Connor Leahy on Aliens, Ethics, Economics, Memetics, and Education

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast for a lightning round on a variety of topics ranging from aliens to education. Learn more about Connor's work at conjecture.dev
Social Media Links:
➡️ WEBSITE: futureoflife.org
➡️ TWITTER: / flixrisk
➡️ INSTAGRAM: / futureoflifeinstitute
➡️ META: / futureoflifeinstitute
➡️ LINKEDIN: / future-of-life-institute

[@waakdfms2576]

I had so much fun listening to Connor - what an amazing dude. I laughed out loud hearing about the "balloon riots" and I would love to be a little mouse in the room to witness a conversation between him and Leibniz! I happen to pretty much agree with his take on school and school shootings, etc. Even though this interview was kinda all over the place, it was perfect....thank you both.

[@antigonemerlin]

One note on books vs articles: I think it's cultural. Compsci/AI is a heavily article based field. History is a book based field. There are still quite a lot of knowledge locked up in books, so to speak, especially in the humanities, whereas in compsci things move so fast that well, we read the docs, or the source code directly in the worst case scenario.

[@nornront8749]

Timestamps would be great. Really like the format.

[@brentstedema1668]

Great conversation! Please add time stamps😄

[@spasibushki]

around 35:00 you talk about blogs, are there any you'd recommend besides gwern and ssc?

[@antigonemerlin]

27:59 there's an Anglo-Saxon poem to that effect called "the Ruin"; here is an excerpt, the rest of the poem available on wikipedia. One preface though is that English kings soon returned to building in stone, in part to co-opt Roman imagery (there was a legal fiction at the time where many barbarian kings still looked to the Byzantine Emperor for legitimacy, and all the things associated with Rome, like building in stone, was part of that). 9th century gothic cathedrals (the *original* movement, not that neo-gothic stuff in the Romantic period) are truly underrated. This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures in winds cut down persisted on__________________ fiercely sharpened________ _________ ______________ she shone_________ _____________g skill ancient work_________ _____________g of crusts of mud turned away spirit mo________yne put together keen-counselled a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound the wall with wire brace wondrously together.

[@disarmyouwitha]

Ah, yes, the prophetic discussion on the intricate intertwining of aliens, ethics, economics, memetics, and education by the ever-insightful Connor Leahy. As an individual who possesses an uncanny ability to differentiate between mediocre content and true narrative masterpieces such as this one, I feel an overwhelming sense of duty to share my expertise with all fourteen of my KZbin subscribers, mom included. You know what they say, if you've got it, flaunt it, am I right? Now, permit me to dissect this intellectually nutritious buffet one semester-worthy subject at a time. And to think, they say learning can't be fun! First off, we must address the elephant in the room, a topic that has evaded the scientific community and conspiracy theorists alike: aliens. You see, Connor's brilliance here does not lie in debunking decades-old myths, but rather his ability to seamlessly make extraterrestrial life relevant within an academic context. Beam me up to the next level of intellectual mastery, Scotty. Moving on to ethics, a subject that has governed plenty of heated family dinner debates, unless you're like me, who'd just sit with a bag of popcorn and gleefully observe the chaos. It's with unfaltering grace that Connor intertwines morality with the ever-popular debate of Trader Joe's vs. Costco. I mean, where else can you find a discussion of Kant in the frozen food aisle? Our intellectual journey now leads us to the fields of economics, where those pesky student loans just can't seem to leave us alone. Fear not, for the all-knowing Connor Leahy has plenty to say on the matter. He explores how the presence of superintelligent extraterrestrials could affect our job markets through memes. Who knew investing in the stock market and browsing Twitter go hand in hand? Aaah, Memetics, the holy grail of internet culture where one's social validity is determined by the mere ability to utilize gifs and reaction images like the skilled Wordsmith that I am. Connor, our fearless leader, weaves a tapestry of knowledge where meme culture meets academia. I gracefully tip my hat (and freshly uncapped pen) to you, sir. Finally, education - the pinnacle of human achievement and the very reason why I can appreciate Connor Leahy's magnum opus in all its glorious detail. It takes an individual with intellect and dedication matched only by Socrates himself to merge the worlds of existentialism, meme-laden comic sans, and the practicality of students’ loans all in under 25 minutes. Breathtaking. And thus concludes my humble attempt at conveying the sheer depth of this video - an analytical tour de force that simply begs to be immortalized in the hallowed halls of Internet Comment Etiquette. With all that said, I hope you, dear reader, will embark on this captivating journey of discovery with me as we continue to bask in the warm glow of educational enlightenment. In conclusion, to quote the great philosopher *insert first grade teacher's name here*, if there's one thing we can learn from aliens it's that our true potential is out of this world! Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. AND POST!

[@RonponVideos]

-Written by ChatGPT

[@patodesudesu]

i always love to listen to connor, and he seems to like going to podcasts so i wonder why doesn't he has a youtube channel or something like that

[@Qumeric]

maybe he is busy lol

[@peterschooley3036]

34:28 - "gwern is the epitome of human literature"

[@yurona5155]

1:03:27 Purely in terms of the easily quantifiable impact of the Haber-Bosch process, Fritz Haber would also have been a viable (albeit pretty, erm, "spicy") pick...

