Best of Pigeon Hour Pigeon Hour

Table of contents
Note: links take you to the corresponding section below; links to the original episode can be found there.
* Laura Duffy solves housing, ethics, and more [00:01:16]
* Arjun Panickssery solves books, hobbies, and blogging, but fails to solve the Sleeping Beauty problem because he's wrong on that one [00:10:47]
* Nathan Barnard on how financial regulation can inform AI regulation [00:17:16]
* Winston Oswald-Drummond on the tractability of reducing s-risk, ethics, and more [00:27:48]
* Nathan Barnard (again!) on why general intelligence is basically fake [00:34:10]
* Daniel Filan on why I'm wrong about ethics (+ Oppenheimer and what names mean in like a hardcore phil of language sense) [00:56:54]
* Holly Elmore on AI pause, wild animal welfare, and some cool biology things I couldn't fully follow but maybe you can [01:04:00]
* Max Alexander and I solve ethics, philosophy of mind, and cancel culture once and for all [01:24:43]
* Sarah Woodhouse on discovering AI x-risk, Twitter, and more [01:30:56]
* Pigeon Hour x Consistently Candid pod-crossover: I debate moral realism with Max Alexander and Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse [01:41:08]
Intro [00:00:00]
To wrap up the year of Pigeon Hour, the podcast, I put together some clips from each episode to create a best-of compilation. This was inspired by 80,000 Hours, a podcast that did the same with their episodes, and I thought it was pretty cool and tractable enough.
It's important to note that the clips I chose range in length significantly. This does not represent the quality or amount of interesting content in the episode. Sometimes there was a natural place to break the episode into a five-minute chunk, and other times it wouldn't have made sense to take a five-minute chunk out of what really needed to be a 20-minute segment. I promise I'm not just saying that.
So without further ado, please enjoy.
#1: Laura Duffy solves housing, ethics, and more [00:01:16]
In this first segment, Laura, Duffy, and I discuss the significance and interpretation of Aristotle's philosophical works in relation to modern ethics and virtue theory.
AARON: Econ is like more interesting. I don't know. I don't even remember of all the things. I don't know, it seems like kind of cool. Philosophy. Probably would have majored in philosophy if signaling wasn't an issue. Actually, maybe I'm not sure if that's true. Okay. I didn't want to do the old stuff though, so I'm actually not sure. But if I could aristotle it's all wrong. Didn't you say you got a lot out of Nicomachi or however you pronounce that?
LAURA: Nicomachian ethics guide to how you should live your life. About ethics as applied to your life because you can't be perfect. Utilitarians. There's no way to be that.
AARON: But he wasn't even responding to utilitarianism. I'm sure it was a good work given the time, but like, there's like no other discipline in which we care. So people care so much about like, what people thought 2000 years ago because like the presumption, I think the justified presumption is that things have iterated and improved since then. And I think that's true. It's like not just a presumption.
LAURA: Humans are still rather the same and what our needs are for living amongst each other in political society are kind of the same. I think America's founding is very influenced by what people thought 2000 years ago.
AARON: Yeah, descriptively that's probably true. But I don't know, it seems like all the whole body of philosophers have they've already done the work of, like, compressing the good stuff. Like the entire academy since like, 1400 or whatever has like, compressed the good stuff and like, gotten rid of the bad stuff. Not in like a high fidelity way, but like a better than chance way. And so the stuff that remains if you just take the state of I don't know if you read the Oxford Handbook of whatever it is, like ethics or something, the takeaways you're going to get from that are just better than the takeaways you're