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unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Greg La Blanc

  • 44 minutes 55 seconds
    482. The Origin of Humanity’s Musical Abilities with Michael Spitzer

    While many species in the world make music, humans have a unique musical ability. In some ways, music might even define what it means to be human. But how did we become so musical? And what is it about humans that sets our music apart from the music found in nature? 

    Michael Spitzer is a professor of music at the University of Liverpool and the author of the book, The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, which explores mankind’s ability to synthesize rhythm, melody, and culture throughout history and why music is fundamental to our humanity. 

    Michael and Greg discuss when and how music became an intrinsic part of human life, the changing role of music from a participatory activity to its present-day passive consumption, and the implications of technological advancements in music creation.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Are we losing the value of music?

    43:32: Music should do much more than just relax you. It should make you think and make you feel more alive. The ubiquity means we, it says, as available now as water and air, and it's become cheapened. If you were born on Beethoven's day, you would be lucky to hear a symphony twice in your lifetime. And when you did, it was special because most of the time, you were in silence, and we've lost silence. So, it's swings and roundabouts. We have this fantastic availability all the time, everywhere, everything now, but it means we don't value it very much anymore.

    Why is music spiritual?

    21:01: Why is music spiritual? It's because you can't see it. Unlike vision, it is out there when you see an object. You have this external objectification of that source. But with music and sound, it's inside you, and ontology, or the experience of sound, that is, it's internal or inside your mind, and you can't see it. So, it's intrinsically related to spirituality. It's invisible; it's ineffable; it's interior; it's linked to contemplation, meditation, and prayer. So it makes sense that music evolved, side by side, hand in hand with spirituality.

    Music as the ultimate mimic of emotion and movement

    19:23: You can't separate the feeling from the ethology—the ethological dimension of the emotion. How do you get from there into music? Well, I hear music as a gesture. Even though you don't see anything, it's invisible. I mean, there may not even be any words. It could be a jazz improvisation or a string quartet. Music evokes a sense of emotion, of something virtual, in a virtual landscape, moving and gesturing. And also a sense of voice. There may not be a lyric, there may not be a human voice, but a violin or a guitar can definitely evoke a sense of voice. So you've got your voice, your gesture, your action, your movement, and all the ingredients of behavior and emotional behavior. And music is incredibly eloquent in communicating emotional behavior. In short, music is like a mimic, like a great impressionist.

    Is music really universal?

    24:55: I don't mean that music is universal. Our propensity and our capacity for music are universal. We're born into a culture, and then this is why every musical culture has different vocabularies, different scales, different instruments, and different vocal types.

    21 November 2024, 1:10 pm
  • 52 minutes 34 seconds
    481. The Science and Philosophy of Economics with Erik Angner

    How do economics play into solving major global issues like pandemics, climate change, or inequality?

    Erik Angner is a professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and the author of How Economics Can Save the World: Simple Ideas to Solve Our Biggest Problems. He’s a rare kind of philosopher of science – while most focus on natural sciences, Erik studies social sciences like economics. 

    In this episode, Erik and Greg discuss why philosophers have not given more attention to social sciences, how economics is not just a discipline but a methodology, and why economists should be more involved when it comes to solving the world’s issues. 

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Why don’t people recognize the consensus in economics?

    45:42: There's a real sort of illiteracy when it comes to economics. We see it in policy questions. We also see it on the private level. So, overwhelmingly, if you ask people questions about interest rates and inflation or whatever, across the world, like, large shares of the population don't understand these concepts, and what that means is that majorities of the population don't have the skills required to make the kind of decisions that they have to make as a citizen of a modern rich country in terms of like choosing mortgages, choosing credit cards, saving for the future, planning for retirement, and so on. We have a system now that requires people to make decisions they're not equipped to make, and that strikes me as a massive problem that we really ought to be doing something about. And it's connected because if people learned more about one, they would maybe learn more about the other.

    How does interdisciplinary research drive economic progress?

    21:01: There's something interesting that happens when you come from another discipline into economics or whatever: you notice blind spots—you bring your own blind spots. But they might be corrected, and then you begin to see opportunities for progress that people within the community might not have seen.

