Conversation with Joe Carlsmith on deep atheism, death, and sincereity

I’m writing to share an enjoyable conversation I had with Joe Carlsmith - a writer and philosopher who works on Claude’s constitution at Anthropic - about his concept of “deep atheism”. Video, audio, and transcript for the conversation is at: https://www.goodconversationproject.com/joe-carlsmith

It’s a very exploratory conversation - about how much we trust or distrust the universe - and related topics, including why death brings life into focus, Teilhard de Chardin, the problem of evil, Elinor Ostrom, and grace as a model for how a whole system can work together. I would enjoy thoughtful comments in the discussion section there!

I expect to record 5-10 conversations like this over the next year - exploratory, in-depth conversations with people I admire. I won’t announce all of them here, but rather through a separate dedicated Substack, which you can subscribe to at:

The conversations will all include video, audio, and transcripts, and a comment section for discussion.

I also recently had a very enjoyable conversation with Dwarkesh Patel on his podcast, about some of the challenges in reliably assessing scientific progress. It’s available here: