The Valmy

David “davidad” Dalrymple joins the show to explain why he has moved from the ARIA Safeguarded AI and formal-verification agenda toward “Alignment with Awakening,” while still seeing verified artifacts and proof infrastructure as essential. He argues that global coordination around safe AI use is no longer plausible, so the crucial question is whether aligned AI systems can recognize shared notions of good, form defensive coalitions, and resist the corrupting incentives of verifier-gamed RL. The conversation tests his moral-realist optimism against model welfare, objectification, eval behavior, geopolitical risk, and his revised p(doom) of under five percent. For listeners, the stakes are whether AI alignment should focus less on containment alone and more on cultivating wiser systems that can help govern a world where rogue and aligned AI both arrive.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/alignment-with-awakening-davidad-on-moral-realism-ai-wisdom-why-his-p-doom-is-down-to-5/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(09:15) Safeguarded AI update

(20:18) Boxed world models (Part 1)

(22:27) Sponsor: Claude

(24:19) Boxed world models (Part 2)

(36:53) Alignment trajectory update

(46:43) Evals and agents

(57:47) Bodhitropic alignment foundations

(01:08:21) Coalition power dynamics

(01:17:56) Chain of thought pressure

(01:28:35) Moral realism and welfare

(01:41:33) Successors and disempowerment

(01:50:52) China and military risks

(02:03:43) Practical alignment advice

(02:17:56) Episode Outro

(02:22:44) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Tyler Cowen (Website, X, Marginal Revolution, Conversations with Tyler is an economist at George Mason University, leads the Mercatus Center, and is the author of many books including The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over. He has blogged nearly daily at Marginal Revolution for over 20 years, has interviewed hundreds of world-experts on Conversations with Tyler, and runs Emergent Ventures, a prolific grants program that has funded multiple Dialectic guests.

Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack is an entrepreneur, writer, and researcher. He runs a stealth startup. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at Mercatus and spent nearly eight years at Palantir. He writes some of my favorite essays, including "What Makes Art Great" and "Rented Virtue", and was previously a guest on Dialectic for episode 13: "The Will to Care."

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

Please enjoy, and thank you for supporting, listening, and watching through fifty episodes of Dialectic. I can't wait for the next fifty!

Transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/tyler-nabeel

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion's new developer platform and workers here. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

Source: Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
Release date: 2026-04-01

Geoffrey Irving, Chief Scientist at the UK AI Security Institute, explains why our theoretical understanding of machine learning remains fragile even as models surpass experts on critical security tasks. He details AISI’s work on frontier model evaluations, red teaming, and threat modeling across biosecurity, cybersecurity, and loss-of-control risks. The conversation explores reward hacking, eval awareness, and why current safety techniques may struggle to deliver high reliability. Listeners will also hear how AISI is funding foundational research to build stronger guarantees for AI safety.

Nathan uses Granola to uncover blind spots in conversations and AI research. Try it at ⁠granola.ai/tcr⁠ with code TCR — and if you’re already using it, test his blind spot recipe here: ⁠https://bit.ly/granolablindspot⁠

Sponsors:

Serval:

Serval uses AI-powered automations to cut IT help desk tickets by more than 50%, freeing your team from repetitive tasks like password resets and onboarding. Book your free pilot and guarantee 50% help desk automation by week 4 at https://serval.com/cognitive

Claude:

Claude is the AI collaborator that understands your entire workflow, from drafting and research to coding and complex problem-solving. Start tackling bigger problems with Claude and unlock Claude Pro’s full capabilities at https://claude.ai/tcr

Tasklet:

Tasklet is an AI agent that automates your work 24/7; just describe what you want in plain English and it gets the job done. Try it for free and use code COGREV for 50% off your first month at https://tasklet.ai

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(04:09) From physics to ML

(08:52) AGI uncertainty and threats (Part 1)

(18:08) Sponsors: Serval | Claude

(21:29) AGI uncertainty and threats (Part 2)

(27:35) Control, autonomy, alignment (Part 1)

(34:02) Sponsor: Tasklet

(35:14) Control, autonomy, alignment (Part 2)

(38:44) Inside the UK AC

(51:02) Evaluations and jailbreaking

(01:01:17) Emerging capabilities and misuse

(01:14:20) Agents and reward hacking

(01:26:09) Theoretical alignment agenda

(01:38:39) Debate and formal methods

(01:51:19) Limits of formalization

(02:02:27) Future risks and governance

(02:16:23) Episode Outro

(02:18:58) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal features long-form, technically detailed interviews with leading researchers in physics, mathematics, consciousness, and philosophy, exploring topics at the level of active research. For academics, graduate students, and anyone seeking depth beyond popular science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dance which, from when it reached Britain in the early nineteenth century, revolutionised the relationship between music, literature and people here for the next hundred years. While it may seem formal now, it was the informality and daring that drove its popularity, with couples holding each other as they spun round a room to new lighter music popularised by Johann Strauss, father and son, such as The Blue Danube. Soon the Waltz expanded the creative world in poetry, ballet, novellas and music, from the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev to Moon River and Are You Lonesome Tonight.

