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- [00:00]
Lex Fridman
Deutsch has this great view of the world where he believes that everything important is understandable by a single human. By important he means underlying base theories that drive most of reality. And he fixates on four theories. I could argue maybe there's a few more, especially if you start getting into Adam Smith and the wealth of nations and a few other sociological ones. But he's obviously a physicist. He's concerned more with reality and truth seeking, not human systems. The four that he picks are the theory of epistemology, the theory of evolution by natural selection, quantum theory. He subsumes relativity and other physics into that, and then the theory of computation, which includes his theory of quantum computation. These four are fascinating. It's probably worth touching on each one for various listeners. What is interesting about each of these theories? What is the breakthrough here that might be non obvious? Let's start with epistemology. The reason I love the beginning of Affinity is because Deutsch does a very rigorous review of what is correct in epistemology. What do we know to be the best answers in epistemology? And once you have that, once you have a good theory of knowledge, then you can decide what else is true. If you're starting with a bad basis for the theory of knowledge, then you're going to decide on a bunch of things that are false when you think they might be true. His epistemology is centered around good explanations. It takes Popper's view of science and truth seeking as being error correcting mechanisms and expands on it. But I'd love to hear your summary of the theory of knowledge or epistemology as Deutsch lays it out.
- [01:35]
David Deutsch
The initial guesses at what knowledge was all about amounted to what is known as the justified true belief vision of knowledge. And it's still the most prevalent idea today. Anyone who calls themselves a Bayesian is a justified true believer. And that's the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify as true your beliefs. And if you've done so, then you can say, I know that thing. So if I can justify as true my theory of gravity, then I should believe that theory of gravity and only then can I say that it's known. The problem with this is that there is no method of showing as true and any piece of knowledge. So the improvement Deutsch promotes in his books is this vision that Popper gave us that all we have are guesses about reality conjectures. People think, oh, that sounds a bit wishy washy. It's just a guess. Well, it's not a random Guess. It's not just anyone decides to have a guess and therefore that stands on equal footing to every other. No, it's a guess that has stood up against trials, against attempts to show that it's false. And, and when people are unable to show that it's false via this method of refutation, then we accept it as a piece of knowledge. This allows us to thereby accept the fact that we're going to be able to make progress in the future, because all of our knowledge is conjectural, all of it is our best guess at the time. And therefore there's this elasticity within the knowledge that allows us to say there's going to be errors, we're going to correct them, and thereby be able to make progress off into the infinite future. This is unlike the previous conception of knowledge which says once you've justified something as true, well, it's true. If it's true, that means there is nothing false about it and therefore it can't possibly be refuted. It's a very religious notion. The modern incantation of this is Bayesianism. Bayesianism says you have a theory, you collect more evidence and you become more and more confident over time that your theory is correct. And it gets a little bit worse than that because then it says this Bayesian reasoning enables you to generate new theories, which it can't. The best that it can hope to do is to show you that you are more confident in this theory than what you are in that theory. The Popperian view says if you can show that there's a flaw in a particular theory, you can discard that theory in almost all cases. You only ever have one theory on offer. In the case of gravity, there literally is only one theory on offer at the moment. There's general relativity. Previously we did have two theories. We had Newtonian gravity and we had general relativity. But we did a crucial experiment. This idea of crucial experiment is the cherry on top of science. You've got these two competing theories and you have a particular experiment that if it goes one way, one theory is ruled out, but the other theory is not, in which case you keep that theory for so long as no problems arise. This vision of knowledge enables us to have an open ended quest for progress when which is completely unlike any other idea about knowledge. The overwhelming majority of physicists are still Bayesian. The reason they're still Bayesian is because this is typically what's taught in universities and this is what passes for an intellectually rigorous way of understanding the world. But all it is is what I would call a species of scientism. It's because they have a formula behind them. Bayes theorem, which is a perfectly acceptable statistical formula. People use it all the time in perfectly legitimate ways. It's just that it's not an epistemology. It's not a way of guaranteeing or even being confident that your theory is actually true. My favorite example of this is prior to 1919, approximately every single experiment that was done on gravity showed that it was consistent with Newton's theory of gravity. What does a Bayesian say in that situation? What a Bayesian has to say is getting more and more confident in Newton's theory. How does that make sense? How do you square that circle of the day before it was shown to be false was the day when you were most confident in it. Now Popperian doesn't have this problem. Paperian just says, at no point was Newton's theory actually true. It contains some truth, but that truth isn't a thing that we can measure. I say it contains some truth because it's certainly got more direct connection to reality than some other random person's guess about what the nature of gravity is. Gravity does indeed approximately vary as the inverse square law, but not exactly. And so we need general relativity to correct the errors in Newton's theory of gravity. And even though general relativity is our best theory right now, it can't ultimately be the final theory of gravity. There can be no final theory of gravity. All we have is better and better approximations to reality.
- [06:15]
Lex Fridman
I think the reason we fall into Bayesian so easily is probably related to why we fall into pessimism so easily. We're evolutionarily hardwired for Bayesianism. Every other animal on the planet that can't form good explanations is a Bayesian. They're just looking at repeated events and saying, the sun rose yesterday, the sun will rise tomorrow. If I touch that thing, it's hot. It's probably going to be hot in the future. So that is how most of our biological systems and how most of our evolutionary heritage worked. It's just now we have this neocortex that can form good explanations that can explain the seen in terms of the unseen. And that gives us a higher level of reasoning. But that higher level of reasoning is not instinctual to us. It requires effort, it requires deep thinking. But we default to Bayesianism because that is how a lot of the natural world around us seems to work, at least at the purely biological level.
