I recently finished the book Rationality: AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and this episode is the first part of my review.

In this episode I spend most of the time comparing rationality, as championed by Yudkowsky with Antifragility as championed by Taleb. In particular I take issue with Yudkowsky's focus on "winning" and also the lake of any methodology for dealing with the difference between rare outcomes with large impacts and rare outcomes with minimal impact.

Technology solves a lot of our problems, this is something everyone knows. But it also creates a lot of problems, though generally those problems are more subtle and take longer to manifest, though in the end there is no law which says that the benefits provided technology have to outweigh the problems created by it.

In this episode I specifically look at the idea of accumulated negative mutations, and the promises and dangers of germline/genetic engineering.

Russian meddling in the election via the medium of Facebook ads has been much in the news lately. This episode examines whether social media advertising is disproportionately effective, after concluding that it is, it examines why that might be and what we should do about it.

In this episode I talk about a recent article I encountered which explored the orthodox-progressive divide in Mormonism. I talk about how, while excellent, the article may not have gone far enough. I provide some additional examples of things which really worry me, and then go on to discuss some of the issues with diversity in the wider world.