Topics on my mind: May 2018
I've been listening to quite a few podcast episodes lately, particularly Rationally Speaking, the 80000 Hours podcast, EconTalk and Conversations with Tyler (who runs the excellent Marginal Revolution economics blog ). I was very impressed by a Rationally Speaking episode with Dr Herculano-Houzel, a brain researcher (here's my blog post about it ), as well as the 80,000 Hours episode with Anders Sandberg. Anders does a wide range of very creative and original research; here he was talking about hibernating aliens , interstellar warfare , and how quick colonising the universe could be . I'd previously seen these arguments as intellectually fun but fairly irrelevant. But on the podcast, Anders presented them in a new light: not simply as speculations on what aliens might be doing, but also as a way of exploring strategies that humans might want to use in the far future. Now that I think about it, that does seem pretty important. I've finally written some political blog