YouSaid · the spoken record

Johnathan Haidt

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-07-14
most recent: 2025-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Come a long way, but we have for the longest time as a civilization working with data, we've been fascinating by just being able to potentially do a thing we don't know what it's for, but isn't it cool that we can move this data? Isn't it cool that we can pull patterns out of it? Isn't it cool that we can store it at scale or collect it at scale without actually asking ourselves where are we going and how are we going to use it? And we are growing out of that painful teething phase where everyone was like, this is fun and let's do it for theory.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is thinking about all the components that need to be thought about and that it's all delegated to the right people. So part of my role then is asking a lot of questions about what's important, who can do this, how do we put it all together, and making sure that we're not operating with any blind spots or missing any components.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And this is a really important point that blossoms into the whole topic of how to think about decision delegation. So the first thing a leader needs to realize is that when they are at the very top of the food chain in their organization, they do not have the time to be involved in very granular decisions. In fact, most of the job is figuring out how to delegate decision-making to everybody else, choosing whom to trust or what to trust if we're going to start to delegate to automated systems, and then letting go of that decision. So you don't want to be asking the CEO about nitty gritty topics around, let's say, the cybersecurity pieces of their shiny new AI system. But what you need to do as an organization is make sure that somebody in the project”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies tend to articulate those things through a mission statement. And very often, at least in my experience, those mission statements aren't nearly detailed enough to guide the sort of granular and deep series of events that AI is going to lead us down.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly. Yeah, I think that's something that people really miss when it comes to what looks like data or mathy situations, that once we have that bit of math, it kind of looks objective. It looks like you start here, you end up there, and there was only one right answer. What we forget is that that little math piece and that data piece and that code piece is a thin layer of objectivity in a big fat subjectivity sandwich, where that first layer is what's even important enough to automate? What's important enough to do in the first place? What would I want to improve? Which direction do I want to steer my business in? What matters to me? What matters to my customers? How do I want to change the world? These are things without one right answer, and things which will need to be articulated somewhat clearly in order for the rest to make sense.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, typically, the big ones are the ones involving AI systems deployment, right? How would you think about solving a problem with AI? That's a big decision. Should I even put this AI system in place? I'm potentially going to have to gut whatever I'm already using. So if I've got some handcrafted system, some software developers have already written for me and I'm getting reasonably good results from that, well, I'm not just going to throw AI in there and, you know, hope for the best, actually in some situations you do because you want to say, I'm an AI company. And so you want to default to putting the AI system in unless you get talked out of it. But quite often, it's effortful. It's expensive. And we want to make sure that it is going to be good enough and right for that company's situation. So how do we think about measuring that?”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From decision making judgment is where you do all the effort of deciding how to decide. What does it actually mean for you to be allocating your resources in a way without take-back seas? So it's up to the decision maker to think about that. What are we measuring? What's important? How might we actually want to approach this decision? Even saying something like this Decision should be taken by gut instinct rather than by effortful calculation is part of that judgment process. And then the decision making process that follows, that is just sort of riding the mathematical consequences of whatever judgment setup you made”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can choose how to frame that to make it definitionally irrevocable. Like if I hire John right now at this point in time, then I'm maybe giving up doing something else like eating my sandwich instead of going through all the paperwork of hiring John. So I could think that's irrevocable. Or I could think of it as, sorry, John, if I hire John, I might be able to fire John tomorrow and that feels like and release whatever resources that I cared more about than time and current opportunity. And so then I could treat that as that I'm able to have a two-way door on this decision. So really, it depends on how you want to frame it. And then the rest will somewhat follow in the math. A big piece of how we think about decision making in psychology is to actually separate into what the name of the field there is. And that is judgment and decision making. Judgment is separate.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it's up to you to think about how you want to define what it means for the allocation to be irrevocable and what it means for them to be allocated. Is this an act that a human must make? Is it an act that a system downstream of a human might make? And what are resources? Are resources just money? Or could you think about time? Or could you think about opportunity? Like if I choose to go through this door, well, in this moment, in this universe, right now I didn't choose to go through that door. And I can't go back. So in that sense, absolutely every movement that we make is an irrelevant allocation of resources.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it depends how you define it. So with all these terms, when you try to study it in the social biological sciences, you'll have to take a word which we casually use however we feel like, like the word decision, and then you have to give it a little box that makes that definition more concrete. It's just like saying let x equals, right, at the top of your page when you're doing math. You can say let x equals the speed of light. Now from now on, whenever I write x, it means the speed of light. And then for some other person's paper, let x equals 5, and then whenever they write x, it means 5. So similarly, we say let decision equal, and then we define it for the purposes. Typically what decision analysts will say defines a decision the way that they do their let decision equals at the top of their page, is they say that it is an irrevocable allocation of resources.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It sounds to me like maybe what really drives decisions and maybe this motion and movement region of the brain as part of it is want, what we want. Like when we're babies, when we're toddlers, decisions are, do I get up? Am I hungry? And so do I cry? It's basic stuff that has to do with mostly physical things because we're not intellectuals yet, I guess. And so you need to have a want or a goal in some sense in order for there to be a decision to be made, right? So that's whether we understand what our real motivation is or not, that's a key ingredient, having some kind of goal in decision making.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unbeknownst to them, the decision was made for them all along. It was primed in some way some kind of inputs got in there. They thought they made a decision. And then afterwards you ask them, so why did you pick red not blue? And they will sing you those beautiful song explaining how it was their grandmother's favorite color or whatever it is. Meanwhile, the experimenter implanted that. And if you don't believe me, go see a magic show. It's the same principle, right? Stage magicians. Will plant decisions in their audience so reliably otherwise the show wouldn't work. And I'm always fascinated by how seriously we take our human ability to know and understand ourselves and feel like we've got all this agency side by side with professional stage magicians entertaining crowds every day.