We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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Kat is an effective altruist who co-founded Nonlinear (incubating artificial intelligence extinction risk non-profits), Charity Entrepreneurship (helping people start new, effective charities), and Charity Science Health. She describes her main focus today as trying “to make transformative artificial intelligence go well instead of poorly.”
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:56 Kat Intro
– “The biggest thing I care about is preventing suffering risks [#S-risks] the risk of causing astronomical amounts of suffering… We’re already in one”
– “We’re a super-intelligent species compared to pigs and chickens and it’s not going great… the worst thing that has ever happened in history as far as I can tell”
– “Right now we’re just racing towards making a species that is much, much more intelligent than us – that hasn’t gone well in the past”
– “I really want to make sure that it goes well not just for us – but also for all sentient beings – and also future sentient beings”
– “How we play this in the next while could be the difference between… the best invention that every happened… or we could all die, like everybody, including all the animals… or be stuck in a factory farming thing where there’s no escape… like there’s no chance for chickens escaping from factory farming”
– Trying to get more people working on this to make sure it goes well
– From #passiveincome #4hourworkweek to #passiveimpact and helping people
– Nonlinear: mentorship, seed funding, helping other people start things
– “Prioritise ideas, make the ideas happen”
06:20 What’s Real?
– Growing up on Canadian West Coast
– “Religion just wasn’t talked about”
– “The only time I heard about Christianity was in my history class… and english class”
– “When I actually found out that people really did believe these things I was like ‘holy shit… maybe I could go to hell… that sounds bad'”
– Delving into Islam, Wiccanism. Christianity “too boring”
– Graduating at 17 & taking a gap year in India & reading Dawkins’ “God Delusion”
– “At the beginning I just thought it was clearly bad… I hadn’t interacted with anyone who was really religious”
– “It’s really easy to demonise somebody that you haven’t met”
– Staying with a family in Rwanda “an extremely religious country”… “At first I was worried… I ended up telling everybody… I’m an atheist” but doing humanitarian work, not “eating babies”!
– Epistemology: “I was very hard-core – do RCTs [randomised controlled trials] for everything…”
– Reading a psychology paper on “willpower” every day… “my first ever experience of real science… this is crap”… small effect sizes, exaggerated abstracts…
– “Science is terrible… but it’s better than your gut most of the time… the only way we see that is because we have ways to evaluate”
– “My confidence interval around what is true got wider and wider… more and more uncertain”
– Experiencing epistemic angst “I can’t know anything… nobody knows anything… I’m just going to go be a hippy in the woods, make some art, do some drugs… but I just kept caring about stuff that was happening in the world… I just have to keep going”
– Astrophysicist Katie Mack episode
…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our ”I’m a Sentientist” wall via this simple form.
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