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- [00:00]
A
Well, thanks for joining me, Naval.
- [00:02]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [00:04]
A
Let's talk about the four strands of the fabric of reality. Theory of epistemology, evolution by natural selection, quantum theory, and computation. Before we get into the specifics of each one, what do these four theories broadly offer to the average person? And why should they care about incorporating each one into their worldviews?
- [00:22]
B
So I wouldn't be parroting David Deutsch. This is not my original contribution in any way, but, you know, he sort of wanted to have a theory of everything. He wanted to understand everything that could be understood, not in the sense of where every particle in the world ends up or what's going to happen, but just the underlying explanation, to the best of our knowledge, as to what was causative or how it happened. And he landed upon these four theories as being the deepest strands. They have the furthest reach, so the most applicability. They have the deepest, most underlying explanations at the right level, not just purely at the level of, you know, particles hitting each other, but at the level where you can actually use it in everyday life. And then I think if you were to talk to David, or if you were to read his books carefully, you would realize that even splitting these into four theories is kind of splitting hairs, because knowledge is a crystal, it's a single thing. Nature hath no boundaries, as the famous saying goes, and everything connects to everything. It's A. The nature of creativity. You can get from A to Z, not just from A to B to C. You don't have to pass every point in between in idea space to get from one idea to another. So these are deeply intermeshed. And what I find fascinating about his work is that understanding any one of these theories not only helps you in that theory, not only actually helps you in everyday life, in some cases not all, but they also connect to each other in very deep and interesting ways. And so it's one of those worldviews that has to be absorbed as a whole. Although even calling it a worldview is doing it a disservice, because a worldview is often just an opinion, you know, whether I'm a communist or capitalist or a Democrat or a Republican, these are worldviews. But these are grounded in our best theories in physics, mathematics, computation, evolution, biology, etc. And so economics, philosophy, sociology, politics, whatever. But so to contradict a piece of what you're saying and what he's saying in one place often means that you have to then go ahead and explain something that you thought was unrelated, but it's Actually deeply related, say, well, then, how do you explain that? So I find his worldview is a framework, and it's a framework that's rooted in fundamentals and sciences, which is not to say it's impossible to challenge. One should always feel free to challenge any part of it. It's just the way to challenge it is to have a better theory, not just to say, well, that doesn't quite work because, well, that explains something, and then there are other things that explain that thing, and there are other things that that explains. So you have to look at it as a web, and it's hard to absorb that. It's hard to take that from another person, especially when your ego steps in the way and says, well, how did this guy figure it all out? So I think if they remove the person from the theories, you have to read both of his books, I would argue, and you would have to absorb them fairly well. It's not a small endeavor, but on the other hand, it can give you a framework for better reasoning and better thinking that can make you smarter. There are not a lot of things in this world that can make you smarter.
- [03:23]
A
Is that how you pitch Deutsch's books to people unfamiliar with his work?
- [03:27]
B
Yeah, I don't really even care about pitching, but, yes, that is how I describe it. I would say that it's the only thing that I can point to in my adult life that has improved my thinking, decision making, and fundamental outlook. Now, there are other people who've been incredibly influential. There was a time when I went through Nassim Taleb's work, for example, and I found it very useful. So it's not to say it's the only useful thing out there, but I think his framework has the deepest explanations and the furthest reach. So you will find yourself applying it all over the place. That said, I think it's a mistake to apply it dogmatically or to say, oh, I believe that, because, you know, David Deutsch said so, or because it's part of critical rationalism, or even to ask, like, what does David think about this? I think that is a mistake. Instead, you just have to absorb the ideas. And some of these ideas I've absorbed, and some of them I haven't. I'm not an expert in quantum physics. Even the computation and mathematical parts, I struggle, although I gave it a good effort, and I learned something a little bit more every time. But I think at the end of the day, it's about the ideas. You have to take each idea, you have to evaluate it on its own merits. And then if you can, you have to absorb it into your framework of thinking until the next better idea comes along. And if you can't figure it out, then you should reject it. The mistake would be to memorize it.
- [04:48]
A
Let's dig a bit into epistemology, because this documentary is primarily about that subject and that strand of the four strands of his fabric of reality, which, as you mentioned, it's kind of a mistake to, I mean, think of them separately, but rather that's a whole worldview or a framework. So fallibilism. Right. It's the opposite of dogmatism and relativism in a sense, in that it says you can be wrong, there's something objective to be wrong about. And both relativism and dogmatism reject that in the sense that dogmatism says you can't be wrong. If you've read the script, this is what came from God, and you necessarily can't be wrong. And with relativism, it's like everyone is. Everyone has their own truth. And again, you can't be wrong. So I guess, how have you applied epistemology to your personal or professional lives?
- [05:40]
B
Yeah, so let me start off by saying I don't like words like epistemology and fallibilism because I think they take things that are very simple and they overcomplicate them. And I understand why they exist. They exist as a jargon for philosophers, logicians, to communicate more efficiently and more precisely. But I think for the everyday person, they just put up a barrier between the thing and the knowledge and the person. And it's actually very simple. Epistemology is just the theory of knowledge, which is another way of saying, how do you know what's true versus how do you know what's false? And this is something that you have to do every day as you go through all of life. How do you know what's true? How do you know it's likely to be true? How do you know what someone's telling you is the truth or not? How do you know if some theory you have is correct or not? So how do you know something is true? And infallibilism just means you not only can you always be wrong, you probably are always wrong, and you should always be trying to correct your mistakes. You should always be trying to get closer and closer to the truth. And as you pointed out, people can confuse that with relativism, which is very different. Relativism is just saying, well, everyone has their own truth, and so we're all Correct. Well that's obviously not true. Like not everybody has their own view of the steam engine or the electric motor and how those work. And the the same way not everything is correct. Like for example, we know that you know, command and control, top down organization doesn't work well for, for economies. Right. So there are absolute truths, there are moral truths, like slavery is wrong or just the simple golden rule, you know, do unto others as you'd be done by or the silver rule that don't do things to others that you wouldn't want done to you. Right. So there are even, there's even moral progress. So we do have things that are more true than other things. So just because we can the ultimate truth and we should always be open minded, AKA fallible or be a fallibilist again I don't like that word. But just because you're always in a state of uncertainty, but yet there are things that have a greater truth composition than others. You just have to get away from this binary thinking of true and false. So there are things that are more true and there are things that are less true. And the nice thing is that this coincides with common sense.
- [07:52]
A
You pointed out that groups often search for consensus and individual search for truth and that making something social destroys the truth of it. Nowadays in the social sciences, political influence seem to motivate a lot of what's happening there. I often feel like when people claim that they're doing science, it's often to tell of the opposite. With political science and climate science, nobody really says physical science or chemical science, it's just physics and chemistry and biology. So I'm curious how you think individuals can independently pursue the search for truth when there are such strong incentives to just conform and be a sheep.