- [07:04]
David Deutsch
In fact, I've got behind me Popper's book called Objective Knowledge, and it's subtitled and an Evolutionary Approach. And that's no accident at all either. There's symmetry between the theory of epistemology and the theory of evolution as we understand it. Before we understood what is known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the only idea that people had was these entities had to be created. All the plants and animals that you see around you had to be created by a creator. There was no explanatory mechanism. Some people came up with the idea of gradual change over time. Lamarck was one such. The reason why giraffes have long necks is because their ancestors had slightly shorter necks. So they tried to stretch their necks to reach the leaves they couldn't reach. But again, there was no mechanism for this beyond the fact that an individual goes off to the gymnasium and works on their biceps, and their biceps get a little bigger over time. Although you can work out in the gym and increase the size of your biceps, that doesn't mean your children are going to inherit those characteristics. So what Darwin came up with is. Is a similar idea to what Popper had in knowledge. It was error correction, the idea that an organism would trial itself out in a particular environment, and if it wasn't, as we say, fit for that environment, then it would die off. But if it was fit in that environment, then it would survive. So you have this encounter with reality between living organisms and the environment, and it's the environment that's giving you feedback from reality and, and destroying those organisms that aren't fit enough to survive. The neo Darwinist view is to give us what the unit of selection is. It's not the group or the herd, it's not even the individual. It's the gene. It's the selfish gene idea, which comes to us from Richard Dawkins, who says if any one of those genes happens to be not fit for the particular environment, that could cause the death of that organism. But the species might not go extinct. The species might survive, but its entire DNA will ever so subtly change over time as the environment changes. And now we have leveled that up. We human beings are the next step in that evolutionary process where we can create explanatory knowledge which does the same thing. Deutsch likes to say genetic evolution was merely a prelude. What's coming next is memetic evolution. The history of the universe from here on out is going to be the history of ideas undergoing the same evolutionary process as what the genes did previously.
- [09:28]
Lex Fridman
Three out of these four theories have an interesting pattern to them, with good explanations and epistemology, we're saying conjectures and their refutations and error correction is how we improve knowledge with genetic evolution. Genetic mutations, variation and natural selections weeds out the ones that didn't work. And then there's mimetic evolution on top of that, where we have ideas, and then criticism weeds out the ideas that don't work. Related to that, in invention there's trial and error, or in capitalism, startups get created and the ones that have bad ideas fail. So we see this pattern recurring over and over. What's interesting though is another meta pattern here, and the meta pattern here is that humans are exceptional in epistemology. Humans are the only non Bayesian reasoners in evolution. Humans are the only mimetic creatures that we know of in the theory of computation. Humans are the only universal explainers that we know of, other than of course, the computers that we've invented. So what's interesting is that science took us from this view of humans being at the center of the universe to being actually humans are nothing special. You're just one little planet out of an almost infinite number of now Kepler like planets that could be bearing life out there. But three of these four theories that we're talking about are pointing us in this direction of humans are extremely exceptional. Humans are capable of maximal knowledge. One interesting realization for me was that even if you were God, even if you had infinite knowledge and power, even if you could control the entire universe, you still wouldn't know you're not in a simulation. You still could never prove that you're not in a simulation. And even as a guy, there's no concept that you could hold in your head that a human being couldn't hold. Unless of course the laws of physics are different. If the laws of physics are different, then all bets are off. Who knows? But working within the current laws of physics, humans are capable of maximum knowledge, of maximum awareness. And that points to a world where humans are exceptional and not just another form of bacteria that got out of control and overran this planet. A lot of these fundamental theories lead to a viewpoint that humans are special, that knowledge is infinite, and as long as we don't destroy the means of error correction and we're always creating new knowledge, then there's good reason to be optimistic.
- [11:46]
David Deutsch
Now you're pointing out a minority opinion there. I think culture is still stuck in the second part of what you were saying. Originally we thought that we were at the center of the universe. This was the religious conception of man's place in the cosmos. The Earth was surrounded by the celestial spheres, and everything was orbiting around the earth. So we were the inheritors of the entire universe and God had gifted us with this. And then science showed us that, in fact, we're not at a particularly special place in the universe. This is the cosmological principle, this idea that the universe is roughly the same at every single place, and we are just one of those particularly unspecial places. And not only are we unspecial in the cosmological sense, but biologically we're nothing particularly special. We're just on the continuum between bacterias to cockroaches through to dogs and chimpanzees. An astrophysicist I absolutely love on almost every other topic, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was talking about how chimpanzees are a lot smarter than what we think, and chimpanzees might be thinking about all sorts of stuff, but we're just not that much better. So this is what almost everyone thinks. But this third view that a lot of us are trying to promote now is that it's not a slight quantitative difference between chimpanzees and us. There is a continuum between bacteria to cockroaches, to dogs and chimpanzees, but we're off axis. We are qualitatively different. And all you need to do is open your eyes, you look out your window, and you look at that beautiful city that happens to be out there. That cannot be explained by this gradual increase of biological complexity.
