(highlight:: Influencing Policy: Have Battle-Tested Ideas, Be Trustworthy, Be Well Connected
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Ezra Klein on punctuated equilibrium.
Speaker 8
You need ideas on the shelf, not in your drawer. Don't put it in your drawer. They need to be on a shelf where other people can reach them to shift metaphor a little bit here. You need ideas that are out there. So this is a governing model that in the political science literature is called punctuated equilibrium. Nothing happens and then all of a sudden it does. Puncture in the equilibrium and new things are possible. And or as it's put more commonly, you never let a crisis go to waste. And when there is a crisis, people have to pick up the ideas that are around. And a couple things are important for that. One is that the ideas have to be around. Two is that they have to be coming from a source people trust, right, or have reason to believe they should trust. And three, they have to have some relationship with that source. So what you want to be doing is building relationships with the kinds of people who are going to be, you know, making the decisions. What you want to be doing is building up your own credibility as a source on these issues. And what you want to be doing is actually building up good ideas and battle testing them and getting people to critique them and putting them out in detail, right? I think it is very unlikely that air regulation is going to come out of a less wrong post. But I have seen a lot of good ideas from most wrong posts ending up in, you know, different white paper proposals that now get floated around. And you need a lot more of those. It's funny because, you know, and I've seen this happen in Congress again and again and again, you might wonder, like, why do these think tanks produce all these white papers, you know, Reports that truly nobody reads? And there's a panel that nobody's at. It's a lot of work for nobody to read your thing and nobody to come to your speech. But it's not really nobody. It's it. It may really be that only seven people read that report, but five of them were congressional staffers who had to work on this issue. And like, that's what this whole economy is. It is amazing to me. The books that you've never heard of that have ended up hugely influencing national legislation, right? Most people have not read Jump Starting America by John Gruber and Simon Johnson. But as I understand it, it's actually a pretty important part of the chips bill. And so you have to build the ideas. You have to make the ideas legible, incredible to people. And you have to know the people you're trying to make these ideas legible, incredible to. Like, that is like the process by which, you know, you become part of this when it happens.)
- Time 0:03:30
-

(highlight:: The Effect of Social Desirability Bias on Irrational Voting
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Brian Kaplan on rational irrationality on the part of voters.
Speaker 9
Imagine that you go to the grocery store and you just start throwing objects in at random and buy them. All right, what happens? Well, you waste a pie of your own money on a bunch of stuff you don't actually want, right? Or imagine even more strongly, what if you just go in there and you just buy a bunch of stuff that you're supposed to want? So you go just go and put in a whole bunch of rice cakes or whatever, whatever stuff is allegedly super healthy, and then you buy it. And what's happened? Yeah, you just have a bunch of stuff that you don't even want to eat because it sounds good, but in fact, it's disgusting and you can't stand it, right? And yeah, and when you make decisions on this basis, you are the one that suffers. It is your money that is wasted, which doesn't mean that no one will ever do it. We've all made purchases that afterwards were like, man, that's kind of dumb. Why did I buy that thing? And yet it is quite abnormal for you to go fill your cart with a bunch of total junk that you don't even want, and then get home and say, why did this happen to me? On the other hand, if you go and vote randomly, or go and vote for a bunch of stuff that just sounds good, even though it doesn't work very well in practice, what happens to you? And the answer is the same thing that would have happened to you if you were the most diligent, thoughtful voter in the world and voted on that basis, because you're just one person. You're just one person out of millions or tens of millions or even 100 million voters. So effectively, you have no influence on the outcome, which means that you really can safely go and vote randomly, or you could very safely go and vote for what sounds good rather than What actually works well. Now, many people say, well, why would I vote randomly? Yeah, probably it's going to be more of your vote emotionally. You'll vote based upon what sounds good, you'll vote based upon ideology. If you were to go and say I'm going to go and figure out what job to do based on philosophy, it's like, yeah, your philosophy's not going to be very helpful for figuring out these questions. But if you're going to go and vote based on a philosophy, that's actually quite normal, right, for people to go and do it in that way. Now, I'm actually, we're in the middle of a new book where I think that I really am taking the argument from the myth of rational voter, I'm giving it a lot more psychological structure, And I think that I'm really happy with how it's coming out. And this is where I build very heavily on the idea of social desirability bias. It's basically very simple. It's a common sense idea with a fancy name, just says when the truth is ugly, people lie. And when the lies become ubiquitous enough, people often just even forget their line, leave those consciousness of it, because no one's ever even challenging them. And I say this is really the general theory of democracy is that what rules policy is just what sounds good, not what is good. Because everyone, or like virtually everyone really is voting based purely upon the most superficial appearances. And even curiosity about what's what the real effects of policies are is solo.)
- Time 0:44:08
-

