YouSaid · the spoken record

Fin Moorhouse

lines on the record: 147
first: 2022-07-27
most recent: 2022-07-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, okay, that's a good question. I feel like I want to say that doing this stuff is really hard. So I don't want to discourage posting by saying this, but I think maybe the median submission is really robustly useful, absolutely worth writing and submitting. That said, maybe the difference between the most valuable posts of this kind or work of this kind and the median kind of effort is probably very large, which is to say that the ceiling is really high. If you think you have 1% chance of influencing $100 million of philanthropic spending, then there is some sense in which a impartial philanthropic donor might be willing to spend roughly 1% of that amount to kind of find out that information, right, which is like a million dollars. So yeah, this stuff can be really, really important. I think”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So website is my name.comhouse.com, Twitter is my name, and podcast is called Hear This Idea, as in listen, this idea. So it's just thatphrase.com. And I'm sure if you kind of Google it, it'll come up.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just mentioned so last month the theme was agency, and the theme this month is to write some response or some reflection on this series of blog posts called the Most Important Century blog post series by Holen Karnowski, which incidentally people should just read anyway. I think it's just really truly excellent and kind of remarkable that one of the most affecting Series of blog posts I've basically ever read was written by the co CEO of his like enormous like philanthropic organization in his spare time. It's just kind of insane.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool, I appreciate that. Yeah, so the criticism contest, the deadline is the 1st of September, the kind of canonical post that announces that is an EA forum post, which be very grateful if you could link to somewhere, but I'm happy to do that. And then Price Paul is at least $100,000, but possibly more if there's just like a lot of exceptional entries. And then hopefully all the kind of relevant information is there. And then, yeah, this blog prize as well, which I've been kind of helping run. I think you mentioned right at the start. So the overall prize is $100,000 and up to five of those prizes. But also there are these smaller monthly prizes that...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's someone you look up to and you think it's very plausible that you might end up in there line of research and you think there's a bunch of things you can learn from them, as long as you're not demanding a huge amount of their time or attention, then you can just ask to talk to them. I think finding a mentor in places like this is just so useful and just like asking people if they could fill that role. Like again, in a kind of friendly way is just, you know, maybe it's a kind of a move people don't opt for a lot of the time. But yeah, it's like taking the non-obvious options, being proactive about connecting to other people, seeing if you can like physically meet other people who are interested in the same kind of weird things as you. Yeah, this is all extremely obvious, but I guess it's stuff I kind of would really have benefited from learning earlier on.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a great point. I guess we're both involved with this blog prize and there was a kind of mini prize last month for people writing about the idea of agency and what you just said, I think links into that really nicely. There's this kind of property of going from realizing you can do something to doing it, which just seems like both really valuable and learnable. So yeah, just like going from the idea of I could maybe do a little podcast series to like actually testing it and like being open to the possibility that it fails but you learn something from it just really valuable. Also we were talking about sending cold emails in that same bit of the conversation, right?”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some particular uncertainty. So it's like, look, I guess I'm a kind of 60% option A is better than B. And that hasn't really changed having done like a bunch of extra thinking. That's roughly speaking the point where it might be best to make the decision rather than holding out for certainty. Does that make sense?”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, oh my god, this is like such a big decision because I guess in this context, it's not only do you have to answer the question of what might be a good fit for me and what I might enjoy, but also like some sense, what is actually most important maybe and how am I supposed to answer that given that there's a ton of disagreement. And so I just found myself bashing my head against the wall of trying to get to a point where I learned that like one option was better than any other. And the piece of advice that I found useful was that often you should just write off the possibility of becoming fully certain about what option is best. Instead, what you should do is you should reflect on the decision, like proactively, that is, you know, talk to people, write down your thoughts, and just keep iterating on that until the dial stops moving backwards and forwards and just kind of settle.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never go to step two and just like be a really excellent researcher or communicator and like anything else. Sure, sure, sure. I think where you have the luxury of doing it, not kind of rushing into the most salient career option and then retroactively justifying why it was the correct option. Think is like quite a nice thing to bear in mind. I suppose often it's quite uncomfortable. Obviously, I don't want to. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I mean, the kind of the obvious advice here is that there is a website designed to answer this question, which is 80,000 hours. Oh, yeah, so maybe some particular bit of advice from ADK, which I found very useful, which was after I left Uni, I was really unsure what I wanted to do. I was choosing between a couple options.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. I also will just do the annoying thing of saying definitely other things you can do other than that kind of like two-step trajectory. But yeah, what's...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, seems good to start working on this stuff And you really want to avoid that regret of, you know, some years down the line like, oh, I really could have just started working on that earlier. There are occasions where this kind of thinking is useful, or at least kind of asking this question, like, what would I do right now if I just did what my kind of idealized self would endorse doing. Maybe that's useful.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's actually just a really good point. I think maybe I'd want to kind of walk back what I said based on that. But I think there's some version of it which I still really endorse, which is maybe like, you know, I spent like some time reflecting on this such that I don't expect further reflection is going to radically change what I think. You can maybe talk about this being the case with a group of people rather than a particular person. And I could just really see this thing playing out where I just believe it's important for a really long time without acting on it. And that's the thing which seems worth. I mean, to be a little tiny bit more concrete, like if you really think some of these potentially catastrophic risks just like are real and you think there are things that we can do about it then”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, can I go along with this argument? Do I see a hole in it? And then if the answer is no, like if it just kind of checks out, even if you're obviously going to always going to be uncertain, but if it's like, yeah, this seems kind of reasonable, then... By default, you might just spend a few years being just kind of living, oh, yeah, this thing that I guess I think is true, but I'm not really acting on. You can just skip that step and be like, well, just act on now.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it kind of hooks into the long reflection stuff a little bit because one answer here Time. So I think the story of people raising concerns about AI is maybe instructive here where early on you get some Real kind of just like radical out there. Researchers are writers who are kind of raising this as a worry. There's a lot of kind of like weird baggage attached to what they write. And then maybe like a first book or two. And then you get more kind of prestigious or established people expressing concerns. I think one way to accelerate that process when it's like worth accelerating is just to ask that question, right? Do I in fact see...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much, what should I prior be on weird ideas being true because they're weird? Is that like good or bad? And then like separately, I know one thing that just seems kind of obvious and important is if you take these ideas, like first of all, you should ask yourself whether you actually believe them or whether they are kind of fun to say, you're just kind of saying that you believe them. And then sometimes, I know it's fun to say with ideas, but it's like, okay, I actually don't have good grounds to believe this. And then second of all, if you do, in fact, believe something, it's like really valuable to ask if you think this thing is really important and true, why aren't you working on it? If you have the opportunity to work on it, this is like the hamming question, right? What's the most important problem in your field? And then what's stopping you from working on it? And obviously, many people have the luxury of dropping at everything and working on the things that they in fact believe are really important. But if you do have that opportunity, then that's a question, which I know is...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one way of thinking about Quote unquote weird ideas is that in some sense they are the result of taking a bunch of common sense starting points and then just like really reflecting on them hard and seeing what comes out. Yeah, so I think maybe the question is like how much trust should we place on those like reflective processes versus like”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become mainstream. I think thinking about really scalable projects as well as just like little fun kind of interventions on margins. There's at least some trans that becomes very important. And so as such, one part of that is maybe just like learning to make a lot of these fields legible and attractive to people who could contribute who are like learning about it for the first time. And just yeah, in general planning for the best case, which could mean just like being thinking in very ambitious terms, thinking about things going very well. That just also seems worth doing. So I think that's a very vague answer, but maybe that's, yeah, maybe not worth keeping him, but that's my answer.