Tag: Philosophy
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The Top Three AGI-Proof Careers and What They Reveal About Our Humanity and The Future
I’m very interested in what society looks like if we achieve AGI but don’t end up in a totally unrecognizable utopia/dystopia. One question is what work will be meaningful in such a world. A lot of what we do today will be rendered irrelevant, but I’ve developed some conviction that…
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Bell’s Inequality
I recently finished Quantum Computing for Everyone, which is a great intro to the basic ideas and math behind quantum computing. I particularly enjoyed its account of Bell’s inequality, which offers a great lesson in the history of science. In the early 20th century, physicists worked out the core of…
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Against The End of History of Venture Capital
I’ve written previously about the deep tech opportunity. While lean software startups have been a great place to invest venture capital over the last thirty years, I believe we’re living through a shift where future returns in venture capital will be more driven by companies that engage in fundamental innovation.…
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Collaborative Intelligence
Humans are not simple creatures. Although we like to present ourselves as coherent wholes to the outside world, on the inside, we’re divided. Marvin Minsky argues in The Society of Mind that minds are composed of smaller agents, each with specialized roles and drives. Inside Out similarly imagines the mind…
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On the Folk Theory of Scaling
In 2019, Rich Sutton argued that the most effective methods in AI were and will be those that leverage computation. Instead of trying to design better heuristics that more closely approximate human intelligence, Sutton thought progress would come from models that could improve with scale as greater computational resources became…
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Communicating Like a Computer
We were recently looking at a new crypto protocol at USV. As we were discussing it as a team, we realized we didn’t totally understand how the protocol worked. Even worse, we found it hard to precisely articulate our questions about the protocol to each other. After some discussion in…
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Self-Mythology & Authenticity
At the end of his recent interview with Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh asked … what really strikes out to me about you… is just how broadly you think of your job description. To the extent that you think of if science is slowing down and civilization is stagnating, that’ll be bad…
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Nietzsche and Niceness
My friend Johnathan recently delivered an excellent lecture on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. He rightly noted how underrated Nietzsche’s ideas are today, showed how they could be usefully applied to the contemporary world, and offered some fair criticisms of the Nietzschean perspective. After I left the lecture, I…
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Underrated Internet Communities
What are the most underrated internet communities today? The rationalists and effective altruists were underrated in the 2000s and 2010s. I stumbled on lesswrong in high school (through reddit) and got a kick out of the quirky perspective over there. It felt interestingly orthogonal to debates I was exposed to…
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Decoding the AI Debate: A Philosophical Perspective
I had a great time speaking last night on a panel with Brendan McCord of the Cosmos Institute and Zoe Weinberg of ex/ante about venture capital, AI, and philosophy. I was really impressed with the group that convened. People were urgently excited to discuss philosophy of mind and language, technical…
Matthew Mandel 