Why People Want Smaller Transistors (And Why Simply Making Bigger Devices Is Impractical
Transcript:
Speaker 3
So why if you're trying to create a lot of compute in order to train these models, why do you need the transistors to be so small? Why can't you just make them bigger, but just make a hell of a lot of them?
Speaker 4
Yeah, so smaller transistors are just more energy efficient. So basically, if you go back, basically the the flop per watt goes down over time and just like energy costs are just a big part of the cost, just like this enables you to just like eventually Go cheaper. And you can just like make these chips go faster because you produce less heat. Cooling is a big thing when we talk about chips. The reason why your smartphone is like running not that fast, it's just like, well, it's only passively cooled. And this black, yeah, eventually takes a big hit to the performance there. And another thing to think about there is, well, when we then have all of these chips and we want to hook them up, it just matters how long the cables are. We're not talking about like hooking something up to like, I don't know, like your home internet, one gigabit or something. We're talking about just like, we want high interconnect bandwidth, we want high bandwidth zones. We literally want these things as close as possible to each other. And they're just limits to like, how long you can run these cables. This is part of the reason why people are really interested in like optical fiber, because well, yeah, you don't have that much loss over longer cables, right? But then you have like, all of these other nodes, like, well, you need to turn optical signal to like, try to make a signal just like, it's an ongoing researcher mind that people are definitely Interested in this, just like building a bigger footprint there, because then you'll have like less heat per area, like this whole notion about data centers, like really important Thing about also from the governance angle. I think that's like a big topic in the future. People should think carefully about this and see what we can do there. And also just how we can detect it is like, if we talk about advanced AI systems, we're not talking about your GP at home, we're talking about supercomputers, we're talking about facilities, Like AI production labs, whatever you want to call them. And there's like lots to learn there.)
- Time 1:11:37
-

(highlight:: Why Lead is So Bad For People
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Lucie, a culta on how bad lead is.
Speaker 7
Yeah, so lead is extremely toxic. One way to think about why is that basically it mimics calcium and other metal ions that serve these essential functions in pretty much every part of the body. And we've evolved for the vast majority of our history in an environment where lead was buried in the earth. And so ourselves are just not well adapted to tolerate any of this interference and interrupts many different subcellular processes. And that affects pretty much every organ system. So we could think about it in terms of like what would the impact be on the average child in a low middle income country? The average child in a low or middle income country has a blood level of around five micrograms per deciliter. And that's high enough to cause like health, educational, and economic impacts. So a child with that blood level would have a reduction in IQ anywhere from around like one to six IQ points, depending on which analysis you take. And then that in turn will affect their future earning potential. They'll also have reduced educational attainment. There was a recent analysis by the Center for Global Development that pretty conservatively concluded that that would be equivalent to around one year of lost schooling. And then it also has causes an increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease and mortality from cardiovascular disease. And that could be as high as a relative risk of around 1.5 at the average level of lead exposure that children have in low middle income countries. That's according to a recent analysis of US data. And then on top of all of that, it increases risk of kidney disease, anemia, fetal health problems, behavioral disorders, ADHD, and possibly even mental health problems and dementia.
Speaker 3
Yeah. So one thing is, because we evolved for so long in an environment where lead was not present, we also don't have any bodily process for removing lead. So it tends to just hang around in the body for a very long time. And it ends up in all kinds of different tissues. I think in adults, often it can end up in the bones and it tends to hang around there a long time and then gradually leach out over decades even. But it's not something that you just consume and then pee out very quickly. It hang around for a long time. And as you're saying, it mimics other metal ions that we do need to use. And so it interferes with all kinds of different enzymes throughout the body that are doing just the basic work of a cell. It's getting in there and just screwing them up constantly. It's also mimicking calcium ions in the brain so it gets into the brain and then it screws up the ability to send signals between neurons.
Speaker 7
And that's particularly dangerous when children are very young and their brains are developing because that's such like a complex and delicate process, which is why it has such a severe Impact on young children by impacting the way that their brains are forming and all those neurons are connecting at the very in the very early years.)
- Time 1:13:15
-

