Priank Ravichandar

We are all collectively haunted by the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: We are all finding that it really is 10x harder to debunk lies than it is to produce them, leading to things like ragebait as a marketing and product strategy - it’s also a great way to raise a lot of venture capital money?

And a decent number of people are willing to attribute conscious experience to large language models. And in fact, people are slightly more willing to do so when they’ve had more experience interacting with them.

So I think one way to think about the human drive for explanation is in terms of the motivations and emotions that drive it, and I think we’ve all had these experiences. So one side of it, we have curiosity. We really want to know why certain things happen the way they do, why they happen at all. And that’s part of what really initiates the process... See more

If something doesn’t work, you reflect on the situation, make an adjustment, and try again, over and over until you reach your end destination.

Agency, then, in my opinion, is not only action, but an undying commitment to iteration. Learning and doing in unison. Making mistakes and correcting mistakes without being seduced back into a comforting... See more

When you're talking about rewards now versus later, most of us prefer the rewards now.

When we're making a conscious decision, there are all of these different inputs, including our emotions, the social context that we're in, and the temporal scale. Like you were saying, what's happening that would be immediately available or rewarding to me right now versus something that I might care about in the future? How certain is the outcome?... See more

I do think that the way that neuroscientists use the word value is different than the colloquial use. The way that many people who think about big-V values, like the kinds of aspirational or higher-level things that we care about most that are fundamental to us, that's one input to our daily decision making. But fundamentally, as a neuroscientist,... See more

The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more

AI can help us complete tasks at scale with unmatched efficiency. However, there are areas where our humanity is a distinct advantage. Our capacity for compassion and connection with people allows us to see, understand, and express things that machines just can’t. Even the most convincing imitations of human intelligence (from the best AI models)... See more