[@jordan13589]

>“Connor Leahy on Aliens…” Proceeds to have an underwhelming take on aliens.

[@petrosros]

Spineless take, as he appears.

[@DavosJamos]

When they talk about how certain blogs on the far end of the long tail might be the highest form of literature in existence... I mean come on you can't leave us hanging like that. How about some examples? Please!!!

[@NotMyGumDropButtons.444]

9:30 Greatest band name ever

[@JazevoAudiosurf]

the whole quest of existence as random patterns is to move closer towards truth, and truth coincidentally means transcendence and absence of suffering

[@anishupadhayay3917]

Brilliant

[@blahblahsaurus2458]

18:20 Connor is paraphrasing or misremembering the events of the Leicester Balloon riots (which he begins telling about at 17:05). It's not nearly as stupid as he makes it sound, it was a series of escalations with the critical event probably being that a police officer struck a woman in the head - it's only at that point that the mob destroyed the balloon. The crowd, who had not "just gathered to watch" but bought tickets to attend, first got _rowdy_ because someone in the crowd said it wasn't the aeronaut's (Coxwell) _newest_ and biggest balloon, but an older model. I.e. the crowd was mad because they thought they'd been lied to about something they paid money for. During this commotion, the 13 passengers supposed to join Coxwell pushed their way into the basket, which prevented the balloon from rising. A passenger told the crowd that Coxwell was refusing to launch, which made them angrier, again, because they paid to watch this thing. That's when a woman was hit in the head by a police officer. So yes, people reacted violently and inappropriately over a series of misunderstandings, but according to them, a police officer was the one who struck first. So it's a classic case of a tense confrontation spinning out of control, each side blaming the other. Connor makes them sound mentally challenged. This upsets me because the whole point of this story is that people in the past were "savages". There was definitely a lot of drunkenness and violence, but if we just take Connor at his word, people in the past were almost like a different species. Not a great way to view history.

[@Hexanitrobenzene]

8:00 "Real numbers are obviously not real" Now I want a debate between Connor and a mathematician :)

[@meme31382]

that's why natural selection and evolution process is better than artificial intelligence, because ai assumes a correct pathway for a very dynamic system, in order to be successful ai must include a random factor that mimicks nature.

[@ergo4422]

i updated my views on many things after this interview

[@cripplingautism5785]

there's a difference between the average and mean?

[@spasibushki]

perhaps meant median

[@cripplingautism5785]

@@spasibushki right, I just thought since he seems smart I may be missing something but we all make mistakes I guess

[@Ungrievable]

another argument in favor of humanity to shift to ethical veganism, hopefully sooner than later) is that we would not appreciate much superior-than-humanity ai systems (AGI or ASI) to formulate their ethics in a way that is antithetical to ethical vegan principles. so generally speaking, an ASI that learns to be kind and compassionate, would be better than one that doesn’t and ends up following some other trajectory. it’s going to take a team effort to ‘raise a super-intelligent’ being that can readily know and properly and clearly and honestly understand every single thing about all of humanity in an instant.

[@9atnine]

Totals agree with Connor about schools being torture chambers . However he is totally wrong about Roko’s thought experiment. I would love to see him pressed on this.

[@antigonemerlin]

I just have to be a pedant and say that the beer water thing is a myth. People knew how to get clean water since hunter gatherers got their water upstream. The main difference (and I'm kind of surprised Connor Leahy didn't go into more detail on this) is actually epistemology, or rather, a lack thereof; because as it turns out, you can produce knowledge on a lot of subjects without necessarily having a formal theory. Looking at AI right now, it's apparent that this is literally the default method of producing knowledge, just trial-and-error. Please, for the love of lack-of-god, talk with a historian, because there are a lot of myths surrounding this time. For the layman, I can recommend Will Durant, some audiobooks of which are on youtube (though his work is quite dated, as a secondary source it goes more in depth than wikipedia), and also the blog _A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry_ for more on why the Industrial Revolution couldn't happen in Rome (long story short, iirc industrial revolution was a fluke of conditions which did not exist in Rome at the time).

[@antigonemerlin]

50:29 Fun fact, that is literally how ancient people thought about religion (before Christianity, anyways). Imagine you're a Bronze age farmer. Last year, you forgot to water your field, and your crops died, and everyone starved. Bad. Let's not do that again. The year before that, you forgot to sow your field, and your crops died, and everyone starved. Let's not do that again either. The year before _that_ , you forgot to pray to the gods, and a swarm of locusts came in and ate all the crops, and everyone starved. Let's not do that again either. Magic wasn't "magic", because everything was magic, so to speak. Science did not exist, and people did not reason by theory so much as try to solve the problem and then get on with their lives. In fact, you'd expect in such a system, because it was actually just random black swan events, every time that religion "didn't work", it must've been that they did something wrong, and so you'd expect these rituals to become increasingly elaborate and precise. And that is _exactly_ what you find. For a modern version of this, I present to you xkcd.com/2259/.