(highlight:: Christopher Brown on The Distance Between Our Moral Intutions, Commitments, and Actions
Summary:
Everyday moral experiences show a significant gap between our moral intuitions, commitments, and actions.
Merely thinking rightly doesn't always translate into doing the right thing, whether at a political or individual level. Despite recognizing societal issues like homelessness, many fail to act due to personal concerns and daily distractions.
History has shown that the mere realization of moral wrongs rarely leads to action or change.
Therefore, collective movements and concerted efforts to address moral issues should be seen as extraordinary occurrences worth understanding, rather than commonplace responses to inhumanity.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Christopher Brown on the distance between our moral intuitions and our moral actions.
Speaker 6
A lot of my work on this subject really begins from reflecting on our moral experience in kind of everyday life. You know, I grew up at a time in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement where there was a lot of discussion about what will it take to get another movement, You know, going to sort of push the next level of equality. And I've always thought that there can be too easy a linkage between, well, if you just get people to think the right way, then they'll do the right thing. And you can see that at the political level, but you also see it at the individual level. You know, just coming into my office in New York City today, I walked by homeless people on the street. It's cold lying on warm grates. This is true for most days in the winter in New York. I see people on the streets, you know, struggling in this way. And we walk by them or I walk by them. I think most New Yorkers walk by them. Often with sometimes with the thought of that's really awful. That's really sad. It shouldn't be this way. Maybe I should do something. But then I'm late for work. My child is calling me. You know, I'm thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch today. And then we go back to sleep at the end of the day, and we wake up and do the same thing. And so I think there's really a great distance between our moral intuitions and even our moral commitments and then our moral actions. And I really, I think that is something that in the writing about, in the thinking about anti-slavery, there had been and sometimes still is a too easy equation of, well, once people Saw the problem, once they realized the humanity of Africans, once they understood the cruelty of slavery, then of course they would organize and do something about it. And not only did it not happen that way, but it almost never happens that way. And so when the other thing happens, when there is a movement of some kind, when there's a commitment, when there's a collective effort, that's the thing that we should regard as strange And try to make sense of, rather than the routine forms of man's inhumanity to man, which unfortunately is all too typical as we know.)
- Time 1:33:27
-

(highlight:: Christopher Brown on Eating Meat as a Moral Catastrophe
Summary:
Questioning everyday conventions reveals moral and ethical issues with consuming meat, recognized by both meat-eaters and non-meat eaters.
Despite being aware of the ethical concerns, people often continue to eat meat due to habits, taste preferences, weakness, and social justifications. The speaker predicts a future where the abundance of food options and challenges in raising animals for consumption will lead to a societal shift questioning the unnecessary consumption of meat.
Transcript:
Speaker 6
The routine, the everyday is where there are all kinds of conventions that on careful reflection really make us ask, why do we do that? Why do we believe that? Why do we accept that? Let me give you another example that I often use in class from our own time, which I think crystallizes something about how this works. It's not difficult at all to see the moral and ethical problems with eating meat. And there is a great number of vegetarians, vegans even, who some for health reasons, but some because they really don't like the thought of eating animals unnecessarily. Someone like me, who eats a lot of meat, I am wholly aware of all of the ethical, really indefensible grounds for consuming meat as much as I do. And yet I do it anyways, because is it because I'm not alert? It's because I'm, it's conventional. I like the taste. I'm weak. Lots of people do it. There are all kinds of things around me that justify the choice.
Speaker 4
Right?
Speaker 6
It's not hard to imagine 20, 50, 200 years from now, when the variety of food, food science options are so vast, and the problems of raising animals to eat is so difficult, that people Will look back on our time and say, what was wrong with these people? I mean, they were just eating meat all the time and they didn't have to. They must not have understood what they were doing. No, we know exactly what we're doing. We know exactly what we're doing.)
- Time 1:36:37
-

