Bretton Goods

Bretton Goods

By Pradyumna PrasadScienceSocial Sciences
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Bretton Goods episodes

  • Ep 57: India's Statistical Story

    I spoke to Pramit Bhattacharya an independent data journalist about India's statistical system. We talked about

    • How did Indian statisticians adapt their statistical methods to account for India's informal sector?
    • How are India's GDP numbers constructed?
    • Why it's so hard to outright manipulate GDP numbers
    • The case for optimism
      • 57 min
    • Ep 56: Talking AI Regulation with Harry Law

      I talked with Harry Law of the University of Cambridge and Google DeepMind about AI regulation

      We talked about

      • Me vs Harry on open source AI regulation
      • Being humble when regulating AI
      • Why a "Manhattan Project for X" is overrated

        • 46 min
      • Ep 55: Adaptive markets and crypto with Derek Wong

        I spoke with Derek Wong about the adaptive markets hypothesis, macro investing and investing in cryptocurrency markets


        We talk about

        • Why investors should consider the financial markets as a complex adaptive system
        • How investing in China is very different from investing in the West
        • How he invests in crypto without fundamental anchors


          • 49 min
        • Ep 54: High Skilled Immigration in America

          I spoke to Adam Ozimek and Connor O'Brien from the Economic Innovation Group about the policy and politics of high skilled immigration in America. We talked about

          • Why reforming high skilled immigration in the US is so difficult
          • The lump of labour fallacy in immigration
          • Reforming immigration through place-based visas
            • 45 min
          • Ep 53: The State of Indian Cities ft. Devashish Dhar

            I spoke with Devashish Dhar, the author of the excellent book India's Blind Spot which talks about India's urbanisation crisis and solutions to it. We talk about

            • Why does India have a much lower reported rate of urbanisation than the rest of the world?
            • Explaining the global bias against cities
            • “Extremely high levels of traffic is caused by poor land policy”
            • Why are there so many floods in Indian cities?
            • How to climate-proof Indian cities
            • “India’s biggest unfulfilled promise is local government”


              • and much more!

              57 min
            • Ep 52: Tyler Cowen on Singapore, AI and Economic Growth

              I interviewed one of the most interesting thinkers today, Tyler Cowen.


              We talked about

              • Why there are such few Singaporean famous people
              • What Singapore can do to get more weird
              • Why he's sceptical of an AI-driven singularity
              • What happens to kids in a post-GPT world
              • What happens to public intellectuals in a post-GPT world
              • Why he's optimistic on Kenyan economic growth

                • And so much more!



                1 hr 8 min
              • Ep 51: Why AI won't kill us all ft. Rohit Krishnan

                I spoke to Rohit Krishnan the author of the blog Strange Loop Canon about why he is sceptical about the idea that AI will kill us all


                We talked about

                • Why he’s sceptical of AI regulation proposals

                • Why AI “timelines” are not as meaningful as you think

                • AI deployment is harder than you think!

                • The value of incrementalism in AI policy

                • Why he thinks instrumental convergence is unlikely to happen

                  • 1 hr 6 min
                • Ep. 50: mRNA vaccines in India ft. Soham Sankaran

                  I spoke to Soham Sankaran who runs PopVax, an Indian mRNA vaccine company. Their goal is to build low-cost broadly-protective vaccines to protect against the entire sarbecovirus species. Read Soham's experience here (https://chronicles.popvax.com/p/three-meetings-and-six-million-funerals) as a complement to this episode. Also check out their jobs page (https://jobs.popvax.com/) for opportunities.


                  This episode includes

                  • How he started PopVax and (went bankrupt in the process)
                  • Why there hasn't been a successful Indian mRNA vaccine yet
                  • Why developing countries can't afford drugs for rare diseases
                  • What they're doing to fix it
                  • Their biggest constraints
                    • 1 hr 2 min
                  • Ep 48: An Introduction to AI Alignment with Trevor Chow

                    I spoke to Trevor Chow about existential risks from AI and techniques to align artificial intelligence with human goals. Specifically we talked about

                    • An introduction to existential risk from Artificial Intelligence
                    • Existing methods for alignment of AI models
                    • Why RLHF might fail in large language models
                    • Whether interpretability research might scale?
                    • New methods being developed to make larger models safer
                    • Regulatory frameworks for the future of AI
                      • ---
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                      58 min

                    About Bretton Goods

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                    I talk to the most interesting people about economic growth