    Why economics can’t ignore values

    07:44: For the longest time, economists imagined that they could proceed without any sort of attention to values. The thought was that economics is a science, that science requires us to ignore values, and that to the extent that values enter into our work, the work is thereby deficient in some way. But that picture is gone. It's gone, broadly speaking, in the philosophy of science, and economists themselves have come to appreciate that we have to engage with values in order to do the kind of work that we need to do as economists. [08:48] To the extent that economists are building things and designing things—designing markets and institutions and auctions and retirement systems and healthcare systems and all sorts of things—we sort of have to begin with a picture of the end goal. What are we trying to build here? What do we want our healthcare system to look like? And that's a question of values. You can't pretend that that's something you can settle by means of data alone.

    18 November 2024, 4:03 pm
  • 54 minutes 53 seconds
    480. Beyond IQ: The Real Measure of Wisdom feat. David Robson

    What are the true natures of intelligence and wisdom, and how do they play off each other in sometimes surprising ways? What are the best ways to mitigate our many biases, and what factors create the placebo and nocebo effects?

    David Robson is a prolific journalist, a former editor at New Scientist, and the author of the books The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World, and The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes.

    Greg and David discuss how intelligence isn't always correlated with wise decision-making, the potential flaws in educational systems, and the crucial role of critical thinking. They also explore how mindset impacts health and learning, touching on topics like cognitive biases and rationality, and dissect the placebo and nocebo effects. 

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Are we reflexively pessimistic?

    41:06: I think a lot of us are reflexively pessimistic in our lives because we think: you expect the worst, and then anything that's better than that will bring you joy. But actually, by expecting the worst through these expectation effects, you might actually be bringing about the worst. It could actually be changing the outcome so that a positive outcome is less likely. So being pessimistic is not rational; it's not as smart as we think it's going to be. But I'm not saying we should be like Pollyanna and just try to pretend that all of these difficulties in our lives don't exist. I think we need to be in that sweet middle ground, where we're remaining open-minded to all of the possibilities.

    Embracing discomfort

    43:06: We don't always have to catastrophise things that feel uncomfortable, because sometimes the discomfort is part of what makes them so powerful.

    On motivated reasoning

    13:38: When we measure something like IQ, it does seem to be related to the efficiency of the brain's networks in some ways. So it is helping the brain to process information more quickly, which can be a big advantage when you're learning something new and complex or when you have to make very rapid decisions. But what it doesn't protect you from is the things that we spoke about. So all of those biases doesn't necessarily mean that you're any more likely to consider a piece of evidence fairly rather than just allowing your preconceptions to cloud your judgment. The big problem is that once you have made those mistakes, you then have your intelligence to rationalize and justify the conclusion that you've come to. That's a process called motivated reasoning, and I think that's really behind this idea of the intelligence trap.

    Can we use other people to counter our biases?

    52:55: It's great to have someone who is a real optimist, is always looking on the bright side, and is always thinking big. But you do want someone—not someone who is pessimistic and is always going to drag everyone down. But you want someone who's realistic and is asking those difficult questions. And they're going to say, "Well, you have these big dreams, but here are the ten challenges that we're going to have to overcome before we get there." So you absolutely want to have those different perspectives. And teams full of one or the other would not work. If you have someone who's only looking at the challenges, they will be less ambitious and maybe produce more mediocre projects. If you have people who are blindly optimistic, well, they're going to overlook some really important challenge that is ultimately going to lead to failure unless you preempt it and plan for it. So that's why I think we can use other people to counter some of our own biases.

    14 November 2024, 1:00 pm
  • 52 minutes 54 seconds
    479. The Birth of Civilizations: Unpacking a 4,000-Year Global History feat. Josephine Quinn

    At what point did the concept of civilization and civilizations emerge? In what ways  do we know that societies were mingling and exchanging ideas and objects with each other? How were the Crusades responsible for our culture’s current sugar obsession?

    Josephine Quinn is a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford, and the author of several books, including her latest work How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History and also In Search of the Phoenicians.