- [08:31]
B
Yeah, I'm deeply suspicious of groups of people coming to the truth in anything because it's not to say groups are bad. Humans are cooperators by nature. We need groups to get things done, but groups need consensus. A group that does not have consensus will fall apart. So a group will not admit its mistakes, it will not admit that it was wrong, it will not pivot. It's not a truth seeking entity. Individuals can seek truth and then based on that, they can choose to cooperate with others for limited periods of times to effectuate that truth or to have something come out of it. But if you're really looking for truth, it's the opposite of looking for social approval. Truth comes from truth requires feedback, it requires error correction. Where does that feedback come from? Well, there are three sources of feedback. In reality, two that are very natural and one that we've invented in modern times, the two that are natural are nature. You know, if I drop an apple, it falls to the ground. There's a truth there of gravity, I can't deny it. That's nature giving me feedback. So as a scientist, a physical scientist, I would naturally gravitate towards that truth, haha, no pun intended. But there's also a truth of social approval, which is if I want to get along with my group, then I can take feedback from people like, did you like that? Did you approve of what I did? And then the one that we've invented as a truth seeking mechanism is free markets. Where in a free market it's not a mob, it's actually the opposite. The applause comes from the mob, which is a group of people who are thinking the same and trying to coordinate. A free market is where individuals are voting differently and they're voting on a merit basis and they're being punished for bad out for bad predictions and they're being rewarded for good predictions. So free markets are also a source of truth seeking in that, for example, if I think that there's a, I think Alphabet is a great stock and I buy it, but I turn out to be wrong, then the truth of the market will punish me as the feedback comes in and I will lose my money. So these are sort of the three mechanisms you have for getting feedback from the environment. They're not all equal. There's actually a fourth which is the part of nature which is just survival, but we break that out into its own thing called evolution. Survival of the fittest. Right. I think the natural truth seeking mechanisms will lead you to truth. The social one will lead you to social approval, but it will not lead you to truth. It can lead you into all kinds of dead ends. And unfortunately most people not only get their feedback from there, they actually get their theories from there. So that's what I call the difference between reasoning from first principles versus reasoning by proxy. If you're reasoning for first principles, which is what you should do for things that you really care about, then you would examine the truth of the statement for yourself. You would be skeptical, you would test it, and then if it turns turns out to be true, you would know that because you get feedback from the right places. And if it turns out to be false, you get punished. But if you're getting your feedback from other people, you're usually going to end up with a wrong answer. So examples of this, like there are entire professions where all your Feedback comes from other people. Politics is a prime example of that. Anything political. Social sciences, I'm deeply suspicious of anything that starts with the word social. Social sciences, socialism, social engineering, social justice, you name it. Because this is all about groupthink. So it's not a mechanism for truth, it's a mechanism for coordination and cooperation. Often it means we're gonna beat the truth into you or you better get along with us and our truth or else.
- [12:03]
A
Right. And Deutsch has this idea of the principle of optimism that all evil is due to a lack of knowledge and anything not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible given that right knowledge. And so we should try and organize society and coordinate society in a way that maximizes the growth of knowledge and which doesn't. Which the social approval aspect doesn't really fulfill.
- [12:24]
B
Yeah, in fact, it's almost oxymoronic. You don't organize society, you almost have to disorganize society. It's not that you reward people, you just stop punishing people for truth seeking. But we do need certain rules of cooperation to get along. If we don't have some minimum amount of rules, there's always cheaters in any system, and those cheaters will overwhelm the system. It doesn't take a lot. It just takes a few people, you know, committing crimes or driving on the wrong side of the road, you know, or, you know, just taking everything and running or tragedy of the commons, whichever model you want to use. But the history of the human species is figuring out how to cooperate while keeping the cheaters out from breaking the system. Otherwise the parasites overwhelm the host and the system dies.
- [13:07]
A
And a lot of people nowadays are concerned about us running out of resources, and they propose the solution is degrowth. Can you make the case for a greater population and that the idea that our resources at any given point of time are only limited by our knowledge and obviously the laws of physics.
- [13:26]
B
Well, there's two different issues here. One is, are we running out of resources and what is a resource? And all that. And then the second is, are we destroying the environment, the biosphere as we replicate? Are we an invasive species that's taking out the Earth? The first one is easier. Are we running out of resources? No, we've never run out of a single resource, ever. There's not a single resource you could point to that was a resource in the classic commodity sense that had any real value where we ran out in some harmful way. Because technology is the act of substituting away from one resource to another as we ran out of burning wood, we started burning coal. We ran out of coal. We didn't actually run out of coal, but we went from coal to oil. And before we could even run out of oil, despite all the peak oil nonsense around the year 2000, we've gotten nuclear, we've got solar, we've got wind. The universe is full of unlimited resources. The universe, the multiverse, whichever version you take is staggeringly large. Way beyond your ability to cause, to run our resources. We haven't even wrapped a Dyson sphere around the sun and extracted all of that energy. There is unlimited energy. Even the so called empty cubic meter of space, there's plenty of energy. It's literally just a question of knowledge. Dark matter, dark energy equals MC squared nuclear fusion. There's unlimited energy. The only thing that's holding us back is knowledge. The same is true of any resource. Are we running out of wood? No, we can grow wood. We can grow unlimited trees. We can plant unlimited trees. So eventually we might find a future civilization, may be able to synthesize trees, maybe able to synthesize long dead trees. So it is always a question of knowledge. So that should put the resource argument to rest, although it won't because there are people who are dogmatically committed to the idea that we're running out of resources. Resources. And they're not fallibilists, to use your earlier phrase. And they're not going to revise their worldview based on mere logic. But then the question is, are we destroying the Earth? Well that's a little more subtle. The Earth is a little hostile to us to begin with. The actual natural state of the Earth would support a population of hunter gatherers that numbers in the millions, not in the billions. So we're already well past that. And we might actually save the Earth in that long term. We might stop the next heavy bombardment, we might start the next asteroid from hitting the Earth. Humans, through the creation of knowledge are the only ones who can save the Earth. But you could argue that we're moving too fast. We are destroying the Earth so quickly our knowledge, in using up the Earth and destroying it and consuming it is outstripping our ability to rejuvenate it and to replenish it. And I think there, there's a debate, but I think the people who tend to win that debate are kind of, they're just looking at the things that are right in front of their, and not paying attention to the larger picture. And they tend to be rather dogmatic or religious in their beliefs. But I think the reality Is mixed. Yes, of course. Species have gone extinct due to humans. Species go extinct not due to human activity whatsoever. All the time. The vast, vast majority of species that have ever existed are extinct because they did not adapt. Humans can actually resurrect species. We're bringing back the woolly mammoth. Anything with DNA signature of we can resurrect. We're cutting down forests, we're also planting forests. North America is now a net carbon sink. We've added so much forest cover because as people get richer, they plant gardens and trees. Now are these old growth forests? No, but they will be someday. We're probably going to terraform Mars at some point. You know, that'll be a lot more life than was there before. So I think these things are more arguable. But as long as the technology is there, we can always kind of earn our way out of it. If climate change is an issue, and it's hard to discuss because it's become so politicized, you know, we can carbon capture out of the environment. But I think, I think there are people who view the world as like this idyllic, perfect place and that we just came along and ruined it. And anything we do in any direction ruins it, whether we try to save it or whether we try not to save it. And I think that's just a fundamentally anti human philosophy. They just want us to go back to 5 million people living in the Garden of Eden and there was no such thing. And to that I just say, you first.
- [17:47]
A
Yeah, and Marxism.
- [17:49]
B
Right.
- [17:49]
A
Like you start out with, oh, we already have everything, but some people have more than their fair share. And so what we really need is just wealth redistribution and for everybody to share.