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Impact really seriously rather than just saying the right things that kind of fades away. So I don't know, I want to say E is currently underrating that in any important sense, but it's like something that seems worth having as a kind of worry on the radar. And then the roughly opposite thing that seems also worth worrying about is I think it's just really worth paying attention or like it's worth considering best case outcomes where a lot of this stuff maybe grows quite considerably. Thinking about how this stuff is”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess off the top of my head, maybe I have two answers which go in exact opposite directions. So one answer is that one kind of something looks a bit like a failure mode that I'm a bit worried about is as or if the movement grows significantly, then the ideas that kind of originally motivated it that were like quite new and exciting and important ideas somewhat kind of dilute maybe because it's like I guess it's related to what you said, you kind of lose these attitudes of taking weird ideas seriously, like scrutinizing one another quite a lot. And it becomes a bit like, I don't know, greenwashing or something where the language stays, but the real kind of fire behind it of like taking.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That feels like a great answer. I just say it's something I'm kind of right about as well, especially in leaning towards a more kind of speculative long-termist end. Seems really important to like. Keep hold of some real truth seeking attitude where those kind of like where the obvious feedback of whether you're getting things right or wrong is much harder and often you don't have the luxury of having that. So yeah, I think just like keeping that attitude in mind seems like very important. I like that.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice, and maybe a connected question is I'm curious what you think EA in general is underrating from your point of view. Also, maybe another question you can answer instead is like what you think I am personally getting wrong or got wrong, but maybe the kind of the more general question is a more interesting one for most people.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice. That sounds great. Maybe this is getting right to the start of the conversation. What about a nonprofit startup? The same leg excitement. If you have a great idea, you kind of skip the fundraising stage. More freedom because you don't need to make.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so cool, so cool. Cool. Okay, I think that's my space rambling. Do I guess I'd quite like to ask you a couple questions if that's all right? I realize I've been kind of hogging the airwaves. Yeah, so here's one thing I've just interested to know. You're doing this like blogging and podcasting right now, but yeah, what's next? Like 2024, what is he doing?”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about how to make sure this stuff goes well. And the story behind that graph is kind of fun as well. I was like messing around on some UN website, which had, it was just like this database, incredible database, which has more or less every kind of officially recorded launch logged with all this data about how many objects were contained or whatever. It was like the clunkiest API you've ever seen. You have to like manually click through each page and it takes like five seconds to load and you have to scrape it somewhere. So I was like, okay, this is great that this exists. I am not remotely sophisticated enough to know how to make use of it. But I emailed the hour and data people saying FYI, this exists if you happen to have a ton of time to burn, then have added. Ed Mato from AWAN Data got back to me like a month later like, hey, I had a free day. All done. And it's like up on the website.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of like pretty important infrastructure kind of currently orbiting the earth and also anti-satellite weapons are being built and my impression is well in fact I think it's the case that there is kind of worryingly small amount of agreement and regulation about the use of those weapons maybe that puts you in a kind of analogous position to not having many agreements over the use of nuclear weapons although maybe less worrying in certain respects but still seems worth taking that seriously and thinking about how to make progress there yeah i think just like a ton of other kind of near term considerations there's this great graph actually um on our one and data which i guess i can tell you the link to after this um which shows the number of objects launched into orbit um especially low earth orbit just over time and it's like perfect hockey stick and i know it's like quite a nice illustration of why you might might kind of pay to like”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or does anything worthwhile worlds in which enlightenment goes well, right? And it goes well in the sense that there's a significant sense in which humans are still in the driving seat and when they're looking for precedence, they just look to existing like institutions and norms. So I don't know. That seems kind of, there's like so many variables here that this seems like a fairly narrow kind of set of worlds, but I don't know, seems pretty possible. And then it's also kind of like, you know, settling the moon or Mars where that is just like much easier to imagine how this stuff actually kind of ends up influencing or positively influencing how things turn up. Feels worth pointing out that there are things that really plausibly matter when we're thinking about space that aren't just like thinking about these crazy kind