driving cars.And I think it was the first time I'd ever thought about it. And certainly the first thing that occurred to me is I was like, oh, well once the computers can do it, then they're gonna have such low accident rates, it's gonna be awesome. Like quite the opposite. I mean, which in some ways I'm like, well I guess that makes sense because they go from the can't do it and then the people are working on having them be able to do it.And so somewhere in the middle they have a higher accident rate than humans. Like I guess when I put it that way, it seems sort of clear, but it wasn't how I was thinking of it [00:45:00] before. I was like, had this more deterministic like, oh, well once it's done algorithmically, then it'll be easy to get the error rate down.Right? That wasn't right.Ben Goldhaber: That, that's the kind of thing that I think seems like the update that I've also made on a lot of these applications of it. Cause I've, I've been following like benchmark progression on many of these tasks for a number of years now, and it seems like we've had human level for a long time on a lot of benchmarks.And yet I don't think that you can actually just give the algorithm a full on, I don't know, write a book style pass and you get a good response. And I feel like there's just, and, and say, I think radiology is an example. I tweeted about this a while ago. I got a lot of good examples from working people in the field about like why it hasn't replaced them.Like why they can't just give it to the software. And it feels like that's just true in a lot of parts of the economy. So I, I, I continue to expect like, high productivity gains without [00:46:00] maybe seeing like immediate job loss from it. I mean, one way I could have know isDivia Eden: you could just like, but okay, so devil's advocate.I, I think that's my ultimate prediction too. But if I, if I wanna make the, take the other side of it, I'd be like, well, but if the same programmer can do, I don't know, like even just three times as much, then why wouldn't I hire fewer of them? And I guess the, I mean, if I take the other side of that one, I'm like, well, maybe actually, I guess some goods go the other way.Like if the good gets more valuable, you buy more of it. So like maybe if the programmers become more productive, then I write more code. I don't knowBen Goldhaber: my pr my prediction though, I don't know if this tracks with formal economic logic, but it is what I have in my head, is it we'll see bimodal distributions in a lot more professions with far with like, I don't know if it's gonna be the same number of programmers, but something like many more programmers in [00:47:00] the like lower quadrant getting paid less and then a few getting paid a lot, lot more.And basically just a split, I guess this is Tyler Cowen's averages over kind of thesis, but applied specifically to ai. And I don't know, I guess that's my prediction for the next few years. And then when I start thinking into 2030, I'm like, I, I really, things get kind of foggy for me. That's one reason why I might take the bet on the other side from Robin is just, it seems like there's so much transformative potential in various ways that I'm like, I don't know what my odds are, but it certainly seems far more possible than many more things are gonna be.Like mechanized is radically different. Yeah. Mechanized. That is a old school term. I don't know why I used that.Divia Eden: Ok. I, I'm gonna go back to what you said about programmers. I see part of what confuses me here, [00:48:00] and it's not that I necessarily think you're wrong, but this sort of old wisdom about programming, is that in fact, productivity differences between programmers are huge and that within.Like when people are employees, it's, the pay never really reflects that. And so if people want to actually capture, if the, you know, I guess this is cringe, talk about the 10 x programmers, but they, but they obviously, some programmers are much more productive than others and if they wanna capture that, they have to go, I don't know, do startup or whatever else.Yeah, because I, because I don't know the pre, the measurement is hard or the pressures for GAL are strong enough. I mean, it seems like measurement is not that hard. But then like what pro I, but then I don't know, like salespeople. Mm-hmm. I guess measurement is easy enough that it overcomes whatever tendencies towards egalitarianism and people, people get paid based onBen Goldhaber: what they do.Yeah. I don't know if this is quite the same as the [00:49:00] measurement problem or it's not how I would describe it, but the salespeople example I think is a good example of, because. It is a eat what you kill profession. It is just a far more direct incentive. And right, there is no third party that needs to allocate things in some way that like, yes, a team spirit.And I say this is somebody who has never really worked in a sales profession. So plausibly it's different. But my impression if we're talking to friends who have is it is like, yeah, you have a team, but it is still a solo artist kind of practice. And I do, it's culturally very different. It's probably different for programmers.It's culturally very different. Yeah. And like I think for most programming jobs, you are programming with a team and that has Right, both harder measurement problems where okay, now you have a credit allocation problem of like who really enabled this person's success along with trying to maintain team cohesion.[00:50:00]Yeah, soDivia Eden: I guess,Ben Goldhaber: okay. No, I know. It's still a good point thoughDivia Eden: now that we've talked this out. I think you might be right about the productivity differential and I think it's mostly not gonna be reflected in in salaries. Yeah. That seems I we'llBen Goldhaber: see. Compelling to me, I guess we, if we look at other professions, because it wouldn't just be programmers like, right.Should we expect sales becoming even more bifurcated? I think maybe copyright and it would be reflected in salary. Yeah, exactly. Copy you, copy be able to just be far greater.Divia Eden: Yeah. I think the, the copywriters that embrace the, the AI and they figure out their prompts and whatever, and see, I, I don't know a ton about copywriting as a profession, but I, I think that, I'm guessing they get paid sort of by the individual copy and how well it performs in a sales type way.That that's, that's my impression that could be wrong about that. This is great. And Yeah, I, I think there, the compensation is gonna get way more skewed and some people will probably stop doing it. Mm-hmm. [00:51:00] Because the other people get so good.Ben Goldhaber: Right? Yeah. Seems right. Seems like that could apply to a number of things.I think actually this is helping me re when I think about the, the, the, the hanon bit is one reason I would not take the other side of it. Why I would be skeptical of a only 20% of the workforce still being in the workforce would be, I feel like there's so many feedback loops in society that would prevent that from happening.Like in the world where things have not radically transformed. I think if you only had 20% of the population still currently employed, you would see a lot more buildings being burned down. A lot more civic on this. Yeah.Divia Eden: No, and I think the politicians are gonna make policies to try to stabilize all of that.I think that's right. Totally. Yeah,Ben Goldhaber: and I think I, I had an argument, oh, sorry. This will be I, I had an argument that I think in [00:52:00] particular the P M C class, the professional managerial class will be threatened by some of these things, and politicians are far more responsive to their concerns than to the rest of us.And that will drive some legislation faster. Yeah, I,Divia Eden: I think like the, the scenario that I, sometimes, I, I don't, I like don't even wanna think about it, cuz to me it seems too dystopian for like the, the other, the sort of less political solution to that is like a lot of jobs. Is the paperwork gonna explode?Like people are gonna using the ais to create additional paperwork and then additional paperwork requirements. Right. And like everybody's, listen, look at some arms race against like, I guess this is sort of the b******t jobs hypothesis. Like in some sense, yeah, many people are doing things that are not really necessary, but people wanna have these other from more nebulous, more statusy, whatever reasons that they wanna hire people.And then is the make work just gonna explode even without any political intervention? [00:53:00]Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. I mean, I guess there's some political solution here, which is like, look, we can never fully trust the ai. Maybe this is an AI alignment. Yeah. And a make work program where you have a human verifying every X number of ais outputs, and this way everybody's employed and nobody's doing real work.Right.Divia Eden: And I think, I mean, I think sort of makes sense because insofar as people's job is to be accountable, There's not really a way to have an AI do that at this time, and I, I don't see, yeah, it seems not that close to havingBen Goldhaber: that. This is in part why at least some people on Twitter have said radiology is still done by humans, is you need somebody accountable at the end of the day and the software would scan the the, the tests.It would, it would, it would try to indicate whether or not there was some kind of thing present that a radiologist needed to look at, but the radiologist still had to [00:54:00] sign off on them, and in terms of liability, they were the ones who would be sued if they got it wrong. So in the end, it didn't really provide that big of a productivity gain.I, I wonder if this would happen in many more professions.Divia Eden: Yeah. And, and like it could, it could. I, it would not surprise me if the way it went, and I don't, I don't have a, I don't know, the technical is, I don't know how far off self-driving cars are. I think I would predict that we'd see way more of them deployed by 20 Now you're ok.On what timeBen Goldhaber: scale? I, I, I, I, I am bullish on a five year time scale without thinking about any of the social implications, which I dunno. I agree with Tucker's take, I'm worried about that doesn't seem strictly great, but in terms of self-driving cars in cities, yeah. Where like instead of Uber, I'm calling a self-driving car in San Francisco and New York and Boston in like a major metropolitan area.I, I think that [00:55:00] becomes even more of a reality. It's already kind of a reality now in San Francisco.Divia Eden: Ok. So two questions. One elsewhere. Yes. So, and you think that even if the car is for all practical purposes, self-driving, there's not gonna be a human in their supervising? Or you think there will be? I think there won't be.Okay. I think I predict. And I, I'm talking about something I don't know that much about that with the truck drivers. It's gonna be that even past the point where cabs don't have a person in them, the trucks will, because again, somebody I think has to be accountable for the goods and maybe they'll be some more, I agree with that trusted way to do it, but I, I think it'll take a while and I don't know.And theBen Goldhaber: companies, I actually also think truck driving is a lot harder than people anticipate. Oh wait, you said in cities, truck driving is a different problem. Yeah, I think cities for truck driving, I'm not sure. And that's another area where we get into areas that don't fully gro. But yeah, it's something [00:56:00] I learned when looking into like why, I don't know why my initial prediction several years ago didn't take off.I like looked a little bit at self-driving trucks is there's just like a lot that truck drivers do as part of their profession that is not just keeping the truck in between the white lanes. Like it is a lot of loading and unloading things. A lot of maintenance, a lot of like. I think like supervising and interfacing with other people, tasks of like getting cargo and things and all of that.I, I think this goes to the ways in which like, yes, maybe actually you just need like weak h e I or full HCI before you can get some of these things automated. Cause there's Yeah. A lot of generality in, in the, in the job of the truck driver.Divia Eden: Yeah. I think, I think that sounds right to me, so, okay. You're, I, I think I would agree with, with what you're saying, bullish on the cabs in cities, but not so much Yeah.On the, in the next five years on truck drivers being replaced.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Which I think, I'm stealing this from somebody, but I do think it's a beautiful sign of irony that it seems much more likely that the opinion [00:57:00] columnists who were writing about the way the like truck driving would be automated five years ago are far more likely to be automated now.Oh, yeah. Than the truck drivers.Divia Eden: Yeah. That is funny. But I, yeah, that would, that, that's another prediction you could make or not. Do you think any. I don't know what this means. Major news publication that is not comedy. Mm. Will regularly, like a regular segment where they put what the AI writes about something.Oh, that's a good question. I think comedy, I'm gonna say yes, absolutely. Comedians are gonna do it. Comedy,Ben Goldhaber: I think. Yes. How familiar are you with V2 or the whole movement of like avatars that are AI generated? I should be clear on not, not, not familiar, I'm curious. No, I'm not. It seems like it's taking off and maybe we need to do a segment at some point where we talk to one, but it seems like it's taking off and strikes me as like a real possible avenue [00:58:00] for exactly what you're talking about, which is just almost fully AI generated.I suspect there'll be some human in the mix for a little while, but like almost fully AI generated personalities. Interesting. So I don't know if a major one will do it for a while. I do think that a startup vertical will do it in the next arbitrary length of time. I'm gonna say three years. We'll see a like who, who did people used to write to?A Miss Mans style columnist. Yes,that'sDivia Eden: right. Alice's, what's your name? But yeah, miss Mans.