It starts off revealing pure scorn for "tech billionaires" etc.

But what they actually seem to be going against is Ray Kurzweil's ideas that there will be a singularity which will go on, forever increasing and using more energy, yet somehow using tech to never run out. They're not actually saying that AI can't totally revolutionize our world of today. And they aren't really saying we can't go to space, yet.

Their tone has reminded me that it's not at all good to begin your argument by revealing one's huge contempt for the other side. It's a huge turn-off and seems so unfriendly and unwelcoming; why would someone who didn't agree w/you yet be convinced by that? remember: you are right - so you can be magnanimous. You can just gently explain and clarify; you can be curious about the other side and meet them using terms they understand; not doing so is a sign that you are doubtful; but remember, you do feel massive certainty - why do you feel so? think about it. is it real? if so, then relax. you've got this, if not you, the next generation. no rush. and if you're not... well, that's another reason to be gentle and try to actually talk to the opposition!

The guest also shows some tendencies to strawman. I feel at times he's about to say "And you know what, I'm just so TIRED" that old classic line; but then he remembers he actually is on a podcast to try to persuade or inform people, primarily those who don't already agree w/him.

Because actually, I'm fine saying "let Kurzweil do what he wants, I don't agree" and openly saying I haven't read it closely and don't believe those things to be true, right now. i.e. this is a kind of nut-picking - using the most extreme person semi-aligned w/your opposition as a strawman to shoot at and blow up and rail against, while rhetorically including everyone on the other side as you, as if you're hitting them too, when in fact my brand of future-belief doesn't include infinitely increasing power and eternal life as a material being... obviously how could one be confident of something like that, geez

Reminder: simply repeating that you don't believe something isn't an argument

Quote starts at: 16:15: "And that is just not going to happen. We're not leaving the solar system. We're not leaving the solar system. It's too hard to get there"

I haven't read the supporters of space travel's arguments enough to say them, but I would think that they have arguments against what he's saying, given that they are literally the very first and most basic arguments against them. i.e. you can't just go on a friendly podcast and give the literally most basic statements of your own position, consider no counterarguments, then drop the mic. I bet there are over 100 books directly addressing his claims on this subject.

It's really unconvincing to take this "But actually, you're just wrong" tone regarding physical issues like life extension, physical space travel, too.

The argument quality here is super weak. Yes, I do already know that you don't believe that the idea of a substrate is reasonable. I disagree w/you. so you should be able to understand that you just repeating your belief is NOT going to convince me

Bonus: Sapolsky's Fallacy!

This is a silly game Sapolsky plays where he acts like that because we are not truly given outside-materialism free will, that therefore we are not truly free to do anything, and then he jumps to something like "therefore you can NOT just 'decide to do something'" since it was all predetermined. To extent that things are predetermined I agree; and I also agree that many things are either impossible or arbitrarily unlikely for someone to do. But yet I hold that the concept of free will still matters. And I believe that because in the area of crime and punishment, Sapolsky uses this to argue that because criminals didn't actually have a choice, we shouldn't punish them. That is, he uses vague philosophy which results in... viola, so-called proof for the petty pretty lovely beliefset of elites of the day. what a coincidence, that happens... so often when scientists dabble in popularity!

My reason for disagreeing is that his argument is too strong. By that argument, isn't there no point to anything? if hosts ask him this, I think he retreats into absurdity or mute gestures, old man stuff, okay. Then he goes back to being a good pro.

So I think he's wrong because he's not taking into account information or time. Actions produce further waves of information, which go into the admittedly mechanistic decisions made by others brains. So if we punish criminals, information about that will be inside the brains of other future potential criminals, and it might dissuade them from doing something wrong. This is so obvious but I'm stating it again.

I think I need a word for a related pattern: imagine a process which has say 10 steps. We then pick one in the middle. Then we talk about all the things which the earlier steps do to get us there, then we talk about the information constraints that the person doing this step would be under, then about the rounding and buffering which happens after. And in the end, someone concludes that they prove that this step doesn't matter.

It feels slightly convincing but it's founded on that same Sapolsky's Fallacy; here's why I think so:

Imagine that we have someone:

• born into poverty
• bad home en
• lack of nutrition
• early problems at school
• fell into bad company
• found himself involved in a robbery gone wrong and was just arrested. He may at that time claim "I never had a chance, please don't lock me up!"

but compare that to another version of the story he might see as an old man in prison:

• he learns to read during a 20 year jail stint.
• after jail, he gradually learns to listen and grow.
• conversion to Christianity
• at the moment before death he confronts and reviews his life, seeing each step and each action as on rails, mandatory. But at this moment he feels free - will he, in his heart, apologize, forgive all who wronged him, and beg their forgiveness?

