Oxford ($OXM) podcast mentions
This is important, right? Because, so effective altruism, this is where it gets complicated. So this is another movement that has similar sensibilities that became intertwined and heavily influenced. They sort of mutually influenced each other, right? But you have effective altruism, it comes out of a bunch of utilitarian philosophers at Oxford. And they have this idea of, oh, we can apply— this should sound familiar— but it's like, if we're very rational and empirical about altruism, we can do altruism better, which I think is like modern utilitarianism. That's a fine idea. This is where they're going around and doing research, like what are the actual best charities to give money to? How do we measure that? They have these ideas like, actually, if you are at Oxford, like an elite university, the best thing you could do for charity is to go get a high-paying banking job and then give up half your salary to charity. So they're trying to think through rationally How do we be, uh, do altruism as effectively as possible?
Cal Newport · Better Offline · Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport · 2026-09-16Because why bother? Why care about, you know, saving 20 million people now from malaria when we could instead be solving, you know, saving a hundred trillion future lives? That will never be born if AI kills us all. So effective altruism, not all of it, it's a complicated field, but big segments of effective altruism, and this is where Nick Bostrom comes out of at Oxford and talking about existential risk and superintelligence. A big segment of effective altruism really begins to care about superintelligent AI as like one of the core things to care about. And a huge amount of money pours into effective altruism. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars starts going to these institutes and groups Nothing's been done yet though.
Cal Newport · Better Offline · Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport · 2026-09-16But, but like, just to— everything Cal said is right except, except one thing. And I think it's important. Nick Bostrom. Is definitely like part of the whole effective altruism community. But Nick Bostrom, he wrote— he's probably best known for a book that he wrote called Superintelligence that came out, I don't know, a little over 10 years ago that made a big splash, basically, you know, expounding on all of these ideas and saying, yeah, you know, superintelligence is really scary and we should, we should, we should figure out, you know, how to control it or stop it before it kills us all. And again, this is before transformer models and the current AI moment. And it's not from any particular thing he's looking at. But the thing is, Bostrom, who at that time is a philosophy professor at Oxford, came out of the same, you know, place basically as Yudkowsky.
Adam Becker · Better Offline · Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport · 2026-09-16He was on those same 1990s listservs, and he's the one who sort of is most responsible for the connection between rationalism and effective altruism. Because it was when his colleagues at Oxford were sort of working on effective altruism that he went over to them and said, oh, if you're worried about that, you really need to be worried about the AI.
Adam Becker · Better Offline · Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport · 2026-09-16Yeah, there's a talk you can find. So William MacAskill was one of the two big utilitarians at Oxford that helped found effective altruism. And I crossed paths with him sort of earlier on in the EA world when they were really caring about especially like the idea of donate most of your salary to charity. There's a talk you can find and I— it's on YouTube and I forget exactly when this happens, but there's a famous talk you can find of McCaskill where he basically comes out and says this is the new thing we should care about is existential, the existential threat of superintelligent AI. This is the sort of long-termism. So they used this— there's another idea that comes out of Silicon Valley, but this long-term view of what's going to happen over the next 1,000 years is actually, if we're just going to do the math, 100 trillion future lives matters more than, you know, 50 million lives now. So he kind of has this moment where he gives this big speech that— where he's sort of announcing this is the new direction for EA. And so now they're like roughly interchangeable.
Cal Newport · Better Offline · Stopping The AI Safety Cult ft. Adam Becker & Cal Newport · 2026-09-16It's across America and worldwide for Global Wall Street. Dominic Constance joins us. Parchment, parchment, I should say, out of Cambridge and Oxford. Dr. Constance, thank you so much for joining us. You say we could have 3 rate increases. Why can't Walsh just say one and done? We have to look for more data.
Tom Keene · Bloomberg Surveillance · AI Safety and Rising Yields · 2026-09-15I mean, it's so wild. If you look at the history of academic science and medicine, which I love to study, I've gone back to like the time of Galen, which is one of the early physicians who did, you'd love this, he worked on gladiators publicly because you couldn't, they didn't allow people to do surgeries on the human body. It was illegal. But like, so he would do these surgeries publicly or a pig. It was wild. There's a great book, it's very dense, but it's called "The Prince of Medicine." and it's all this medieval stuff that you love, and you'll realize what a prehistoric thing medicine is even now, like how fast and how far we've come in the last 50 years, 100 years. But the whole pomp and circumstance thing of like, look, I've never been to High Table dinner at Oxford. It'd be fun to go, but the whole thing of like the robes and somebody sits higher than everybody else, that dissolved in the American universities. You still see it at some of the East Coast universities, but that's dissolving. So what's literally happening is people are being, these authorities are being brought down to other people's level, right? It's almost like this was borrowed from other, you know, other aspects of life, of course, politics and even religion, this kind of thing. You know, the uniform was so important and people like this reverence and the internet has, it hasn't leveled the playing field, but it's completely disrupted that model. So, you know, I'm not the only one, of course, but like for people to, learn inside the system, go outside the system, and now for the system to bleed onto campus and scientists to bleed out into the world. God bless Anna Lembke, almost what, 10 years ago, saying like, "This dopamine thing, we gotta worry about this, but just understand what it is." God bless her, people like her, Bob Sapolsky. These people were the pioneers. I can't claim to be, I was early but not first, and they broke out of the system and started publicly educating. Educating people, and that it builds up their authority. This is what people need to understand. Builds up their authority, but it does dissolve public education and bringing people all down to the same level.
Andrew Huberman · The Joe Rogan Experience · #2553 - Andrew Huberman · 2026-09-14Oxford?