- [13:19]
Lex Fridman
The artificial general intelligence crew gets this completely wrong too. Just add more compute power and you'll get intelligence when we don't really know what it is underneath. That makes us creative and allows us to come up with good explanations. People talk a lot about GPT3, the text matching engine that OpenAI put out, which is a very impressive piece of software. But they say, hey, I can use GPT3 to generate great tweets. Well, that's because first, as a human, you're selecting which tweets out of all the garbage that it generates are good. Second, it's using some combination of plagiarism and synonym matching and so on to come up with plausible sounding stuff. But the easiest way to see that what it's generating doesn't actually make any sense is just ask it a follow up question, take a GPT3 generated output and ask it why. Why is that the case? Or make a prediction based on that and watch it completely fall apart because there's no underlying explanation. It's parroting. It's a brilliant bayesian reasoning. It's dating from what it already sees out there, generated by humans on the web. But it doesn't have an underlying model of reality that can explain the scene in terms of the unseen. And I think that's critical. That is what humans do uniquely, that no other creature, no other computer, no other intelligence, biological or artificial, that we have ever encountered does. And not only do we do it uniquely, but if we were to meet an alien species that also had the power to generate these good explanations, there is no explanation that they could generate that we could not understand. We are maximally capable of understanding. There is no concept out there that is possible in this physical reality that a human being, given sufficient time, resources and education, could not understand.
- [14:56]
David Deutsch
They're scientifically minded types. It's astonishing who say, perhaps we won't be able to understand the next set of laws of physics. Perhaps we won't be able to understand the aliens. It's nothing but the appeal to the supernatural. It's logically equivalent to God's out there, and you can't possibly understand what God is. God is this infinite, all omniscient being that is beyond us. You can believe that if you like. You can believe the simulation hypothesis. You can believe any one of these things. They're all metaphysical claims about a reality that we have no access to. And whether or not you want to introduce aliens who will have ideas that we can't comprehend, it's all standing on the same footing.
- [15:33]
Lex Fridman
At least the God metaphysics, you could say, okay, that's in a different universe, that's outside of our laws of physics, but the aliens presumably would be under the same laws of physics. So I don't even see what the basis for that is. Any species that is smart enough to get off its home planet knows that the limiting factor is ideas. So the thing that they should want the most from any other species they encounter is new ideas. And the trade that they should be making is the trade of ideas. There's this Malthusian philosophy in science fiction now called the dark forest hypothesis, that every human species, like bacterium, we're going to run out of room. No. The universe is infinite in size. It's expanding. The multiverse is even more infinite in size. And we are at the beginning of infinity. We're not running out of resources. Everybody's craving ideas. Smart alien civilizations trade ideas, and successful civilizations trade ideas because those ideas take things that were useless before and turn them into resources. And every alien civilization can trade ideas with every other civilization ideas because they're all Universal explainers. They're capable of maximal understanding. In fact, the mind blowing thing here is that your mind cannot be blown. There's no idea out there that your mind cannot absorb, given the time and the effort. So if we encounter an alien species, we should probably rejoice. They probably don't want anything from our planet other than our ideas. And the best way to trade ideas is to have a dynamic, abundant, thriving civilization. Because I grew up on Rote Sci fi, I used to be pessimistic about alien encounters. Oh, yeah, if we encounter aliens, they'll just destroy us. Like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Vogons thoughtlessly demolished the Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass. But the reality of it is that any species that finds us is going to immediately give us all the knowledge that they have, and they're going to be craving new knowledge that we have because they'll realize that that would allow them to light up the dark matter, the dark energy, the unused resources in the universe to have themselves thrive as well. Let's talk briefly about the Fermi paradox, since we're talking about aliens, for those listeners who don't know. Enrico Fermi was a famous physicist, part of the Manhattan Project, and he said, where are the aliens? Universe is so large, there's probably so many planets that are capable of supporting life of some kind or another. Shouldn't we have seen them by now?
- [17:48]
David Deutsch
Around almost every star, there is a contingent of planets, much like our own solar system. And the number of stars that exist within a typical galaxy like the Milky Way is something like 200 billion, although the estimates go up to about 400. And the number of galaxies that we can see is around 200 to 300 billion. But the observable universe is just a small fraction of the entire universe. That means that the number of planets is absolutely astonishing astronomical. Surely, given these numbers, it has to be the case that there are not only planets out there that are suitable for life, but the universe should be teeming with with civilizations far more advanced than ours, less advanced than ours, and some that are similar in advancement to ours. So where are they now? That's one argument. And we have to be humble in the face of uncertainty here. No one knows. But I want to give an argument that rarely gets any airtime. The argument is that we are alone. And the argument has nothing to do with astronomy. It has everything to do with biology. The argument goes like this. Look at planet Earth and look at the number of species, not only that exist right now. Millions of them. But the number of species that have ever existed on planet Earth, hundreds of millions. When life arose something like three and a half billion years ago, for about two and a half billion years, for most of the history of life on Earth, there was nothing but bacteria. So life apparently doesn't have much impetus to evolve quickly beyond bacteria. It just remains as simple as possible. A lot of people have this misconceived idea that Darwin really did away with the idea that evolution has a direction in mind. You see these pictures of evolution that appear in high school textbooks of the monkey that's hobbling around on all fours and he's hunched over and then eventually he's standing up and holding a briefcase as if this is what evolution had in mind. It only seems to be what evolution had in mind in retrospect, by looking backwards. This American academic, his name is Charlie Lineweaver and he calls this the Planet of the Apes hypothesis. As if if you removed the humans from a planet, the apes would naturally evolve to fill the intelligence niche. And he said, you can imagine another situation where you're an elephant that is able to think about themselves and they reflect on the length of their trunk and they look back through biological evolution and they see that trunks get ever shorter. So what they conclude is, ah, evolution has been geared towards making ever longer trunks. That's what evolution is all about. Of course we can see that that's ridiculous. It just happens to be the case that this creature called the elephant has evolved and it's got this long trunk. But length of trunk doesn't appear to be a convergent feature of evolution. So we say a convergent feature of evolution is a feature that exists within biological entities which has arisen again and again independently. Wings is my favorite example. Fish have wings of certain kind. There's flying fish, butterflies have wings. So we've got them in insects. They arose in mammals as well with flying foxes and certain kinds of possums. And of course birds and dinosaurs had wings as well. So independently in all these species the wings keep on arising. So do eyes, so do organs for sound. But now let's think about the capacity to do mathematics or to build radio telescopes. In other words, to be an intelligent creative species? How many times has that arisen on geological history of the Earth in one species and one species alone? Can we conclude on that basis that therefore it's inevitable that intelligent species will arise? If you were to repeat the experiment by sprinkling a little bit of bacteria around all the bio friendly planets that exist throughout the universe. Would you be guaranteed to get a entity like us? Here's another way to think about it that is mathematically frightening for the people who think that the aliens are out there and they're going to visit us at some time in the future. We were talking earlier about trillions of planets that exist throughout the known universe that might even be friendly for life to arise. Imagine that between us as intelligent human beings and the most simple form of bacteria that we can imagine, there are only 100 independent evolutionary steps. Now, that's not true. It's probably a million or more different mutations that had to happen and were favorable allow any organism to survive such that we exist today. But just make it only 100. And imagine that each of those independent steps had a probability of just 1 in 10 of happening now. In fact, it's probably more like one in a million, but we'll be generous. We'll say 1 in 10. So now what we have is a chain of probability. 1 in 10 times 1 in 10 times 1 in 10, 100 times. And if you know how to do mathematics, you'll realize that this is 1 over 10, all to the power of 100, which is 1 over 1, followed by 100 zeros. That number swamps the astronomical number I was talking about with planets earlier on. In other words, the probability of us arising on this particular argument is infinitesimally small. The fact that it's happened once should blow our minds. These are all uncertain hypotheses. But we also have to keep in mind that there's so much about evolution by natural selection we don't know. David Deutsch has this little quip, if you can't program it, you don't understand it. Which means in the case of AGI, we can't program AGI. That means we don't understand what this idea of general intelligence that we have is. And the same happens to be true of evolution by natural selection. There are these things called evolutionary algorithms, but this is not programming evolution by natural selection. This is not being able to create artificial entities inside of a computer that, when subject to actual environmental pressures, are able to evolve towards this increasing complexity. We still have this problem of what DNA was doing for that approximately two and a half billion years, the overwhelming majority of the history of life on Earth. Why didn't it evolve at all during that time? What's going on? There's a wonderful book called Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee. And these guys talk about all the weird, quirky things that happened in the evolutionary history of Earth. I just picked on the fact that we universal explainers evolved seemingly fortuitously, seemingly once. But you can go back and you realize that evolving from single celled bacteria to a multicellular organism was weird and unusual and hasn't been able to be repeated in the laboratory setting. And then to go from the multicellular organism to something that's like a plant and then something that's like an animal, each of these things seems to have occurred for chance reasons that we don't understand.
- [24:39]
Lex Fridman
I think there could be a combination of things going on. Your argument can be statistical rather than absolute. We may not be alone in the universe, but to becoming universal explainers might be so rare that when you start multiplying that by interstellar distances, which are quite vast. And I think Fermi also had the unreasonable assumption that interstellar aliens would figure out how to get past the speed of light, when we have no hypothesis whatsoever as to how that might be possible. We have nothing even vaguely in the category of how to get past the speed of light. So if you're limited by the speed of light and if the jump to universal explainers is rare, then we might just be too far apart and it might just take a lot longer. The universe is very big, but it's also, at least as far as planets and stars are concerned, almost entirely empty. Given that, it's still quite reasonable to say that, yeah, humans and human like explainers are quite rare. We're still early in their formation across the universe, and they're just spread out by such incredibly vast distances that we haven't encountered each other. And if we did encounter each other, I think we'd know. For example, by the time an alien spacecraft got here, their radio waves would have arrived long before, because there's a pretty long period in a civilization's history where it invents radio and starts broadcasting radio waves out before it invents interstellar travel, and it's sending rockets and civilizations around the universe.