The contradiction is that this frame of "clearly I can cancel any single step by looking at it retrospectively" also invalidates the concept of in-this-moment freewill. Yet people believe in that. I mean I'm sitting here telling you I believe in it.

The guest in the early minutes also makes this kind of gesture; that it's just (my word: heuristic, for what I think he wants to say) impossible to merely exert humanity's will and influence the universe.

Let's bet

This seems the type of guy who if we had only gotten him to either bet or cravenly refuse to bet on it, would have to take a super doubtful position about everything that's happened - IMO gold, AIs being able to write poetry, all the best things they're doing as of today 8/2026 let alone their future. But if challenged, he'd switch to 100% going for the crowd to disapprove of me and win that way rather than actually think about what actually might happen with all those compyootahs. And so he'd be very hard to pin down. (Hopefully future LLMs will let us get an edge on this kind of skimming around, being wrong by implication, but trying to win via crowd approval your whole life type of people. And no, it's not malicious of me to hope this for them, because I'm hoping for an accurate system to really reward or punish people; if he's right, he will be rewarded. So don't act like I'm trying to railroad him.)

For me, my views are that it seems likely that change will continue to accelerate and things really will get crazy. I don't know about a singularity or state change, but at least something very different after which I wouldn't even know how to predict. I am not saying anything is infinite at all! and also this is not on rails - so many random things (asteroid, etc) at least could derail it, as well as tons of other ways other things might happen. At least from the fact that huge percentages of the types of questions I asked, why I went to the library, etc as a kid would nowadays be instantly answered; as well most (by percent) of all the work & jobs I've done would be either replaced or changed significantly. So I expect huge changes.

Tl;DR

Physicist who feels personally affronted that other people are being bold uses 1990s style "but you just know inside yourself" reasoning to attack straiten of the other side, including people who are really working hard and have already saved thousands of lives, and prevented lots of suffering, at EA.

I'd love to get this guy on the record about this new technology idea of using anti-viral IR light to protect vulnerable groups (old aged home, etc.) from infection (by zapping things as they float in the air or on surfaces, which this rather cheap and safe tech makes possible). This could result in things like certain states or countries actually being able to drastically reduce ward or building infection rates; and would have helped a bunch against a certain recent epidemic too! And moreso, here's where he'd begin steaming I imagine, that once deployed widely enough, we might globally reduce the total rate of infectious diseases held by humanity by cutting into their very population and the areas where they reproduce and mutate! so that there would eventually be so few that they'd actually even have potential to (dare I say) be eliminated entirely from earth?

For me based on what I've seen so far, this is a reasonable hope. It won't be easy but it's not an impossible dream. Whereas this guest, I'm not sure. I think he'd very easily slide into just a general contempt, "pick-me pleeez, mister elite" sort of broad anger and desire to punish those who defy the pro viewpoints. It's really a very strange inversion because although he's a prof and most likely a dem, he's taking such an extremely conservative line against someone who is very clearly a super prototypical hippie! Kurzweil went with Minsky, and all those psychedelic/physics/future/society can change guys in Stuart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog. I'm sure he was in both of them, when I read it as a kid - that we'll live in communes, there'll be much more freedom, more rights, more naturally living with earth. They weren't having power fantasies, it's true, about increasing energy use, but still. Whereas I've always been the same - grey-tribe technofuturist, sometimes optimist sometimes afraid, but we've gotta try. I also wonder if this guy would instantly say, when hearing about a plan to massively eliminate microbes which infect humans, to say things like "but maybe they are good for us actually!" of course bro, just like it's good you forgot your umbrella cause you learned not to forget it, everything bad is good in the counterfactual for you and everything good is bad. for me i'm a "the default result of something I judge to be good... is... good, and if something does bad things... I judge that its effect on the world shall be... bad". I would agree that this isn't always the case; sometimes human judgment systems are wrong or outdated. But there is a class of people who instantly go to "but what if that good thing you told me about, happily, were actually bad"? and I think this is not a useful way to think.

This tone is common nowadays.

I also ran into it in one of those Weinersmith books poo-poohing the very idea of space travel. It was a long list of intentionally badly set up strawmen all written to let people revel in their naysaying against people who just want to change things and to them better!