(highlight:: Influencing Policy: Have Battle-Tested Ideas, Be Trustworthy, Be Well Connected
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Ezra Klein on punctuated equilibrium.
Speaker 8
You need ideas on the shelf, not in your drawer. Don't put it in your drawer. They need to be on a shelf where other people can reach them to shift metaphor a little bit here. You need ideas that are out there. So this is a governing model that in the political science literature is called punctuated equilibrium. Nothing happens and then all of a sudden it does. Puncture in the equilibrium and new things are possible. And or as it's put more commonly, you never let a crisis go to waste. And when there is a crisis, people have to pick up the ideas that are around. And a couple things are important for that. One is that the ideas have to be around. Two is that they have to be coming from a source people trust, right, or have reason to believe they should trust. And three, they have to have some relationship with that source. So what you want to be doing is building relationships with the kinds of people who are going to be, you know, making the decisions. What you want to be doing is building up your own credibility as a source on these issues. And what you want to be doing is actually building up good ideas and battle testing them and getting people to critique them and putting them out in detail, right? I think it is very unlikely that air regulation is going to come out of a less wrong post. But I have seen a lot of good ideas from most wrong posts ending up in, you know, different white paper proposals that now get floated around. And you need a lot more of those. It's funny because, you know, and I've seen this happen in Congress again and again and again, you might wonder, like, why do these think tanks produce all these white papers, you know, Reports that truly nobody reads? And there's a panel that nobody's at. It's a lot of work for nobody to read your thing and nobody to come to your speech. But it's not really nobody. It's it. It may really be that only seven people read that report, but five of them were congressional staffers who had to work on this issue. And like, that's what this whole economy is. It is amazing to me. The books that you've never heard of that have ended up hugely influencing national legislation, right? Most people have not read Jump Starting America by John Gruber and Simon Johnson. But as I understand it, it's actually a pretty important part of the chips bill. And so you have to build the ideas. You have to make the ideas legible, incredible to people. And you have to know the people you're trying to make these ideas legible, incredible to. Like, that is like the process by which, you know, you become part of this when it happens.)
- Time 0:03:30
-

(highlight:: The Effect of Social Desirability Bias on Irrational Voting
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Brian Kaplan on rational irrationality on the part of voters.
Speaker 9
Imagine that you go to the grocery store and you just start throwing objects in at random and buy them. All right, what happens? Well, you waste a pie of your own money on a bunch of stuff you don't actually want, right? Or imagine even more strongly, what if you just go in there and you just buy a bunch of stuff that you're supposed to want? So you go just go and put in a whole bunch of rice cakes or whatever, whatever stuff is allegedly super healthy, and then you buy it. And what's happened? Yeah, you just have a bunch of stuff that you don't even want to eat because it sounds good, but in fact, it's disgusting and you can't stand it, right? And yeah, and when you make decisions on this basis, you are the one that suffers. It is your money that is wasted, which doesn't mean that no one will ever do it. We've all made purchases that afterwards were like, man, that's kind of dumb. Why did I buy that thing? And yet it is quite abnormal for you to go fill your cart with a bunch of total junk that you don't even want, and then get home and say, why did this happen to me? On the other hand, if you go and vote randomly, or go and vote for a bunch of stuff that just sounds good, even though it doesn't work very well in practice, what happens to you? And the answer is the same thing that would have happened to you if you were the most diligent, thoughtful voter in the world and voted on that basis, because you're just one person. You're just one person out of millions or tens of millions or even 100 million voters. So effectively, you have no influence on the outcome, which means that you really can safely go and vote randomly, or you could very safely go and vote for what sounds good rather than What actually works well. Now, many people say, well, why would I vote randomly? Yeah, probably it's going to be more of your vote emotionally. You'll vote based upon what sounds good, you'll vote based upon ideology. If you were to go and say I'm going to go and figure out what job to do based on philosophy, it's like, yeah, your philosophy's not going to be very helpful for figuring out these questions. But if you're going to go and vote based on a philosophy, that's actually quite normal, right, for people to go and do it in that way. Now, I'm actually, we're in the middle of a new book where I think that I really am taking the argument from the myth of rational voter, I'm giving it a lot more psychological structure, And I think that I'm really happy with how it's coming out. And this is where I build very heavily on the idea of social desirability bias. It's basically very simple. It's a common sense idea with a fancy name, just says when the truth is ugly, people lie. And when the lies become ubiquitous enough, people often just even forget their line, leave those consciousness of it, because no one's ever even challenging them. And I say this is really the general theory of democracy is that what rules policy is just what sounds good, not what is good. Because everyone, or like virtually everyone really is voting based purely upon the most superficial appearances. And even curiosity about what's what the real effects of policies are is solo.)
- Time 0:44:08
-

Why People Want Smaller Transistors (And Why Simply Making Bigger Devices Is Impractical
Transcript:
Speaker 3
So why if you're trying to create a lot of compute in order to train these models, why do you need the transistors to be so small? Why can't you just make them bigger, but just make a hell of a lot of them?
Speaker 4
Yeah, so smaller transistors are just more energy efficient. So basically, if you go back, basically the the flop per watt goes down over time and just like energy costs are just a big part of the cost, just like this enables you to just like eventually Go cheaper. And you can just like make these chips go faster because you produce less heat. Cooling is a big thing when we talk about chips. The reason why your smartphone is like running not that fast, it's just like, well, it's only passively cooled. And this black, yeah, eventually takes a big hit to the performance there. And another thing to think about there is, well, when we then have all of these chips and we want to hook them up, it just matters how long the cables are. We're not talking about like hooking something up to like, I don't know, like your home internet, one gigabit or something. We're talking about just like, we want high interconnect bandwidth, we want high bandwidth zones. We literally want these things as close as possible to each other. And they're just limits to like, how long you can run these cables. This is part of the reason why people are really interested in like optical fiber, because well, yeah, you don't have that much loss over longer cables, right? But then you have like, all of these other nodes, like, well, you need to turn optical signal to like, try to make a signal just like, it's an ongoing researcher mind that people are definitely Interested in this, just like building a bigger footprint there, because then you'll have like less heat per area, like this whole notion about data centers, like really important Thing about also from the governance angle. I think that's like a big topic in the future. People should think carefully about this and see what we can do there. And also just how we can detect it is like, if we talk about advanced AI systems, we're not talking about your GP at home, we're talking about supercomputers, we're talking about facilities, Like AI production labs, whatever you want to call them. And there's like lots to learn there.)
- Time 1:11:37
-

(highlight:: Why Lead is So Bad For People
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Lucie, a culta on how bad lead is.
Speaker 7
Yeah, so lead is extremely toxic. One way to think about why is that basically it mimics calcium and other metal ions that serve these essential functions in pretty much every part of the body. And we've evolved for the vast majority of our history in an environment where lead was buried in the earth. And so ourselves are just not well adapted to tolerate any of this interference and interrupts many different subcellular processes. And that affects pretty much every organ system. So we could think about it in terms of like what would the impact be on the average child in a low middle income country? The average child in a low or middle income country has a blood level of around five micrograms per deciliter. And that's high enough to cause like health, educational, and economic impacts. So a child with that blood level would have a reduction in IQ anywhere from around like one to six IQ points, depending on which analysis you take. And then that in turn will affect their future earning potential. They'll also have reduced educational attainment. There was a recent analysis by the Center for Global Development that pretty conservatively concluded that that would be equivalent to around one year of lost schooling. And then it also has causes an increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease and mortality from cardiovascular disease. And that could be as high as a relative risk of around 1.5 at the average level of lead exposure that children have in low middle income countries. That's according to a recent analysis of US data. And then on top of all of that, it increases risk of kidney disease, anemia, fetal health problems, behavioral disorders, ADHD, and possibly even mental health problems and dementia.
Speaker 3
Yeah. So one thing is, because we evolved for so long in an environment where lead was not present, we also don't have any bodily process for removing lead. So it tends to just hang around in the body for a very long time. And it ends up in all kinds of different tissues. I think in adults, often it can end up in the bones and it tends to hang around there a long time and then gradually leach out over decades even. But it's not something that you just consume and then pee out very quickly. It hang around for a long time. And as you're saying, it mimics other metal ions that we do need to use. And so it interferes with all kinds of different enzymes throughout the body that are doing just the basic work of a cell. It's getting in there and just screwing them up constantly. It's also mimicking calcium ions in the brain so it gets into the brain and then it screws up the ability to send signals between neurons.
Speaker 7
And that's particularly dangerous when children are very young and their brains are developing because that's such like a complex and delicate process, which is why it has such a severe Impact on young children by impacting the way that their brains are forming and all those neurons are connecting at the very in the very early years.)
- Time 1:13:15
-

(highlight:: Christopher Brown on The Distance Between Our Moral Intutions, Commitments, and Actions
Summary:
Everyday moral experiences show a significant gap between our moral intuitions, commitments, and actions.
Merely thinking rightly doesn't always translate into doing the right thing, whether at a political or individual level. Despite recognizing societal issues like homelessness, many fail to act due to personal concerns and daily distractions.
History has shown that the mere realization of moral wrongs rarely leads to action or change.
Therefore, collective movements and concerted efforts to address moral issues should be seen as extraordinary occurrences worth understanding, rather than commonplace responses to inhumanity.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Christopher Brown on the distance between our moral intuitions and our moral actions.
Speaker 6
A lot of my work on this subject really begins from reflecting on our moral experience in kind of everyday life. You know, I grew up at a time in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement where there was a lot of discussion about what will it take to get another movement, You know, going to sort of push the next level of equality. And I've always thought that there can be too easy a linkage between, well, if you just get people to think the right way, then they'll do the right thing. And you can see that at the political level, but you also see it at the individual level. You know, just coming into my office in New York City today, I walked by homeless people on the street. It's cold lying on warm grates. This is true for most days in the winter in New York. I see people on the streets, you know, struggling in this way. And we walk by them or I walk by them. I think most New Yorkers walk by them. Often with sometimes with the thought of that's really awful. That's really sad. It shouldn't be this way. Maybe I should do something. But then I'm late for work. My child is calling me. You know, I'm thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch today. And then we go back to sleep at the end of the day, and we wake up and do the same thing. And so I think there's really a great distance between our moral intuitions and even our moral commitments and then our moral actions. And I really, I think that is something that in the writing about, in the thinking about anti-slavery, there had been and sometimes still is a too easy equation of, well, once people Saw the problem, once they realized the humanity of Africans, once they understood the cruelty of slavery, then of course they would organize and do something about it. And not only did it not happen that way, but it almost never happens that way. And so when the other thing happens, when there is a movement of some kind, when there's a commitment, when there's a collective effort, that's the thing that we should regard as strange And try to make sense of, rather than the routine forms of man's inhumanity to man, which unfortunately is all too typical as we know.)
- Time 1:33:27
-

(highlight:: Christopher Brown on Eating Meat as a Moral Catastrophe
Summary:
Questioning everyday conventions reveals moral and ethical issues with consuming meat, recognized by both meat-eaters and non-meat eaters.
Despite being aware of the ethical concerns, people often continue to eat meat due to habits, taste preferences, weakness, and social justifications. The speaker predicts a future where the abundance of food options and challenges in raising animals for consumption will lead to a societal shift questioning the unnecessary consumption of meat.
Transcript:
Speaker 6
The routine, the everyday is where there are all kinds of conventions that on careful reflection really make us ask, why do we do that? Why do we believe that? Why do we accept that? Let me give you another example that I often use in class from our own time, which I think crystallizes something about how this works. It's not difficult at all to see the moral and ethical problems with eating meat. And there is a great number of vegetarians, vegans even, who some for health reasons, but some because they really don't like the thought of eating animals unnecessarily. Someone like me, who eats a lot of meat, I am wholly aware of all of the ethical, really indefensible grounds for consuming meat as much as I do. And yet I do it anyways, because is it because I'm not alert? It's because I'm, it's conventional. I like the taste. I'm weak. Lots of people do it. There are all kinds of things around me that justify the choice.
Speaker 4
Right?
Speaker 6
It's not hard to imagine 20, 50, 200 years from now, when the variety of food, food science options are so vast, and the problems of raising animals to eat is so difficult, that people Will look back on our time and say, what was wrong with these people? I mean, they were just eating meat all the time and they didn't have to. They must not have understood what they were doing. No, we know exactly what we're doing. We know exactly what we're doing.)
- Time 1:36:37
-