of very long run sci-fi scenarios, although they are like pretty fun to think about. One is that there's just a ton of”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digital people come along for the right. It's not obvious why there's some discontinuity there. I guess the important thing is considering what happens after anything like kind of transformative artificial intelligence arrives. My guess is that the world in which this is like even kind of remotely, this like, you know, super long-term what norms should we have for selling space? The worlds in which this”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So I guess I know. The first thing I want to say is that it does, in fact, feel like an extremely long shot to expect that any kind of norms you end up agreeing on now, even if they're good, flow through to the point where they really matter if they ever do. But OK, so you can ask, what are the worlds in which this like early thinking does end up being good? On the endpoint, I don't know. I can imagine, for instance, the US Constitution.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resources probably won't kick in, but that's like that's just me speculating, so yeah, I don't know if I have a kind of clear answer to that.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guess is that the timescales on which these dynamics are relevant are extremely long timescales compared to what we're familiar with. So I don't think that any of this straightforwardly translates into wanting to speed up on the order of decades. And in fact, if any delay on the order of decades, I don't know, presumably also centuries gives you marginal improvement in your long run speed, then just because of the time scales and the distances involved, you almost always want to take that trade-off. So yeah, I guess I'd want to be wary of reading too much into all this stuff in terms of like what we should expect for some kind of race in the near term. It just turns out the space is like extremely big and there's like a ton of stuff there. So in anything like the midterm, I think this reasoning about like, oh, we'll run out of useful.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe that is a reason to spread more quickly than you otherwise would have planned once you've figured out what that thing is, if that makes sense.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the things he says are like a little bit subtle, but I guess to kind of bastardize the overall point, there's this idea that you should expect kind of. Selection effects on what you observe in the long run of like which kinds of things have won out and this kind of like race for different parts of space and in particular the things you should expect to win out are these things which like burn resources very fast and are like greedy in terms of grabbing as much space as possible and I don't know that seems like roughly correct he also has a more recent bit of work called grabby aliens I think there's a website grabbyaliens.com which kind of expands on this point and asks this question about what you know we should expect to see such kind of grabby civilizations yeah I mean one maybe kind of one like slightly fanciful upshot here is you don't want this like greedy von Neumann type probes to win out that also just like dead they have no kind of nothing of value and so if you think you have something of value to spread”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just kind of have this like green goo dynamic is because there are competing organisms, there are things like antivirals and so on. So I guess like you mentioned, it's not as if as soon as this thing gets seeded, it's game over. You can imagine trying to catch up with these things and stop them. And I don't know what's the equilibrium here where you have things that are trying to catch things and things which are also spreading. It's like pretty unclear, but it's not clear that it's everything gets burned down although unknown. It seems like worth having on the table as a possible outcome. And then another thought is, I guess something you also like basically mentioned. Robin Hansen has this paper called, I think Burning the Cosmic Commons.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really good question. So, okay, maybe there's an analogy here where we have on Earth, we have organisms which can convert raw resources plus sunlight into more of them and they replicate. It's notable that they don't like blanket the earth. Although I do, just as a tendon, I remember someone. Mentioned there's a thought of like an alien, you know, arrived on Earth and asked the question what are the most successful species? It would probably be grass. But again, the reason that particular organisms that just reproduce using sunlight don't.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so mutually assured destruction doesn't work. And that's kind of like actually a bit of an uncomfortable thought because the alternative to mutually assured destruction in some sense is just first strike, which is if you're worried about some other actor being powerful enough to destroy you, then you should destroy their capacity to destroy you. So yes, that's slightly bleak blog post. I think there are like a ton of other considerations, some of which are a bit more hopeful. One is that you might imagine there's in general a kind of like defensive advantage in space over offensive one reason is that space is this like Dark canvas in 3D where there's absolutely nowhere to hide, and so you can't sneak up on anyone. But yeah, I think there's like a lot of stuff to say here and a lot of it I don't quite fully understand yet.