    Greg and Josephine discuss the challenges and insights from piecing together 4,000 years of global history, and digging into the concept of 'civilizational thinking' and its origins. Josephine explains how civilizations intertwine through war, trade, and cultural exchange, and also highlights how modern perspectives shape our understanding of past human interactions. They also discuss the subject of another of Josephine’s books and unpack the significant yet often misunderstood impact of Phoenicians and other early civilizations on today's world.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Tracing the roots of civilizational thinking 

    10:52: One of the things I really want people to take away from my book is that war is one of the most effective modes of communication that people have. But all the same, depended on fundamental notion of similarity between peoples. [11:36] But around 1500, what's happening with this European expansion is to me, a very radical change in that, at the same time as Europeans are engaging in mass conversions to Christianity overseas, they're expelling the significant Jewish and Muslim populations from Europe itself. And so, it's creating a, sort of, us and them situation. Basically for the first time, a significant scale, I mean, things like that happen on a smaller scale and throughout history in all societies but I think this is really, in terms of a global history, something really quite new. And so, to me, it is the roots of that civilizational thinking that gets fully articulated a few hundred years later, starting in the 18th century. 

    The idea of continents is fictional and is used by other geographers to create divisions in their works. 

    17:01: The idea of continents is a fascinating one to me. It goes back, in fact, to ancient Greek-speaking scientists who are working on the coast of what's now Turkey, very much in touch with what was going on in the big intellectual centers of antiquity, like Babylon, with Egyptian scientists, and so on. But we don't have any evidence that anybody else thought about the world in terms of continents. But they invented it with some geographers, and it was a kind of label. It wasn't a sort of major concept. One of my favorite commentaries is by another Greek historian, Herodotus. I say Greek-speaking. He also was from Anatolia, grew up in Persian lands, but he says, Well, people say that there are these three continents, and they're all named after women: Europa, Asia, Libya, [the] Greek term for what we now say—Africa, but I think this is nonsense. I mean, people don't even know where they begin and end. And, of course, that's right. I mean, some continents exist. The America exists. Australia exists. But Europe, Asia, and Africa?

    Why do people care about the heterogeneity of origins of things in the modern world?

    43:05 This is the big question, isn't it? Do people have an investment in the idea of a pure West that is facing pollution or even replacement from the outside right now? I think it's the same kind of question. And I think part of it is just that that's an easier way to think. It offers certainty. I think certainty is a terribly attractive thing but the problem is that human history isn't certain. It's fuzzy and complicated and if there's one thing that I would love people who read this book to think harder about, it's the idea of heritage. I think heritage is often seen as a very positive thing in the world today. But actually, I feel like there's a danger that people invest in a collective past at the expense of a collective present. And that, I think, is quite dangerous. But it is much easier to read things than it is to have conversations.

    The idea of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations as two separate cultures is a historical typo.

    The whole idea of Minoan and Mycenaean are basically just two rival labels of two basically warring groups of archaeologists about exactly the same thing. It's like a historical typo that people now think of them as different.

    11 November 2024, 1:58 pm
  • 52 minutes 26 seconds
    478. The Neuroscience of Perception: Exploring Self, Social Conformity, and Animal Cognition feat. Gregory Berns

    What does the sense of self give humans over other animals, and how do our storytelling instincts set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom? What can be learned about humans and animals by training a dog to allow humans to scan its brain with an MRI machine?

    Gregory Berns is a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of several books, including Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent—and Reinvent—Our Identities, and his most recent work, Cowpuppy: An Unexpected Friendship and a Scientist’s Journey into the Secret World of Cows.

    Greg and Gregory discuss the complex interplay between self-perception, social influence, and animal behavior. Referring to his work in The Self Delusion, Gregory delves into how our brains construct and reconstruct our identities, influenced by both sensory information and social pressures. Gregory used brain imaging and machine learning to study conformity, the psychological impacts of social media, and the balancing act between primal instincts and modern life. They also dive into the evolution of human storytelling compared to animal communication, Gregory’s groundbreaking MRI research on dogs, and the deep connections formed through living on a farm and working with cows. This insightful episode also touches on the philosophical and theological questions around human behavior, aiming to provide a holistic understanding of the underlying neuroscience and psychology.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Human life is telling stories

    30:16: We're all storytellers, even if you write scientific papers. Ultimately, it's still a story where you do an experiment, you collect data, and yes, I guess at some level, we're testing hypotheses, but most scientific papers these days are not about that, to be honest. Most are more in the exploratory sense, where we're doing experiment because we want to understand something about the world. We might have an idea about it, but it's usually much more nuanced. And then you do the experiment, doesn't turn out the way you expect it. And then it's like, well, what happened? So you tell a story about what you think happened and what it means. And I think, ultimately, that is all that human life is. It is us telling stories, because if it weren't that, then we're not that much different than bees and all the other animals that I study, but we clearly are. 