- [26:00]
David Deutsch
I think Stephen Hawking himself said that it was a mistake to broadcast radio waves out into the universe because the aliens are going to be out there and they're going to be like conquistadors and they're going to want to take over our planet for their resources and various other things. There's a couple of responses you can have to the idea of evil aliens coming to get us. The first of which is the only way to make progress off into the infinite future. To have the technologies that would enable you to traverse the galaxy is to have this vision of knowledge that Popper had namely, that you are freely able to explore the space of ideas, able to falsify assumptions and to not have centralized authorities and force being used on people, which dampens down creativity. To have a maximally creative society, you have to have freedom, you have to have liberty. And therefore you will have a nonviolent society. You will have a society which values creativity as an end in itself. When we encounter the aliens, we should expect not that they're going to be immoral bastards that are going to want to take over our resources, but the opposite. They're going to look at us and think what primitive savages we are. They're going to think that we're moral midgets. And they're going to want to teach us. They're not going to want to put us in prison or anything like that, because knowledge is a unified whole. If their physics is so much better than ours, which enables them to approach the speed of light or to use some weird general relativity gravity thing that creates a wormhole so they can get through space faster than the speed of light, all of their sciences are going to be so much further ahead. All of their knowledge is going to be further ahead. Their mathematics, their morality, their political institutions. So we don't have to worry about the aliens. And by the way, we don't have to worry about their stealing our resources. It's not like they're going to go, ah, there's a planet full of coal and water. We're going to take it. No, they're going to have the knowledge to be able to sweep up the hydrogen in intergalactic space and turn that into a fusion Reactor and use 3D printing to create any technology that they want. And in fact, that might be another answer to the Fermi paradox. They don't need to leave their local area because they've already got the technology to perfectly sustain them in a relatively small region of space.
- [28:02]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, they've got Dyson spheres. They can gather all the energy they need, they can gather all the matter, they can create anything they want, and they can have any reality in VR space that they want. So literally the only thing that they would be lacking is new knowledge that they don't have. It's literally the only thing they would be lacking. Humans have a history of conquest because we fight for the same exact resources. But even in human history, the first explorers were traders. They were going out there to find spices, gold, silk, new plants to domesticate new animals, et cetera. They weren't going out there necessarily to conquer land. Eventually they did because of the finite resource dilemma when you're stuck on Earth, but the moment you have technology to get off of Earth, finite resources go away. And if you want a resource, then you go find a neutron star, you go find a star system. You don't go after a little planet. There's infinite Kepler planets out there that are gonna be much closer to them. It's ideas and trade that people want. And if you look at modern society, even though I know this is not the common belief, we're becoming less warlike as we become more civilized. And the reason is because you don't conquer Russia anymore for its natural resources. You don't roll in the tanks because you're trying to grab all the natural resources. The wealthiest places in the world now are the ones that have the best ideas. Silicon Valley was on top for a while as a wealth creation engine because it had the best ideas. The new oil is ideas. It's all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in idea space. In fact, if you're starting out today as a young ambitious person, you don't learn real estate. You don't learn coal and oil mining. You don't go into extraction of physical resources to create wealth. You go into idea space. You go into programming books, movies, blogs, and podcasts, and building robots, which are mostly intellectual property underneath. So even as a human civilization, we're moving away from conquest of physical resources and moving much more into trading of ideas. The downside scenario for the human species is that too much of our larger countries and nation states believe that they've achieved maximal ideas. Now it's time to save resources. They end up destroying the means of improvement, error correction, and creativity, and they end up stagnating. Then you have the idea generation coming out of a much smaller set of city states, which then have to defend themselves against this larger mass of more predatory ossified states. Every time people talk about China being so impressive, look at their rocket launch, look at their gdp, or look at the city that they built. Call me when they invent something new. Call me when they come up with some incredible idea that we haven't had and they build some technology that we haven't had. Because so far it's all imitative. It's all them taking advantage of technology that they've picked up from us that they're now catching up on. They're just applying scale to it because they have more people. But call me when their GDP per citizen crosses ours. Call me when they come up with pharmaceuticals or vaccines or spacecraft. Or energy generators or fusion reactors that we do not know how to build. Call me when the authoritarian society figures out, top down how to build something brand new, when it's more creative, when their art is better, when their science is better, when their technology is better. Call me when that happens over a democratic, free, capitalist society. Because I've never seen the case of that, ever.
- [31:23]
David Deutsch
China keeps on graduating more Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Engineers than anywhere else in the world. We're lagging behind China because their universities are pumping out more science graduates. They're not pumping out more innovators. It's not like the students that are coming out of those universities in China with their science degrees are going off and doing PhDs and doing innovative stuff. Quite the opposite. Because they've been trained in a particular way, because they've been trained to memorize this textbook, respond to this exam, and they actually can't think outside of the box. They've been trained that this is what's true, this is the unquestioned correct way of thinking about science. And that might be good for being able to imitate as we see, but it's not going to be the thing that enables you to push forward the frontier in technology, let alone fundamental physics or anywhere else. So I don't care what the statistics are on how many science graduates they've got, that makes no difference. Give me 10 innovative, creative young physics graduates. Over 50,000 physics graduates that all are able to pass the exam with 100% efficiency any day.
- [32:29]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, one Einstein is worth a legion of drones with PhDs in physics. Doesn't matter. Creativity by its nature goes 0 to 1 and no amount of throwing bodies at the problem will get you there. That's just the nature of mimetic evolution and it's just the nature of creativity. There are a lot of institutions in our society today that are relying upon credibility stamps. They used to be how you gain credibility in society. So if you were a journalist writing for the New York Times or Washington Post, then you had the masthead of the New York Times and Washington Post. If you're a professor at Harvard, you have credibility because you're a professor at Harvard. So of course those systems got hacked. A lot of social scientists who have no business telling the world what to do are now in there with their nonsense political models masquerading as economists or natural scientists. Or you have people who are activists writing under the mastheads of these formerly great newspapers and burning up the credibility capital that these newspapers have built up over time. The Internet is Exposing them slowly but steadily. And we're going through a transition phase where the masses still believe in the institutions and we're caught in this shelling point, this coordination point for the institutions. How do I know if I should hire you? Will you have a diploma from Harvard? I know it's not as good as it used to be. I know Harvard Humanities diploma is probably nonsense at this point, but I don't have any other credibility metric to filter you, and I need to do it in an efficient way. What we're seeing is the transition of power from institutions to individuals. But it's going to be messy. It's going to take a couple of generations, or at least a generation. And in the meantime, the institutions are fighting back. We're in the Empire Strikes Back phase where they're trying to take over the new platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Patreon, which empower the individuals.
- [34:06]
David Deutsch
The university and all of academia have, has a very big stick in terms of being able to train their own next generation of teachers who then go on to teach the next generation of primary and secondary school students.
- [34:20]
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it's a priesthood. You're only allowed to say what the priests have approved. And you can only say that if you are yourself a priest and the priests get to decide who's a priest. Innovation requires a couple of things. One of the things that it seems to require is decentralization. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Athenian city states, the Italian city states, or even the United States, when it was more free form and less federal government control, were hotbeds of innovation because you had lots and lots of competition. People could switch from one state to another if their ideas weren't welcome. And there was a robust competition of ideas. The real diversity that matters is diversity of ideas and that diversity of skin color. And you also need a frontier. You need something new to explore, either an intellectual frontier or physical frontier. We've occupied California. If anything, now California is the institution, the establishment. No longer the front of the Wild West. Maybe we need one in space. Maybe we need intellectual ones like we have in cryptocurrencies. And it's the nature of Wild Wests that they're always filled with scammers, they're always filled with crimes, they're always filled with very strange and odd things because they tend to attract a weird crowd. But at the same time, it is where a lot of the innovation is going on. I see a lot of lamenting from old school scientists and entrepreneurs. Where are the new entrepreneurs welcome? I think Paul Graham tweeted this the other day. He's the Y Combinator founder, brilliant guy. He said something along the lines of, steve Jobs today wouldn't be able to get a job or wouldn't be able to survive at a Silicon Valley company. He'd be canceled by his own team. But Steve Jobs today would be in crypto. He'd be in crypto with all the scammers and all the criminals and all the weirdos. But at least there he'd have a space to be weird. He'd have a place to be different. He'd have a place to try new things without having to constantly answer to someone. There is a pendulum between centralization and decentralization. For example, if you look in the crypto world, centralized finance ends up very ossified. You have the government and the regulators telling you exactly what you can and can't do. You get regulatory capture. Next thing you know, Wall street is sucking 20% of the profits out of the economy, and crypto can replace that. So you get decentralization pressure where people can do it in a free form, programmatic way, but. But then you end up with a lot more scams and fraud and losses as well. In old times, you worry about brigands and robbers in the forest, so you appeal to the king. Well, the king builds a nice keep. The king mints the money. But next thing you know, the king is debasing the currency and the king is throwing people in jail. Then some people run off into the forest and they become brigands again because they want their freedom. But now, of course, they're subject to attacks and harassment from their peers. So there's natural pendulum swing that goes on in history between centralization and decentralization. And I think the arc of technology actually swung us towards centralization in the last decade. I'm a big fan of Amazon, but it's a very centralized entity. There's a decentralization arc that is taking place even in that industry. Things like Shopify that are coming up and enabling small stores to compete, or even local delivery services like DoorDash. They're centralized services, but they're allowing a decentralized army of restaurants and local shops to compete against centralized services. So we're going to see this arc going back and forth, this idea of.
- [37:22]
David Deutsch
Questioning things that hitherto you thought were unassailable in a particular domain. For millennia, people were wondering about the best way to conceive of what democracy is. Even Plato had this idea of what is democracy? And he had the question about who should rule. That's the whole idea of democracy. Supposedly we'd have to figure out who should rule. Should it be the philosopher kings who should rule? Should it be the population of citizens? And he decided that a mob would readily vote away the rights of a minority. That's what he thought democracy was. But Popper questioned this whole idea of looking at what democracy was. He went even deeper and said, democracy has got nothing to do with who should rule. Democracy is the system which allows you to remove policies and rulers most efficiently without violence. And that's how you judge different democratic systems. So you can actually make a judgment on France, England, the United States, Canada. These places have better or worse kinds of democracy. We might all call them democracy. But to the extent that we're actually able to get rid of the people that we don't like from the democratic system quickly, efficiently, easily, without violence, that's the measure of a good democratic system. Rather than trying to figure out which system's going to give us the best rulers, that's the same mistake as saying, what method of science is going to give us the true theory? No method of science is going to give us the true theory. Science is an error correcting mechanism. All we can hope for is to get rid of the bad ideas. And by doing that, we've corrected some of our errors and then we can move forward to find something that's a better theory than what we had before. Which actually raises the idea of how to make good decisions when you're at loggerheads with someone else. This idea that compromise is supposed to be a virtue of some kind, and it's not. It's preferable to having a violent confrontation if you've got two people who otherwise can't possibly reach an agreement and they're going to get into a battle of some sort. But if you're in a situation where a person A has idea X and person B has idea Y, the common understanding of what a compromise is is it's somewhere between X and Y. Person A won't get everything they want and person B won't get everything they want. So let's come up with a compromise. This is theory Z. When that policy proves not to work, we shouldn't be surprised, because neither person A or person B actually ever thought it was the best idea in the first place at all. They thought that X or Y was the correct idea. So when they implement Z, what happens when it fails is that no one learns anything. Person A goes back to saying, I always told you that X was the correct Idea and. And person B goes back to saying, I always told you that idea Y was the best idea. So they haven't made any progress whatsoever. They've shown that Z is wrong, but no one ever thought that Z was correct in the first place. So this is the poverty of compromise. And this is what you get in science at certain times, everywhere in politics as well.
- [40:19]
Lex Fridman
Marc Andreessen summarizes this nicely as strong opinions loosely held. So as a society, if you're truth seeking, you want to have strong opinions, but very loosely held, you want to try them, see if they work, and then error correct if they don't. But instead what we get is either strong opinions strongly held, which is the intolerant minority, or we get weak opinions loosely held, which is the compromise model where no one really takes blame, no one gets credit, no one gets to try it the way that they want to, and everybody can then fall back on. Real communism hasn't been tried. Although in that case real communism has been tried, it just hasn't worked out well. As a digression, one of the common critiques that I hear people say we need to move to a post capitalist world. Capitalism isn't working. Okay, well, what is your alternative? And usually this is where people start fumbling, because there aren't a lot of choices. When you're trying to figure out how to divvy up credit, divvy up resources, and reward people for their work, you essentially have two choices, feedback from free markets and reality. And the best model for that is money. Or you have feedback from people, which is where communism ends up. Which is a group of people decide that you did the best work. Now who decides you did the best work? Someone has to be in charge of doing that. Invariably that ends up being the biggest thug. So I don't think it's an accident that every communist country degenerates into a dictatorship. Communism never seems to actually be run by a distributed majority of the people. It always ends up being run by a bunch of people who are taking charge. Because it's just human nature that if I get to decide who gets the gold, it's going to go to my friends, family, and the people that I like. And that's invariably what ends up happening. Either you need an objective function to carve it up, and money is the known objective function, or it becomes all subjective. And if it's subjective, then who's to say you carving it up instead of me? We're just going to decide based on who has more physical force, who has.
- [42:11]
David Deutsch
More guns, what we say on the side of free markets is that what we've extracted out of that decision making process is the coercion. So no one is forced into purchasing a service, undertaking an agreement. The only time that force is applied is when the government gets involved. The people at the top then say, this is the best decision and you will all have to agree with it. Otherwise there's going to be a man with a badge and a gun turn up at your door. All that we're saying when it comes to free market is that the individual gets to decide without being coerced what might work for them. Now they could be wrong, but why shouldn't they try and make mistakes? It's the only way to make progress. The only way to error correct is to actually try something else.
- [42:49]
Lex Fridman
Perhaps file making something social destroys the truth of it, because social groups need consensus to survive. Otherwise they fight, they can't get along. And consensus is all about compromise, not about truth seeking. Science was this unique discipline, at least in natural sciences, where you could have individuals truth seeking on behalf of the rest of society. Other individuals would verify that they did indeed have the best current model of how reality works, and then that could be spread out through inventions or a society. But the social sciences are this virus that crept into academia and have taken over. Social sciences themselves are completely corrupted. Firstly, they need to appeal to society for funding, so they are actually politically motivated. And then they themselves are influencing society because their studies and models are used to drive policy. So of course that ends up corrupted as well. But now even the natural sciences are under attack from the social sciences and they're becoming more and more socialized. The more groupthink you see involved, the further from the truth you actually are. And yes, the more you're getting along. But you can have a harmonious society while still allowing truth seekers within that society to find truth and to find the means to alter and improve reality for the entire group. Even historically, most of the scientific breakthroughs didn't come from scientific institutions. The big ones came from individual natural philosophers who were very independent thinkers who were reviled in their time, often persecuted, who fought against the rest of society on the basis of their truths. And it took decades or centuries, often after their deaths, before those truths were accepted. A lot of these academic theories don't actually stand up either to replication, if you look at what's going on in psychology, or even to reality. Rory Sutherland had this great quote where he said something along the lines of marketing is the knowledge of what economists don't know. Economists assume perfectly rational behavior, but humans are obviously wetwear biological creatures, so you can hack around that using marketing or Nassim. Taleb would go even further and say they assume a false rationality. Whereas humans are pricing in the risk of ruin, the risk of going to zero. And the academics are making mistakes about ergodic reasoning. They're assuming that what's good for the ensemble is good for the individual. And it's not because an individual doesn't want to go to zero, doesn't want to go die. So they will not take risks of ruin and they will not take risks of bankruptcy. Whereas a group should be willing to take a risk of bankruptcy because that's spread out among so many different people. Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in a mythology of we were oppressed than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don't like to admit failure, but eventually they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit we made a mistake because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. So I'm hard pressed in history to find examples of large groups where they've said we thought A, but the answer is actually B. Usually what happens in that case is a schism where you go from Catholic Church to Protestant and so on. There's a divergence and usually a lot of infighting. This happens in Cryptoland too, where the coins fork. Bitcoin doesn't suddenly say we should have had smart contracts or ETH doesn't suddenly say we should have been immutable. I was on the board of a foundation that was charged with giving out money for a cause. And I found it very disillusioning because what I learned was that no matter what the foundation did, they would declare victory. They would give money for a certain thing, they would support a certain project. And every project was victorious. Every project was a success. There was a lot of back slapping, there was a lot of high sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners, but nothing ever got done. And what I realized was because there is no objective feedback, because there is no loss, it's all social profit, they couldn't fail. And because they couldn't fail, they misdirected resources all day long. And eventually, of course, such groups run out of money. If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is A for profit. Because for profits have to take feedback from reality. Ironically, for profit entities are more sustainable than nonprofit entities. They're self sustainable. You're not out there with a begging bowl all the time. And of course you lose the beautiful nonprofit status. You have to pay your taxes. And also you can get corrupted by being purely for profit. But I would argue that the best businesses are the ones that long term are both for profit, sustainable and ethical. So you can attract the best people, you can sustain it because it's a mission. It's not just about the money because there's diminishing returns to making money, there's diminishing marginal utility to money in your life. So I learned that if you want to change the world, you're probably better off trying to do it with a for profit.
