#13 – Jaime Sevilla Molina on on Forecasting, Cultural Persistence, and Quantum Computing - a podcast by Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti

Jaime Sevilla Molina is a visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, and is beginning a PhD studying Bayesian reasoning. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and his academic background is in mathematics and computer science.

In this episode we discuss:

• How the social sciences infer causation from natural experiments;


• Evidence for 'cultural persistence', particularly in the context of the Atlantic slave trade;


• What is forecasting, and why does it matter? Why is good forecasting so hard to come by?


• What are the likely implications of quantum computing for cryptography, drug discovery, and AI?

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up hearthisidea.com/episodes/Jaime.

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