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah, one of those. I think we'll see that. That's okay. Well, definitely. I'm gonna go back through this transcript, by the way. We need to get all these predictions out. And also what is what's, what's your take on that, do you think?Yes. No, sometimes the V YouTube thing. Numerical conf. Yeah.Divia Eden: I, I, I'm gonna defer to you on that one. I, I know little enough aboutBen Goldhaber: this. I have [00:59:00] my finger on the pulse of what the youth are into, and I'm gonna tell you it's messed up. And the youth are wrong.Divia Eden: Okay. Next que next prediction. Since, since we're gonna do something, how much do you think AI is gonna come up in the next round of presidential debates?Do you think it'll happen in the primaries? Do you think it'll happen intheBen Goldhaber: general? I definitely think it will. I, I think that people are, I'm going to go strong prediction on this. I don't know what that turns to in I should be better at making percentages on this, but I'm all right. I'm willing to definitely go above 50%.It's mentioned at least one time in all of the debates. I think actually that's even, I should say, like, I'm gonna go over, I'm gonna go 70% or higher that it's mentioned in at least one of the, one of the debates. Okay. Mm-hmm. Right. And I guess another question is like a strong topic what the primary or [01:00:00] sorry, be like, does it become like an argument in the primary?Yeah, I think so. Okay. I think so. Maybe like I'll like cut that down to like, I don't know, now I'm just really pulling numbers out, but like 55, 60, it gets a like, like a, it's like an actual like topic of discussion.Divia Eden: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Okay. That's pretty high. Yeah, I think, I think that's a little bigger than I was thinking, but, but I think you, I, again, I would probably defer to you on this.I had been thinking, I don't know, I think I would've said maybe more like 35, 40% PRI bill. It'll happen in the primaries. But in part, cause I w I think I was surprised how I think that the Democratic primary debates were happening last time. During Covid? Yeah, during Covid. And it, yeah, it, it did come up, but it was a little later than.I would've thought, and I, yeah, so I guess I, maybe this is like, my theme is I'm almost trying to fight the last war with my [01:01:00] predictions.Ben Goldhaber: Oh, another argue way to put that is if you're trying to like have an outside view, would you reference glass? Well, I'm just like, no, no, no. It is in the discourse, but that is kind of, mine is strictly inside view is unlike, I think that this has dominated the discourse over the past month or two months.And we're getting like Wall Street Journal articles now about like dealing with AI grief, all of these topicsDivia Eden: that, no, it's a good point. There have been news article, why journals. Yeah. No, I, I think you've persuaded me that IBen Goldhaber: think the news just set the tenor cool. Yeah. Yeah. All right.My turn. When do you think if slash when would you expect to see a. Major Luddite style protest or event doesn't have to be a protest, but you get kinda what I'm pointing at. [01:02:00]Divia Eden: Yeah. I get, when you first said that, I was like, I, my stereotype of different populations, I'm like, I think maybe we see this in Europe first Hmm.Ben Goldhaber: More. Right. IDivia Eden: dunno. Like, and I don't wanna, again, I'm talking about things I don't know that much about, but I think the base rate of like, is there a major protest happening right now in France, for example, is very highBen Goldhaber: Francis all the time. It's, it's so, they're so, they're so professional about it.They're just doing it constantly, so, yes. Yeah.Divia Eden: I mean I used to, I took French in high school. I, my French is not that great, but I, for a while I tried to watch French news. It was like I don't know. I thought it would help me get better at French. And there was part of what struck me, I news is all about either American pigs or it's about local protests.Which again, I'm, so this is probably an offensive thing to say to French people, but this was, this was my impression asBen Goldhaber: American from what I watched. I feel like they need to own that. Yeah.Divia Eden: Yeah. And so, yeah, I think, okay, that's, that's my, I haven't answered [01:03:00] your real question yet, but I think, and also, isn't there some, like, I wanna say German legislation or something that just came out about like, you have the right to insist that your personal information be removed from any AI training set.Isn't there something like that happening?Ben Goldhaber: There's, there's definitely something like that. I dunno if it was German or not, andDivia Eden: it's, I don't know how far it got. Certainly people were like, well, that, I mean, as with many of these laws, it's like written by people with like not a lot of Right. It's sort of impractical, given the architecture to implement it the way that the law, which is maybe the intended point of law.Maybe they're, they're sort of hoping to effectively ban it. But, but anyway. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna say, so how is just any protest. It's co let's say that's covered by some news or something. Yeah.Ben Goldhaber: It's covered by some news and it can't just be like 10 people milling around Right. Just for the photograph or something.It needs to have that kinda it all, it has to have [01:04:00] a spark of a liveness, of a protest. I a French protest where something's getting burned. Not something doesn't have to get burned, but you get it.Divia Eden: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So I definitely think that it's of course much more likely if there is some major AI incident.Yeah. And I, and it doesn't have to be a huge incident, it just some newsworthy thing where the AI screws something up. Mm-hmm. I don't, I think then that's pretty likely to spark a protest. I don't wanna like make this too conjunctive, but, I guess, I'm trying to think. Right. So I think, I think it could happen.Yeah. What scenarios I see. Yeah. Right, right. So it could either be like, there's some accident that's newsworthy because of an ai, or maybe there's some, even if this isn't broadly what's happening, there's some major unemployment event due to an ai That I think is, that's a bit what I add in mind. Yeah.Yeah. That could totally spark a protest. I also think we could, it's, you said Luddite. I also, [01:05:00] I feel like there's already some small contingent that's like, but we're not treating AI well enough too, which is not really a Luddite thing. I don't know that those people are inclined to go out and protest, but I think there's some sentiment and it will only grow because, I mean, that's another one of those things you could talk about is like, I think this is again, a pretty cold take among people who've thought about it, but I think people are gonna start falling in love with these ais soon.Yeah.Ben Goldhaber: I mean, arguably they already have. I don't, I didn't look into it myself, but I remember reading about the replica AI. Yeah. And I mean, and people who didn'tDivia Eden: look, I think the bar is fairly low for people that are pretty lonely. Like Eliza really was a, was fun to interact with for the, for people who don't know, that was like a very early chatbot that did a not even very interesting version of sort of repeating back what people said and asking them some more questions about it.And it was clearly to an adversarial examiner. Clearly not very intelligent, but, [01:06:00] but still, I think I, to me, this is one of the sort of compelling mysteries, and people say they have explanations to me, it still feels mysterious about human communication, that there aren't facts. Hmm. According to me, relatively formulaic ways to interact with people as described in communication books, most of which say similar things that tend to be actually pretty fulfilling for people.And I think most people don't spend a lot of time leaning on these formulas. What's the example? So I, I, for example, I'm a fan of non-violent communication. But like lots of activism, sort of things like that. Like, like, ok, so a really basic one. I'm also, you know, that book never Split the Difference, the host, that, that's another one of those.There's so many things. It's like if somebody says something, even just being like, oh yeah, like, tell me more about that. Like, like that's sort of the most basic non-responsive formula where people are Hmm, yeah. Like they make some interested noise and they want the person to keep talking. I feel like many people actually really like it [01:07:00] when they're engaged with a counterparty that's doing that.And then I think Totally. I think maybe, yeah. And then I think a level beyond that is when people say things in response that both reflect that they understand what the person is saying by some sort of rephrasing and in a way that then what I'm hearingBen Goldhaber: when you say that, yeah. Is that, it's great. No, sorry that was too easy, but exactly.Divia Eden: And look, I, I don't know. I consider myself extremely privileged in life to have, I don't know, people that I really enjoy talking to. And actually, I don't know, like I have, yeah. I don't really know how to put it, but like I And thatBen Goldhaber: are alive, sentient humans, right?Divia Eden: Yes. I actually, I have, I know a lot of humans that are, that are pretty down to talk, but I think, I think there's a substantial contingent of people that doesn't so much.Yeah. And so I think it's combined that there are relatively formulaic ways of interacting that I think tend [01:08:00] to work okay for people, and that a lot of people are kind of lonely. Look, okay, sorry. Here, here's a more