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone else, I can identify the someone else that first rate came from, and I can kind of like credibly commit to retaliating. And the thought is that this disincentivizes that person from launching the first strike in the first place makes a ton of sense. Gordon's point, I guess the thing you already mentioned is... Where a strike came from that means that you don't have any kind of credible way to threaten a retaliation.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For any point in space, so if you just consider the next cluster over or maybe even the next Galaxy over, there'll be a time in the future where it's impossible to reach that other point in space, no matter how long you have to get there. So even if you sent out like a signal in the form of light, it would never reach there because there'll always be a time in the future where you start expanding faster than the speed of light relative to that other place. So, okay, like there's a small consolation there, which is if you last long enough to get to this kind of era of isolation, then suddenly you become independent again in the strict sense. I don't think that's especially relevant when we're considering kind of more, I guess, relatively speaking neuro term things. Gordon's point is really nice. So Gordon starts by pointing out that we have this like logic with nuclear weapons on Earth or mutually assorted destruction where the emphasis on a second strike. So if I receive a first strike from...”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really good question. I will say that I think I have not reflected on that question enough to give a really authoritative answer. Incidentally, one person who absolutely has is Anders Samberg, who has been thinking about almost exactly these questions for a very long time in some point of the future might have a book about this. Watch that space. One consideration is that you can start at the end. Consider what happens very far out in the future And it turns out that because the universe is expanding”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one consideration. And then, if you're less sympathetic to this AI story, then I think you'd also just tell a story about being optimistic for our kind of capacity to catch up along some kind of wisdom or coordination dimension. If you really zoom out and look at how quickly we just invented all this kind of insane technology, that is a roughly kind of exponential process. You might think that might kind of eventually like slow down, but our like improvements and just how well we're able to coordinate ourselves continues to increase. And so that's like defensive advantage in the long run. Those are two pretty weak arguments. So I think it's like actually just a very good question to think about. And I like, you know, also kind of acknowledge that's like not a very kind of compelling answer.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tilts you towards being safe just like indefinitely long. And one reason is if bad things pop up, like as an unaligned thing, then you have this much better established, safe and aligned thing, which has this kind of defensive advantage.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just physical space between two different places is really not going to work as a real kind of hedge. So I'd say something like space seems kind of net useful to diversify, go to different places, but absolutely not sufficient for getting through this kind of time of perils. Then, yeah, I guess there's kind of this follow-up question, which is like, okay, well, why expect that there is any hope of like getting the risk down to sustainable levels? If you're sympathetic to the possibility of like really just transformative unofficial general intelligence arriving, you might think that in some sense getting that transition right where the outcome is that now you have this thing on your side, which like has your interests in mind or has good values in mind, but has this like general purpose kind of reasoning capability that in some sense this just like”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like having multiple kind of backups of some data in different places in the world, right? So if those risks are independent, then it is in fact the case that going to space is just like incredibly good strategy. I think there are pretty compelling reasons to think that a lot of the most worrying risks are like really not independent at all. So, one example is, you can imagine very dangerous pathogens. If there's any travel between these places and the pathogens aren't going to travel, but maybe the more pertinent example is if you think it's worth being worried about artificial general intelligence that is unaligned that goes wrong and really relentlessly pursues really terrible goals, then just having some like”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one point here, so actually maybe it's worth beginning with a kind of like naive case for thinking that like spreading through space is just like the ultimate hedge against extinction. And this is, you know, you can imagine just like duplicating civilization or at least having kind of civilizational backup like things, which are in different places in space. If the risk of any one of them being hit by an asteroid or otherwise encountering some existential catastrophe, if those risks are independent, then you get this like, it's exponential, it's like a power law where every new backup, right? It's like”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that seems good. Also, there's some way of thinking about this where you could just like, if you just write off in advance that your first, I know, let's say seven episodes, I'm just going to be like embarrassing to listen to. That is more freeing because it probably is the case. But you need to go through the bad episodes before you start getting good at anything. I guess it's not even the podcast point. Yeah, also if you're just like brief and polite, there's like very little cost in being ambitious with the people you reach out to. So yeah, just go for it.