Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

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Could AI simultaneously be an extraordinarily powerful technology and an economic bubble, and why would those possibilities not contradict each other? What does the history of the internet bubble suggest about the comforting idea that a financial crash would make AI itself go away? How should we think about the enormous investments flowing between AI companies, chipmakers, and data centers, and could their financial risks become dangerously correlated? Are concerns about AI's energy use justified, while claims about its water consumption are sometimes missing the relevant denominator? What do the boosters get right about abundance, productivity, medicine, and education, and what do they overlook about democratic control and human agency? Could a frictionless AI mediated life make people less capable through what has been called cognitive surrender? What would it mean to stop the race to build universal labor replacing machines while continuing to develop forms of AI that solve genuinely valuable problems?
Garrison Lovely is a freelance journalist and author. His writing on artificial intelligence and its political economy has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Jacobin, Nature, Bloomberg, BBC, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, and other publications; he was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network.
Links:
Garrison's Book: Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It
Staff
Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director
Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant
Music
Broke for Free
Josh Woodward
Lee Rosevere
Quiet Music for Tiny Robots
wowamusic
zapsplat.com
Affiliates
Clearer Thinking
GuidedTrack
Mind Ease
Positly
UpLift

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What exactly is procrastination, and how is it different from simply deciding to postpone something? Why is chronic procrastination so common, and why can it affect highly conscientious and productive people just as much as anyone else? Are there really different types of procrastination, and why does it matter whether someone is procrastinating because of anxiety, distraction, burnout, impulsivity, or perfectionism? How does anxiety turn an unpleasant task into something we continually avoid? Why can anxiety sometimes motivate action while overwhelming anxiety instead leaves us paralyzed? What happens when we repeatedly use procrastination to make ourselves feel better in the short term? Why does that temporary relief reinforce the very behavior that makes things worse in the long term? How do digital distractions differ from internal distractions such as boredom and frustration? And why can procrastination persist even when we genuinely care about the thing we're putting off?
Itamar Shatz created Solving Procrastination to help people understand and overcome procrastination, based on insights that he synthesized from hundreds of research articles, and holds a PhD from Cambridge University, where is an affiliated lecturer teaching quantitative research methods.
Links:
Itamar's Latest Book: Solving Procrastination
Staff
Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director
Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant
Music
Broke for Free
Josh Woodward
Lee Rosevere
Quiet Music for Tiny Robots
wowamusic
zapsplat.com
Affiliates
Clearer Thinking
GuidedTrack
Mind Ease
Positly
UpLift

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What does “neurodivergent” actually mean, and has the term become too broad to be useful? Why might people grouped under the same neurodivergent umbrella have conflicting needs? Is autism really a single spectrum, or would it make more sense to speak of multiple “autisms”? Why are autistic people somewhat less likely to be religious than their non-autistic peers? What is the “cognitive dissonance pressure cooker,” and why might it contribute to religious deconversion? Why do some autistic Christians migrate from evangelical churches toward highly ritualized traditions? Why do autistic communities develop distinctive linguistic norms, and what happens when non-autistic people begin adopting them? Why are excessive caveating, specificity, rigidity, and moral certainty sometimes associated with autistic communication? What is the “broader autism phenotype,” and could it help explain why autistic traits cluster in fields like engineering and technology? When are traits associated with autism genuinely advantageous, and when do the same traits become disabling? Is ADHD or autism really a “superpower,” or does that framing obscure important weaknesses and support needs? Do autistic people actually lack empathy, and what is the difference between cognitive and affective empathy?
Jonathan Machnee is an autistic researcher who has conducted the largest English language ethnographic study of Christians and ex-Christian autistics. His research has included data mining over 26,000 autistic adults and conducting over 500 interviews with autistic Christians and ex-Christians in order to understand the unique intersection between autism and the practice of Christianity.
Links:
John's Twitter

John's Substack

Staff
Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director
Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant
Music
Broke for Free
Josh Woodward
Lee Rosevere
Quiet Music for Tiny Robots
wowamusic
zapsplat.com
Affiliates
Clearer Thinking
GuidedTrack
Mind Ease
Positly
UpLift

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Why is producing meat so inefficient? How does animal agriculture contribute to hunger and malnutrition? How large are the environmental costs of meat production? How does industrial animal agriculture increase the risk of antibiotic resistance and future pandemics? Would organic or free-range farming solve these problems? What are the biggest sources of suffering for animals on factory farms? Why do people who oppose animal cruelty continue to buy factory-farmed meat? Why does meat consumption keep rising around the world despite decades of advocacy encouraging people to eat less of it? What exactly are plant-based and cultivated meat, and how are they made? Could cultivated meat eventually become a one-to-one replacement for conventional meat? What scientific and engineering problems still need to be solved? Why did plant-based meat attract so much excitement before its growth began to stall? What did companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat get right, and what challenges remain? Why has cultivated-meat research developed differently from plant-based-meat research? Could government funding accelerate alternative meat in the same way public investment helped technologies like renewable energy, electric vehicles, penicillin, and mRNA? And what would it take for alternative meat to finally reach price and taste parity with conventional meat?
Bruce Friedrich is co-founder and president of The Good Food Institute (GFI), a Y Combinator funded non-profit that promotes plant-based and cultivated meat. He is also a co-founder of the alternative protein venture capital firm New Crop Capital.
Links:
Bruce's New Book: Meat
The Good Food Institute
Staff
Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director
Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant
Music
Broke for Free
Josh Woodward
Lee Rosevere
Quiet Music for Tiny Robots
wowamusic
zapsplat.com
Affiliates
Clearer Thinking
GuidedTrack
Mind Ease
Positly
UpLift

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Read the full transcript here.
What makes an attachment to AI meaningfully different from an attachment to a human, animal, or fictional character? If chatbot relationships are built around validation and adaptation, can they ever provide the friction and otherness that make human relationships opportunities for growth? Does a relationship need reciprocity to be genuine, or can an asymmetrical relationship still be deeply valuable? How would the possibility of AI sentience change the moral status of human relationships with artificial companions? When a company controls the personality of something a user loves, how much power does that company gain over the user? Why might emotional attachment create an internality that ordinary consumer protections are poorly equipped to handle? Can a freemium business model ever be compatible with healthy AI companionship when emotional dependency itself drives engagement? Where is the line between comforting validation and reinforcing distorted beliefs or harmful emotional patterns? How should an AI distinguish between respecting someone's subjective experience and helping them question a potentially false interpretation of reality? If people increasingly turn to systems optimized around their own preferences, what forms of compromise, disagreement, and personal growth might they lose?
Claire is an Assistant Professor in Technology Law and AI Governance at the European University Institute School of Transnational Governance and a Visiting Research Associate at the Cordell Institute of the Washington University School of Law.
Links:
Claire Previously Founded Successif

Spencer's Permanent Instructions for LLMs

Staff
Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director
Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead
WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant
Music
Broke for Free
Josh Woodward
Lee Rosevere
Quiet Music for Tiny Robots
wowamusic
zapsplat.com
Affiliates
Clearer Thinking
GuidedTrack
Mind Ease
Positly
UpLift

[Read more]