    Stories go beyond the current state of the art in terms of predictive models

    31:38: We tell stories to ourselves and to each other to have meaning in our lives. It's not the case that the machine is ever going to care about what's meaningful. So, I do think that meaning, in and of itself, has value to humans that has yet to be captured in any kind of computer model.

    Are preferences endogenous or constructed?

    07:36: I think we tend to fool ourselves a little bit in that our preferences are endogenous because it comes back to us thinking about us thinking. It’s like, okay, well, I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate ice cream. Well, has it always been that way? I don’t know. Or is it just something that I have come to believe out of habit, and it’s not necessarily the case—or that it even changes based on the circumstance?

    Why the most meaningful experiences are often the most uncomfortable

    20:52: I've written a bit about the ways that we might get around that, and one of the ways is novel experiences. The thing about novel experiences is that they're anxiety-provoking—unless, I mean, for the minority of people who thrive on that. For most people, they like the status quo; they like the comfort of things being predictable, and things being unpredictable causes a great deal of anxiety. Even though, if you ask pretty much everyone, the most memorable experiences in their life, the things they think most fondly of, are probably the things that were most difficult, and the things that initially did cause all that anxiety or were uncomfortable. The things that we, as humans, attach meaning to are the things that are meaningful because they're difficult.

    7 November 2024, 5:21 pm
  • 52 minutes 22 seconds
    477. Cultivating Creativity: The Vital Role of Art in Education and Personal Growth feat. Will Gompertz

    How does art influence our perception of the world? Can fostering creativity in education lead to overall personal happiness and growth? What lessons can be drawn from historical and modern art practices?

    Will Gompertz is the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and the author of several books, including What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art, Think Like an Artist: How to Live a Happier, Smarter, More Creative Life, and most recently See What You're Missing.

    Greg and Will discuss the transformative power of art as a tool for self-help and critical engagement. Will analyzes the impact of creativity in education, emphasizing the need for a balanced curriculum that fosters both artistic and analytical thinking. Greg and Will talk about some key figures in the modern art world such as Pierre Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp, who serve as examples of revolutionary artists that challenged the status quo. Will and Greg also explore new ways to look at the importance of teaching art in schools, and how supportive environments in schools and workplaces, like those fostered under leaders like Satya Nadella, can enhance curiosity and innovation. 

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Why is art considered self-help?

    01:18: I think art is self-help. I think art is self-help by the artist when he or she is trying to express themselves. It's self-help for us as viewers when we're trying to commune with this idea, this thing which has been put before us and asked us to consider it. And so, I think actually for this sort of the crazy world we live in now, museums, galleries, art, the arts more broadly, are the sanest things that are available to us, where humans are thinking and sharing and considering and challenging and sharing their feelings in a way that seems to be completely disappearing from everyday life, which seems to be getting more hectic, more insular, more anxiety-ridden. So actually, I think the arts are an entity, a form of self-help for all involved.

    Creativity and asking questions make us human

    07:05: Creativity and asking questions are what make us human. Therefore, when we're doing that, we're at our most human; we're feeling the life force at its most powerful. 

    On creating safe spaces for self-discovery in schools

    17:56: School should be a place of self-discovery, friendship, community, and expression, not somewhere which feels like an army drill camp; where you get shouted at and told to sit still, sit still, then sit still. But why don't you want to sit still? So we start asking questions and start creating environments where young people feel respected and safe.

    Do people need to set aside some time for the consumption of art?

    53:45: Human beings have created art in one way, shape, or form since the very first person walked on this earth. And we will continue to create art until the very last person walks on this earth. It (art) is an essential part of the human experience. Therefore, we should all be given the time and space to enjoy.

    4 November 2024, 1:00 pm
  • 37 minutes
    476. AI's Potential for Positive Social Change feat. Juan M. Lavista Ferres

    AI is a fast-growing field full of potential insights, challenges, and ethical implications for its users and the world. How can the people behind the machines explore the ways to use AI and data technology to leverage societal benefits?

    Juan M. Lavista Ferres is the Corporate Vice President and Chief Data Scientist of the AI for Good Lab at Microsoft. He also co-authored the book AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health.