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, cool. Maybe one last thing that seems worth saying on this topic of podcasting is it's quite easy to just start doing a podcast. And my guess is it's often worth at least trying, right? So I don't know. I guess there are probably a few people listening to this who've kind of entertained the idea. One thing to say is it doesn't need to be the case that if you just like stop doing it and it doesn't really pan out after like five episodes or even fewer that it's a failure like you can frame it as I wanted to make like a small series that's just like a useful artifact to have in the world which is like I don't know here's this kind of bit of history that I think's underrated and I'm gonna tell the story in like four different hour long episodes like set out to do that then you have this like self-contained chunk of work so yeah maybe that's like a useful framing and there's a bunch of resources which I'm sure it might be possible to link to on just like how to set up a podcast I like tried writing like collecting some of those resources”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can kind of get the best of both worlds, so you can put your recording into the software that transcribes your podcast, right? Put it into that. If you're lucky enough to have someone to help you with this, you can get someone, or you can just do it yourself, like go through the transcript and make sure it's kind of there aren't any glaring mistakes. And now you have this artifact that is in text form that lives on the internet. And it's just way cheaper than writing it in the first place. But yeah, that's a great point. And also people should read your barbells for life. Is that it? Barbell strategies for life?”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of covering all your bases and making it really well written, and then just like the information per kind of effort, it's just like so much lower. And I guess like academic, certain kinds of academic things are like way out on the other side. So yeah, just like as a way of solving this kind of problem of there's this overhang of important ideas, podcasts do seem like a really kind of good way to do that. I guess when you don't successfully put ideas out into the world, you get these little kind of like clusters or like fogs of like contextual knowledge where everyone knows these ideas in the right circles, but they're hard to pick up from like legible sources. And it's like kind of maps onto this idea of context being that thing which is scarce. I remember Tyler Cohen talking about that. I kind of like eventually made sense in that context.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know, just like having a conversation with that person is just like one of the most kind of efficient ways of doing it. I think it's interesting in general to consider the kind of rate of information transfer for different kinds of media and stuff, like transmitting and receiving ideas. So on the best end of the spectrum, right? I'm sure you've had kind of conversations where you everyone you're talking with shares a lot of context. And so you can just kind of blurt out this slightly incoherent three-minute, like I just had this kind of thought in the shower and they can fill in the gaps and basically just like get the idea and then at the kind of opposite end like maybe you want to write an article like a kind of prestigious outlet and so you're like”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I know kind of one reason you might think podcasts are really useful in general is I guess the way I think about this is like you can imagine there's a kind of just stock of ideas that seem really important. Like if you just have a conversation with, I don't know, someone who's researching some cool topic and they tell you all this cool stuff that's like isn't written up anyway. You're like, oh my God, this needs to kind of exist in the world. I think in many cases this stock of important ideas just grows faster than you're able to like in some sense pay it down and like put it out into the world. And that's just a bad thing. So this is overhang you want to fix and then you can ask this question of, okay, what's the just like the most one of the most effective ways to communicate ideas relatively well put them out into the world”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you could even just do this before the interview, right? And then it gets to the good stuff where they're actually being made to think about things. Rob Wiblin has a really good list of interview tips, which I think, I don't know, I guess the reason this is kind of nice to talk about other than the fact this is like good to have some kind of like inside baseball talk is that, you know, like skills of interviewing feel pretty transferable to just asking people good questions, which is like a generally useful skill, hopefully. So yeah, I guess I found that it's like really difficult. I still get pretty frustrated with how hard it is. But it's like a cool thing to realize that you are able to like kind of slowly learn.”
2022-07-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source