Here are two EA-themed podcasts that I think someone could make. Maybe that someone is you!
More or Less, but EA (or for forecasting)
More or Less is a BBC Radio program. They take some number that’s circulating around the news, and provide context like “Is that literally true? How could someone know that? What is that actually measuring? Is that a big number? Does that mean what you think it means?”—stuff like that. They spend about 10 minutes on each number, and usually include interviews with experts in the field. IMO, someone could do this for numbers that circulate around in the EA space. Another variant is to focus on forecasts—what factors are going in, what’s the reasoning for those guesses, etc.
This could be pretty easy to listen to, but moderately hard to make—requires research, editing conversations down, etc.
AI Safety Fellowship / Course thing—the podcast.
Get someone who’s doing something like the AGI Safety Fundamentals course or the Center for AI Safety’s thing like that. Each week, they make a podcast episode about what they think of the week’s readings—what seemed persuasive, what didn’t, what was interesting, what was novel. For a long version, you could make an episode about each reading.
If someone’s already doing one of these courses, I think it wouldn’t be much extra work to make this podcast (after the set cost of learning how you make a podcast). It would end up having an inherently limited run (but maybe you could do future seasons about reading thru Superintelligence / MIRI chat logs / various agendas?).
If you’re reading this, you might wonder: how do I actually make a podcast? Well, here’s the basic technical stuff to get started.
Buy a decent microphone, e.g. the Blue Yeti (costs ~$100). This will make you not sound bad.
If you’re going to be talking to people who aren’t physically near you, use some service that will record both of you talking. I recommend Zencastr (free for how I use it).
Record some talking (this is the hard part). My strong advice is that if you’re doing this remotely, you should both be wearing wired headphones. Please do this in a non-echoey, non-noisy space if you can. Kitchen is bad, sound-isolated place with blankets is good.
Do some minimal editing. Don’t try to delete every um and ah, that will take way too long. You can use the computer program “audacity” for this (free), or ask me who I pay to do my editing.
Optionally, make transcripts by uploading your edited audio files to rev.com (~$1 per minute of audio). You’ll then have to re-listen to the audio and fix mistakes in the transcript. If you do this, you will probably want to make a website to put transcripts on, which will maybe involve using Github Pages or Squarespace (or maybe you just put transcripts on a pre-existing Medium/Substack/blog?)
Think of a name and logo for your podcast. Your logo needs to be exactly square and high-res.
Use a podcast hosting service. I like libsyn (~$10/month for basic plan). Upload your audio files there, write descriptions and episode titles. You should now have an RSS feed.
Submit your RSS feed to Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. This will involve googling how to do this, you might make some errors, and then it will take ages for Apple to list your podcast.
Once you’ve done all this and dealt with the inevitable hiccups, you now have a podcast! Congratulations! It is certainly possible to do all of this better, but you at least have the basics.
Here are two EA-themed podcasts that I think someone could make. Maybe that someone is you!
More or Less, but EA (or for forecasting)
More or Less is a BBC Radio program. They take some number that’s circulating around the news, and provide context like “Is that literally true? How could someone know that? What is that actually measuring? Is that a big number? Does that mean what you think it means?”—stuff like that. They spend about 10 minutes on each number, and usually include interviews with experts in the field. IMO, someone could do this for numbers that circulate around in the EA space. Another variant is to focus on forecasts—what factors are going in, what’s the reasoning for those guesses, etc.
This could be pretty easy to listen to, but moderately hard to make—requires research, editing conversations down, etc.
AI Safety Fellowship / Course thing—the podcast.
Get someone who’s doing something like the AGI Safety Fundamentals course or the Center for AI Safety’s thing like that. Each week, they make a podcast episode about what they think of the week’s readings—what seemed persuasive, what didn’t, what was interesting, what was novel. For a long version, you could make an episode about each reading.
If someone’s already doing one of these courses, I think it wouldn’t be much extra work to make this podcast (after the set cost of learning how you make a podcast). It would end up having an inherently limited run (but maybe you could do future seasons about reading thru Superintelligence / MIRI chat logs / various agendas?).
If you’re reading this, you might wonder: how do I actually make a podcast? Well, here’s the basic technical stuff to get started.
Buy a decent microphone, e.g. the Blue Yeti (costs ~$100). This will make you not sound bad.
If you’re going to be talking to people who aren’t physically near you, use some service that will record both of you talking. I recommend Zencastr (free for how I use it).
Record some talking (this is the hard part). My strong advice is that if you’re doing this remotely, you should both be wearing wired headphones. Please do this in a non-echoey, non-noisy space if you can. Kitchen is bad, sound-isolated place with blankets is good.
Do some minimal editing. Don’t try to delete every um and ah, that will take way too long. You can use the computer program “audacity” for this (free), or ask me who I pay to do my editing.
Optionally, make transcripts by uploading your edited audio files to rev.com (~$1 per minute of audio). You’ll then have to re-listen to the audio and fix mistakes in the transcript. If you do this, you will probably want to make a website to put transcripts on, which will maybe involve using Github Pages or Squarespace (or maybe you just put transcripts on a pre-existing Medium/Substack/blog?)
Think of a name and logo for your podcast. Your logo needs to be exactly square and high-res.
Use a podcast hosting service. I like libsyn (~$10/month for basic plan). Upload your audio files there, write descriptions and episode titles. You should now have an RSS feed.
Submit your RSS feed to Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. This will involve googling how to do this, you might make some errors, and then it will take ages for Apple to list your podcast.
Once you’ve done all this and dealt with the inevitable hiccups, you now have a podcast! Congratulations! It is certainly possible to do all of this better, but you at least have the basics.
What do you see as the main value of idea 2?
More easily digestible discussion / analysis of AI alignment ideas. Also it might be fun to listen to.