- [17:59]
B
And Marxism, besides denying human incentives, also has a problem where it just assumes that everything is finite and we're all just dividing up the same small set of things. Well, the cavemen didn't have color TVs and computers and cars and antibiotics and medicine. You know, we're not sitting around dividing up the same few things. The knowledge grows, we create more. It also tends to assume that we can freeze frame at some point in society and say, well, we have enough different kinds of sneakers and we have enough different kinds. We have enough housing. We just need to allocate it better. And that is not how anything works. Deutsch has a great definition of wealth, which he says, wealth is the set of physical transformations that we can affect. Or not even physical, it's a set of transformations that we can affect. Although every transformation is physical ultimately. And so when you Think about it that way. You realize that knowledge is not just stored up capital in the classic Marxist sense, capital versus labor, but it's also knowledge and what to do with that capital. The cavemen or the Paleolithic ancestors had access to all the same resources we did. They were living on the same earth. And by the modern environmentalist arguments, they had a better earth, they had more to do things with, but yet they couldn't do anything. They were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. And why? It was because of knowledge. Life is not a zero sum game. It's a positive sum game. But we are hardwired to think it's a zero sum game because for millions of years or billions of years, there was no such thing as wealth. There was no such thing as persistent knowledge creation in the environment. And so what you had was you just had a small amount of resources being divided up. And most of the games were status games, whereas which monkey outranks which other monkey and that decides which monkey gets to eat first. And we played that game for a billion years. So now we come onto a recent game where actually we can all eat, eat. And the big problem is obesity. It's no longer starvation, and the big problem is boredom. It's not actually work. There's enough work. So in this environment, switching your evolved mindset from a zero sum game to a positive sum game where we can all win if we create knowledge together and if we use the resources that we have to create more resources and more wealth, that's the game that we all need to be playing. Now, inequality is an issue, and it's going to be a bigger issue because. Because technology creates leverage, and leverage creates the gap between the haves and the have nots, just by the nature of the choices they make and what they choose to do. So that drives people into thinking that things are really unfair. But the reality is the opportunities have never been more equal than now. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have the same iPhone you do. They don't have some better version of an iPhone. They're eating food that might be marginally better than yours, but it's basically the same. You might even have a better diet than them. You probably have more time to go to the gym than them. Not immortal. And they're not going to be, most likely, not at this time scale. So you have more youth than them. You have a lot of advantages over them. So the wealth gaps are actually much smaller than people think. And a lot of that is due to just mass production, which comes from specialization of labor and capitalism. But it's very easy to overlook that and agitate because that gets you higher in the status hierarchy with other monkeys, because it makes you look like you're, you know, fighting for noble causes and gives you status, which is really what people are craving these days. They're craving status, not money or wealth. And status is a zero sum game. So it's kind of an evil game to play because there have to be losers for every winner, and the only way to win is by crushing somebody else down.
- [21:29]
A
AI is all the buzz in the world right now. And people have this. People are afraid that it might kill us all. And so they propose that we regulate the free exercise of mathematics, as you put it, and let the good guys ensure that the technology is used for the right purposes. Why do you think this is such a bad idea?
- [21:46]
B
First of all, I don't think we know how to make AGI. I think what we have is natural language computing, which is a tremendous breakthrough. We can parse natural language data sets. Instead of us having to learn how to speak the computer's language, like Python or C, we can speak English, the computer will speak English back to us. That's a tremendous innovation. So let's not take away from AI. AGI is a different thing. AGI is something that is capable of creativity, which I haven't seen much evidence of. And I don't mean creativity like taking a whole bunch of images and drawing a new image. That's large data set, interpolation, extrapolation, impressive, but not the same thing at all. Creativity is having a problem and solving it completely out of left field and jumping huge boundaries, cutting through huge swaths of search space to find the correct answer and to test it and keep revising it. I don't think necessarily the current batch of computing algorithms will get us there, Although we're always one breakthrough away from the future. Whether nuclear fusion or rocketry or immortality or fighting viruses or computing, almost all the innovation of the last 50 years has come in the unregulated industries. If you go to the regulated industries, like healthcare, it's a nightmare because there's just too many bureaucrats where they're saying no and you can't actually do anything interesting. So it's not a coincidence that most of the innovation has happened in the world of bits versus atoms. Peter Thiel lamented, dude, where's my flying car? Well, it's because you're not allowed to take a car and put it in the air because if it falls down, hurts somebody God forbid nuclear power has been frozen and the human race has been deprived of cheap and free energy because we haven't been allowed to innovate on nuclear power. I get it, it's nuclear weapons are scary, but it's a conflation in the monkey mind of the two things. Nuclear power doesn't necessarily need to lead to nuclear weapons and they don't necessarily go together. Just like, you know, exploding of fuel. And a fuel air explosive is not the same thing as a gasoline engine. So we've been held back through regulations. And most of the innovation that we've seen in the last few decades has been on the Internet in mobile computing and software has been AI, has been in cryptography and cryptocurrencies. What is the common thread between all of these things? It's all software, it's all in bits. What is software's thinking? It's speech, it's mathematics. So people who are trying to regulate AI out of this doomsday fear from having watched the Terminator movies one too many times, they're regulated in the free exercise of mathematics. This is completely innumerate people, which is the modern version of illiteracy, who literally do not know how anything works. They don't know how the computer works, they don't actually understand how you know, they don't understand mathematics. They're scared of it. These are the same kids who were scared of math in high school. They're now writing regulations to prevent other kids from doing math that are actually going to make the human race better off. If you limit computers, you have literally removed. Removed and computation. You literally removed the last source of innovation that we have in our society. You're freezing us in place. Don't think you're going to make advances in biology or rocketry. Somehow magically, while you've stopped the improvements in mathematics and computing, you've also fundamentally limited speech. So what are these? I'm sorry, this is the one place where I get worked up. What are these idiots going to actually do? Are they going to show up and say, you can't run this computation this many times, you can't solve this math problem this many times? Well, all knowledge is connected to all other. What if I come up with a different way to solve the same thing? What if I don't have to do matrix multiplication, but I do a different transformation? Are you going to ban that too? Are you going to prevent me from doing it? What about if there's a hundred of us doing it? What if the Chinese are doing it and they're building an AI to power their drone swarms. What do you want us to do? Just get blown up by them? No. So they always make an exception for the military. So we end up in the worst of all possible worlds. No private sector innovation is allowed. Human freedom is curtailed completely and oppressively. You have to arrest people for doing mathematics, which is insane. You have to prevent new forms of mathematics from emerging. Yet somehow you have to miraculously hope that your military sector will keep up, even though it has no support from the private sector and they're mostly incompetent building things themselves. And now you're competing head on against the Chinese and whoever else who you consider your enemies, who are going to go full well into it. So to me this is just innumerate people writing legislation.
- [26:12]
A
Yeah. And anytime you add a regulation, it can be in any sector, you entrench an infinite amount of error because they like you cut off one path and you don't see that that path branches out as a tree and those branches keep on growing and keep on growing in this infinite paths that if that regulation weren't in place could have led to. And that would possibly be maximal value creation because that's where all the people are willingly spending their money. So once you cut off that path, you're basically.
- [26:41]
B
You've stopped knowledge creation in that space. Correct. And to give an example, let's take the most horrific example. What was the most horrific invention of the last hundred years? Prob. Nuclear. Nuclear weaponry. Nuclear power. Well, this same group would have happily banned nuclear weaponry and nuclear power and they would have had a much better argument for doing so. And if that was, and if they had done that, we would all be speaking Russian or German right now.
- [27:06]
A
People often talk about the good old days that never even happened. And one of Spain's top ranked universities now has a master's degree in degrowth. And I wonder who's going to hire anyone with a degrowth degree? Even the people who want degrowth. Right. They aren't willing to start loss making businesses.
- [27:22]
B
Well, they don't want feedback from free markets because nobody would hire them. But they will get hired by academics, which is feedback from people.
- [27:31]
A
Exactly. Why do you think there's such a growing interest, an academic growing interest in degrowth and maybe talk a bit about the fall of Western universities.
