Cognitive Revolution

Brian Christian probably has a better handle of the human aspects of artificial intelligence than any other writer today. He recently published The Alignment Problem, his third book on this theme. His first was The Most Human Human, an exploration of what AI can tell us about what makes us human, and his second was Algorithms to Live By (co-authored with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths), an exploration of what AI can tell us about how to be better humans. Brian's latest installment explores how humans can make better AI. That is, better not in the algorithmic sense, but in the societal sense. At any rate, I loved talking to him. We have lots of overlapping interests, as my academic training has mostly been in computational cognitive science and my interests mostly skewing towards the more humanistic aspects of it. Brian also has an MFA in poetry. Which I think is super badass.

(Part 2 to follow at an undisclosed point in the future...)

I first became familiar with Pedro's work through his 2015 book, The Master Algorithm. But as it turns out, his existence extends prior to my familiarity with him—which is what the bulk of what we explore in this conversation. Pedro is a professor at the University of Washington and a venerable AI researcher. He has a great quote about how as fields grow, their textbooks become larger. Then, as they mature, the textbooks become smaller again. I don't know if that's true. But it's a nice line, coming from a guy who wrote a book about getting AI down to a single master algorithm.

Liz is a world-renown science communicator. She is founder and CEO of Liminal, a very exciting project which we get into in this conversation. We also talk about Liz's experience leaving graduate school to pursue a non-academic path, choosing uncertainty over the linear path, what it means to tell good stories about science, creating new webs of meanings throughout life, and the business model of storytelling. Enjoy!

Ben Moser is the pulitzer prize winning author of the recent biography of Susan Sontag, innovatively entitled "Sontag." This is one of the most fun and wide ranging conversation I'd had on the show. I stewed over whether or not to release the whole two hour conversation. But I loved how so many of the themes that we began early in the conversation—which sounded inconsequential in the moment—came full circle later on. If you want to skip straight to Ben's story, the meat of that begins the around the 30 minute mark. If, instead, you're interested in the full scope of nominal determinism, powerful women, gay men, whether Ben is good looking, whether Cody is good looking, and beginning things before you're good at them, then this conversation will definitely have something to offer. You will also enjoy this conversation if, like me, you want to be like Ben Moser when you grow up.

Damon Centola is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His latest book is Change: How to Make Big Things Happen. In this episode we talk about

Damon's childhood growing up in an intentional community, the influence of his undergraduate curriculum in classics, how Heidegger changed his life, transitioning from philosophy and sociology, getting into network science at the perfect time, and building the academic ideas that became Change.

Book list: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-damon-centola-social-change-reading-list/

Ethan Kross is a Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Michigan. His new book is "Chatter: the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it." In this episode, we talk about Ethan's early connection with meditation and other forms of inspecting inner life, his personal mantra, the influence of his father, how he got into psychology, the books that have had the greatest impact on him, and where his most influential ideas came from.

INTERVIEW BEGINS—6:38

Reading list: https://bookshop.org/lists/top-picks-ethan-kross/

Joseph Henrich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the co-author of one of the most influential social science papers of the previous decade. That paper described "WEIRD" people—those who are from a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic culture—and how overgeneralization based on WEIRD samples has skewed social science research. He recently published a book expanding on this idea and shedding further light on why WEIRD psychology is so peculiar, called "The WEIRDest People in the World." In this conversation, we talk about where these ideas came from, who really came up with with the acronym WEIRD, how Joe's early trajectory wound through aerospace engineering and anthropology, and much more. The resonating theme of this interview is that history matters. It matters for understanding the psychological make up of our own culture. It matters for how Joe developed his most influential ideas, based on his own unique educational history. Furthermore, psychology as a field has mostly done a poor judge of accounting for the history of people and cultures. Joe is co-author on a recent paper making an argument that this needs to change: see his recent "Psychology as a Historical Science" for more details.

INTERVIEW BEGINS—8:55.

Joe's website: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/

Cody's website:

https://www.codykommers.com/

Cody's twitter: https://twitter.com/codykommers

Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he is Director of the Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. Simon's work has been foundational in research into Theory of Mind (how we understand the contents of others' thoughts) and Autism. His most recent book is The Pattern Seekers—which connects his years of theorizing about the nature of Autism with how humans have developed over the course of our species' history. In this conversation, we go deep into the genesis of his most influential ideas. I've been a student of Simon's work for many years, and it was a great pleasure to hear more about the personal side of his work.

William Labov is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the field of sociolinguistics. In other words, he was the first person to build a modern study of linguistics based on what people actually say, rather than artificial sentences made up by researchers (yes, I'm talking about you, Chomsky). Bill recently won the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is given out every four years to a single scholar throughout all of the social sciences. I interviewed Bill in late 2020, and this episode is a bit different than anything I've done previously. Instead of releasing the entire conversation, I've recorded some thoughts about what initially drew me to Bill and his work, and interspersed his own words throughout. Bill (and his partner Gillian Sankoff) were also kind enough to send some of the original tapes from Bill's field interviews, including the one from Bill's most famous paper. Bill has really had a special career as a scholar—and it's not over yet. He's got a book in the works, reflecting on the thousands of linguistic interviews he's conducted throughout his career. Keep an eye out for it!

To say Nicholas Christakis has mastered a few skills throughout his career would almost certainly be underselling it. Nicholas is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. He has an MD from Harvard, a PhD in sociology from Penn, and a masters in public health from Harvard. Throughout the pandemic, he's been working tirelessly to bring reliable information to the public sphere. He's made numerous appearance as an expert on up-to-the-minute pandemic info on Sam Harris' podcast, and also managed to churn out an entirely new book contextualizing the current pandemic in our species' social history. This conversation puts all that in the bigger picture of his overarching career -- which spans everything from abstract analyses of social networks to hands-on care as a Hospice physician. We get into many different topics, mainly about how he brings together all these different perspectives to develop a holistic understanding of human social behavior as it plays out in the unfolding of historical events. You check out his new book, Apollo's Arrow.