My best interview with Paul Bloom

Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is a partial summary of the episode:

Together, Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists have a better understanding of everyday human behavior than ordinary people, how children can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the ability to believe in God, why religion is the way it is. about monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best theory of mind tests, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is underrated, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unconventional practice, what he will work on next, and more.

And here is one episode:

COWEN: I have some questions about intelligence. When we think about examples of big languages, should we let them feel disgusted to avoid leftist bias?

BLOOM: [laughs] Why would disgust make them avoid leftist bias?

COWEN: Maybe we’re not sure it will happen, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a basic emotion, and that high doses of feeling disgust somehow encourage people to maintain sociality. It’s debatable, but I don’t think it’s a crazy idea. So, if you build LLMs, and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, you’ll get left-leaning LLMs, who might say, “Well, that was my intention.” But obviously, not everyone will accept it that the end or.

BLOOM: I don’t want to wake up LLMs. I think there are too many –

COWEN: You have them, of course.

BLOOM: I found them. I think Gemini is the one, if I want to go – the awakened LLM of choice. Because I think the doctrine called awakening leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in some ways, but I don’t care about left-wing LLMs.

Honestly, I’m not one to be obnoxious. You are right that disgust is often associated with the right-wing, but at its worst. Disgust is what motivates the hatred of gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, exclusion of immigrants, exclusion of other races. If there is one emotion I can take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in the moral realm. They could keep their disgust at rotten food and that sort of thing. That’s exactly what I have I won’t included in LLMs. I’d rather put anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is one thing I can’t handle.

COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the edges. Would you just take your disgust out of people if you could?

Also:

COWEN: I think on the margins, moved against empathy More being the host of the podcast, I’m going to ask a question –

BLOOM: wait Why are you a podcast host?

COWEN: Well, I’m going to ask a question, and many guests think it’s more polite to simply show sympathy than to give a concrete answer. I find empathic responses unattractive, and I think most of my listeners do, too. Yet people will continue to do this, and it frustrates me. And then I thought, “Well, Tyler, you’ve got to be a little more sympathetic for this reason.” Again I think that is correct.

However, Paul cannot be blamed for doing that. It is very important, interesting, and entertaining throughout.


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