Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

Read the full transcript here. Why is depression on the rise globally? We've all heard that social media is a big cause of depression, but what other factors might we have overlooked? Why are anxiety and depression so closely linked? What is group interpersonal therapy? How does it differ from cognitive behavioral therapy and other treatment modalities? Which languages lack an equivalent to the wo...

Read the full transcript here. Why should we not optimize some things in life? Should some things (e.g., interpersonal relationships) be "off-limits" for optimization? How much time spent being unproductive is good for us? What can we learn by paying attention to our moods? Does science make progress and produce knowledge too slowly? Why is research methodology applied so inconsistently, especiall...

Read the full transcript here. How can we make science more trustworthy? When scientists break into factions around a particular topic, whom should we trust, and why? Why did trust in science as an institution plummet drastically during COVID? What is the state of the evidence for the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, or vitamin D against COVID? Why is controlling for variables so d...

Read the full transcript here. What is a "quasi-monk"? How hard is it to govern one's own speech and thoughts? What is "maximum deep benefit"? And how does it differ from effective altruism? How can we best direct our energy, time, and resources to do good in the world? Should more people become monks and/or adopt a lifestyle of service to others? Tasshin Fogleman is an extremely online wandering...

Read the full transcript here. What is metaethics? Is moral objectivism the same thing as moral realism? When philosophers examine sentences like "Murder is wrong", are they generally more interested in (1) the role that the language is playing in a social interaction (e.g., that it's an imperative or that it expresses an emotion) or (2) the concepts themselves and their relations? Could it be the...

Read the full transcript here. Why do organizations get slower as they grow? What can organizations learn from slime molds? What are the advantages of top-down organization versus bottom-up organization, and vice versa? How can organizations encourage serendipity? What use are doorbells in jungles? Why is it so hard for organizations to set a "north star" that is at once plausible, coherent, and g...

Read the full transcript here. How can we as individuals and as societies un-break politics? What is the two-step ideal of reasoned politics? How might this ideal apply to specific political issues, like free speech? Is it possible to reach agreement or even compromise on political issues that are rooted in intrinsic values? How can we reduce our own political biases? Are there some political issu...

Read the full transcript here. Why doesn't capitalism seem to be living up to its promises of free and fair competition, low prices, and high quality goods and services (at least in Western nations)? What did Adam Smith fail to foresee about the ways economic systems would change on the way to 2022? What is "common ownership", and what effects does it have on economies? What interventions should b...

Read the full transcript here. What is interoperability? What counts as "unauthorized" access to computers or parts of computers? If the rendered design of a web page is copyrighted, then does blocking ads on that page count as copyright infringement by creating a derivative product? Does Facebook really want what's best for its users? Is Google evil? Could blockchain-based solutions provide much-...

Read the full transcript here. What is a criminal label? What implications should criminal labels have (or not) for a person's future? To what extent are the long-term social effects considered as part of the sentence for a crime (e.g., not only considering sending a person to prison for 5 years but also considering how likely they are to be shunned socially or to be prevented from working certain...

Read the full transcript here. What the heck happened with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried? Were there early warning signs that most people failed to notice? What could've been done differently, and by whom? What effects will this have on the EA movement going forward? Timestamps: 00:01:37 — Intro & timeline 00:51:48 — Byrne Hobart 01:39:52 — Vipul Naik 02:18:35 — Maomao Hu 02:41:19 — Marcus Abramov...

Read the full transcript here. What is the field of development? What are the differences between rapid and participatory rural appraisal? Under what conditions should qualitative surveys be preferred over quantitative and vice versa? What is participatory mapping? How has the field of development changed over the last few decades? Why do people get taller when sanitation improves? Robert Chambers...

Read the full transcript here. What are the main categories of interpersonal relationship problems? What's really going on when most people say they have a "communication" problem? What are the criteria for being a good listener? What's the "right" amount of conflict to have in a healthy relationship? How can we best express our wants and needs? What sorts of requests are reasonable (or not) to ma...

Read the full transcript here. How do campaign and election dynamics affect the sorts of people that politicians court and the kinds of platforms they build? How well can we really know non-voters' preferences? What would your life be like if your most treasured belief turned out to be false? What are all the ramifications of voting against your own party? To what extent is "political capital" a r...

Read the full transcript here. Content warning: Please be aware that rape and sexual abuse are discussed in this episode. If you are particularly sensitive to these issues, then please take care when listening. How have identity politics and social media changed sex work? To what extent is sex work work ? Under what conditions is a sex worker a victim of abuse? Why does rape seem so much worse tha...

Read the full transcript here. Can machines actually be intelligent? What sorts of tasks are narrower or broader than we usually believe? GPT-3 was trained to do a "single" task: predicting the next word in a body of text; so why does it seem to understand so many things? What's the connection between prediction and comprehension? What breakthroughs happened in the last few years that made GPT-3 p...

Read the full transcript here. How can we change the way we think about expertise (or the trustworthiness of any information source) using forecasting? How do prediction markets work? How can we use prediction markets in our everyday lives? Are prediction markets more trustworthy than large or respectable news outlets? How long does it take to sharpen one's prediction skills? In (e.g.) presidentia...

Read the full transcript here. What is intelligence? What exactly does an IQ test measure? What are the similarities and differences between the structure of GPT-3 and the structure of the human brain (so far as we understand it)? Is suffering — as the Buddhists might say — just a consequence of the stories we tell about ourselves and the world? What's left (if anything) of the human mind if we st...

Read the full transcript here. How does 3D-printed food work? How do hackers and inventors think? What are some ideas that don't matter? Why are humans so driven by stories? What are the current sentiments around nuclear energy? What is an "information DMZ"? Is "cryptocurrency regulation" a contradiction in terms? What are "deep" and "shallow" technologies? How could we handle intellectual propert...

Read the full transcript here. What should we do (or not do) to make a good first impression on others? Is "humble-bragging" better or worse than straightforward bragging? Or is completely hiding our successes an even better strategy than humble-bragging or straightforward bragging? When do our attempts to signal something about ourselves actually end up signalling something else that we don't int...

Read the full transcript here. Are ambition and altruism compatible? How ambitious should we be if we want to do as much good in the world as possible? How should we handle expected values when the probabilities become very small and/or the values of the outcomes become very large? What's a reasonable probability of success for most entrepreneurs to aim for? Are there non-consequentialist justific...

Read the full transcript here. How much should we actually trust science? Are registered reports more trustworthy than meta-analyses? How does "inspired" science differ from "open" science? Open science practices may make research more defensible, but do they make it more likely to find truth? Do thresholds (like p < 0.05) represent a kind of black-and-white thinking, since they often come to r...

Read the full transcript here. What is longtermism? Is the long-term future of humanity (or life more generally) the most important thing, or just one among many important things? How should we estimate the chance that some particular thing will happen given that our brains are so computationally limited? What is "the optimizer's curse"? How top-down should EA be? How should an individual reason a...

Read the full transcript here. What is the genetic fallacy? How do the analytic and continental philosophical traditions differ? What is the role and value of intuition in analytic philosophy? Is continental philosophy too poetic for its own good? Alexander Prescott-Couch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is currently writing a book on genealogy that is under...

Read the full transcript here. Does the US have one of the worst implementations of democracy in the world? Why do people sometimes seem to vote against their own interests? Is it rational for them to do so? How robust are various voting systems to strategic voting? What sorts of changes would we notice in the US if we suddenly switched to other voting systems? How hard would it be to migrate from...