The Students

Renan Santos — How We Built The Mission Party

Renan Santos tells how he built the Free Brazil Movement and worked out the doctrine, mobilized it into Brazil's Mission Party, and how the lessons of building an outside

What Americans Should Learn From Brazil's Mission Party — Victor Antoun

The Mission Party has risen by mobilizing a young, sharp, online demographic which was traditionally checked out of politics. Victor Antoun explains how.

You Cannot Predict the Singularity

Ben Landau-Taylor argues that techno-singularitarian predictions are unfounded, while Wolf Tivy defends his xenohumanism program. They cover why theology is inevitable, a

When AIs Pay Their Own Bills — DC Posch

DC Posch and Wolf Tivy discuss the coming of economically self-sufficient AI—how these "digital replicants" could navigate the ecology of the digital market, the selectio

How To Turn Your Research Obsession Into A Career — Elizabeth Van Nostrand

Elizabeth Van Nostrand tells Ben Landau-Taylor how she turned her idiosyncratic interests into a career as a professional research hobo, and the business lessons she lear

We Need A Theory Of Consciousness To Navigate The Singularity — Michael Edward Johnson

Michael Edward Johnson and Wolf Tivy get into the weeds on consciousness. What type of theory is the "theory of consciousness" that so many people are searching for, and

How Nations Fight Over Industry — Ian Fletcher

Ian Fletcher describes the fundamentals of industrial policy, how economic theorists ignore the practice of successful businesses and successfully industrializing nations

Where New Industries Come From: Ben Landau-Taylor lecture

​Sober, risk-averse, rational businessmen make great captains of industry—in established industries which someone else already built. But the new industries which drive p

Samo Burja — How Bureaucracy Defeated Democracy

Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor cover bureaucracy—why the golden age of bureaucracies worked so well in the early 20th century, how bureaucratic class interest overcomes

Richard Ngo — What Makes Hierarchy Legitimate (Human Or Not)

Richard Ngo argues against Wolf Tivy’s xenohumanism lecture. (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XmEjgRaBpp3OxDrV3WXLD) What is the moral ground for cooperation and hierar

Stop Waiting For AGI And Go To Space

The long-awaited Marko Jukic episode. We all expect AGI to colonize the stars because it's the obvious thing any healthy expanding system does naturally. So why aren't we

Where "Open Source" Came From

The internet can feel like a part of the landscape, but all our software was intelligently designed—and so were the social systems which produce that software. Christine

The Problem Of Humanity: Wolf Tivy lecture

​Our concepts of "humanity" and "humanitarianism" are usually taken as the eternal bedrock of morality. Today, artificial intelligence raises the prospect of "posthumanit

Will Technocapital Outlive Our Civilization?

Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy discuss the forces raising our civilization higher vs the forces pulling it down. Is techno-industrial progress made of social and intellectual c

Joscha Bach — Consciousness Builds the Mind

Joscha Bach and Wolf Tivy discuss how consciousness may be a convergent strategy for organizing both human and machine minds, whether powerful AI minds will resolve confl

The Dutch Revolt: Jonathan Wallis lecture

In 1572 twelve Dutch cities - less than a million people - began a war for independence against a global superpower and won. Over the next century they went toe-to-toe wi

Someone Had To Build Your Community — Jonathan Wallis

Intellectual activity, like any complex activity, can only take place in a rich social fabric. Jonathan Wallis and Ben Landau-Taylor talk about how to build community and

Why Science Slowed Down — Samo Burja

Scientific breakthroughs are much rarer today than the glory days of the early 1900s. Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor discuss how the WWII-era centralization of science

We Can Do Better Than "Human Values" — Ginevra Davis

Philosophers talk of aligning AI to “human values”. This supposes there is no objective value, only the arbitrary values that humans happened to land on. Ginevra Davis an

Oliver Habryka — Good Discourse Needs Leadership

Oliver Habryka joins Wolf Tivy to tell how he revived LessWrong after it nearly died, built the Lighthaven campus, and launched his $35m/quarter project to reform grantma