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the funny conclusion, right? What we can do is we can prod in, we can pry, and we can get some sense. But at the end of the day, the actual nitty-gritty of how humans do it is a mystery. And what's also really funny is humans think they know how they make the decision, but quite often you can plant a decision and then unbeknownst to your participant we call them, I would say victim in the study.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was moving away from the cartoonish take that you get in popular science that you just have one region and it just does this thing and it only does this thing. Instead it's an entire network that is constantly taking in inputs and processing them. So of course memory would be involved in decision making and of course the ability to imagine which you would think of more as your visual occipital cortices that would definitely be involved in some way or other so it's a whole thing it's a whole network of activations that are implementing human decisions and to summarize this for you John neuroscientists have no idea how we make decisions”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there is another structure that is sort of forward in the prefrontal cortex, typically you have ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices will be involved in different kinds of what you would think of as effortful or slow down decisions, things to do with the difference between choosing a stock because, I don't know, you feel like it, you don't even know why, and sitting down and actually running some numbers, doing some research, integrating all of that and having a good long think, ponder as to what you should do. So broadly speaking, different regions, broadly speaking, from different evolutionary stages, the prefrontal cortex is a little newer, and you have these systems sometimes in coordinated action, sometimes a little in conflict, involved in decision-making. But what we also really cared about back in those days”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't know that you were gonna drag my neuroscience degree into this. It has been a while. I apologize to any actual today practicing neuroscientists that I'm about to offend. But at least when I was in grad school, the models that we had for this were that you would have your dopaminergic midbrain, which would is a region that's very important for movement. Executing some of what you would think of as the more instinctive or driven by basic rewards, rewards like sugar, avoidance of pain, those kinds of rewards. So you have that, what you might think of as evolutionarily older structure. And isn't it fascinating that movement and decision making be similar? Similarly controlled in the brain is a movement a decision, is taking an action, the same thing as a decision. We can get into that.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even before we get there, though, like staying at the very basic level, how do people learn to make decisions? There's the, I guess, fundamental idea of if you touch a hot stove, you do it once, and then you sort of know not to do that again. How does the wiring in our brain sort of work that teaches us to be a decision maker and develop our own processes for doing it?”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should not have phrased it that way. But today, you can go and have AI make the attempt at an answer for you. And you could get an answer really quickly. And if you're used to just immediately running in the direction of your answer, you won't think as much as you should about, well, how do I test if this is actually what I need and what's good for me? And also, what did I actually ask in the first place? What was the world model, if you like? What were the assumptions that went into this decision? So, yeah, it's all about priorities. It's all about knowing what's important.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and your priorities. So, one of the things that I find really fascinating about what AI in the kind of large language model chatbot sense today is doing is it's making answers really cheap. And when answers become cheap, that means that the question becomes really important. Because what used to happen with decision making for again the big thorny data-driven decisions is a decision maker might come up with something and then they would ask their data science team to work on it. And then by the time that that team has come back with an answer, it's been, well, a week if you're lucky, but you know could be six weeks, could be six months. And in that time, you actually get the opportunity to think about what you've asked, refine what that means to you, and then maybe re-ask it, have that shower thought like man.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends on the decision. It can be very easy to make a decision. And one of the things that I actually advise people is unless you're a student of decision making, your number one rule should be to try to match the effort you put into the decision with what's at stake in the decision. So of course if you're a student you can go and agonize over how would I apply a decision theoretic approach to choosing my sandwich at lunch but don't be doing that in real life, right? The slowdown and think carefully and consider the hard decisions. Do your best by them is for the, again, important ones that will touch your life or critically the lives of thousands, millions, billions of other people, which is something that we see with technology that scales. So our decision's hard, not all of them.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let the mischief begin. So the chief decision scientist at Google, I think, starts to frame what it is that you're good at. And we're going to get into the AI implications and leadership and technology and all that. But first, let's just start with the basics. What's so hard about making decisions?”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was really starting to kick off. This is a fun one. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Okay, decision scientist Cassie Kosarkov. Here we go. You are the founder and CEO of Causer and the former chief decision scientist at Google. Welcome to Decoder. I'm going to welcome myself to Dakota too because this isn't even really, this isn't my podcast and just sort of like having fun punching the buttons, but it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To machine learning. Her expertise here landed her as a top advisor inside Google, where she spent nearly a decade helping the company make smarter use of data. Recent years, her work has collided head on with artificial intelligence. As you'll hear, Cassie explain, generative AI systems like ChatGPT are making it easier and cheaper than ever to get advice and analysis. But unless you have a clear vision of what it is you're looking for and what values underlie the decisions you make, all you'll get back from AI systems is a lot of messy data. So Cassie and I really dug into the science behind decision making, how it intersects with what we're seeing in the modern AI industry, and how her work today in AI consulting is helping companies better understand how to use these tools to make smarter decisions that can't just be outsourced to agents or chatbots. I also wanted to know a little bit about Cassie's own decision-making framework and how she made some key decisions of her own, like what to pursue in graduate school, why she left academia for Google, and then why she struck out on her own just as the generative AI boom.”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. This is John Fort, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fort Knox podcast. As you just heard, Nehi say, I'm stepping to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he's out on parental leave, and I'm very excited for what we've been working on. For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kazakov, the CEO and founder of AI Consultancy Kazer, and the former chief decision scientist at Google. For a long time, Cassie has studied the ins and outs of decision making, not just decision frameworks, but also deeply understanding the underlying social dynamics, psychology, and even in some cases the role the human brain plays in how and why we make certain choices. This is an interdisciplinary field, Cassie calls decision intelligence that mixes everything from statistics and data science”
2025-07-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How decision making will change when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT