Kat Woods is an effective altruist and the co-founder of Nonlinear, which incubates longtermist nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship. Gianluca and Kat discuss brain hacks for curing imposter syndrome and being more agentic, infohazards, the simulation hypothesis, why you don’t need permission to do things, “passive impact” via automation, and Kat’s exciting new projects at Nonlinear.

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Kat Woods on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Kat__Woods

Kat’s blog: www.katwoods.org/

Nonlinear: www.nonlinear.org/

Effective Altruism (EA): https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

The Effective Altruism Handbook: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/handbook

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality

Replacing Guilt: https://anchor.fm/guilt

SMBC cartoon on compatibilism: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/compatibilism

Nonlinear Library (podcast): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JTZTBienqWEAjGDRv/listen-to-more-ea-content-with-the-nonlinear-library

Kat’s post on text-to-speech automation: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tAWK33eNXZKMckPhn/how-and-why-to-turn-everything-into-audio

EA Houses: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4zHWQNzCusaTfD7jz/ea-houses-live-or-stay-with-eas-around-the-world

Nonlinear support fund: www.nonlinear.org/productivity-fund.html

Nonlinear bounty programme: https://super-linear.org/

EA hiring agency: https://second-bellflower-54f.notion.site/EA-Hiring-Agency-0d6d75a0f5934455be9003fd7886d537

Nonlinear newsletter: www.nonlinear.org/subscribe.html

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter: www.twitter.com/podtangent

Bit of a Tangent on Instagram: instagram.com/podtangent/

In this episode, Gianluca and Jared discuss the neurobiology of predictive processing, the role of dopamine in reward signalling, satisfaction, and human desire. They also touch on the relation of reward to reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence.

The podcast then shifts to discuss the clinical manifestations of the predictive brain, including the computational psychiatry of depression, autism-spectrum-disorder, and schizophrenia, and how top-down prediction, and precision-weighted prediction error explain central aspects of these conditions.

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Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last episode: https://podtangent.com/e/029-predictive-processing-2-where-the-action-is/

This week’s episode of Bit of a Tangent is a continuation of our 3 part series on Predictive Processing - a fascinating neuroscientific account of the way our brains come to understand the world. If you haven’t already listened to part 1 (episode 028), check that out first!

In this episode Gianluca and Jared discuss the importance of sensory precision, the circular causality of prediction and action, how action comes about in a counterintuitive way from high confidence predictions, the way in which prior expectations can bias sensory sampling, and how this could lead to self-fulfilling spirals that would make your life either much worse or much better!

Find us on Twitter @podtangent