Conspicuous Cognition

Steven Pinker on AI Doom and Consciousness

Why Pinker thinks intelligence isn’t a superpower, the doom scenarios don’t hold up, and AI systems (probably) aren’t conscious – and what he got wrong…

Oct 7 • Dan Williams and Henry Shevlin

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The Crooked Timber of Humanitarians of Tinder

How the pursuit of material, social, and sexual advantage shapes our values

Oct 1 • Dan Williams

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September 2026

New Podcast: Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?

A Sceptical Look at AI’s Existential Risk With the Philosopher Dan Williams

Published on The Ruffian • Sep 27

1:09:08

Woke 1 Was Lazy

The fight for social justice in an era of half-arsed politics

Sep 20 • Dan Williams

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Wishful Thinking Is (Mostly) A Myth - Unpaywalled

How social games, not comforting falsehoods, distort what we believe.

Sep 11 • Dan Williams

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GPT-6 Astra Reviews ‘The Social Roots of Delusions’

There is currently much debate about how impressive frontier AI models really are and what role they can play in research, including in academic…

Sep 6 • Dan Williams

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August 2026

Most Questions About AI Aren’t About AI

Why the AI revolution is a golden age for polymaths, philosophers, and moderate epistemic despair

Aug 26 • Dan Williams

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Navigating the Intelligence Explosion (with Fin Moorhouse)

Explosive technological progress, the "grand challenges" on the path to superintelligence, space expansion, and the ethics and politics of artificial…

Aug 19 • Dan Williams, Henry Shevlin, and Fin Moorhouse

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1:54:22

The Social Roots of Delusions

Clinical delusions, collective irrationality, and the fragile achievement of human knowledge

Aug 4 • Dan Williams

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July 2026

We Are Stuck With Human Nature, Not Human Ignorance

Why a tragic view of human nature need not imply a pessimistic view of human reason

Jul 29 • Dan Williams

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Who Will Control Europe’s AI Future? (with Judith Dada)

'Europe 2031', AI sovereignty, and the geopolitics of compute

Jul 21 • Dan Williams, Henry Shevlin, and Judith Dada

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1:16:11

Highbrow Propaganda

Ideological power, populist distrust, and the strongest rational case against rationalism

Jul 14 • Dan Williams

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