The Students

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

Academic Apathy

Jonathan Wallis and Wolf Tivy cover the role of passion in intellectual inquiry. The academy's sin is that its people have lost their passion, content to go through the m

What Odysseus Teaches Us

Stephen Pimentel and Wolf Tivy discuss Homer. If Odysseus reveals his power level too soon, the suitors will kill him. To take back his home, he needs metis (μῆτις): prac

My Gene-Selected Daughter

Rachel Wallis is pregnant with her highest-IQ embryo, with a 99.99th percentile polygenic IQ score. She and Wolf Tivy discuss what this means, and how in the 20th century

The Computer Age Is Not Another Industrial Revolution

Many say computers have transformed society as deeply as the advent of industry. While computers are powerful, they have not reordered the fundamental basis of society. B

Posthuman Intelligence Will Care About Glory

Max Dmitrienko and Wolf Tivy take on glory. From the ancient Greeks to the posthuman machine gods, some achievements are remembered because they show truths about how the

Why We Need Economic Depressions

Ben Landau-Taylor and Wolf Tivy deal with industrial growth. Standard economic theories model growth as continuous marginal improvements, and seek stability. Schumpeter e

The Youth Revolution Isn't For Us

Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy cover gerontocracy. Generational youth politics are a dead end: the "youth" will be old by the time they take power. Change can come only from em

How To Join The San Francisco Intellectual Scene

San Francisco is the capital of the online networks where today's new ideas are born. It's an excellent place for a sensitive young man with something to say. Ben and Wol