26 Comments
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Noah Tsutsui's avatar

How about Alex Wellerstein?

Short bio: Historian of science and nuclear weapons and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology

Creator of NUKEMAP: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

WIRED video - "Nuclear Historian Answers Nuclear War Questions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJTA2OinEHw

Full disclosure... I went to highschool with him.

Maxime's avatar

How will sort between all the recuring demands for Joscha Bach, Karl Friston and Mike Israetel? ^^

Btw the go to guy for chinese economic history, the great divergence, innovation and the current Thucidide trap is Yasheng Huang from MIT. His work on historical chinese innovation is a tour de force.

Andrew's avatar

David Eagleman - AI x Neuroscience. Stanford professor and author.

Rita Berardino's avatar

Would love to see you interview Yuval Noah Harari

Dallas E Weaver's avatar

Interesting questions. I have had a question about evolution for a long time. Our brain, like AI, is a real energy burner, using about 20% of our energy supply. Evolution as an algorithm is a small-step hill-climbing mechanism, which means most steps have little impact. What factors drove a larger brain by providing a huge energy payoff?

Before homo sapiens, our ancestors used stone tools and smaller jaws, indicating fire and cooking. Fire and stone tools didn't drive the evolution of our large brain. The complexity of large groups of primates is common and within the intelligence range of many primates.

So what advanced paid the energy cost for a large brain?

My hypothesis is that specialization and trade are not all equal, as not all rocks are created equal. Some primate ancestor had someone enter his territory with a hunk of obsidian that made much better stone tools, and rather than just stealing the rock, traded some food and goods they had, with the suggestion that the stranger go back and get more rock. This evolution of "specialization and trade" has a huge energy payoff, but it required keeping track of individuals across different tribes and over long time periods. Remembering who you can trust and who you can't is critical, and ultimately, setting up cultural mechanisms for determining trust requires a large brain.

Tracing stone tools to their sources would give the start of trade.

Perry Ismangil's avatar

Good to know you can't just create AI Agent Scouts

Tan's avatar

You should have more repeat guests. Bring em back a year later, you'll have plenty to talk about.

Excelente Oveja's avatar

Some great interviews would be:

-Joscha Bach: Cognitive Scientist, for his unusual takes on culture, intelligence, consciousness as a self-modeling simulation, but his most interesting interviews are the ones in he answers off-topic questions about politics, movies, autism, modernist vs postmodernist countries, etc.

-Emmanuel Todd, French historian. Shows how regional differences in family configurations (inheritance, authority, co-residence) causally shape whether societies prefer democracy, autocracy, individualism or collectivism. Fresh anthropological framework for today's politics & ideology debates

Rapa-Nui's avatar

Instead of (or additional to) paying by the hour, you should offer bounties on a per-guest basis.

Allan Degra's avatar

Shouldn’t that be the job of an Ai agent???? 😉

Rapa-Nui's avatar

Actually, this is exactly the kind of task where physical embodiment and networking is best. I think at their current level, an AI agent would not have found Sarah Paine.

annotator's avatar

Gregory Cochran

Arnold Kling

Benji's avatar

Alice Evans. 10000 years of patriarchy.

SlowlyReading's avatar

Highly polymathic and somewhat in the David Reich 'lane': Razib Khan!

https://www.razibkhan.com/archive?sort=top

I'm not sure how many scientists know as much history as Razib does, nor how many historians know as much science.

Maxime's avatar

Dwarkesh already invited Razib Khan, Charles Muray, Garret Jones, Joseph Henrich and Gregory Clark years ago (same genre). It might be some the first episodes in his youtube history.

(The first ones were the GMU econ crew with Brian Caplan, Tyler Cowen Robin Hanson etc...)

Akhil Patel's avatar

I think a great person to interview is David Silver, either through Google or UCL...incidentally he co-wrote a paper with Richard Sutton, amongst being behind most of the big successes at DeepMind

Jonathan Kerr's avatar

At the risk of cutting against your prompts here, I would love to see an interview with Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll) on the intersection of art and AI, and the implications for human artists. He also has academic level understanding of radical politics which could provide for some interesting dialogues.

I offer this recommendation for free!

Oliver Klingefjord's avatar

You'd have an amazing chat with Joe Edelman (@edelwax) ;)