    Greg and Juan discuss Juan's book 'AI for Good,' various AI projects, and the critical role of data labeling. They also discuss philanthropic initiatives from Microsoft, the transformative impact of robust data collection, and the challenges of applying AI to real-world problems. 

    Juan covers innovations like GPT and Seeing AI, as well as the ethical concerns of open access to AI models, and Satya Nadella's leadership transformation at Microsoft. Listen in for insights into the importance of using AI responsibly, collaborative efforts for accurate data processing, and how AI technology can actually enhance real lives.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    On deciding which ai-driven projects are worth doing

    12:26: We first ask the questions like, can we solve it through AI? Not a lot of problems can be solved from AI. There's a small portion of them that can be solved with AI. From those problems, does the data exist? Is the data of good quality? And sometimes the answer is no. Even if the data exists, do we have access to the data? Can we get access to the data? We will usually work on the partners' data sets, not our data sets, meaning that the data set will not leave the partners, but sometimes there's no way to have a data-sharing agreement in place, where it makes it impossible to share the data. Once we have that part, the next question is, do we have the right partner? We are not subject matter experts on the point that we work. We are subject matter experts on AI, but if we're working with pancreatic cancer, we need, on the other side, a group of people that are experts on pancreatic cancer, for example. In that case, we try to partner with people who are subject matter experts and are world-renowned.

    Data needs to be representative

    19:55: Data is a fundamental part. I would say the majority of the success or failure will happen because of the data set, and investing in understanding the data set—making sure that there's no bias—is a critical part of the work. It's tough; it's difficult. Data needs to be representative.

    What are the do’s and don’ts for companies looking to launch initiatives for good?

    36:40: I would love more companies. So, this is something that we discussed with my team. Whenever we see other competitors creating something like we do, we feel proud because that would be a success for us in many ways. So I would encourage everybody to use that technology for good. That's something that I think is certainly worth the do's and don'ts; I think it's important to make sure that this organization remains clear that its objective is on the noncommercial part of the philanthropic aspect of the company because, within this organization, the objective is to be helping society and making it clear for the people that are working there. That is something that is helping us a lot. Our end goal is to help society, and I think I would encourage other companies to do it.

    Is there a possibility of a zero bug project?

    21:09: Some of these problems require people to really ask the question: how is this model going to be used correctly? And that takes experience. More importantly, I think it's crucial that in many of these cases, we need to be ready to find those problems and fix them, correct? And I think that this is like software development in many ways. The chances of having a zero-bug project are zero, correct? Projects that have zero bugs are projects that people don't use. What I think is important as an organization is to find those problems, be proactive in trying to find them, and be really fast in solving them.

    31 October 2024, 1:16 pm
  • 44 minutes 27 seconds
    475. Unraveling The History of Economic Crises with Harold James

    How have economic crises throughout history shaped the relationships between nations? Which crises had a hand in wars and major global conflicts? 

    Harold James is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University. His recent book, Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization examines major economic upheavals from the 1840s to modern day. 

    Greg and Harold chat about the concept of a crisis and its evolution, the delicate nature of interconnected economies, and how the World Wars contributed to hyperinflation or exchange rate stability and continue to impact economic policy today. 

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    From isolation to innovation lessons from the 1840s and 1970s

    41:07: In the longer run, it seems to me that the pattern that I saw in the 1840s and the 1970s, that the longer-term reaction to a supply shock is actually to open up more. And the 1970s had exactly that. First of all, it's turning inward to the thinking that we can do it ourselves in all the big economies. And then an awareness that the most successful economies had actually not done that, turning in on themselves, but had remained open and had allowed themselves, as a consequence, to innovate. 

    The 1840s crisis paves the way for a new era

    04:05: The crisis of the 1840s generated something in the 1850s that brought the world into a new era, and it's really an era where the Marxist diagnosis gets less and less appropriate.

    Understanding demand and supply shocks

    27:50: The 2008 shock was really best thought of as a negative demand shock that was the consequence of a financial panic, a contagious financial panic. The 2020 shock was a negative supply shock. It has analogies with previous negative supply shocks, but can't be handled in the way that you deal with the absence of a demand shock in the wake of a financial crisis. So the way in which people might have dealt more effectively with the Great Depression and did deal quite effectively with the Great Financial Crisis, the Great Recession, whatever you like to call the 2008 story. And so the fiscal stabilization is much bigger in 2020 than it was in 2008, but really inappropriately so. So it pushes more inflation in these moments of demand shocks. You just want more demand. When it's a supply shock, you need a specific kind of good or commodity.