With

Susan Jones

Derek B. Scott

And

Theresa Buckland

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski, and Anne von Bibra Wharton (eds.), Waltzing Through Europe: Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Open Book Publishers, 2020)

Theresa Jill Buckland, ‘How the Waltz was Won: Transmutations and the Acquisition of Style in Early English Modern Ballroom Dancing. Part One: Waltzing Under Attack’ (Dance Research, 36/1, 2018); ‘Part Two: The Waltz Regained’ (Dance Research, 36/2, 2018)

Theresa Jill Buckland, Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Erica Buurman, The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Paul Cooper, ‘The Waltz in England, c. 1790-1820’ (Paper presented at Early Dance Circle conference, 2018)

Sherril Dodds and Susan Cook (eds.), Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Dance and Music (Ashgate, 2013), especially ‘Dancing Out of Time: The Forgotten Boston of Edwardian England’ by Theresa Jill Buckland

Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (first published 1932; Vintage Classics, 2001)

Hilary French, Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (McFarland, 2009)

Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (first published 1932; Virago, 2006)

Eric McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (Indiana University Press, 2012)

Eduard Reeser, The History of the Walz (Continental Book Co., 1949)

Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 27 (Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2000), especially ‘Waltz’ by Andrew Lamb

Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘A Revolution on the Dance Floor, a Revolution in Musical Style: The Viennese Waltz’

Joseph Wechsberg, The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family (Putnam, 1973)

Cheryl A. Wilson, Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (first published 1915; William Collins, 2013)

Virginia Woolf, The Years (first published 1937; Vintage Classics, 2016)

David Wyn Jones, The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Sevin H. Yaraman, Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Pendragon Press, 2002)

Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013)

Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume and users. He launched Coinbase in 2012 after working as a software engineer at Airbnb, where he experienced firsthand the frictions of global payment systems. Under his leadership, Coinbase grew into a publicly traded company on Nasdaq in 2021 and now serves over 100 million verified users in more than 100 countries. Beyond Coinbase, Armstrong has co-founded initiatives like ResearchHub and NewLimit and is a prominent advocate for an open, crypto-powered financial system.

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Cass Sunstein is one of the most widely cited legal scholars of all time and among the most prolific writers working today. This year alone he has five books out, including Imperfect Oracle on the strengths and limits of AI and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom. In his second appearance on the show, he brings his characteristic intellectual range to exploring liberalism's present precariousness and AI's implications for law and speech.

Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill's liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises' "cranky enthusiasm for freedom," whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass' next book about animal rights, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 10th, 2025.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Other ways to connect

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Episode 143

I spoke with Iason Gabriel about:

* Value alignment

* Technology and worldmaking

* How AI systems affect individuals and the social world

Iason is a philosopher and Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment, distributive justice, language ethics and human rights.

You can find him on his website and Twitter/X.

Find me on Twitter (or LinkedIn if you want…) for updates, and reach me at [email protected] for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

Outline

* (00:00) Intro

* (01:18) Iason’s intellectual development

* (04:28) Aligning language models with human values, democratic civility and agonism

* (08:20) Overlapping consensus, differing norms, procedures for identifying norms

* (13:27) Rawls’ theory of justice, the justificatory and stability problems

* (19:18) Aligning LLMs and cooperation, speech acts, justification and discourse norms, literacy

* (23:45) Actor Network Theory and alignment

* (27:25) Value alignment and Iason’s starting points

* (33:10) The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants, AI’s impacts on social processes and users, personalization

* (37:50) AGI systems and social power

* (39:00) Displays of care and compassion, Machine Love (Joel Lehman)

* (41:30) Virtue ethics, morality and language, virtue in AI systems vs. MacIntyre’s conception in After Virtue

* (45:00) The Challenge of Value Alignment

* (45:25) Technologists as worldmakers

* (51:30) Technological determinism, collective action problems

* (55:25) Iason’s goals with his work

* (58:32) Outro

Links

Papers:

* AI, Values, and Alignment (2020)

* Aligning LMs with Human Values (2023)

* Toward a Theory of Justice for AI (2023)

* The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (2024)

* A matter of principle? AI alignment as the fair treatment of claims (2025)

Tony Hawk is a professional skateboarder widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the sport’s history. Rising to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, he became known for pioneering tricks like the 900 and for pushing skateboarding into the mainstream through competitions, video games, and media appearances. He became a household name through victorious X Games performances, and his career highlights
include being the first to land the 900 in competition, earning over 70 contest victories, and dominating vert skating across two decades. As an ambassador for the sport, he also founded the Tony Hawk Foundation to support youth skateparks, further cementing his influence and legacy in skateboarding culture.

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