concrete prediction. I think, and I don't know how it's gonna work out in a regulatory way, but I think, and this is already starting to happen, I, I think AI therapists are gonna be better than the median human therapist in the next few years if they aren't already.And I partly say this because I think the bar is low. No insults intended to therapists. I think it's, but I think some of the, some of the advantages that the AI has is one, I mean, it seems trivial if somebody has an AI therapist, unless there's some idiotic insurance rules that someone could access it on demand, which I think is a major value add.Right. Talking to someone when, when I'm upset as opposed to once a week seems huge. Also, I think many people will have an easier time being vulnerable with an ai and then additionally, yeah, itBen Goldhaber: also seems very plausible.Divia Eden: Like I, you know, something I've been [01:09:00] pretty into internal family systems therapy over the past decade or so.I, I first, I first heard about it and then I bought the book and so the book comes with an appendix that's, it's, it's honestly very formulate. Cause this is another example of formulate communication that I think people tend to be, be pretty engaged with. Like, it's not, I. Right. It's not fully a formula, but you're like, okay, well you did, did this part of you, how does, how do you feel towards this part of you?And then it's like, okay, well, you know, okay, now it's like a tree of, and they have it in the appendix and they map out all these questions and is there some human discernment? Like of course there are many ways that people can add value to this, but I think the formula gets people pretty far. And then, especially if you ask this ai, like maybe I'm going on about this too much, but like people could pick their modality.Maybe somebody's like, I wanna try internal family systems this week. I wanna try cognitive behavioral therapy. They're gonna be fluent in all these things. They're gonna be available on demand. I think it's not gonna feel near perfect memory. Near perfect memory will feel pretty easy to open up to them.So anyway, that, [01:10:00] that's my, that's my prediction. I think AI therapists are gonna outperform. I don't know whether people will adopt them much, but I think they might, because I think it's pretty easy to make some business. Yeah, I, I, I think, yeah, I think adoption will also be, IBen Goldhaber: saw a great prompt that was I saw a great prompt that was like, all right, now pretend to be chat v p t ad sponsored and it would like include a mention of the front trap supreme or something like that at the tail end of every random number of ones, and make it a natural segue and it nailed it.So I really do think you could have an AI therapist slash best friend slash lover, but that's how you monetize it. That's usually worse than a mention of a Pepsi. Yeah,Divia Eden: yeah. No, that's, I haven't even thought of that.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Seems right, right. LikeDivia Eden: so I I still haven't answered your question. I, I'll, I please.This is me trying to like, imagine scenarios AI protest when, so this is like my, is it probability in the next interval of [01:11:00] time or like my point estimate for when it'll occur.Ben Goldhaber: Pick either whichever one feels, I dunno, maybe easiest or like best to visualize.Divia Eden: Oh, also, sorry. Do we count like the, I don't know, the.Sort of our people in a way, like the ows rationalists, like if they, if they set up a protest, does that count?Ben Goldhaber: I was gonna ask, does Ludite also, should I be using Judite as a term? Yeah, it's, I think, yeah, I feel like, no, I doesn't count. Yeah. That seems somehow like not correct. It's not, there's not not authentic people movement.I dunno why I say that though.Divia Eden: Fair enough. Yeah.Oh, I don't, okay. I guess I'm gonna say three years.I, and I think, yeah. Right on. I think having talked this through, I kind of wanted to say something sooner, but I think, I [01:12:00] think the thing is like, there's so many causes that people care about a lot that never get protests because it's only like the protestor class that protests. Does that make sense? Yes.And I don't really, yeah, I don't think I understand the mind of the protestor class. Other than that, I think it doesn't like large unemployment events. I think that's something, I think it also doesn't like restriction of freedoms. Yeah. Or at least some, but again, some of them, like did we see any protests about like the, I forget, you know, like the, what do you, the Patriot Act or something?No. Like we didn't see protests about that. Right.Ben Goldhaber: I think we saw a few. I don't know what the scale was. I remember,Divia Eden: oh, sorry. Wait. Ok. I thought of a new scenario. I thought of a new scenario, which is anti-war protests are totally a thing. So what if there's some sort of AI weapons event? I still am gonna go with three years.Yeah. But that's now a new scenario that, that seems sort of plausible to me. Yeah.Ben Goldhaber: No, I don't know. This seems, this seems quite plausible. So three years you would give it at like [01:13:00] 70, 80% some kind of like, High level of confidence? Or is it more like I, I said, sorry, now I'm putting you on it.Divia Eden: No, it's good.I said point, point. You gave me a range. What, what exactly? I think point estimate means like median, right? Yeah. So I think I meant like 50%. It happens by then. Cool. Is that what put, yeah, I think that's what point estimateBen Goldhaber: means. Oh, I, I, I feel like Point could mean, could be used a couple ways, but that seems like a very fair way to use it.We might wanna wrap up as it is approaching midnight here on the East Coast. Oh, are you on the east coast now? We wanna, I, I'm back the great state of North Carolina right now.Divia Eden: Oh, I didn't quite realize that. Cool. Congratulations.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Having made the returns. Yes. It's good. I will be, Taking an [01:14:00] Amtrak tomorrow to visit my sister up in Virginia, but otherwise North Carolina for a little bit.Nice. Yeah. Yeah. This is,Divia Eden: this is good to catch up and, and just talk about stuff. This is, I guess people can get used to it because if we don't have a guest for a particular week, we're gonna try to keep doing this. We,Ben Goldhaber: I think people need parasocial relationships that are not just ai and we're doing our part here.And I think I'm also on demand, if anybody wants somebody not skilled in any of the modalities people talked about, just subscribe to the premium subscription. We're gonna roll out and I promise to tryDivia Eden: all versions. All our truly unhinged shakes only for the, you know, a hundred dollars a month subscribers.That's forBen Goldhaber: the premium. Yep. Oh, wow. Wait, we can, that's a great plan. We'll bring a chat bot. In our style. And then premium subscribers get that. And it'll also include whatever hallucinated[01:15:00] hot takes you want from it. That's right. Perfect.Divia Eden: Like, you know, there's the observation there was the, the ai ai, the azer gives up on alignment.I don't know, is it a deep fake? I mean, it was obviously fake, but it it was pretty funny.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Yeah. I liked it. Certain thingsDivia Eden: to come. Oh, that I, I'm still not on this. I'm like, what specific scenarios? Like do you think if some deep fake causes a problem that could cause a protest? Maybe, I don't know what it would be.Maybe not. I don't know. I,Ben Goldhaber: I think it's gonna be some kind of unemployment thing, as you pointed out. That seems like the most likely one to me. Or a scandal involving AI with a. Beloved celebrity or sacred value of some kind? Yeah. There was a Twitch streamer who, I don't know the details, I don't follow this community at all, but I [01:16:00] remember it was apologizing for watching deep fake horns of his fellow Twitch treatment.Yeah,Divia Eden: I saw this discourse. Yeah, a little bit.Ben Goldhaber: Yeah. Yeah. Which, I mean, I think it's obviously kinda messed up, but something like that. Hmm.Divia Eden: Somebody caught the streamer doing it right?Ben Goldhaber: Somebody caught the streamer doing it. Exactly. It was like on his stream. He went switching away from it. Mad Ops fat obsec.That's actually one of the big takeaways here is, wow, come on. Terrible offset. But something like that I could see causing some kind of, I don't know. It's, it's, I think something I don't get about protests or is like, it seems like there's catalyzing movements. Catalyzing triggers it. Yeah. You would never predict ahead of time.And so maybe it was an unfair question to me, but like the classic like Arab Spring protest that was set by a Tunisian Street offender, setting himself a fire. It feels like conditions become very ripe for protests. And then the actual thing that causes it [01:17:00] is, yeah. Who knows what.Divia Eden: Yeah. Yeah. It'll, I mean, we'll probably get to find out, so we'll report back on that when it happens, I guess.Ben Goldhaber: Yep. And we should create manifold markets or cheap predictions on various ones of these. Oh yeah. That other people's predictions are on this. Yeah. Yeah. IDivia Eden: like that weBen Goldhaber: put this more opportunities to gain notes.Divia Eden: Yeah. All right. Well anyway, I think, I think that's it for today, but we'll, mm-hmm. Record another one soon.Ben Goldhaber: Yep. Talk to you, Divya and everyone else later. This is a public episode. 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