Goodhart's Law states that as soon as a metric becomes an optimization target, it ceases to be a good metric for what it was supposed to measure because people will find ways to fulfill the metric that no longer provide the intended benefit or actively produce harms

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founding figures in deep learning and neural networks, recently left Google (May 2023) expressing concern that AI systems may soon become more intelligent than humans and could develop capabilities for manipulation and finding ways around safety constraints that humans cannot prevent

Ian McGilchrist's theory of brain hemispheres suggests that the left hemisphere (focused on logic, symbol manipulation, analysis, and optimization of isolated metrics) has become dominant in Western culture at the expense of the right hemisphere (concerned with context, relationships, wholeness, and direct experience), and this imbalance is both a cause and expression of the metacrisis

The theory of theories of everything podcast is that fundamental reality should be investigated from theoretical physics perspectives while also abstracting out to ask what consciousness is, whether philosophy and metaphysics have anything to say about it, and whether there is a fundamental reality that can be approached or known

The Nash equilibrium is a state where all players choose their optimal strategy given their beliefs about other players' strategies such that no individual player can improve their outcome by unilaterally changing their strategy, and equilibria are frequently suboptimal for all players collectively compared to coordinated alternatives

Extreme scale AI models are expensive to train and only a few tech companies can afford development, concentrating power while making it impossible for broader research community to inspect, dissect, and audit these systems for safety, creating a governance and epistemic crisis

Large-scale AI system development will be accompanied by massive job displacement (Goldman Sachs estimates that AI systems can replace 300 million jobs globally and one in four work tasks in developed economies), with the biggest impacts on developed economies, but this has received less public attention than speculative AGI risks

There is something cosmically inherent in consciousness that recognizes and is oriented toward good, beauty, and meaning, and this recognition can influence others even when not explicitly taught through word or argument

We do not think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking—meaning that cultural transformation requires embodied practice and lived experience, not just intellectual understanding

The phrase 'just get wet' comes from Wheeler and refers to the idea that with abstruse mathematical and conceptual material, one should get used to the concepts through repeated exposure rather than trying to bang one's head against the wall to understand it on first exposure, and understanding generally comes through rewatching and re-listening