Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

Read the full transcript here. What are the "relating" languages? What strategies do we use when interacting with each other under various conditions? How does one formulate a new taxonomy in a field? What information can we glean from our own emotional and physical reactions? What is authenticity? What are the strengths and weaknesses of various personality typologies? Sara Ness is a facilitator,...

Read the full transcript here. Why should we be doing more experiments on our own lives? How should we approach and get started with self-experimentation? Why are such varying dietary changes able to improve people's well-being? What are some measures and interventions for improving executive function, memory and learning, emotional self-regulation, and creativity? Do brain games actually make you...

Read the full transcript here. What is "long" history? Why don't historians usually focus on what happened before recorded human history? What (if anything) is special about agriculture when it comes to the development of civilization? How far back does human civilization go, and why should we care? Have humans always been gardeners? What factors cause civilizations to crumble or thrive? Should we...

Read the full transcript here. What are some of the challenges of defining utopia? What should a utopia look like? What are concrete versus sublime utopias? What are some of the failure modes related to various conceptions of utopia? Is it really that hard to create a shared, positive vision of the future? What is the value (or disvalue) of creating new people, especially in relation to the utopic...

Read the full transcript here. How can we leverage our own limitations? Why does converting the average human lifespan from years to other units (like weeks) give us such a shock? What are the most useful kinds of reactions to contemplating our own mortality? What causes our feeling that time speeds up as we age? What is the "importance trap"? How should we handle the frustration or disappointment...

Read the full transcript here. How can we accelerate learning? Is spaced repetition the best way to absorb information over the long term? Do we always read non-fiction works with the goal of learning? What are some less common but perhaps more valuable types of information that can be put on flash cards? What sorts of things are worth remembering anyway? Why is it important to commit some ideas t...

Read the full transcript here. What is metamodernism? How does metamodernism relate to spiral dynamics? What does it look like to apply a metamodern approach to large-scale problems? What are shadow traits, and what is shadow projection? What do our reactions about others' behavior tell us about ourselves? What's going on psychologically and physiologically when we relive past traumas? What dosage...

Read the full transcript here. What is a choreographic interface? Is dance for everyone? What is dance for ? What can dancers learn from roboticists, and what can roboticists learn from dancers? What are some of the practical difficulties one encounters when programming a robot to dance? Why do robots break or fail so often? What are the pros and cons of using virtual reality to train or test robo...

Read the full transcript here. What is "metaphysical geometry"? What do we get out of surrendering to the idea of death? Why do some people find the sensation of intense fear to be pleasurable? Is psychosis valuable? Are all mental states valuable? Why are altered states of consciousness typically socially unacceptable, and why should we move towards accepting them? Could oxytocin be used as a les...

Read the full transcript here. What is "the precipice"? Which kinds of risks (natural or technological) pose the greatest threats to humanity specifically or to life on Earth generally in the near future? What other kinds of existential risks exist beyond mere extinction? What are the differences between catastrophic risks and existential risks? How serious is the threat of climate change on an ex...

Read the full transcript here. What is risk-driven development? How should we weigh advice, best practices, and common sense in a domain? What makes some feedback loops better than others? What's the best way to take System 2 knowledge and convert it to System 1 intuition? What are forward-chaining and backward-chaining? When is it best to use one over the other? What are the advantages and disadv...

Read the full transcript here. How should math be taught in primary and secondary schools? How much is science denialism caused by statistics illiteracy or lack of statistical intuitions? What do p -values actually mean? Under what conditions should null results be published? What are some of the less well-known factors that may be contributing to the social science reproducibility crisis? Stuart...

Read the full transcript here. Why has there been such an explosion of progress in genomics recently? What's the right way to think about how genes affect the likelihood of experiencing certain health outcomes? How can people mitigate genetic risks for their potential children? What sorts of moral obligations (if any) do parents have to mitigate potential genetic risks for their children? How does...

Read the full transcript here. What is the Great Rationality Debate? What are axiomatic rationality and ecological rationality? How irrational are people anyway? What's the connection between rationality and wisdom? What are some of the paradigms in cognitive science? Why do visual representations of information often communicate their meaning much more effectively than other kinds of representati...

Read the full transcript here. How can you live your best life? What's a good definition of "wisdom"? What are some possible taxonomies of life outcomes? What are some low-hanging fruit in the realm of self-improvement? What are some useful behavior change frameworks and techniques? All his life, James Norris has been searching for the best ways to change himself and change the world. He started a...

Read the full transcript here. What are "shed" and "cake" projects? And how can you avoid "shed" projects? What is the "jobs to be done" framework? What is the "theory of change" framework? How can people use statistics (or statistical intuition) in everyday life? How accurate are climate change models? How much certainty do scientists have about climate change outcomes? What are some promising st...

Read the full transcript here. What sorts of things do the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds do? How we can make people more intelligent? How much is intelligence heritable vs. environmental? What's the value (or disvalue) of holding interviews during the hiring process? When do we over- and under-use cost-benefit analyses? Richard E. Nisbett is one of the world's most respected psychol...

Read the full transcript here. How can we restructure schools around student needs? What sorts of skills do people actually need in the 21st century, and how can education systems reorganize themselves around those skills? What sorts of things do impact investors look for when investing in education companies? How can teachers cultivate critical thinking and passion in the classroom? Should prejud...

Read the full transcript here. How is Chinese culture different from American culture? For what reasons do Chinese people get plastic surgery, and how do those reasons differ from those of their American counterparts? What is love addiction? Are 12-step programs the only way (or the best way) of overcoming addiction? Ava King is an international singer, songwriter, and producer based out of LA. Sh...

Read the full transcript here. How do you design a product to handle user failure? How do you keep users motivated even when they fail? How do you successfully onboard new users? What are some different kinds of search behavior? How and when does gamifying a product increase user engagement and success? What psychological components do games attempt to engage with? How do we develop expert intuiti...

Read the full transcript here. What is the Internal Family Systems model? What kinds of information do our emotions give us? How many agents live in our heads? And, if there's more than one, how well do those agents cooperate? What is operant conditioning? What is attachment theory? How does parenting differ from animal training? Is decision theory able to unify many different psychological theori...

Read the full transcript here. How can we become better leaders? How can we give better feedback to others? How can we be better listeners? How can we give good advice? How do startups (or even existing companies) build great products? What sorts of things do experts actually know? When is it useful to poll customers for feedback? Julia Carvalho serves as an advisor to startups doing impactful thi...

Read the full transcript here. How can people be more effective in their altruism? Is it better for people to give to good causes in urgent situations or on a regular basis? What causes people to donate to less effective charities even when presented with evidence that other charities might be more effective? We can make geographically distant events seem salient locally by (for example) showing t...

Read the full transcript here. What is the illusion of explanatory depth? Are there forms of debate or dialogue that actually help people to change their minds (instead of stacking the incentives such that people feel forced to harden and defend their views)? What is epistemic "debt"? Should people avoid having opinions on things where they haven't thought deeply and carefully about all of the rel...

Read the full transcript here. Why is YouTube such a great way to communicate research findings? Why is AI safety (or alignment) a problem? Why is it an important problem? Why is the creation of AGI (artificial general intelligence) existentially risky for us? Why is it so hard for us to specify what we want in utility functions? What are some of the proposed strategies (and their limitations) for...