    28 October 2024, 1:00 pm
  • 47 minutes 7 seconds
    474. Common Sense in the Discourse on Sex and Gender feat. Doriane Lambelet Coleman

    With sex and gender becoming such politicized and polarizing issues recently, what’s a common sense approach to sorting through all the information to better understand the issues at hand? How have different struggles for equal rights throughout history shaped and informed these common-sense positions?

    Doriane Lambelet Coleman is a professor at Duke Law School, specializing in scholarship on women, sports, children and law. She is also the author of On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach and Fixing Columbine: The Challenge to American Liberalism.

    Greg and Doriane discuss the evolving landscape of sex and gender, highlighting the shift from traditional binary definitions to more inclusive yet controversial perspectives. Doriane advocates for a balanced, evidence-based approach that recognizes both biological differences and the rights of transgender individuals. The conversation also touches on the legal implications of defining sex and gender and the socio-political dynamics that shape current debates. 

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    Balancing trans rights while acknowledging the reality of sex

    46:59: Trans people, including trans women, of course, have every right to the same dignity and respect as anyone else, and certainly, equal protection should attach to everyone, including trans people. I don't think we can resolve the impasses without recognizing the difference between sex and gender. I think that we can have trans rights, but not by way of denying sex. In other words, the strategy that requires sex blindness in order to achieve rights for trans people is not going to work for a lot of females. And so, leaving the political right aside that doesn't want to see any gender diversity and working with people who want to be inclusive but also recognize that there are differences between females and trans women, it's going to require that trans advocates take a step back and accept that, in some places, we need to see sex, and we need to be smart about it.

    What does it mean to be inclusive?

    49:25: Being inclusive means taking into account relevant differences and ignoring differences that aren't relevant. That's really important to do, and we shouldn't shy away from that.

    Confronting the provocative shift in our understanding of sex and gender

    40:31: I think it's just a really provocative challenge to something so fundamental about ourselves and our society. Like, if you grow up understanding how fundamental sex is to you or gender is to you, and then somebody says it shouldn't be, or we're going to throw it out, or we're going to change what it means, or you can't use that word for yourself anymore, which is all the stuff that's happening, right? People are saying that you've got to start calling yourself a cis woman or, I mean, lots of vocabulary policing, all that kind of stuff about things that are so fundamental. I think it's super provocative, and I think it's super interesting. It's intellectual. It's a phenomenal intellectual challenge. It's an extraordinary political challenge.

    Is sex difference an equality problem?

    20:27: I think we've made a mistake to put all of sex into equality as an idea. That is the prism through which we view sex. Period, right? That anything you say about sex or do with sex that automatically belongs in the equality bucket, we've automatically got to, like, push it through this increasingly; it's technically intermediate scrutiny, but it's increasingly perceived as strict because that presumes that sex differences are bad. That presumes that any distinctions we would make on the basis of sex are bad. And I think that's wrong. I don't think sex is all bad. I don't think we should presume that most of it is bad. I think a lot of it is great. And so I think that we've made a mistake to see all of sex and sex differences as an equality problem.

    24 October 2024, 1:00 pm
  • 56 minutes 7 seconds
    473. The Evolution of Intelligence with Neil D. Lawrence

    As we get better and better at training machines to emulate humans, are there certain aspects of human intelligence that artificial intelligence will never be able to copy?

    Neil D. Lawrence is a professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge. His new book, The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI explores the meaning of intelligence as it relates to both humans and machines. 

    Neil and Greg chat about the nuances of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, discussing how terminology affects perceptions and expectations of AI, pivotal technology advancements in history that paved the way for AI, and the insights Neil gained from his time at Amazon. 

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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    The trade-offs of increasing automation and the moral concerns of AI

    25:16: As you increase automation, things that would have been moral judgments get moved into processes, whether that's courts of law or whatever; we tend to sort of codify what was a moral judgment, and it brings big advantages. It means we can live together at scale. It reduces the moral load we have if I can make a thousand employees redundant without having to worry individually about how many of them are single mums or whatever I'm worrying about. But, we lose something in that process. And one of the big concerns I have with AI is, yes, something like that's going to happen again. And I don't want to prejudge the future—what people will decide about where they want this technology automating decisions and where they want the human element in. But what I strongly feel is that, as a society, we're not being invited into that decision. And that decision is being made by very few companies and entities who themselves have proven themselves to have a very limited understanding of these subtle elements of society.

