Next week for the 80,000 Hours Podcast I'll be interviewing Carl Shulman, advisor to Open Philanthropy, and generally super informed person about history, technology, possible futures, and a shocking number of other topics.
He has previously appeared on our show and the Dwarkesh Podcast:
- Carl Shulman (Pt 1) - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment
- Carl Shulman (Pt 2) - AI Takeover, Bio & Cyber Attacks, Detecting Deception, & Humanity's Far Future
- Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
He has also written a number of pieces on this forum.
What should I ask him?
I thought about this and wrote down some life events/decisions that probably contributed to becoming who I am today.
A lot of these can't really be imitated by others (e.g., I can't recommend people avoid making friends in order to have more free time for intellectual interests). But here are some practical advice I can think of:
ETA: Oh, here's a recent LW post where I talked about how I arrived at my current set of research interests, which may also be of interest to you.