Max Tegmark
speaker
2,248 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2018
last heard 3 Nov
Max Tegmark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
But at the same time, they are trapped in this horrible race to the bottom.
Have you read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander?
Yes.
Yeah, it's a beautiful essay on this poem by Ginsberg where he interprets it as being about this monster
It's this game theory monster that pits people against each other in this race to the bottom where everybody ultimately loses.
And the evil thing about this monster is even though everybody sees it and understands, they still can't get out of the race, right?
A good fraction of all the bad things that we humans do are caused by Moloch.
And I like Scott Alexander's...
naming of the monster so we humans can think of it as a thing.
If you look at why do we have overfishing, why do we have more generally the tragedy of the commons, why is it that Liv Bore, I don't know if you had her on your podcast.
Great.
She made this awesome point recently that beauty filters, that a lot of female
influencers feel pressure to use are exactly Moloch in action again.
First, nobody was using them and people saw them just the way they were.
And then some of them started using it and becoming ever more plastic fantastic.
And then the other ones that weren't using it started to realize that if they want to just keep their market share, they have to start using it too.
And then you're in the situation where they're all using it.
And none of them has any more market share or less than before.
So nobody gained anything.
Everybody lost.
Showing 421–440 of 2,248 · page 22 of 113
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