- [47:25]
David Deutsch
Knowledge is the thing that makes the existence of resources infinite. The creation of knowledge is unbounded. We're just going to keep on creating more knowledge and thereby learning about more and different resources. There's this wonderful parable of Europium in the Beginning of Infinity where David talks about 60 years ago or so, when first color television started to be manufactured. They were cathode ray tube type, where you'd fire a stream of electrons at a phosphorescent screen. And the phosphorescent screen have these pixels, three different colors, one of which was red. And those red phosphors on the screen were filled with the element europium. And the interesting thing about europium is when you put electricity through it, when you excite it, it glows with this red color. And the extra interesting thing about europium is that it is the only such element on the periodic table. It's the only chemical that will do that. If you fire electrons at it, it will glow the red that you need and to have color television. So now it was calculated that there's only a certain amount of europium on the earth. And that amount of europium was quickly being consumed by cathode ray tube manufacture. So the scientists had a perfectly robust mathematical theory about how the number of cathode ray tubes was finite. Therefore, we're going to run out of cathode ray tubes. And it's true in a very narrow sense that for any given resource, you're going to have a finite amount on planet Earth. Of course there's going to be europium in outer space, and you could probably mine it. There's. But the deeper point is no one has cathode ray tubes anymore. The whole idea of color television has nothing to do with the excitation of Europium these days. We've all got LCD screens, we have plasma screens, and there'll probably be something else coming in the future as well that will have absolutely nothing to do with the technology we have today. But we're still going to have color television or color screens. And this is true for absolutely any resource that we can think of. You might very well make a perfectly good Malthusian calculation that we can't keep on burning wood if you happen to be living on the African savannah, because eventually all the forests are going to be burned down. Obviously we're going to run out of wood. There's a finite amount of wood. Even if you can grow more wood, eventually the consumption of wood is going to outstrip the amount that's there. And this is the argument that's made for coal, oil and everything else that we happen to be consuming.
- [49:34]
Lex Fridman
Even so called empty space has a lot of matter and a lot of things that could be converted into energy. There is no limit to the amount of resources out there. There's purely a limit to knowledge. And unfortunately, there's a pessimistic assumption here that people make that human creativity is bounded. And I think it's the people who themselves have not built things, who have not created new things from scratch, who seem to feel this the most.
- [49:56]
David Deutsch
There was a story on ITV in UK and they were talking about how much supposed waste that Amazon produces, that Amazon was destroying a whole bunch of products regularly, routinely. And I thought, why are these people inserting their opinion into a business that they know absolutely nothing about? What would they prefer? Would they prefer Amazon to have the impossible, namely, perfect knowledge of precisely how many products need to be made? In other words, an epistemologically impossible situation to be in? Or would they prefer that Amazon made insufficient products so the people who wanted to purchase them weren't actually able to get hold of them? What Amazon, of course does is make slightly more than what they need. That's what happens in any business. They make slightly more than what they need now and again.
- [50:41]
Lex Fridman
I once had a venture capitalist argue to me that there were too many kinds of shoes. And it was an example of how capitalism had failed, because nobody needs this many kinds of sneakers. And clearly we've overshadowed society. My question to him was, when did you know that there were too many shoes? What's the point in history where we decide there's too many shoes? Where before that we need more shoes because we need more stretchy shoes, we need more durable shoes, we, we need thicker sole shoes, we need lighter shoes, we need all Kinds of amazing shoe innovation. And then at some point, somebody decides, now we have enough shoes. Now we need to kill all the other shoe lines. Where did you come up with this idea that you just happen to be born in the right time, in the right place to identify that, yes, we have enough shoes? This is a certain parochialism that everyone falls into. There's a more macro version of that, which is we're running out of resources philosophy. And it starts with, the Earth is finite. There's this finite set of resources. We're running out, and we're consuming them all. And therefore, we're all going to die if we don't tamp back our consumption. First of all, how did you decide it was the Earth? How did you decide that your town wasn't running out of resources? Why wasn't the town the actual area that you wanted to save, and then everything outside of that was foreign and unreachable? Why draw the boundary around the Earth? We could go to the solar system, we could go to the galaxy, we could go to the universe, we could go to the multiverse. There's a lot of resources out there, if you know how to harness them. And then how do you define what a resource is? A resource is just something that through knowledge, you can convert from one thing to another. So there was a time when coal wasn't a resource, iron wasn't a resource. To a caveman, very few things are resources. Just a few edible plants and a few edible animals, and that's it. But domestication, harvesting crops, metallurgy, chemistry, physics, developing engines and rockets, all of these are things that are taking things that we thought were worthless and turning them to resources. Uranium has gone from being completely worthless to being an incredible resource. So this finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point. And therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving. But knowledge is the thing that we can always create more of.