Podcasts

On existential risk and climate change

These are all just loosely related, but I listened to them all around the same time and found it very interesting to hold the arguments and implications in my head together. Putting climate change in perspective (before the 80,000 hours podcast I had just default assumed climate change was a major existential risk) while still acknowledging the extremely destructive impacts of the warming that is likely to happen. Early on in the Noah Smith interview, there was discussion around progress that has been and continues to be made. Overall I was left feeling probably more optimistic about our likely climate future than I was before.

One other interesting note is about the different approaches advocated in the Toby Ord and Elizabeth Popp Berman interviews. The Efective Altruists (80,000 hours is an EA podcast and organization) seem to place high value on rigourous quantification of everything, including highly uncertain topics like existential risk. By contrast, the whole premise of Elizabeth Popp Berman is that quantitative analysis has become too dominant, sidesteps important issues, and quite often is not nearly as objective as we tend to think. I think both of these approaches are valuable. Making good faith, quantitative analyses is exceptionally useful when measuring interventions, comparing outcomes, and thinking through implications of decisions to name a few. However, I also think this approach is limited, both from a technical (statistical) and ethical perspective. The first point is obvious to anyone who has studied causal inference even in passing, while the second is a bit less emphasized (in my experience). There are a million little decisions that are made in a quantitative analysis that may have some impact on the results - what you are measuring, how you collect the data, etc. etc. On the other hand, quantitive analysis gives many frameworks that have been developed and deeply considered by thousands of people of hundreds of years and numerous tools to fight the pitfalls that come along with trying to measure things and reason with numbers. I don’t have anything profound to say about all of this other than numbers are great and they have their limitations. All I ask is that people be honest, fair, clear about their assumptions and biases and limitations. Easy, right?

Other podcasts:

  • The Trojan Horse Affair. This was super addictive and quite interesting. I had not heard of the Trojan Horse Affair before this.

  • Mixtape

  • Jane McGonigal on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape. Using large scale, digital simulations with real human participants to imagine the future and respond. I’ve got her latest, Imagined, on hold at the library now. I’m intrigued about the positive effects of games and gaming on humans, but I haven’t looked into it much and as a non-gamer don’t even have any experiential insight.

  • Janet Lansbury’s 7 Daily reminders for parents. Definitely listen to the podcast, but here’s your cheatsheet.

    1. Let the feelings be
    2. Acknowledge
    3. Wait
    4. Set limits early
    5. Concerning behavior is a request for help
    6. I won’t let you
    7. Confident momentum in transition

Books

  • Five Little Indians by Michelle Wood.
  • Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Easily one of the best contemporary writers. So much delicacy, masterfully paced. He is consistently excellent.
  • Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life and Others. These stories really blew my mind. I’ve got some notes I wrote on the titular story (that Arrival was based on) here.

Blog posts / articles

I was sent this critique of Emily Oster by a friend. It’s not that it’s wrong, per se, it’s that it doesn’t offer any constructive argument in response to what it is criticizing and relies entirely on the technique that it criticizes Oster for using (motivated reasoning). I guess I am also somewhat inherently biased toward the person doing something that they think is beneficial for humanity than the person criticizing that person (within reason, of course). Some questions it brings up: Is it better to be explicitly political even when you don’t believe politics are an important part of what you are trying to say1? I had never heard of Protean, but they state explicitly that they are a left wing publication and the article clearly argues from that perspective. What is the precautionary principle? I only have a very vague sense and many questions about it. How do you decide what to take precautions against? In the case of COVID and schools, do we take more seriously the uncertainty around viral transmission in schools or the uncertainty around the effects remote schooling on the futures of the millions of impacted kids (heavy screen use, diminished quality of education, loss of socialization for children, parental job loss, etc.)?

  1. I think my answer would be that there are plenty of instances where the political implications of an argument are not central enough to the issue that it makes sense to leave them aside. That’s not to say that politics are irrelevant to many things (it’s also probably true that most everything has some sort of political implication, however benign or trivial). ↩︎