​Sober, risk-averse, rational businessmen make great captains of industry—in established industries which someone else already built. But the new industries which drive progress come from wild half-mad ideologues. This lecture covers the psychology of the men behind the major breakthroughs, from the steam engine to the large language model.

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Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor cover bureaucracy—why the golden age of bureaucracies worked so well in the early 20th century, how bureaucratic class interest overcomes checks and balances, and bureaucracy’s role in today’s Western governments.

Richard Ngo argues against Wolf Tivy’s xenohumanism lecture. What is the moral ground for cooperation and hierarchy? We need the answer to build a good society today, or to build a good AI future tomorrow.

The long-awaited Marko Jukic episode. We all expect AGI to colonize the stars because it’s the obvious thing any healthy expanding system does naturally. So why aren’t we? Marko explains the elaborate cope keeping us on Earth.

The internet can feel like a part of the landscape, but all our software was intelligently designed—and so were the social systems which produce that software. Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute tells Ben Landau-Taylor about the struggle to define “open source software”.

​Our concepts of “humanity” and “humanitarianism” are usually taken as the eternal bedrock of morality. Today, artificial intelligence raises the prospect of “posthumanity”, and magnates and regulators discuss what “humanity should do” about this. But in fact, the concept of “humanity” is a relatively recent and flimsy creation of the postwar political order. We need to abandon it to find our place in the future.

Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy discuss the forces raising our civilization higher vs the forces pulling it down. Is techno-industrial progress made of social and intellectual components which will take it down when they go, or can it weather the decay?

Joscha Bach and Wolf Tivy discuss how consciousness may be a convergent strategy for organizing both human and machine minds, whether powerful AI minds will resolve conflicts by merging or by fighting each other, and much more.

In 1572 twelve Dutch cities - less than a million people - began a war for independence against a global superpower and won. Over the next century they went toe-to-toe with the Spanish, English, and French and built the institutions which have defined the modern world. Jonathan Wallis explains how.

Intellectual activity, like any complex activity, can only take place in a rich social fabric. Jonathan Wallis and Ben Landau-Taylor talk about how to build community and why it’s worthwhile.

Scientific breakthroughs are much rarer today than the glory days of the early 1900s. Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor discuss how the WWII-era centralization of science divorced theorists from the ideological—if not outright mystical—cult of Truth.

Philosophers talk of aligning AI to “human values”. This supposes there is no objective value, only the arbitrary values that humans happened to land on. Ginevra Davis and Wolf Tivy argue there is a deeper well of value in material reality.

Oliver Habryka joins Wolf Tivy to tell how he revived LessWrong after it nearly died, built the Lighthaven campus, and launched his $35m/quarter project to reform grantmaking.

Jonathan Wallis and Wolf Tivy cover the role of passion in intellectual inquiry. The academy’s sin is that its people have lost their passion, content to go through the motions. With passion, the work comes alive—but this upsets careers and institutions.

Every civilization is defined by its economic engine—the social system that accumulates wealth, and reinvests in the production of further wealth. The development and decay of its economic engine drives a civilization’s rise and fall.

Stephen Pimentel and Wolf Tivy discuss Homer. If Odysseus reveals his power level too soon, the suitors will kill him. To take back his home, he needs metis (μῆτις): practical intelligence under duress. Today's would-be reformers need metis as well.

Rachel Wallis is pregnant with her highest-IQ embryo, with a 99.99th percentile polygenic IQ score. She and Wolf Tivy discuss what this means, and how in the 20th century our concept of "humanity" narrowed into an ideological straitjacket.

Many say computers have transformed society as deeply as the advent of industry. While computers are powerful, they have not reordered the fundamental basis of society. Ben Landau-Tylor and Wolf Tivy cover the history.

Max Dmitrienko and Wolf Tivy take on glory. From the ancient Greeks to the posthuman machine gods, some achievements are remembered because they show truths about how the world works and the challenges of coordination.

Ben Landau-Taylor and Wolf Tivy deal with industrial growth. Standard economic theories model growth as continuous marginal improvements, and seek stability. Schumpeter explains growth is a destructive "history of revolutions" which cause chaos.