Best 80000 Hours Podcasts (2024)

1
#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness 2:33:50

2h ago2:33:50

2:33:50

"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going…

1
How much does a vote matter? (Article) 32:32

4d ago32:32

32:32

If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key things that determine the impact of your vote: The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome. How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others. He then discusses a couple of the best arguments against voting in…

1
#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do 3:11:05

9d ago3:11:05

3:11:05

"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the other tank as well. If the fish takes the blue triangle, this fish will receive food, but nothing will be delivered in the other tank. So we have a prosocial choice and antisocial choice. When there is …

1
#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism 1:57:48

15d ago1:57:48

1:57:48

Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript. On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk…

1
#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation 1:25:09

1M ago1:25:09

1:25:09

"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1' — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total… And I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well… There …

1
Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame 1:36:00

1M ago1:36:00

1:36:00

In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, shame, anger, and pride. Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript. They cover: Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold them What it’s like not experiencing sustained guilt, sh…

1
#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science 2:20:26

2M ago2:20:26

2:20:26

"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply crackpot ideas. In general, [science] advances building on the knowledge we have, and seeing what the next questions are, and then getting to the next stage and the next stage and so on. And occasionally there’ll be revolutionary ideas which will really…

1
#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet 2:01:43

2M ago2:01:43

2:01:43

"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. It’s just very difficult. And I know that sounds surprising, because humans are very good at this. In fact, even with one eye, we can navigate and we can clear the dinner table. But it seems that we’re b…

1
#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks 2:49:24

2M ago2:49:24

2:49:24

"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting from this belief.' So we wanted to make that very legible to people. We wanted to say, 'Experts think this; accurate forecasters think this.' They might both be wrong, but we can at least start from here and figure out where we’re coming into a discussion…

1
#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy 1:12:37

2M ago1:12:37

1:12:37

"I do think that there is a really significant sentiment among parts of the opposition that it’s not really just that this bill itself is that bad or extreme — when you really drill into it, it feels like one of those things where you read it and it’s like, 'This is the thing that everyone is screaming about?' I think it’s a pretty modest bill in a…

1
#198 – Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects 3:48:12

2M ago3:48:12

3:48:12

"This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don’t spend as much time learning about them at museums; and they’re just harder to spend time with in a lot of ways, I think, for people. So people have pet…

1
#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task 2:29:26

3M ago2:29:26

2:29:26

The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policies designed to make their AI models less likely to go rogue or cause catastrophic damage as they approach, and eventually exceed, human capabilities. Are they good enough? That’s what host Rob Wiblin tries to hash out in this interview (recorded May 30) w…

1
#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter 2:01:50

3M ago2:01:50

2:01:50

"In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anaesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to appalling cases, and to public outcry, and to campaigns to change clinical practice. And as soon as [some courageous scientists] looked for evidence, it showed that this practice was completely indefensib…

1
#195 – Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them 2:08:29

3M ago2:08:29

2:08:29

"Computational systems have literally millions of physical and conceptual components, and around 98% of them are embedded into your infrastructure without you ever having heard of them. And an inordinate amount of them can lead to a catastrophic failure of your security assumptions. And because of this, the Iranian secret nuclear programme failed t…

1
#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government 3:04:18

3M ago3:04:18

3:04:18

"If you’re a power that is an island and that goes by sea, then you’re more likely to do things like valuing freedom, being democratic, being pro-foreigner, being open-minded, being interested in trade. If you are on the Mongolian steppes, then your entire mindset is kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered … the breeding ground for basically eve…

1
#193 – Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war 2:23:34

4M ago2:23:34

2:23:34

"You don’t necessarily need world-leading compute to create highly risky AI systems. The biggest biological design tools right now, like AlphaFold’s, are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of compute requirements than the frontier large language models. And China has the compute to train these systems. And if you’re, for instance, building a cybe…

1
#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US 1:54:24

4M ago1:54:24

1:54:24

"Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: everything is ablaze. Ring three, another three or five miles out on every side: third-degree burns among almost everyone. You are talking about people who may have gone down into the secret tunnels beneath Washington, DC, escaped from the Capitol an…

1
#191 (Part 2) – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI 2:20:32

4M ago2:20:32

2:20:32

This is the second part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The first episode is on the economy and national security after AGI. You can listen to them in either order! If we develop artificial general intelligence that's reasonably aligned with human goals, it could put a fast and near-free superhuman advisor in everyone's pocket. How wou…

1
#191 (Part 1) – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI 4:14:58

4M ago4:14:58

4:14:58

This is the first part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The second episode is on government and society after AGI. You can listen to them in either order! The human brain does what it does with a shockingly low energy supply: just 20 watts — a fraction of a cent worth of electricity per hour. What would happen if AI technology merely ma…

1
#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious 2:00:46

5M ago2:00:46

2:00:46

"One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water — you and me – and we can look up at the stars, and look into our brains, and try to grapple with the most complex, difficult questions that there are. And even if we can’t make great progress on them and don’t come to completely satisfying solutions, …

1
#189 – Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems 2:48:51

5M ago2:48:51

2:48:51

"You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one course of COVID vaccine in January 2021 was over $5,000. They were selling for between $6 and $40. So nothing like their social value. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that they should have charged $5,000 or $6,000. That’s not ethical. It’s also…

1
#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good 2:40:15

6M ago2:40:15

2:40:15

"Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people superforecasting tests when they’re doing peer review, and we find that you can identify people who are super good at picking science. And then we have this much better targeted science, and we’re maki…

1
#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard" 3:06:47

6M ago3:06:47

3:06:47

"Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility do labourers have otherwise to go somewhere else? Well, if you are on the one company town on Mars, your labour mobility is zero, which has never existed on Earth. Even in your stereotypical West Vir…

1
#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives 1:18:58

6M ago1:18:58

1:18:58

"I work in a place called Uttar Pradesh, which is a state in India with 240 million people. One in every 33 people in the whole world lives in Uttar Pradesh. It would be the fifth largest country if it were its own country. And if it were its own country, you’d probably know about its human development challenges, because it would have the highest …

1
#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals 2:33:12

7M ago2:33:12

2:33:12

"The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, 'Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.' I think another possibility, which…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

80000 Hours Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

1
80,000 Hours Podcast

Rob, Luisa, Keiran, and the 80,000 Hours team

1
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours

The 80000 Hours team

1
The 80000 Hours Podcast on Artificial Intelligence

80k

1
Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems – 80000 Hours

80000 Hours

1
The 80000 Hours Career Guide — Find a fulfilling career that does good

Benjamin Todd & the 80,000 Hours team

1
#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness 2:33:50

1
How much does a vote matter? (Article) 32:32

1
#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do 3:11:05

1
#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism 1:57:48

1
#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation 1:25:09

1
Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame 1:36:00

1
#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science 2:20:26

1
#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet 2:01:43

1
#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks 2:49:24

1
#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy 1:12:37

1
#198 – Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects 3:48:12

1
#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task 2:29:26

1
#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter 2:01:50

1
#195 – Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them 2:08:29

1
#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government 3:04:18

1
#193 – Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war 2:23:34

1
#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US 1:54:24

1
#191 (Part 2) – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI 2:20:32

1
#191 (Part 1) – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI 4:14:58

1
#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious 2:00:46

1
#189 – Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems 2:48:51

1
#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good 2:40:15

1
#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard" 3:06:47

1
#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives 1:18:58

1
#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals 2:33:12

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