Eliezer Yudkowsky
speaker
1,716 appearances
7 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2015
last heard 13 Mar
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
What gives you hope about this?
Possibility of being wrong.
Well, I can easily imagine that at some point this panic expresses itself in the waste of a billion dollars.
Spending a billion dollars correctly, that's harder.
If you're wrong... To solve a number of things.
Stuff has to be easier than I think it is.
The first time you're building a rocket,
Being wrong is, in a certain sense, quite easy.
Happening to be wrong in a way where the rocket goes twice as far and half the fuel and lands exactly where you hoped it would, most cases of being wrong make it harder to build a rocket, harder to have it not explode, cause it to require more fuel than you hoped, cause it to land off target.
Being wrong in a way that makes stuff easier, that's not the usual project management story.
There's no examples in history where we... Oh, there's all kinds of things that are similar if you generalize incorrectly the right way and aren't fooled by misleading metaphors.
Like what?
Humans.
being misaligned on inclusive genetic fitness.
So inclusive genetic fitness is like not just your reproductive fitness, but also the fitness of your relatives, the people who share some fraction of your genes.
The old joke is, would you give your life to save your brother?
They once asked a biologist, I think it was Haldane, and Haldane said, no, but I would give my life to save two brothers or eight cousins.
Because a brother, on average, shares half your genes, and cousin, on average, shares an eighth of your genes.
So that's inclusive genetic fitness.
And you can view natural selection as optimizing humans exclusively around this one very simple criterion.
Showing 921–940 of 1,716 · page 47 of 86
← Previous
Next →