{"podcast":{"title":"LessWrong (Curated & Popular)","slug":"lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401","podcast_index_feed_id":5643401,"rss_url":"https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2037297.rss","website_url":"https://sites.libsyn.com/421877","image_url":"https://storage.buzzsprout.com/xq8g0aka74ttwoa9xkxlmy5fn9oa?.jpg","author":"LessWrong","episode_count":1002,"summary":"Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma. If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.","last_synced_at":"2026-09-28T08:23:50.844993+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401"},"episode":{"title":"\"Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies\" by Steven Byrnes","slug":"tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies-by-steven-byrnes","published_at":"2026-08-30T16:16:16+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies-by-steven-byrnes","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401","url":"https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19724546-tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies-by-steven-byrnes.mp3","audio_url":"https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19724546-tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies-by-steven-byrnes.mp3","summary":"A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is: “A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus“An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking enough to recognize that this group is right about everything while you’re wrong. You just can’t tell those apart from the outsid...","meta_description":"A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is: “A self-dea…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":976,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/episodes/tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies-by-steven-byrnes/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies-by-steven-byrnes.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}