Gianluca and Jared speak about absurdism, existentialism, and an antidote to becoming bored with the world. They then think out loud about direction versus random walks as well as their visions for the long term future of humanity and how to even think about these kinds of massive questions. They also touch on attention and what it would mean to use it well, all things considered, some of the basics of Transhumanism, and what single thing each of us would wish for to give humanity its best chance at thriving!
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Shownotes:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Absurdism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Existentialism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
Some great videos from The School of Life about Existentialism: ‘Philosophy - Sartre’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bQsZxDQgzU and ‘Existentialism and Dating’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcniOW0wc5k
Kurt Vonnegut books: ‘Slaughterhouse Five’: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4981.Slaughterhouse_Five and ‘Breakfast of Champions’: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4980.Breakfast_of_Champions
Bonus: Jared’s favourite article introducing a key concept related to Transhumanism: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
80 000 Hours on why we should value the long term future: https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/ as well as a podcast episode (from the 80 000 Hours podcast) on a similar topic: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/why-the-long-run-future-matters-more-than-anything-else-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/ and a strong argument for thinking about existential risk: https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/
Book ‘The Art of Doing Science and Engineering’: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/530415.The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_Engineering
‘The Last Question’, a short story by Isaac Asimov: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4808763-the-last-question P.S. a great reading can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0
‘Do Spoilers Change a Person's Enjoyment of a Television Show?’ https://digital.usfsp.edu/masterstheses/166/ and ‘Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797611417007?journalCode=pssa - two studies suggesting maybe spoilers aren’t as bad as we think? (that being said, don’t try me - Jared)
Jared’s current favourite explanation of the Buddhist concept of ‘emptiness’ comes from this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32895535-why-buddhism-is-true
A great, short video explaining some aspects of the Fermi Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc (part 1), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno-uI (part 2) and a bonus on the Great Filter hypothesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
031 | Kat Woods — Effective Altruism, Infohazards, and Brain Hacks
030 | Predictive Processing 3: Neurobiology, Prediction, and Computational Psychiatry
029 | Predictive Processing 2: Where The Action Is
028 | Predictive Processing 1: The World You Thought You Knew
027 | 7 Practices to Survive the 2020 Apocalypse
026 | Drink and be Rational
025 | Self-Supervised Machine Learning: Introduction, Intuitions, and Use-Cases
024 | Replacing Guilt
023 | Are Brains Just Neural Nets?
022 | 6 Books You Need to Read in 2020… and 1 You Probably Shouldn’t
021 | The Top 19 Ideas from 2019
020 | Mental Models 3: Fantastic Biases and Where To Find Them
019 | Mental Models 2: How To Think Like A Bayesian, Avoid Black Swans, & Know The Value of Your Decisions
018 | Mental Models 1: How To Have Better Ideas and Improve Your Thinking
017 | Bronwyn Williams: Universal Basic Income & Individual Sovereignty
016 | Free Will, Compassion, and Reinforcement Learning
015 | You have no Choice in the Matter
014 | The Art of Looking - Part 1 of ??
013 | How To Learn Anything!
012 | How Deep Learning Does Magic
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