- [27:41]
B
Well, you can look outside the window, it's perfect out here. Here, you know, it's beautiful and the quality of life is incredible for a student. They have no real responsibilities and they get fooled into thinking that's how the entire world works. But this is a controlled environment of low entropy and very high resources being pumped in from the outside, from the state, from their parents, from all kinds of wealth creation that was done outside that is coming into the university. And it's an, an institution for knowledge, which is fantastic, but it's not how the real world works. It's a small game inside the larger world and I think they just lose sight of that. So they just have too many resources and too little feedback from nature. And so that's going to lead you to a lot of bad ideas. And that's fine. I mean, it's the nature of the university to come up with ideas good and bad and then eventually they get tested in the real world. But when the bad ideas start eating the good ideas, that's when you have a problem, when the bad ideas start forbidding the good ideas. The whole concept of degrowth is nonsense sense. Nobody actually engages in degrowth in their actual everyday life. Nobody lowers their standard of living, nobody wants to be less fit, nobody wants to be less healthy, nobody wants to be less knowledgeable, nobody wants less of anything. So the idea that society as a whole is going to go through degrowth is just, it's, it's just suicide of a sort. Now these bad ideas, they're basically a tax on the good ideas. But any society that degrowths itself will simply get out competed by the societies that don't degrowth themselves themselves. And there are plenty of societies that are not going to degrowth themselves. You can go to rural India or rural China or anywhere in that part of the world to see what degrowth society looks like. It's the pre growth society. It's the same thing. It's high infant mortality, it's malnutrition, it's lack of access to health care. And again, it's the fundamental mistake of saying, oh, we're done, we've figured everything out and we're going to stop here and now we're just going to divide up the loot. Complete nonsense. Would you even go back 10 years in time and lose out on all the medicines and all the computing and all the knowledge and all the travel that we have invented in the last 10 years? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even go back to iPhone 14, but maybe I'm an extreme case. But everybody wants the latest and greatest of everything. It completely flies in the face of degrowth. So degrowth might be fun at cocktail parties and, you know, impress people and make you sound like you're looking out for the future of the human race. I don't know why. Maybe it's built into the human species and evolutionary context. But there is a place for a person who says, stop, we're all going to die, right? And that's been around since, I think, the dawn of humanity. There's always been someone saying, stop, we're all going to die. And we keep those people around because once in a while they're right. It's like, okay, don't insult the king. We're all going to die. Don't go over there and don't eat that bat. You know, we're all going to get a virus, right? So in some sense they must have been correct once upon a time because we keep them around. But at this point, it's almost become performative. There are too many people around there, you know, carrying around those the end is near signs just now they say different things. It's like the population collapse, running out of resources, climate change, whatever. There's a bunch of them every generation. And I think there's some small use to having those people around because yes, there are things we could do that could kill us all. I don't think we should be creating many more Wuhan institutes of biology, for example, nor should we be spreading nuclear weapons. And there's some common sense to that that we can agree on. But in general, I think the whole exercise has become performative and the degrowth crowd is just a politically correct version of, of those.
- [31:14]
A
Yeah, with degrowth, I guess Covid was a great example, right? If you were a proponent, if you are a proponent of degrowth, you should be able to look back at Covid and say, see, this is what we need. This is what this is like. We need Covid for the next, I don't know, 30 years, until like 2050, and then we can go to zero net carbon. Like it will be zero.
- [31:32]
B
Don't give them any ideas.
- [31:36]
A
But if we were to actually reach zero carbon emissions, emissions, I mean, in a linear fashion, maybe we can predict.
- [31:44]
B
The growth of knowledge.
- [31:44]
A
We don't know if we actually have much better technology tomorrow that captures all the carbon in the atmosphere and we don't have to use carbon anymore. But obviously that's like fantasy thinking. But if you actually wanted zero emissions, you would have to have kind of like a Covid every year for the next, I mean, until the Paris.
- [32:02]
B
Covid is a good example because the question to a degrowth advocate, they're all for down downsizing. Well, it's never them first. Everybody else Started downsizing. They're all for like stopping production. Okay, how much healthcare are you willing to give up? Which health advances you want to give up? You know, we got a bunch in the labs right now. Now it's overly regulated, so it's very hard to make innovation in healthcare. But it still happens because it's such an important thing. Everybody wants to be healthy, everybody wants to live longer. So we grind onwards. Great. What healthcare would you like to give up? You know, none. They always want the maximal health care, everybody wants a maximal healthcare. Nobody wants to be unhealthy. But that argument applies ad infinitum. So I just view these as like small groups of misguided people who will cause damage to their own societies. But India and China are not going to degrowth. They're on the exact opposite trajectory. Maximum speed, pedal to the metal. And when 6 billion humans are voting this way and you're over here, all you're degrowthing are your own life's prospects. I would argue to the people who are getting degrees in degrowth, it might make you feel good, but your life is not going to land in a good place. At the end of it, you will probably end up miserable and childless and poor and everybody else will just be getting richer and happier. So it's not a good fork. It's not too late. Pick a different direction. Yeah, I've been a doomer too at various times in my life. So, you know, just error. Correct. You made a mistake. Happens.
- [33:32]
A
Does that make you a bit more bullish on India and China and some of these developing countries rather than also like the developing and developed countries? Right.
- [33:39]
B
It's, it doesn't really, it doesn't really work anymore. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there are, there are, there are ways in which I go to Asia and it's far more developed than here in the uk. And there are times when I go to, you know, UK and the west and it's far more developed in Asia. But so there are good ideas everywhere and there are bad ideas everywhere. The thing that I worry about is the west is a uniquely open, free, liberal, liberated, tolerant society with still good rule of law. It's a very unique combination. I love the American Bill of Rights, for example. Freedom of speech, right to bear arms, right to not have surveillance and warrants. All that stuff is slowly being nipped away because the nature of power to take those things away, but the incredible amount of intellectual, physical and real freedom that's available in the Western, it's not really there in the rest of the world, those ideas are spreading, but they're also being constrained. You know, most of the world basically does not live in free countries. If you just kind of add up the sheer numbers, they're not free in the way that people in the west are. And free doesn't mean freedom to, you know, live on the streets. Freedom is much more in the sense of human rights. Human rights are taken much more seriously in the west and things like, like regulating the free exercise of mathematics is highly limiting human rights. So that's why I don't think it's. Culture is not equivalent. You can't just swap one culture for another and say, yeah, they're equally good. That's again, relativism and assumes that there's no progress made in knowledge and there's progress made in all kinds of knowledge, including moral knowledge. So, yeah, I don't, I don't think they're the same and I don't think they're easily swappable. I'm just saying, saying, like, you're not going to stop India and China from doing what they're doing, and India and China is just shorthand for basically the rest of the world. But at the same time, I'm not saying that's. I don't know. I don't know which is a good outcome and what's not. I just know that the freedoms and the rights that we have in the west get taken for granted. And if we lose them here, I'm not sure we get them elsewhere.
- [35:48]
A
Do you have any guesses for, obviously the Enlightenment happened, but do you have any guesses for what were the circumstances or the ideas that actually led to that kind of rebellion against authority and against just worshiping knowledge instead of now criticizing knowledge and seeking better explanations.
- [36:06]
B
I think one common factor you see in the Enlightenment, the free thinking eras that we know about, is a high degree of federalism. And that means like lots of small city states next to each other. So, for example, ancient Greece, you had a lot of little city states. In the era of the Enlightenment, you had a lot of little city states and small municipalities in Europe. And there was also the Age of exploration was going on. So people were very free to go to different places. And what you generally find is in those kinds of environments, people can sort of freedom shop. They can go to the area that is most allowing them to be free. And if that starts becoming oppressive, they can just go next door. And it's culturally fairly similar and it's geographically not very far away. But yeah, all the smart people are now Gathering here, right? All the free thinkers are now gathering over there. So it kind of gives them an escape valve from society, not just from the government, but also from cultural regulations or just from being, you know, too close to their family and having to like work on the family farm, whatever it is. High degree of mobility and, or and self organization allows the people who want to push the boundaries forward to move around. So I think that's been a common thing the user. The US for example, still is, but was much more federalist where it used to matter much more which state you lived in rather than the country itself. Now the federal government has a lot of power and chews up a lot of the gdp. So it doesn't matter what the federal policies are, but you used to be able to shop policies state by state much more. And that allows people who want to innovate to say, okay, fine, I'm not going to do it in Wyoming, I'll do it in Texas or I can't do it in Texas, I'll do it in California or I can't do it in California, so I'll do it it in New York. That's disappearing. But I think what's taking its place is the Internet combined with a new mobile generation that's coming up that's much more global, so called sovereign individuals who, although it gets hard to do with family and culture, right? It's all fun and well, hopping airplanes and living out of Airbnbs until you have family.
- [38:10]
A
We were just talking about healthcare and you mentioned that no one wants less health care, less healthcare than we have today. Everyone wants to be healthy, but some people really get riled up when you talk about extending lifespan as if you cannot exceed a certain natural limit that a supernatural entity has bestowed upon us. So why do you think that is? And do you try to convince people otherwise that that is evil?
- [38:36]
B
It's mostly a religious belief when you dig down to it. I mean on the Internet people say all kinds of crazy things, but if you sit down with a normal person over a normal dinner table and they say, and they express opposition to extended lifespan, first notice, nobody is opposed to extending health span, right? So nobody is like, hey, I've got a way to make you feel 10 years younger right now, Right now there's nobody who will say no to that except maybe a 10 year old, right? Anyone north of 10 will take the regression in their feeling. They want their body to be younger. Okay, great. So everybody wants more health span, right? And nobody wants to die right now while they're Healthy, healthy. So de facto, you know, if A, then B, B, then C, you believe in immortality, you want it too. So really it just boils down to a religious belief of it's unnatural. And what they're doing is they're thinking one level higher to one, are we, are we killing the earth again? Does that mean there'll be too many of us? And then you know, two, does that, what does that mean for society? And they kind of can't reason through all of that. Well, we got millions of times richer. We already, you know, doubled our lifespan. The world didn't end. Things got general better because I know you wouldn't go back and be in the Paleolithic era and you know, walking around with a club looking for dinner. So I think deep down there are very few people who are actually opposed. What they're opposed to is the idea that we're going to destroy the earth or it's a religious belief that we're being extremely unnatural. And it's always a herd issue. It's never a, I don't want to live healthier. It's that, what if everybody else does? So it's kind of this amorphous fear. But I think it's largely religious belief. I think if you just start up and the way that so called immortality will arrive if it arrives and you know, if we're lucky enough to see it, hopefully soon, but I don't know, a little skeptical there too. But the way it's going to come is through rejuvenation therapies. It's going to come through. Oh my 80 year old mom can, you know, her knees are better and now she can get up off her wheelchair and walk around. Well, no one's going to stop that, you know, and if you're hurt, like, oh my, you know, look at the lengths people go to just to improve their skin. Right? Just to look younger, get rid of the wrinkles, you know, get your hair back, all of those things. So everyone's going to go for that. So everyone's going to improve their health span and then no one wants to die when they're healthy. No one wants to be walking around healthy and fit and good looking and then suddenly drop dead. Well, we don't want that either. So what's left? If I can make you younger and if I can stop you from dying when you're younger, then death is, is gone.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah. I often make the same kind of similar logical argument. I say like, if you are in perfectly good health and I ask you the question, do you want to die tomorrow, what would you say? It's like, no, no, when do you think that answer will be? Yes, if you're perfectly good health, you're never going to say, oh, yeah, I want to die tomorrow.
- [41:28]
B
And you can always off yourself. So. So it's never about the self. It's always about this fretting and an anxiety about what happens to the world, what happens to species, what happens to the race, what happens to the Earth. And we've discussed that a little bit. But I would also add that one of the things that you really learn when you read Deutsch's theories and you authenticate them for yourself is you realize humans are universal explainers. What does that mean? That means that everything that we know in the universe follows the laws of faith physics, and there's no reason to believe otherwise. If you think otherwise, then please present your better theory that explains the world. If you can't do that, then you have to go with the laws of physics. Well, the laws of physics are completely computable. What does that mean? They can fit inside a Turing machine or computer, and a computer can simulate the laws of physics with arbitrary accuracy, limited only by the specific power of that computer. And if you increase the power of the computer, you can simulate them more accurately. So humans already simulate. In our minds, we simulate. And through our computers, we simulate the weather, we simulate quantities, quasars, we simulate, you know, even human systems. We simulate the economy. We simulate all kinds of things. Okay? So anything that can be understood, we can understand in our minds. This is something the AGI people get wrong when they talk about super intelligence. There is nothing out there that can understand something fundamentally that we can understand. It might be faster at it might have more compute, might have more memory, but there's no concept that it can understand that we can't ourselves understand. So we are maximal universal explainers. And that means that every human is capable of unbounded creativity. Anyone could be the next Einstein or Fermi or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Jonas Salk or whatever. So we can create anything. And if we can create anything, every human is a lottery ticket bet on the future of the species.
- [43:26]
A
You have a great tweet where you say the modern secular religion casts man as the devil and the state as the savior. This religion comes in various shapes and forms, but ultimately they all lead back to. To Marxism. Why do you think that is?
- [43:39]
B
I don't know if it's Marxism per se. I think there's a struggle that's been going on in the human species from the very beginning. There are many struggles, but this is one of the more interesting ones, which is between collectivism and the individual. If we're all individuals, if we're all closer to lions and tigers, for example, or even more solitary animals, then yeah, you have maximum freedom, but you have no survivability for the species. In fact, humans, Homo sapiens, I think you all know. I've heard Hariri talked about this in his book. Humans are cooperators and we're cooperators across genetic boundaries. So you can't have more Neanderthals meet in the battlefield than are related to you by genes. So you can get to your uncles and cousins and go to war and beat up the monkeys. But on the flip side, Homo sapiens, you can have 100,000 of them unite on the battlefield because they're all Christian or they're all Muslim or they're all Hindu. They have these shared belief system, these shared stories, systems. So humans uniquely can cooperate across genetic boundaries. Ants can't, bees can't. And yeah, people always find like tiny, tiny little exceptions like the pigeon on the wolf's back. But these are just like, you know, silly little anecdotes. They're not true in a broad scale. So humans have this ability to cooperate across genetic boundaries and that makes them very powerful. But at the same time, as we discussed earlier, that's for a form of group think that's like, we're going to go to war and destroy everyone. We're going to build this factory. It's not for creativity and coming up with new ideas together necessarily. All the markets are good for organizing that. And this is something that high R and D institutions do well, like Elon Musk and crew building Dragon for SpaceX or whatever. So in general, you have the cooperative theory of the world or the collectivist theory of the world, and they kind of go together. And then there's the individual freedom theory of the world or the Great Man Theory of history, where you have, and I didn't make that up, they call it Great Men, you can rename it if you want, but it's like Einstein and, you know, Feynman or Caesar, like these, These individuals took acts that then forked history. And if they hadn't come along, would it have happened? So the debate is like, if Napoleon hadn't come along, would there have been another Napoleon, someone with a different name, if Elon Musk hadn't come along? Einstein. The answer is usually yes, but a different timing and the details would have been different. And it's a collection of individuals that makes history anyway. So it's kind of this instinct of collective collectivism versus individuality. So what is collectivism? Collectivism is inherently millenarian. It's inherently religious in nature. It kind of says we're all headed towards unity. We're all going to be one thing. We're going to go from being unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms, to being a civilization, a multicellular organism that marches together. And in its best vision, it's like humanity becomes a God. And we're all cells in a giant nervous system of the brain of this new entity that we're going to create. Maybe AGI unites us all. In the hell version, it's the Borg. You know, we're all just like a big fungus and we're all the same. We're all just eating everything and there's no differentiation. So this is just a struggle that goes on back and forth. And so Marxism is just an example of this. I don't think anybody would want to live in a completely individualistic society. That would be Mad Max, okay? But I don't think anybody wants to live in a collectivist society either. That's the Borgs. That's the struggle you have. And with the new religion. The religion is about uniting the masses. Religion is about bringing people together with some higher vision. And it used to be about God. And there are different versions, but let's go with the Western version for a moment. There's usually a white male in the sky, surprise. Who's telling you how to do things. And they have a set of rules supposed to follow these rules. If you don't, you're going to get hurt in the next life. And if you do, then you'll get reward in the next life. And a lot of people still believe that. And, you know, it's fine. Religion is a cooperating system for humans. So, you know, it's good to be around in certain. Certain doses. But I think a lot of people, when science came along, Nietzsche famously declared, God is dead. And why do you say that? Because once you took Newton and the Enlightenment scientist seriously, you realize, well, maybe there isn't a guy in a white robe. Maybe that's a little too literal. Maybe there's something else. Maybe there's something less. So I think sitting. Since then, humanity has been searching for an organizing principle. And it's hard to argue that all there is is just this reality of mind and body. Yes, science is great. It lets us navigate the world, lets us Predict future outcomes, lets us build technology. But the fundamental mystery of existence, of consciousness. Why am I even here? How did I get here? Who the heck am I really? You know, what happens when I die? Those questions science has not made much progress on. It does not answer. So there is always going to be a religious impulse. So, and I think it's baked into the human species, it's hardwired into us at some level. And so that religious impulse will always be answered. There will always be a religion, whether you care to call it that or not. So, and I think the founders of the United States very intelligently separated church and state. They said, you shall not make any official state religion, you won't abridge the exercise of any religion. Because they knew that this impulse was always going to be around and people had to be free to explain, express it, but the state should not mandate it. Well now we do have a state mandated religion which is you just remove God from the equation and then it doesn't look like religion anymore, but it still has the same characteristics. Okay, so you know, if you are for example, an enlightened atheist, you don't believe in God and you don't believe in hell and you don't believe in heaven, you don't believe in an afterlife. Well, what's left? Well, you could still have a vision of a perfect world, a utopia, that's heaven. So you could say, ah, well, you know, if the world was like a paradise, it was like a natural paradise, Garden of Eden, right? Everything is perfect until man comes along, then he ruins everything. So man is a sinner who's destroying the world. Gaia would be just fine if it weren't for these evil humans. So you have the sinner, you have the devil, which is mankind, you have the perfect heaven, which is the utopia that you want to create, you have the heaven hell, which is what man is leading you towards right now. The technological hell of capitalism and progress. And then who's the savior? Well, eventually somebody has to save the day. So it's going to be you and your merry band of friends weaponizing the state against individuals. So I think that's the current religion that's going on. It goes by various names, Wokeism, identity, Marxism, just hides sometimes cause of liberal. It has to be a shadow religion. It can't actually let itself be named because if it is named, named as a religion, then it's actually forbidden by the constitution for the government from engaging in it. But it's very cleverly disguised. But I think it's a collectivist impulse, and it will always reassert itself. And again, if you don't have that, you have a brutal society. So you have to have some variation of it. But at the same time, if it takes over the whole thing, it's a. That ate the host and the whole thing is a fungus.
- [50:43]
A
Now, obviously, traditionally, religions put man at the center of things. And then science came along and said, oh, actually you were just descended from, from the apes. And you're not even at the center of the universe nor the center of the solar system, right? There's this whole big universe that most of which is so far away we might never be able to explore. And so you're just like chemical scum.
- [51:08]
B
As Steven Hawk, this is one of Deutsch's greatest refutations and insights, which is he shows how humans, by being universal explainers, we're not just like smarter monkeys. Monkeys are not capable of encoding much knowledge outside of what's in their genes. Humans are complex, capable of anything, anything that can be imagined, we can imagine. Anything that any intellectual thing can believe or do or deduce, we can. And so humans are just qualitatively different. Where that classic figure of like the, you know, the walking, the crawling to the, sorry, the tadpoles to the fish to the, you know, to the toad to the walking monkey, to the taller and taller monkey, to the gorilla to the human, that is completely false. If you've seen that, you need to unbrainwash yourself. That is not true. Humans are universal explainers. You know, we can create rockets. There's no amount of evolution that is going to get a monkey to create a rocket that is going to, sorry, there's no short of it becoming a universal explainer like us, no number of tadpoles getting together are going to create a rocket and launch off to the stars. Knowledge is unique output of human creativity. And then when you look at what's going on with creativity, creativity is unbounded. So we have moved evolution from the physical to the mimetic domain, and it is the most powerful thing in the known universe. If you were to look at all the stars of the telescope in the night sky and you would find that they would be different, but they would be different within certain physical parameters. If, on the other hand, you get to a certain one and it's got, you know, you see an asteroid heading towards it, and this is David's example, not mine, and the asteroid gets deflected at the last second with an explosion like, whoa, there's something going on there that's fundamentally different. And it means that there's creative knowledge there, there's life there, there's intelligent life there. And intelligence changes everything because knowledge can be perfectly replicated. You could, you could take the knowledge of how to terraform a planet, if you had it, and you could beam it to another planet. And then a hundred years later you could see that that world is terraformed, it's changed. So it could be a copy, it could be its own version. But knowledge is so powerful that it can completely change the environment. And you can look and just see how humans have changed the Earth to see that. Just recently, I think David was telling me this today actually where he said that he read that the mass of things produced by humans for the first time has like passed the mass of things created by other things in the biosphere. I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but it's just like you cannot explain the Earth without first understanding humans. Any alien species that arrives on Earth, the first thing they're going to be interested in is humans. You cannot explain anything else about this Earth, right? Everything else would go to the sidelines. They would not be interested in the geological crust or the weather patterns or the structure of the environment. Environment. Because they would say, well, I can figure that out by looking at any other planet but these humans. That's causing huge change. And the moment we leave this planet, we become multi planetary species. That will be more obvious. But you can no longer explain the universe without explaining humans because we're creative entities. Not to say that there might not be other creative entities on other planets. There probably are, just by the law of large numbers. But we, without explaining intelligence and knowledge and creativity, you cannot explain the universe anymore. So it's kind of a nice little full circle where we went from being the center of the universe to being infinitesimal and unimportant in the universe, to actually saying, well, actually through the knowledge that we create and the progress that we make, we are actually incredibly important in a very large universe.
- [55:02]
A
How have you applied Popper and Deutsch's epistemology or any of their vast implications in own life?
