Cold Takes Audio

The rate of violent deaths is one of the key measures of long-run quality of life, and strong claims are made on both sides.

https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/

Part of the "Has Life Gotten Better?" series.

https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/

"Hunter-gatherers"/"foragers" are sometimes said to have strong gender equality. But as far as I can tell, they don't. Part of the "Has Life Gotten Better?" series.

https://www.cold-takes.com/pre-agriculture-gender-relations-seem-bad/

Why I think life has gotten better over the last couple hundred years.

https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/

Trends in quality of life over all of human history (not just the last few hundred years).

https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/

Listing the big events for empowerment and well-being, leaving out all the wars that didn't clearly affect these things.

https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/

Why would we program AI that wants to harm us? Because we might not know how to do otherwise.

https://www.cold-takes.com/why-ai-alignment-could-be-hard-with-modern-deep-learning/

Given all our uncertainties about the most important century, I'm issuing a "call to vigilance" instead of "call to action": look out for opportunities to help the most important century go as well as possible. 

https://www.cold-takes.com/call-to-vigilance/ 

We, the people living in this century, have the chance to have a huge impact on huge numbers of people to come - if we can make sense of the situation enough to find helpful actions. 

https://www.cold-takes.com/making-the-best-of-the-most-important-century/ 

What the best available forecasting methods say about when we can expect transformative AI - and why there's no "expert field" for this topic.

https://www.cold-takes.com/where-ai-forecasting-stands-today/