Bit of a Tangent Gianluca Truda and Jared Tumiel

Kat Woods is an effective altruist and the co-founder of Nonlinear, which incubates longtermist nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship. Gianluca and Kat discuss brain hacks for curing imposter syndrome and being more agentic, infohazards, the simulation hypothesis, why you don’t need permission to do things, “passive impact” via automation, and Kat’s exciting new projects at Nonlinear.

In this episode, Gianluca and Jared discuss the neurobiology of predictive processing, the role of dopamine in reward signalling, satisfaction, and human desire. They also touch on the relation of reward to reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence. 

The podcast then shifts to discuss the clinical manifestations of the predictive brain, including the computational psychiatry of depression, autism-spectrum-disorder, and schizophrenia, and how top-down prediction, and precision-weighted prediction error explain many important features of these conditions.

This week’s episode of Bit of a Tangent is a continuation of our 3 part series on Predictive Processing - a fascinating neuroscientific account of the way our brains come to understand the world. If you haven’t already listened to part 1 (episode 28), check that out first! 

In this episode Gianluca and Jared discuss the importance of sensory precision, the circular causality of prediction and action, how action comes about in a counterintuitive way from high confidence predictions, the way in which prior expectations can bias sensory sampling, and how this could lead to self-fulfilling spirals that would make your life either much worse or much better!

Find us on Twitter @podtangent

It's here. It's finally here! The first in a series of three episodes diving into the predictive processing theory of brain function! Jared and Gianluca discuss top-down versus bottom-up perception, Bayesian Brain hypotheses, the logic of caring only about prediction error, and the phenomenology of visual illusions!

Gianluca and Jared have survived 2020 (so far) and are back for Season 3 of Bit of a Tangent. In this episode they bring you 7 new habits and techniques that can be used to iteratively upgrade yourself — even in lockdown. Forget everything else that’s going on in the world, and take a deep dive into personal optimisation. Or, as they’d put it, prepare to geek out on organisation hacks, bootstrapped learning, and motivation pumps. Shownotes at podtangent.com

[Epistemic status: slightly intoxicated]
Jared and Gianluca exchange rapid-fire questions whilst becoming increasingly inebriated. Think of this episode as the Ferriss/Rose “Random Show,” but with more references to Bayesian inference. It’s pretty likely to entertain you, but hopefully you’ll find it interesting too. Topics include Email response times, VR projects, and the statistical approach to an ethical diet. 
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Shownotes:
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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn
Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond
Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)
Last episode: https://www.podtangent.com/e/025-self-supervised-machine-learning-introduction-intuitions-and-use-cases/
The Game Changers: www.imdb.com/title/tt7455754/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq4Apc2Xk7Q
Sam Altman on Conversations with Tyler: conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-altman/
Top 19 Ideas from 2019: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/
Jared’s Twitter thread (19 ideas I couldn't stop thinking about in 2019): https://twitter.com/jnearestn/status/1211681767742156803
Donald Knuth on Lex Fridman’s podcast: https://lexfridman.com/donald-knuth/
Glen Weyl on the 80000 Hours podcast: https://soundcloud.com/80000-hours/glen-weyl-radically-reforming-capitalism-and-democracy
Eric and Brett Weinstein talking about DISC and the failings of peer review on The Portal: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/19-bret-weinstein-the-prediction-and-the-disc/id1469999563?i=1000462975502
Gianluca’s paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05363
This equation will change how you see the world by Veritasium: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJcsL7vyrk