Dwarkesh

speaker

1,722 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Nov

Dwarkesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

Scale's research team, SEAL, is creating the foundations for integrating advanced AI into society through practical AI safety frameworks and public leaderboards around safety and alignment.

Their latest leaderboards include Humanity's Last Exam, Enigma Eval, Multi-Challenge, and Vista, which test a range of capabilities from expert-level reasoning to multimodal puzzle solving to performance on multi-turn conversations.

Scale also just released Scale Evaluation, which helps diagnose model limitations.

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If you're an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how Scale's data foundry and research lab can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash thwarkash.

One thing I'm really curious about is what effect these diseases through history have had on the cognitive functioning of people.

I mean, yeah, you discuss this in the chapter about more recent history of the great divergence and probably contributed to the productivity of Europe that they were able to have public health earlier.

But literally, if you go back thousands of years, you mentioned, for example, that Caesar was 5'5", and that was considered tall during his period.

diseases and malnutrition, whatever it was that caused these physical health effects also mean that like the average IQ was much lower just because of like, you know, you're like when you're a kid, you're sick and that steals away nutrition from brain growth or something.

Yes.

You have this great profile in the book about like living in London in the 18th century and just like how disgusting it was.

Pretty disgusting.

But at the same – like literally at the same time in that city, you're just mentioning –

There's these scientists and people with towering intellects who are basically figuring out how the universe works and how to make all these machines and so forth.

And so, I mean, one answer is just like what you just said.

Like, look, the distribution was lower, but that's still like... Maybe Newton would have had an IQ standard deviation higher if he was born today.

But just like seeing that from the small population, you're seeing so much genius.

Yeah, I guess the question is...

How is that still...

How could you have had this much of a deleterious impact on cognitive functioning and still had enough spare geniuses to kick off the Industrial Revolution?

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