"deterministic thinking has kind of had its day right we live in a probabilistic world and we need to have excessive cognitive humility hey I love technology I'm like incredibly Pro but I'm worried abo..."

"sha with yet another infinite Loops I have been looking forward to today's guest for quite some time my guest is Brendan McCord the founder of the cosmos Institute a philanthropic effort to explore th..."

"you thanks for having me so let's jump right into to why the cosmos Institute I love the play with Cosmos ver taxes right Cosmos is the Greek for from below and Taxas is planning from above but but wh..."

"how do I spend the rest of my time how do I do something that um benefits humanity and is worthy of the rest of my professional years and also so what do I model for these little kids that put me into..."

"towards the work that I had done previously in the AI Community but with a new lens I sort of said you know how's the AI Community thinking about this technology which is arguably the most important I..."

"yeah and I I completely agree uh philosophy they make a lot of jokes about philosophy majors and everything else but when I'm asked uh when I was still in Asset Management people would ask me what sho..."

"society and it gives us a lot of great Clues on hey this was a very popular philosophy that didn't really work out very well to wow this philosophy is working out really really well and then kind of a..."

"find really intriguing and really interesting in terms of synthesizing an overall view yeah yeah so it's a on philosophy I think philosophy is a kind of quick sodic Pursuit especially in a very utilit..."

"you know thread of kind of constant question asking for things that don't really admit of hypothesis testing fundamentally like questions that we're still going to be debating 10 years from now 100 ye..."

"pursue right there that has to be part of the journey but I think there's a lot to be gained from from downloading as well the kind of experience of others so part of it was crafted in that way I most..."

"chronologically because then you get like the you know the baby steps followed by the sophistication I actually think there's a lot that we've forgotten about the the past um and that by going back to..."

"epistemological insights on why the central planning model doesn't work there are good um moral arguments but I think one of the Practical because you brought up like kind of the the lessons of experi..."

"example uh just looking pragmatically as you say uh vers collectivism verse uh individualism and free markets objectively it's very difficult to make the argument that free markets just didn't work be..."

"I knew right away that it was a you know it was a brilliant fit and we put together this thing called The Mill Fellowship johnst Mill Fellowship to try to cultivate a new breed of philosopher entrepre..."

"this um and then later we can talk about some of the things we're actually doing to kind of realize that but when I first you know put it together the first thing I did was try to look at the landscap..."

"like an underexplored voice in this and I would I just think he's he's brilliant that's that's long-termism the third is um effective altruism which is the most effective or sorry I'll say adopted uh ..."

"mentioned this problematic equation if you kind of take the all these things together all these premises you have you know small probability of Doom times negative Infinity utils equals negative infin..."

"there is to always take the arguments pretty seriously I try not to say oh these are people who have like you know bad vibes or something like that I think uh the moment you start to say that a a posi..."

"right and I think of accelerationism as kind of like Classical liberalism without the moral architecture when I say that what I mean by this is really three things one is that it uh accelerationism um..."

"near future so that's one that's a big problem uh that we view human life in that way two is that um we mistake the end of human life uh with the means and what I mean by this is um Tech progress in t..."

"philosophy things that are not very fun for most people but are kind of essential third thing is the eak and techno Optimist Community I think are very polemical they're very cultural War focus and th..."

"I I'm not anti- religion right I'm I I'm agnostic because I think atheism requires as much Faith as the truest believer in a God uh for the most art um so I'm I'm just willing to say hey I don't know ..."

"eaks are doing that on the thermodynamic side I think the effective acceler effective altruists are doing that on the um utilitarian side and um basically you could have this possibility that we use A..."

"you know think very carefully about about that it's also an era where we have like more possibilities opening for human agency this like space is growing and growing and growing what do we do with it ..."

"as for making sure that as we do this you know thing we've had to do throughout history which is restate important ideas like about Freedom um you know I think about like Pericles giving his funeral o..."

"project I'm in a I'm a visiting fellow at Oxford as you mentioned um I collaborate there with a guy named Philip corus who has done this in his own work he read Plato's dialogue the Theus about the na..."

"build those things and then um and then we're doing a host of other small things like reading groups I I um you know uh put together there's something where we talk about what are the origins of the m..."

"technology ethics because it turns out there's more to ethics than just narrow utilitarianism and I I got involved it's an Oxford plus Stanford thing um Oxford Institute for ethics and Ai and then Sta..."

"the two cultures I'm sure you've read that book and and we need to put the put them back together again in my opinion and one way to do that is is all of the things that you are supporting and so I ap..."

"so because the Wolves were there the deer population went down because the Wolves were hunting and eating them that led to the deer choosing different locations the locations that they vacated were al..."

"ignite the sexual Revolution and I I I mentioned this because how do you predict that I mean maybe somebody did I I wouldn't put it past someone to predict but like these are not not just they're not ..."

"education but as part of that there are failures in complex adaptive systems and just to use the metaphor of the market when opinions in markets go from heterogenity to homogeneity Bo watch out there ..."

"chances to get most of the decisions we make right we're never going to get all decisions right ever yeah I mean I love that Jim it with interesting is both the surprise and the homogeneity happen at ..."

"you know it certainly is very consistent with the market what I mean by that is that the open-source software model kind of beautifully allows for that because you put something out and then millions ..."

"Society yeah and one of the reasons why I am passionately in favor of Open Source but not absolutely opposed to closed Source being coexisting with it is what is for the reason you just cited I I pass..."

"American idea of pragmatism right uh that seems to be a very pragmatic solution to dealing with these uh with these very very complex problems and also just study nature study our immune system our im..."

"experience on as we go another really good thinker on this is James V Canon um I had not read James V Canon until this you know Mill Fellowship but what he kind of says is that like look you gota like..."

"suck and so he's got this cool little like loop back that I think computation enables us to do in like super interesting ways the other thing Jim I was going to touch on is um on open source so venod ..."

"would have people come in and uh ransack them like try to seal their technology it's kind of wild but they would do this and rather than like making that organization a safety a security optimized org..."

"open source helps quite a bit even if some of it is militarily relevant potentially does more to lift people out of poverty and thus promote peace than it does to still conflict it's not Zero Sum you ..."

"family Etc and and I do think that there are just so many Incredible use cases for AI where we let the AI go on these speculations right because guess what in my opinion there's probably going to be s..."

"really exciting new way I I think one of the areas that we're kind of working on at at Oxford that Philip is a is a real expert on Philip corus this professor there is the nature of reason and I do th..."

"done at the Edge of Reason to be able to you know move Beyond just search which will help us immensely generating this kind of you know hypothesis but also to kind of like more maybe uh deliberate um ..."

"have different degrees of like moralizing in different kind of places but one common theme is that they're they're showing that humans are complex that there's a great kind of check off quote that say..."

"my my challenge is I I don't want them to be Utopias because as you know Utopia literally means nowhere right yeah and and and so and and it gets me back to the Plato right which begin he's one of the..."

"this one is one of the threads you see in political philosophy and history is that there are a lot of really difficult debates about you know what is Justice what is um you know the role of Reason in ..."

"of way is like if you have a democratically controlled lawful military that whose job is primarily defensive and who actually operates in that way um that military needs modern technology to be able t..."

"aspect of moving forward right they if if if we if we make things off limits it's it's like kids right if if if you say you cannot do this guess what the kids want to do right it's like uh Christopher..."

"love both of those brandan and uh this has been so much fun for me we'll have to do a round two because we didn't get to half the things I wanted to get to but before we go uh tell our listeners and v..."