- [55:08]
B
The epistemology is really helpful because it helps you figure out what's true and what's not. So there are a lot of authors that I used to read where I would sort of absorb what they said. And now I realize a lot of that is nonsense. Simple example is Guns, Germs and Steel. You know, where he has a real. Jared diamond has a beautiful explanation of, you know, why Certain cultures evolved and others didn't. He's like, well, Europe is horizontal and the Americas in Africa are vertical. And when you're vertical and the latitude changes change temperature. So technologies like food production and domestication of animals don't transfer. And so you're just, your technology is very narrow. Whereas in Europe the technology applies across the board so you can develop much faster. And that's why they took over the world. It's a neat little explanation. It turns out to be maybe there's some truth to it, but it also turns out to be mostly false. Because even a small amount of creativity or a small amount of error correction will quickly break you out of the that trap. So you realize that the dominant thing that's important is knowledge creation and then error correction to get better and better knowledge creation. And geographic and resource factors don't apply that much. Yes, resources matter, but there are areas of the world that are better resourced than the areas of the world that where we first developed the technologies that now the entire world relies upon. So creativity is so much more the dominating force. If you pay attention to that. That's an easy example. It helps you get over the we're running out of resources argum, or that wealth creation is evil, or let's be pessimistic because we're all going to kill ourselves or there are too many humans. It's kind of all these antinatalist, anti human, anti people arguments. So I think in that sense the epistemology is useful at a base level. You're always trying to figure out what's true. And so Popper had the concept of falsifiability, which is very important. Like if I make a statement that can't be disproven, it's kind of a meaningless statement. For example, example, we're living in a simulation. Well, how would you disprove it? Anything you do, I'll just say, well, that's in the simulation, that's part of the simulation. So it's an unfalsifiable statement, which means it's just religion, it's just a nonsense statement, or the free will argument is another nonsense argument. So it helps you not waste time on those because they're non falsifiable. Secondly, Deutsch added the additional criterion, which I think is a very good one, saying that a good theory is hard to vary, which means you can't change the details of the theory without changing the outputs. You can't just move the goalposts afterwards. So for example, the example he gives in One of his books is, you know, why do we have Seasons? So there's the old Greek mythology theory. Well, it's because Persephone got kidnapped by Hades and when she came out, like spring came out and so on. Well, that one is really easy to vary. Why did spring start later today? Well, later this month? Well, it's because Persephone, you know, got lost in her way out. Or why Persephone? Why wasn't she just Aphrodite? Right. So it's just a very easy to vary theory. So it's not really a good explanation. On the other hand, if you look at the axial tilt theories, because the earth is tilted 23 degrees and you know, when it's going around the sun, there's, you know, parts of it are further away and parts of it are closer. And that determines the seasons. Well, okay, that's a very good theory because if I move from 23 to 22, the date of spring should change. So it's a very precise theory. It's a very narrow theory. It's hard to, to vary. And then to that I would also add, you know, there are parts of his books where you can read and he adds a few more. Not criterion. But these are telltale signs. And so I would say good theories also often make risky and narrow predictions. So now when someone makes a good theory, say they have a good explanation, they have a new theory, it's okay, well, let's test it. What prediction are you making that other people were not making? That is not a high risk prediction, that if it turned out to be true, you'll be validated. But if it turned out not to be true, then, you know, egg on your face. And it should be hard to vary. It should be fairly precise prediction, a narrow prediction, and you should be taking risk. So I would add that in another thing he talks about, which I think has been very helpful, is like, you don't throw out your theory just because there's a mistake in it. You only throw it out if you have a better theory that explains what the previous theory did plus corrects a mistake. And that is a good criterion for choosing between alternative explanations in induction. Oh my God, he takes down induction. That's a huge one. We live our whole lives through Induction. The sun rose yesterday, so it'll rise tomorrow. You know, so humans are very inductive creatures. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then comes 6, 7, 8. But a lot of the interesting things in life are explaining the seen in terms of the unseen. Which means that very often things will happen that are non linear, that suddenly there's emergent properties or there's a non linearity or kink in the curve which something unexpected expected happens. How did that happen? You're boiling water, it goes 98 degrees, 99 degrees, getting hotter and hotter and hotter, 100 degrees. Oh, it's really hot. And then stays at 100. What's going on? Well, it's turning into steam, but the water is not getting any hotter than 100. The steam is hotter than the water. You're going to burn yourself in the steam. Or you can drive an engine with more power with the steam than you could with just the water. So clearly something here has happened that you need to explain. And life is full of these. So that's another example of where his epistemology has been revolutionary. Another one is he's not reductive. So he doesn't say like it's all about particles, particle physics, or the fundamental layer of explanation. Everything else above is just like made up theories. Because you don't understand particles. No, it's because they're emergent properties at every scale. You can't, you can't explain how we got how you and I are sitting here without applying to, higher level theories about, you know, capitalism and reasoning and documentary filmmaking and all that. You, you can't just say, well, it's because of particle collisions from the big bang till now, because that's the theory that explains everything. And theories that explain everything explain nothing. So, you know, an unpopular one is people these days that, you know, they'll say, I'm depressed, I'm unhappy. Why? Because I have a chemical imbalance in my brain. Well, every mood you have is a chemical imbalance in your brain. That's not helpful, right? Yes, that might be a way to fix it. Maybe I can give you drugs that will make you happy, but it's not really the underlying cause. The underlying cause is probably there are things that are making you depressed, there are thoughts that are making you depressed, maybe external factors of how you want things to be different that are making you depressed. But mere chemical imbalance, it can be useful for trying to fix it, but it's not really the explanation at the right level of why you might be unhappy. And that's what cognitive behavioral therapy tries to do. It tries to unravel why you might be unhappy and talk through it and think through it and then reevaluate your decisions and choices and it might help you. So I think, you know, operating at the right level of explanation, he's got Tons of this, by the way, tons and tons of it. But there's lots of ways in which it can improve your thinking. You know, all life is correction, all judgment is error correction. You know, just the core principle of like, you want explanations. You won't be satisfied with mere prediction. Mere prediction is not enough because the world is a predictor. You know, you can just, if you want to see what's going to happen next, just wait. The world will show you. But you also want to deeply understand why. And at an explanation, at a core level, that's what an explanation does. It tries to answer the question of why. And that, that I think is a fundamental question that people always ask. But you can always ask why that, why that thing. And because you can always keep asking why, you're always going to have a new and better problem underneath when you've solved this one. And that's why there's an infinite number of problems to be solved and you're always at the beginning of infinity.
- [62:31]
A
I think Popper and Deutsch both reject the anything called the scientific method, which gets pushed into universities nowadays. It's like, it's kind of like inductivist and empiricist a little bit where you start with observations and then you form a theory, but without a problem, you can't form any observations in the first place.
- [62:47]
B
And some of these theories come so far out of left field in physics, it's more obvious. Relativity and quantum mechanics are examples that come out of left field. Where it's not like Einstein just dropped more apples than Newton and then eventually got to relativity. No, he just did these crazy thought experiments that looked like they had no bearing on anything. No scientist was even talking about them. And inducted productive sense like go from A to B to C to D and then ended up with relativity. But you know, even in simple like everyday life, it's like, should I eat chicken or should I eat beef? Right? Well, a simple empirical model would be like, well, let's lay all the food out in front of us. Let me take the. But humans are incredibly creative. I just like, I don't want to eat at all. I'm going, I'm just not going to eat. I'm just going to fast or I'm just going to drink or I'm going to make a smoothie out of this or I'm going to just throw it all together. So creativity is unbounded and unlimited. So just extrapolating inductively will not get you to the best answers and the best explanations. And computers are very good at induction and scientific method. The moment you have a method, you program it, you can write a program for it. Well, if you, if you can write a program for creativity, that's called AGI, let me know when you have it. But until then, just programming a method in that just integrated, just repeats experiments and use induction to go a little bit further will not get you the best explanations. Induction has its place when you're trying to figure out if the sun's going to rise tomorrow or you know, how much prices are going to go up next year. Probably induction is very useful. Induction works really well in what Nassim Taleb calls Mediocristan, the space that we operate in most of our everyday lives. But it's not, it's not how you want to form a theory or an underlying explanation of how something works. You can use induction when you have nothing else to try and predict what's going to happen next. And that's human nature. But you're not going to use to come up with good explanations of what's actually going on underneath. The Nassim Taleb example that he likes to give is that, you know, the turkey is being fed by the farmer and every day it gets like a nice meal and it's like, wow, this farmer loves me. It's such a benevolent farmer. And Thanksgiving shows up and his neck gets cut off because it had a bad explanation of what was going on. It was purely inductive.
- [65:07]
A
What do you think about the low hanging fruit theory of knowledge? And I guess like, does that explain the slow progress that we've seen, the slowdown of progress that we've seen in physics and other scientific fields?
- [65:21]
B
I don't, I don't think that's a good explanation. I think the first of all, if we're going to run out of low hanging fruit, we would have run out a long time ago. So I don't think, I don't know why you can pick an arbitrary point in the curve and say this is the point where we run out. I think it's much more around. I think science and academia right now suffers from a lot of groupthink. New ideas are aggressively rejected. We don't have as many natural philosophers anymore kind of just off doing their own thing and just trying to figure out better explanations. There's a lot of reliance on, oh, we need a super collider or a bigger telescope. Telescope. There's a lot of group think like 30 people's names in a paper. Entire areas of scientific research are sort of kind of closed off or forbidden, especially in the biological sciences and genetics, partially for political reasons, partially just because, you know, no bureaucrat will let you do anything that might ever harm a single person because it reflects poorly on them. And I actually think we are making a lot of progress. It's just not. Not, it may not be, it may not seem as fundamental. Like for a simple example, the theory of quantum computation that Deutsch came up with or the multiverse theory or constructor theory that he's working on. I'm sure there are other scientists working on lots of other interesting things. Quantum gravity, time, etc. They may just not have had the immediate visible output. But all it takes is one person figures out the theory of dark energy. And if we can harness that, that wow. Or if we actually get cold fusion working, that would be huge. So I do think more theoretical breakthroughs are already happening. You're seeing a lot of math conjectures solved. You can see the advances in computing, how machine learning has completely turned the whole field upside down its head. And the theory is actually now trying to catch up to the reality. The pace of technological progress has been tremendous. And you could also argue that that technological progress itself, itself is, you know, the theory is struggling to catch up to it. A lot of like we still don't even exactly know the turbulence mechanics of helicopters and how they fly. So sometimes technology out and engineering outpaces the theory. Nothing wrong with that. The theory has to catch up. So I, I don't think it's a low, I don't think low hanging fruit is a good explanation. I think it's, it may be a combination of we have it and we're still applying it. We have it in technology. We're looking in the wrong places with the wrong, in kind of the wrong group thinking ways. We're relying too much on very large and very expensive equipment. We have this grant system where I think the average person who gets a grant in university now is 48, whereas most of the scientific breakthroughs tended to come through people in their 20s or late teens. So maybe the wrong people are getting the money and the encouragement. It's hard to say.
- [68:19]
A
Final question. What do you think are the biggest threats to Western civilization right now? Let's get as specific as we can.
- [68:26]
B
Well, I think the first thing is you want freedom of thought and communication. That comes with freedom of speech. So I think any efforts to limit speech are misguided. There's no such thing as misinformation. Your information is my misinformation. My information is your misinformation. That's just putting somebody who gets to define what misinformation is in charge. So I think censorship has to be resisted strongly. Secondly, I think the society is always structured around the ability to do violence, like it or not, because the people with the guns fundamentally eventually need to get paid or they take over. So even though I myself am not, I think there are terrible things that happen with guns. A lot of crimes and school shootings don't get committed with guns. I do think that you need something like the second amendment where the citizens are the ones who are armed because then they have a chance to speak up against a government that does not redress their grievances. And also because freedom of speech goes away if you can't. If you cannot back up what you believe with your own ability to inflict violence when you are threatened, then your freedoms will be eventually taken away. It's just a matter of time. And I think we're seeing that across the world. Most of the world lives in unfree societies. And I think that trend is just getting worse. So I think that is a difficult thing. Religion is still around. It's just masquerading is secular. So you know that. That invisibility gives it kind of a mind virus characteristic. Other threats. I mean, there is, there is truth to the fact that some kinds of knowledge are almost forbidden. Knowledge in the sense that like a single virus could end most of the human species. A nuclear war could end most of the human species. The problem is not discovering these things. You can't stop discovery. And everything has a bad kind of side to it in technology. But the tough part happens when the people who discover it are not the people who are wielding it, not the people who hold onto it. That knowledge gets spread very quickly. So, for example, countries that could never. That don't have the civilization structure and the knowledge structure and the moral structure to develop nuclear weapons, get nuclear weapons, right? And they become the delivery systems for other cynical people. But again, the only way out is through. You can't kind of stop people because the people who are doing the stopping then end up with everything. This is. This is the mistake that I think a lot of young people make. They believe in institutions as being infallible. So they basically say, well, we'll just stop all the racists from talking and we'll stop all the evil people from having guns. Who's going to do that? Because those people will be the evil ones, I guarantee you. The lesson of history over and over and over is the People who are in charge of the guns, who are telling you what to do and what you can't do and what you can own, what you can't own, they end up in charge. This is why every Marxist revolution ends up with a single family thug on top. Pol Pot running Cambodia, Mao Zedong killing everybody in China, Stalin running Soviet Russia, Chavez and Maduro running Venezuela. Because when you can no longer allocate resources through merit, your only remaining option is to allocate them through power. Even if we live in a communist utopia, who has to clean the toilets? Somebody has to clean the toilets. Who's living on the beachfront property and who's living inland? Well, some are. And, you know, coincidentally, it ends up being the friends of the people with guns, AKA the Communist Party or the ruling family. So these are just monarchies by another name. They're just more popular. Instead of appealing to God and saying, I'm ruling because I have the divine right of kings and God is telling me to rule, instead these dictators and thugs are saying, I'm ruling on behalf of the people. I have the divine masses of the people behind me. The state is behind me. So I think that these are just the modern versions of the old divine monarchies. We've evolved, things have gotten better, but there's still more ways to go. So if I had to say, I would say the greatest threats to the future are suppression of freedom of speech, freedom of mathematics, freedom of expression, freedom of creation. And those are pointless if they can't be backed up by violence. If you don't have your own ability to inflict violence, it will be taken, taken away from you. One recent tweet I had was, I said, the right to vote does not give you power. Power gives you the right to vote. You can just do a simple thought exercise. If there were a hundred of us on a desert island and we're trapped, and we all kind of have to cooperate to make society, to create a new society. Suppose There are 10 of us who are 10 people on the island who are all from the same ethnic background, who are all extremely unified, and they have all the guns. Those 10 have it the other other night, you don't. Who do you think is going to end up running the place for the benefit of the others? Anyone who's been around the block a few times knows what's going to happen. So it's just the nature of humans that if you want freedom at the individual level, if you want the rights to be dispersed and distributed, and the power has to be dispersed and distributed, and there's very few institutions and organizations that do that. Really. It's the right to bear arms. Cryptography, free speech, mathematics, personal computer computing. These are examples of decentralized technologies and capabilities that spread power amongst people. Most things concentrate, power.
- [73:42]
A
Mic drop. That was awesome. Thank you so much.
- [73:45]
B
Thank you.
- [73:45]
A
Appreciate the time.