    On the great AI fallacy

    22:17: I think that the great AI fallacy was that we built anything that was going to adapt to us and accommodate us. When we hadn't, it was just more automation of things that humans had to do or could do in the past; but humans then had to accommodate this automation in order to make the best use of it.

    Debunking the myth of AI as infallible, all-seeing, and dominating

    31:38: One of the problems with the international conversation now is that it's conflating these two things. It's like the thing that appears intelligent is being intelligent through copying our own evolution, our cultural ideas, but then people are assuming that alongside that it has this characteristic of always getting things right, which is just not true because these shortcuts and heuristics it's using are our shortcuts and heuristics, which we know can fail in different circumstances.

    What’s the role of software engineers in the emergence of AI?

    55:09: So, this modern scribe is the software engineer in terms of the modern scribe, the person who can translate human ideas into things that can be on machines. So it's almost an advance in terms of the computer's powerful technology; it's actually an unpicking of the democratization of information technology.  Because as more and more of our understanding of the world is stored in machines, we're entering a world where it's harder for lawyers and accountants, etc., to access the machine. But this latest wave of technology offers the potential to put that right, because this latest wave makes it possible for a regular human to talk to a computer. 

    21 October 2024, 1:00 pm
  • 55 minutes 37 seconds
    472. The Endless Quest to Define Humanity: Exploring Prehistory feat. Stefanos Geroulanos

    Historically, how were narratives used around race, species, and the beliefs of Western civilization? What have been the contemporary implications for those earlier societal beliefs?

    Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute, a professor of history at New York University, and the author of several books. His latest book is called The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. 

    Greg and Stefanos discuss the complexities of defining human nature and the role of prehistory in understanding humanity's origins. Stefanos explores the ongoing debates about human progress, the impact of scientific discoveries like new fossils, and the culturally loaded interpretations of those findings. 

    They also discuss how perspectives on indigenous populations and humanity's past are shaped by evolving scientific interpretations and narrative constructions, highlighting the intersection of science and politics in the research of human origins.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    Guest Profile:

    His Work:

    Episode Quotes:

    Understanding who we are as humans is key to recognizing our differences

    47:37: If we can begin to admit that we are people who are culturally fundamentally, economically fundamentally different—our lemons come from half a world away, the meat that we consume from another half a world away, and so on. If we come around to understanding that our family structures, our relationships, our religious questions are structured in a different form, that our world is technologically bound, and that ultimately, one way or another, we have biological connections, but even our microbiomes must be fundamentally different from what ancient microbiomes were, then we will not end up having this need to say, "Here's where it's all begun."

    Recognizing fundamental problems in our story opens paths beyond human origins research

    54:49: Recognizing that there have been fundamental problems with a story is one path to recognizing that some of the things we believe in, and some of the hopes we want set, are not necessarily bound by that story entirely, nor were they ever necessarily or entirely bound by that story. I don't think that moral arguments would have ever utterly depended on human origins research.

    How human origins research helped overcome traditional views

    02:53: Human origins became really key at several stages, and at each of those stages, something absolutely current or something truly urgent was in play. Some of these moments had to do with overcoming traditional religious answers. Others had to do with an overcoming of ideas of human nature, so that certain kinds of stability of human nature and so on. Let's not pretend that they simply disappeared, but they did become secondary. And so human origins research came to fill that void. And in some respects, that's a real advance. And in some respects, that's a problem.

    Two stories that helped convince people about evolution

    44:40: I kept thinking, in some way, whether these stories of prehistory helped convince people about evolution. And I really thought that there were two of them that did. One was the bit that we were saying before about the thin veneer—that people came to use the expression so much and to believe there is a continuity between our antiquity and now. Not simply between another, meaning an indigenous person somewhere, but that person was a reflection of who we were. And that helped create the broader belief in human continuity. But the other one was this sense about a renaissance, that people would have to somehow come to this astonishing realization that their body is made of hundreds of thousands, millions of years, which is a story that they couldn't think of without these ruins within. 

    18 October 2024, 1:00 pm
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