Be passionate about the territory, not the map
Balaji is a deep thinker on crypto and its implications. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he's seen how technologies evolve over time, which ones change the world and which ones fizzle out as a fad.
He believes crypto technologies such as bitcoin represent the former. To him, crypto will emerge as something that's as important as the Internet and influence our society for decades to come.
Ever heard of meta-science?
It’s the science of science. In this episode, I interview the meta-scientist James A. Evans who explains how science happens, why smaller teams do big scientific breakthroughs, similarities between startups and scientific endeavors, and what research shows about the path to success.
His research shows how science is not an automatic machine that keeps on generating truth, but is rather a system where social dynamics of how scientists interact with each other determine what they end up discovering. ... Read the entire post →
Should we worry about AI?
Connor Leahy is an AI researcher at EleutherAI, a grass-roots collection of open-source AI researchers. Their current ambitious project is GPT-Neo, where they’re replicating currently closed-access GPT-3 to make it available to everyone.
Connor is deeply interested in the dangers posed by AI systems that don’t share human values and goals. I talked to Connor about AI misalignment and why it poses a potential existential risk for humanity.
Do we see reality as it is?
I discuss this question with Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He studies consciousness and perception from an evolutionary point of view. His research has led him to make a bold claim that while we do not yet know what the underlying reality could be like. Rather, reality as we know it now - including space, time, and objects - is a useful fiction that evolution invented for us.
Do surgeries work? Most of us assume they do, but is there any scientific evidence that they do?
In this episode, I talk to Dr Ian Harris who is a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a practicing orthopedic surgeon specializing in trauma surgery. Outside his practice, his research interests broadly cover the topic of surgical effectiveness and clinical research.
In the first episode of Bold Conjectures podcast, I talk to Dr Anders Sandberg who is a Senior Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. His academic collaborators include nanotechnology pioneer Eric Dexler and the philosopher Nick Bostrom.