Better in Person · Freakonomics Radio · Amazon Was Supposed to Kill the Bookstore. James Daunt Had Other Plans | Better in Person · 2026-09-09Between May and June, our use of revolving credit grew 6%. That's comprised mostly of what we spend on credit cards, which meant consumers are putting more on their credit card to pay for groceries, gasoline, necessities. Ryan Sweet, chief global economist at Oxford Economics. Those necessities are getting more expensive. Our wages are rising too, though not as fast, and consumers are using credit cards to make up the difference. Now, so far, people generally are making payments on those debts on time.
Caitlin Taniane · Marketplace · As prices rise, so too does our credit reliance · 2026-09-07Here she is. I had been studying HPV at that time for 8 years and had read every paper and understood it deeply because it was the subject of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford. And when she asked me that question, I immediately came to mind the trial design that would lead to the WHO changing its guidelines and recommending single-dose HPV vaccination. We conducted the trial in a record 18 months, uh, including during the pandemic, ran perfectly on time, presented the data. And since that day, millions of girls who have not otherwise been vaccinated have received the HPV vaccine. And with India and China adopting single-dose vaccination, we are on track to vaccinate 90% of girls and prevent cervical cancer in 90% of those young women as they age to mid-adulthood. And that is thrilling. And it was thanks to the creativity, the deep learning, and the moment of inspiration that we were able to solve this question. Thanks so much for a fantastic podcast. So, Aap, I find Rohan's story so wonderful, but it makes me wonder the extent to which deep background knowledge is a prerequisite for inspiration?
Shankar Vedantam · Hidden Brain · Blowing Up Your Life · 2026-09-07But there is this major point in 1854 where a major report is written that proposes there should be one central exam for applicants to the civil service, the British civil service, and that this exam basically should consist of a lot of knowledge of the classical languages of Greek and Latin. And these are very prestigious at the time in Britain. They're taught in a lot of the public schools, the, the, the great public schools. They're taught at the famous ancient universities Oxford and Cambridge. And you have two administrators of the time, a guy called Stafford Northcote another man called Charles Trevelyan, who writes a report that essentially proposes that these curriculums with the heavy emphasis on ancient Greek and Latin should become the basis for the exam that selects for civil servants.
Daisy Christodoulou · EconTalk · Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou) · 2026-09-07What they actually did in that report was encourage the British civil service to keep hiring people like themselves, people who've gone to Oxford and Cambridge, who were really good at Latin and Greek. And as you point out in your essay, which is hilarious, uh, people at the time said, you know, it really doesn't matter what they study or what the criteria are or what the subject matter of the test is, It just has to be hard, and that will get the people who are good at hard things, and they'll be skilled. They'll be the most skilled people because they could do the hardest things, even if it's nonsense. Uh, Thomas Macaulay, the great historian, says, yeah, you know, if they studied astrology or alchemy or the Ptolemaic, uh, system of astronomy of the solar system instead of Newton, they're hard to master, and that's what, that's what counts. So I've thrown a lot on the table here. Take a crack at reacting.
Russ Roberts · EconTalk · Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou) · 2026-09-07What I think this guy Michael Culican is arguing, and what I, I would agree with, and what I think you were saying too, is actually what was happening is before Northcote-Trevelyan, there definitely was some corruption, but there were also a lot of moves to modernization and professionalism. There were civil service departments that were using exams that were useful for the specific job that the candidate would be doing. And actually, Northcote-Trevelyan came in and said, we're going to replace all that with one central exam that's going to be, it's going to be based on topics that really have no relevance to the job in hand. So it is a revisionist take, it is a controversial one, And there are people I think have grown up with that standard take on Northcote Rebellion who don't like that revisionism. So it is controversial, but I think this book by Michael Cooleghan does a fantastic job of drawing out a lot of the debates. And in particular, he draws out a lot of the importance of a guy who's the master at Balliol College at this time, a very important figure behind the scenes. He's called Benjamin Jowett, and he is incredibly keen to be getting his classics graduates from Balliol College, Oxford, into positions of influence all over the British establishment. And he's very successful, and he is a kind of a major figure in the background of Northcote Rebellion and subsequent developments. So I would agree with you, with your— how you put it there. But as I say, I would say this is a relatively controversial take in Britain.
Daisy Christodoulou · EconTalk · Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou) · 2026-09-07Well, American retail, frankly, pivoting along, but doing nicely. We saw some great results out of Victoria's Secret yesterday. At the same time, Lululemon is obviously falling a lot today as they have work to do. And then you saw terrific results out of Abercrombie Fitch. You have companies like Oxford Industries who are still working to improve Lilly Pulitzer. So for the most part, companies are managing inventory. They're using marketing and social marketing to drive new customer growth. And you have companies like Tapestry and Ralph Lauren that are continuing to see more new customer growth and AUR increase.
Dana Telsey · Bloomberg Intelligence · Bloomberg Money: Premium Travel, Fast Fashion, Luxury at the US Open & The Cost of College · 2026-09-05Doing well in American retail, frankly pivoting along but doing nicely. We saw some great results out of Victoria's Secret yesterday. At the same time, Lululemon is obviously falling a lot today as they have work to do. And then you saw terrific results out of Abercrombie and Fitch. You have companies like Oxford Industries who are still working to improve Lilly Pulitzer. So for the most part, companies are managing inventory. They're using marketing and social marketing to drive new customer growth. And you have companies like Tapestry and Ralph Lauren that are continuing to see more new customer growth and AUR increase.
Dana Telsey · Bloomberg Surveillance · Bloomberg Money: Premium Travel, Fast Fashion, Luxury at the US Open & The Cost of College · 2026-09-04