The Students

Michael Edward Johnson and Wolf Tivy get into the weeds on consciousness. What type of theory is the "theory of consciousness" that so many people are searching for, and what is it trying to explain? How will we know when we have it?

Ian Fletcher describes the fundamentals of industrial policy, how economic theorists ignore the practice of successful businesses and successfully industrializing nations, and why the US has the institutions it needs for strong industrial policy.

​Sober, risk-averse, rational businessmen make great captains of industry—in established industries which someone else already built. But the new industries which drive progress come from wild half-mad ideologues. This lecture covers the psychology of the men behind the major breakthroughs, from the steam engine to the large language model.

Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor cover bureaucracy—why the golden age of bureaucracies worked so well in the early 20th century, how bureaucratic class interest overcomes checks and balances, and bureaucracy's role in today's Western governments.

Richard Ngo argues against Wolf Tivy’s xenohumanism lecture. (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XmEjgRaBpp3OxDrV3WXLD) What is the moral ground for cooperation and hierarchy? We need the answer to build a good society today, or to build a good AI future tomorrow.

The long-awaited Marko Jukic episode. We all expect AGI to colonize the stars because it's the obvious thing any healthy expanding system does naturally. So why aren't we? Marko explains the elaborate cope keeping us on Earth.

The internet can feel like a part of the landscape, but all our software was intelligently designed—and so were the social systems which produce that software. Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute tells Ben Landau-Taylor about the struggle to define "open source software".

​Our concepts of "humanity" and "humanitarianism" are usually taken as the eternal bedrock of morality. Today, artificial intelligence raises the prospect of "posthumanity", and magnates and regulators discuss what “humanity should do” about this. But in fact, the concept of "humanity" is a relatively recent and flimsy creation of the postwar political order. We need to abandon it to find our place in the future.

Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy discuss the forces raising our civilization higher vs the forces pulling it down. Is techno-industrial progress made of social and intellectual components which will take it down when they go, or can it outgrow the decay?

Joscha Bach and Wolf Tivy discuss how consciousness may be a convergent strategy for organizing both human and machine minds, whether powerful AI minds will resolve conflicts by merging or by fighting each other, and much more.

In 1572 twelve Dutch cities - less than a million people - began a war for independence against a global superpower and won. Over the next century they went toe-to-toe with the Spanish, English, and French and built the institutions which have defined the modern world. Jonathan Wallis explains how.

Intellectual activity, like any complex activity, can only take place in a rich social fabric. Jonathan Wallis and Ben Landau-Taylor talk about how to build community and why it's worthwhile.

Scientific breakthroughs are much rarer today than the glory days of the early 1900s. Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor discuss how the WWII-era centralization of science divorced theorists from the ideological—if not outright mystical—cult of Truth.

Philosophers talk of aligning AI to “human values”. This supposes there is no objective value, only the arbitrary values that humans happened to land on. Ginevra Davis and Wolf Tivy argue there is a deeper well of value in material reality.

Oliver Habryka joins Wolf Tivy to tell how he revived LessWrong after it nearly died, built the Lighthaven campus, and launched his $35m/quarter project to reform grantmaking.

Jonathan Wallis and Wolf Tivy cover the role of passion in intellectual inquiry. The academy's sin is that its people have lost their passion, content to go through the motions. With passion, the work comes alive—but this upsets careers and institutions.

Stephen Pimentel and Wolf Tivy discuss Homer. If Odysseus reveals his power level too soon, the suitors will kill him. To take back his home, he needs metis (μῆτις): practical intelligence under duress. Today's would-be reformers need metis as well.0:00 — Intro2:22 — Restoring order in ancient Greece; Agamemnon’s warning9:24 — The importance of metis 15:34 — The meaning of Odysseus’s challenges22:46 — Circe, sorcery, and science27:30 — The Phaeacians31:26 — The recognition of nobility33:03 — Justice and retribution38:05 — Restoring order today 40:08 — How great stories and great men transcend the present moment

Rachel Wallis is pregnant with her highest-IQ embryo, with a 99.99th percentile polygenic IQ score. She and Wolf Tivy discuss what this means, and how in the 20th century our concept of "humanity" narrowed into an ideological straitjacket. 0:00 — Intro 1:17 — How we selected the embryo 5:04 — What do these predictors actually mean? 12:53 — Financial costs and benefits 17:16 — Cultivating virtue 22:31 — Where is this going for future generations? 24:48 — Virtue and courage 28:47 — Overcoming the “humanitarian” straitjacket 34:00 — Transcendent humanism died in the war 44:04 — The silicon ubermensch 48:30 — “The choice between death or change” 52:27 — Investing in the next generation

Many say computers have transformed society as deeply as the advent of industry. While computers are powerful, they have not reordered the fundamental basis of society. Ben Landau-Tylor and Wolf Tivy cover the history 0:00 — Intro 2:44 — "We take the industrial background for granted" 8:36 — What does it mean to revolutionize society? 13:56 — The industrial social system 18:41 — The rise of the laptop class 22:34 — Cultural homogenization 28:43 — Technological changes vs novelty effects 31:05 — The case of journalism’s decline 39:00 — The time traveler thought experiment 41:02 — What will the full development of a computerized society look like? 49:27 — Computers and material production 58:21 — "What would it mean for computing to be as impactful as the Industrial Revolution?"

Max Dmitrienko and Wolf Tivy take on glory. From the ancient Greeks to the posthuman machine gods, some achievements are remembered because they show truths about how the world works and the challenges of coordination. 0:00 — Intro 1:26 — "How should one live given that one is mortal?" 7:11 — What is worth remembering? 13:53 — The transhuman perspective 18:01 — Achilles' choice vs Socrates' choice 29:18 — The legitimate basis of cooperation 35:24 — What does glory look like in the modern world? 39:37 — Reaching higher forms of society 44:25 — Distinction vs gradients 50:34 — What glory will mean to the posthuman AI