The Valmy Unknown

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show Episode: Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He IsRelease date: 2024-04-26Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” made him the target of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who denounced the book as blasphemous and issued a fatwa calling for his assassination. Rushdie spent years trying to escape the shadow the fatwa cast on him, and for some time, he thought he succeeded. But in 2022, an assailant attacked him onstage at a speaking engagement in western New York and nearly killed him.
“I think now I’ll never be able to escape it. No matter what I’ve already written or may now write, I’ll always be the guy who got knifed,” he writes in his new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”
In this conversation, I asked Rushdie to reflect on his desire to escape the fatwa; the gap between the reputation of his novels and their actual merits; how his “shadow selves” became more real to millions than he was; how many of us in the internet age also have to contend with our many shadow selves; what Rushdie lives for now; and more.
Mentioned:
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Book Recommendations:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Mrinalini Chakravorty.

Podcast: Political Philosophy Podcast Episode: THE POLITICAL RIGHT & EQUALITY With MattMcManusRelease date: 2024-04-28What defines the modern American right? Matt McManus argues we should understand the movement as fundementally about hierarchy, we then get into a general conversation about the Biden administration and the direction of the US Left.

Podcast: The Gradient: Perspectives on AI Episode: David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case Against LongtermismRelease date: 2024-05-02Episode 122
I spoke with Professor David Thorstad about:
* The practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary work
* Why theories of human rationality should account for boundedness, heuristics, and other cognitive limitations
* why EA epistemics suck (ok, it’s a little more nuanced than that)
Professor Thorstad is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, a Senior Research Affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and a Research Affiliate at the MINT Lab at Australian National University. One strand of his research asks how cognitively limited agents should decide what to do and believe. A second strand asks how altruists should use limited funds to do good effectively.
Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.
Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter
Outline:
* (00:00) Intro
* (01:15) David’s interest in rationality
* (02:45) David’s crisis of confidence, models abstracted from psychology
* (05:00) Blending formal models with studies of the mind
* (06:25) Interaction between academic communities
* (08:24) Recognition of and incentives for interdisciplinary work
* (09:40) Movement towards interdisciplinary work
* (12:10) The Standard Picture of rationality
* (14:11) Why the Standard Picture was attractive
* (16:30) Violations of and rebellion against the Standard Picture
* (19:32) Mistakes made by critics of the Standard Picture
* (22:35) Other competing programs vs Standard Picture
* (26:27) Characterizing Bounded Rationality
* (27:00) A worry: faculties criticizing themselves
* (29:28) Self-improving critique and longtermism
* (30:25) Central claims in bounded rationality and controversies
* (32:33) Heuristics and formal theorizing
* (35:02) Violations of Standard Picture, vindicatory epistemology
* (37:03) The Reason Responsive Consequentialist View (RRCV)
* (38:30) Objective and subjective pictures
* (41:35) Reason responsiveness
* (43:37) There are no epistemic norms for inquiry
* (44:00) Norms vs reasons
* (45:15) Arguments against epistemic nihilism for belief
* (47:30) Norms and self-delusion
* (49:55) Difficulty of holding beliefs for pragmatic reasons
* (50:50) The Gibbardian picture, inquiry as an action
* (52:15) Thinking how to act and thinking how to live — the power of inquiry
* (53:55) Overthinking and conducting inquiry
* (56:30) Is thinking how to inquire as an all-things-considered matter?
* (58:00) Arguments for the RRCV
* (1:00:40) Deciding on minimal criteria for the view, stereotyping
* (1:02:15) Eliminating stereotypes from the theory
* (1:04:20) Theory construction in epistemology and moral intuition
* (1:08:20) Refusing theories for moral reasons and disciplinary boundaries
* (1:10:30) The argument from minimal criteria, evaluating against competing views
* (1:13:45) Comparing to other theories
* (1:15:00) The explanatory argument
* (1:17:53) Parfit and Railton, norms of friendship vs utility
* (1:20:00) Should you call out your friend for being a womanizer
* (1:22:00) Vindicatory Epistemology
* (1:23:05) Panglossianism and meliorative epistemology
* (1:24:42) Heuristics and recognition-driven investigation
* (1:26:33) Rational inquiry leading to irrational beliefs — metacognitive processing
* (1:29:08) Stakes of inquiry and costs of metacognitive processing
* (1:30:00) When agents are incoherent, focuses on inquiry
* (1:32:05) Indirect normative assessment and its consequences
* (1:37:47) Against the Singularity Hypothesis
* (1:39:00) Superintelligence and the ontological argument
* (1:41:50) Hardware growth and general intelligence growth, AGI definitions
* (1:43:55) Difficulties in arguing for hyperbolic growth
* (1:46:07) Chalmers and the proportionality argument
* (1:47:53) Arguments for/against

Podcast: Conversations with Tyler Episode: Peter Thiel on Political TheologyRelease date: 2024-04-17In this conversation recorded live in Miami, Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should lead us to be woke, why Carl Schmitt is enjoying a resurgence, whether we’re entering a new age of millenarian thought, the one existential risk Peter thinks we’re overlooking, why everyone just muddling through leads to disaster, the role of the katechon, the political vision in Shakespeare, how AI will affect the influence of wordcels, Straussian messages in the Bible, what worries Peter about Miami, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded February 21st, 2024.
Other ways to connect
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Podcast: Making Sense with Sam Harris Episode: #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective AltruismRelease date: 2024-04-01Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about the implosion of FTX and the effect that it has had on the Effective Altruism movement. They discuss the logic of “earning to give,” the mind of SBF, his philanthropy, the character of the EA community, potential problems with focusing on long-term outcomes, AI risk, the effects of the FTX collapse on Will personally, and other topics.
If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
 
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast Episode: Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken - How to Build & Understand GPT-7's MindRelease date: 2024-03-28Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast.
No way to summarize it, except: 
This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them.
You would be shocked how much of what I know about this field, I've learned just from talking with them.
To the extent that you've enjoyed my other AI interviews, now you know why.
So excited to put this out. Enjoy! I certainly did :)
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. 
There's a transcript with links to all the papers the boys were throwing down - may help you follow along.
Follow Trenton and Sholto on Twitter.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Long contexts
(00:16:12) - Intelligence is just associations
(00:32:35) - Intelligence explosion & great researchers
(01:06:52) - Superposition & secret communication
(01:22:34) - Agents & true reasoning
(01:34:40) - How Sholto & Trenton got into AI research
(02:07:16) - Are feature spaces the wrong way to think about intelligence?
(02:21:12) - Will interp actually work on superhuman models
(02:45:05) - Sholto’s technical challenge for the audience
(03:03:57) - Rapid fire


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