Joe Carlsmith

I think sometimes there's an interesting process where someone says like, blah, provocative thing.

And it's a kind of

an epistemic project to be like, wait, why exactly do I think that's false, right?

And you really, you know, someone's like, healthcare doesn't work.

Medical care does not work, right?

Someone says that and you're like, all right, how exactly do I know that medical care works, right?

And you like go through the process of trying to think it through.

And so I think there's like room for that.

But I think ultimately like kind of the real profundity is like,

true right or like kind of things things become less interesting if they're just not true um and i think that's i think sometimes it feels to me like people um or it's at least it's at least possible i think to like lose lose touch with that and to be more like flashy and and it's kind of like this actually isn't there's there's not actually something here right one thing i've been thinking about recently um after i interviewed leopold was or while prepping for it listen i haven't really thought at all about the fact that there's going to be a geopolitical angle to this ai thing

I mean, I think there's also room for division of labor, right?

Like I think there can be, yeah, like, you know, there are people who are like trying to like draw a bunch of pieces and then be like, here's the overall picture.

And then people who are going really deep on specific pieces, people who are doing the more like generative, throw things out there, see what sticks.

So I think there, it also doesn't need to be that like all of the epistemic labor is like located in one brain.

And, you know, it depends like your role in the world and other things.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, I think that I don't know where this discourse leads.

I just, I'm like suspicious of the amount of like ongoing confusion that it seems to me is like present in our conception of consciousness.

You know, I mean, so I sometimes think of analogies with like, you know, people talk about like life and like Alain Vidal, right?

And maybe, you know, there's a world, you know, Alain Vidal was this like hypothesized life force that is sort of the thing at stake in life.